Them Bones of Adventure - IV: Traps

Continuing my exposition on table procedures for common exploration feats & rules, which began here with part one.

Introduction

Directly adjacent to the topic of searching and spotting static objects is that of Traps. Broaching it is in itself a meta-trap of sorts, recalling my readings around the blogosphere. I’ll try to lay my thoughts clear.

Trap Lethality and the Player

Trap: noun, spelled “[uhn-fair]”.

Should traps be lethal? Of course. 

Should traps be lethal in a real-world-logic sense? Absolutely not. That’ll just invoke the kind of jadedness and powerlessness that frontline soldiers are eventually reduced to. Not at all a feeling that fantasy, even the gritty flavoured one, should be in any rush to recreate.

Traps must have their rationality hammered into a gameable-shaped hole. The game is, after all, about facing and conquering adversity through pluck or might; something that the deadly-yet-unseen spear trap is totally remiss in bringing into focus. Thus, I defend that a trap’s difficulty to spot should be inversely proportional to its lethality, nurturing meaningful decisions instead of feeding the voiding hopeless sense of being the runner in a landmine marathon.

That said, rationally, traps, even the weaker ones, should have the credible damage potential to bring down an ordinary man. Meaning our levelled protagonists will be able to take their lumps and live to see another day well within the logic of the setting even as their feet come awash in the blood of any redshirts they happen to have bravely volunteered to take the point.

On the traits of the Useful Trap

What exactly is a trap in an RPG context? They’re pretty much akin to narrative devices and come in three flavours:

Erosion – Very low lethality; Difficult to discover;

- Exist to tax a party’s resources, slowly building up tension and unease as the characters choose to push deeper.

Pacing  – Low lethality; Findable as long as the right measures are taken;

- Exist to slow down a party’s progress, causing existential risk only if they are not aknowledged.

|-------- verboten design space ---------|

Setpiece – High lethality; Obvious to recognize;

- Exist to serve as meat of the game i.e. being interesting or at least unusual in nature and requiring creative input to be surpassed. Can sometimes assume the shape of puzzles but not necessarily.

The verboten design space filler means “I don’t go there”; Not that I like to plant absolute border markings, but the combination of “potentially lethal damage output & moderately hard to find” is much akin to sterile soil from a game running perspective. It can certainly be used productively given the right effort or party configuration, but it lacks universal utility.

The Crunchy Bits

As per the previous chapter on Searching, the player’s input is of the greatest importance.

It is here that the clarifying question: “how do you go about doing that?” comes into its own: if a player is getting ready to tackle a door, a chest, an object, or the party is gearing to spread out across a room, I’ll remember to tease out these open-ended questions that help reinforce the collective mind’s eye picture of what is happening and allow me to adjudicate fairly how likely anyone is to perceive certain sensory details, to spring a trap or walk into an ambush.

  

A good trap should be laid like a pop quiz question – obvious yet slippery to the mind, in bottlenecks that make sense and otherwise unguarded and remote passages with little to no foot traffic, with traces alerting the savvy observer. Once the player gets himself some seeing eyes, the answer should be almost a given most of the time, to enourmously rewarding effect when well pulled.

Detecting Traps

A note on Passive Perception – Like any other static object, traps are either In Plain View, Concealed or Hidden, the later two necessitating an active search declaration by the player, as well as time spent doing it (scan, rote or thorough), to be revealed. I reiterate that I don’t care about Passive Perception, to my mind it serves little purpose, only being usable to detect things that are both visible and amiss, something that a trap shouldn’t be.

Mechanically, the corresponding Spotting DC will either be in the 7-10 range for Concealed traps – that only need a rote search from a character directed at the correct space – and 12-20 for actual Hidden ones. These numbers are more formalism than dogma: generally I’ll want the traps to be found in response to careful searching behaviour, even by the most perception-challenged of characters, as per old school play, rewarding player involvement and not using stat shortcomings as a barrier to stunt play development. This is to say: if a character is weak at Perception, it should mean he pretty much always has to search extra carefully, not that he’ll blunder along from trap to trap with no recourse.

A declaration on game principles: if a search is forgotten, the player must be the one brought to task for playing the game poorly, pure and simple; there’s no crying about “my 9th level thief would never forget to check that!”, the player is the one running the character, not the other way around except where forceful abstraction is involved. Last I checked, Chess players were not allowed to rectify their opening moves on the basis of their rank never allowing them to forget certain things, I don’t see how DnD players should be any different.

Springing Traps

Like the old editions of the game proscribe, it is possible that a trap, particularly ancient ones, will only be triggered on a given chance (“1 in 4”, “1 in 6”, etc.), meaning that missing its detection and passing through its space, tapping ahead with a pole or sending ahead the most able-bodied man won’t necessarily result in a predictable conclusion.

From there, unless we’re going exotic, they’re either treated as attacks, if the armour the character is wearing can conceivably block the effect, or as Save-or-suffer rolls, for most everything else.

Disarming Traps

While propping a walkboard over a pit trap requires no great brain wattage, describing the inner workings of a complex trap can be daunting for the uninitiated (exhibit A: me) so, given that I’m not a swiss clockmaker, this will occasionally have to be deposited on abstraction's running bar-tab unless I get confortable with Mechanisms 101.

On the adjudication front, two rolls can be asked for, the DCs should begin at Hard ~ 15 and only go up from there.

- [Intelligence] check for determining how to disarm a given trap – or even if it is at all possible for the character to do so. Success on this roll will give the player access to the Disarm attempt's DC and the springing chance, as such it can be obviated if the character has experience with the trap type or if the player wishes to save time and risk going in with “never tell me odds”.

A failure won’t carry any special penalty, unless it is a fumble, in which case the observer has probably gotten carelessly handsy and either sprung the trap or made a ruckus.

- [Dexterity (+Thieves Tools)] check for the actual disarming effort.

A failure here will have the referee rolling the trap’s springing chance, a fumble will skip right to the hurtful part. Also, every time the character fails and tries again, increase the DC and/or the fumble margin by one, raising the tension on account of the character worrying the mechanism.

Note that, as ever, a well thought-out approach to a trap by the player (“I jam the spear trap’s firing tube”) can obviate any and all need for rolls, stepping over any of the above stages.

Closing Thoughts - Traps and the Open Table

I won’t practice illusionism by shifting the damage baselines. Instead I’ll be keeping these categories consistent: if a very-low lethality trap keeps to the same damage averages the dungeon will remain accessible even to a lower-level party that just wants to poke around under cover of stealth. The monsters can be beefier, sure, as they can always be evaded/outrun/misdirected, but if the baseline of “hard to spot/low damage” trap turns up actually being lethal, I’ll have a problem on my hands, likewise if the damage rates are ostensibly shifted around according to the level of whatever party wanders in, as it saps bricks from this fourth wall that I’m building in an altogether too visible way if suddenly I start saddling the exact same type of traps previously encountered with twice the damage.

It is possible, of course, to shift the type of trap being encountered, but that counts as special dispensation and should come along with ample foreshadowing, as the vanished ancient civilizations of the world at large certainly won’t be switching to the upgraded model at the mid-point of their aeons of dust-collecting activity.

If dealing with a high-level character, I’ll simply aknowledge the obvious: that he’s earned his survival stripes and can stand a few hits before resources start being sweated. I’m not worried, since the erosion is all I’m after. Of course, that is only possible because I’ll be doing away with the sworn enemy of attrition: 5E’s prohibitively friendly hp recovery.

Them Bones of Adventure - III: Searching

Continuing my exposition on table procedures for common exploration feats & rules, which began here with part one.

Introduction

The procedures of the search seem like they would be one of these really minor, blink-and-you’d-miss-‘em blip on the rules radar, a minor trifle if anything.

Yet this topic is one of the main pillars of old school play and how it is treated at one’s table speaks volumes of the tone set for a game. There is good reason for this as it is one of the foremost instances (by association with traps, the passing of time and the possibility of random encounters) where player creativity and input can become rather frequently solicited: deciding when to search, what to search for, where to search for it, and how to do it are all finer points of player expression which should have real implications on the end result, in numerical bonuses (if new school) or direct results (when old school). By comparison, a player’s not usually invited to wax poetic about a sword thrust from his character, but when searching for nooks all of the words have to be measured, the abstraction taking a back seat and interaction with the description becoming very important indeed.

Traditional play dealt with this in a very loose fashion, intuition being the watchword of the day, things were either In Plain Sight – described readily upon coming under a character’s notice, Concealed – meaning they were found as soon as a character declared he searched the general proximity of the correct spot or Secret – requiring a die roll to find even when a search effort was directed at the correct place.

Since I’m bridging an adaptation here, I’ll retain these terms and attempt to translate this approach to current mechanics.

That’ll be just the check, please – the Collective Roll Syndrome

A noticeable folly of the new school, I’ve seen players signal the referee to coast a search along, ask for dice to be rolled and just be presented with the itemized final tally of what they’ve found in a whole room.

This time around, in addition to abstrusely dispersing the relevant information in three separate entries (maybe more as these were the ones I could find) Fifth Edition seems to not have made up its own mind on how to treat this: the sidebars titled “Hiding” and “Finding a Hidden Object” pointing in semi-conflicting directions. Eventually, as going by the current books, we’re soon led into an ugly place in terms of game design: the collective search roll.

I’ve had a gut-problem with collective party rolls for searching since my first reading of the rules. Here is a place that inequivocaly points to the superiority of old school play, wherein the players cannot simply wander into a room and each pay their due d20 perception rolls like at a toll booth and expect to be rewarded with shinies if they score high. It’s just too easy, too mindless. 5th does take the positive step of requiring input from the player for the search to be a valid one, but doesn’t go quite as far as I’d like.

What’s worse: metagaming rears its ugly head but quickly, once a given player rolls poorly, in barges the nearest party mate, knuckles a-cracking to repeat the search “just to make sure the ranger searched things right”; rinse, repeat, nauseate. Lets face it: if something was hidden to the point of resisting a search by the highest of 4-to-6 Perception rolls we can pretty assuredly assert that it just wasn’t made to be found, conversely, knowing most things won’t stand to that kind of character scrutiny, why bother?

Granted, plenty of old school blogs nowadays have pretty much homed in on good procedural for doing this, so I’ll just push this along to completeness and avoid earning further stripes in obviousness. The Alexandrian, as well as Hack & Slash tackled this effectively, the first one even coopting some useful new school concepts (“take 10/20”) that already were implicitly present in old school play but simply lacked such designation, gelling it all together.

The Crunchy Bits

Searching is a choice of action that implies free hands or adequate tools and a minimum degree of illumination, meaning candles can actually be of use in providing localized light while at the same time minimizing the party’s profile to attention from the exterior. Characters focused on a search may well become disadvantaged at noticing other things so it is advisable to post a lookout.

Searching for static objects, whether hidden doors, items, features or traps is to be done dicelessly save for those cases so cornered that they’re basically rabid beasts. It’s a very stable albeit time-consuming task, hence my leaning that only the players’ options and the character’s Passive Perception, modified by circumstances and mode of search, are to count. This is basically the interpretation of the traditional methodology as shifted through the lens of the 5E mechanical frame. 

Remember: Perception only tests the character’s senses, whereas Searching is a lot more about deduction and investigative inspiration (i.e. actual play through meaningful choice) than rolling a die to see if you blinked at the wrong time. Also, note that despite referring to Perception throughout, I don’t care to formalize which skill bonus is actually applicable (Perception, Investigation or other), it’ll be subjected to adjudication on a per-case basis.

Verbal Declaration – Player Input

This is intended as the obligatory ground floor to whatever search effort the player wishes the character to engage in. The search pattern is directed by the player in relation to the description handed by the referee and the method of searching (Rummage, Rote or Thorough) is selected.

Whenever a player feels like the situation merits it, he can describe his search in greater detail, the character being thus allowed to manipulate his surroundings in a way that still adheres to the numerical logic of the rules, since without the proper input he’ll only ever find items or features hidden within his perception range, but can occasionally supersede them if adequate action is taken, for example smashing a sealed cubic urn upon the ground to access its contents instead of attempting to find a delicate opening mechanism concealed on its underside or spilling water to watch if it seeps through any hidden cracks instead of being helplessly prevented from finding an otherwise impossibly-well-hidden trapdoor.

Single Glimpse – Skill Check

A character that only gets one glimpse through a corner as he tries to count the number of denizens in a room or he wants to assess details as he steals a quick glance down a side-passage while on the run from something nasty; Basically, when pressure and uncertainty collide, randomization is the answer.

Ransack – Skill Check

When time is of the essence and the character wishes to wantonly rummage through a room’s contents, ransacking takes half the time of a rote search and can even yield better results depending on the roll, but I’ll impress upon the players that it is exceedingly noisy and absolutely careless behaviour, and the gains of rolling high (i.e. matching a Thorough Search at most) are probably not worth the accumulated risk of Fumbling and attracting undue attention or even breaking fragile treasure.

I’m willing to retain the maligned option of rolling for Searches as I can appreciate its borderline uses (and recognize that sometimes change is hard to impose at a table) but I'll be sure to stress that as soon as the d20 is lifted, it’s all on fate and the player's shoulders: I only let characters fail forward when there’s a swordpoint or a pit trap greeting them at the other end.

Standard or Rote Search – or “Take 10” – Passive Average Perception Score

This total is actively applied to whatever the character searches at a slow pace, taking a rough average of 10 minutes per 10’x10' area searched, 10' of wall section, or 2 minutes per handheld object inspected. Multiple searchers linearly accelerate the process.

Thorough or Detailed Search – or “Take 20” – Maximum Perception Total

Nets the best possible search effort that the character can muster, as per having rolled 20 on the die, slowing the pace to a crawl and taking five times as long as a rote search to perform.

Orientation on DCs

Note that I’m really only mechanically concerned with Hidden level of information. Concealed things are given to anyone who merely takes the time and indicates searching in the correct place (meaning they’ll have a DC in the 7-10 range if that), the rest being In Plain Sight and either directly part of the referee’s initial description or obtained immediately upon request (for example, the texture of the walls, the height of the ceiling, any plant growth or discolourations, etc).

Going with the static totals requires some thinking about DCs, as the searching efforts become very stable: keep in mind that something labelled “Hard – DC 15” will be found by anyone – even a Perception 3 character – with a thorough search; while it takes a DC of 27+ to ensure that a character maxed out in Perception (taking 20, +4 mod, +2 from Proficiency) cannot find a chest buried under flagstones.

I’ll most likely (d)evolve my approach into gut-feeling these numbers as a “requires rote search to find/requires thorough search to find” simplified heuristic labelling, the actual DC being little more than a numeric middleman that will prove the most useful when writing or adapting published material. Time will tell.

Modifiers

Not many that I can produce, but searching under dim-light (since movement is already pretty hard-coded into the search modes), will impose a -5 to the Perception total. Again, I should only resort to the numbers when discretion fails me.

Closing Thoughts - Relativizing the importance of missed content

A word relating to the importance of missed content. This type of occurrence will only ever truly matter in a revisitable megadungeon or a place where otherwise several parties with varying rosters of players are likely to pass through. It only really carries any weight that we lock some information or item in a fixed place if the importance of doing it is demonstrably not spurious, otherwise it is ourselves that we’ll be fooling. With but one party to master, whatever they don’t find in the first comb-through is very much akin to never having existed in the first place, as even later maps pointing to a supposedly original hidden place can be created out of thin air after the fact, along with the placement for the reward.

My adoption of the above system was rooted on this asymmetry between unknown difficulty (since a player can never know for sure if there is something hidden when he searches or not) contrasted with the player’s own public rolls, conspiring to create this inelegant metagaming vortex of die after die being thrown at a problem until the desired high roll comes along and the referee has to tell a crestfallen player that no, there really isn’t anything there worth the chase, all this punctuated with the occasional pavlovian score that shines through only to perpetuate the behaviour.

Them Bones of Adventure - II: Light

Continuing my exposition on table procedures for common exploration feats & rules, which began here with part one.

Introduction

Light is the lifeline of dungeon delving. Even more than rope or sustenance, light sources in pits of indissoluble darkness are a complete game changer for those willing to embrace the challenges of exploration and wishing to avoid succumbing to the plagues of convenient glowing fungi or networks of eternally fuelled sconces patrolled by the world’s most sysiphean workforce, 1/0 switch definitely included.

Modelling light itself is much like the abstraction of an abstraction, one that at the best of times can hardly hope to be traced with perfect boundaries and rigour. My advice, this coming from someone who has wasted his share of time trying to adjudicate the clash of atoms, is to take the burden of its meaningfulness to where you can and avoid falling prey to blatant irrealism but otherwise avoid sweating too much on it; it is a windmill waiting to be tilted and one that emphatically should not dominate the proceedings. Err on the generous side with this one.

Shared Woes – Anatomy of a Houserule

Turning light into a non-handwaveable notion requires that it should not be a challenge affecting just a select slice of any given party of explorers.

I’m all for the possibility of magical items and spells as means of overturning a problem, but decidedly less keen on the demihuman condition at large, whose suite of abilities invariably tends to include that which mitigates a key part of human psychology, which all ought to share: the fear of the dark.

Unless they’re of proven cave dweller stock (and thus actually sensitive to daylight!), I’m houseruling in favour of demihumans having low-light vision (mechanically, simply treating dim light as bright light) instead of darkvision, with the pertinent exception of Dwarves and maybe some Gnomes, but still at a range not exceeding a claustrophobic 30 feet.

The Crunchy Bits

Light Sources (and Light Radius)

There are no bullseye lanterns and the lanterns that do exist, instead of the usually implied default of renaissance fare, are modelled on the medieval lanthorn type, that hems the light from a candle or oil lamp in a cage protected with strips of thinly stretched animal skin or translucent panes of bone (hence the name) and thus still vulnerable to being blown out though retaining an edge on duration compared to a torch.

So, going with:

- Candles: 5’ of light radius, lasting 30 minutes

- Oil Lamps: 15’ of light radius, lasting 1 hour

- Leviathan' Oil Lanthorns: 20’ of light radius, lasting 3 hours

- Torches: 20’ of light radius, lasting 30 minutes, d4 fire damage if used as melee weapon, but must check to see if the light extinguishes

N.B: Both these radii and durations are a purely gamey abstraction that does nothing but mock the subtle intricacies of the real world; I am nothing but proud of them.

I’m keeping the dual radii of Bright plus Dim Light, as per the book, meaning the above figures for each light source are accompanied by an effective doubled range consisting of dim light.

The dim light radius, however, is predicated on the light source being held high. Should the bearer drop or deliberately throw his light aside such as to free up his hand for combat, this kills the dim light, leaving only the bright light radius in effect.

Who’s Holding the Light?

Within the metrically drawn confines of the dungeon corridor, a ready answer leaps forth; yet other, vaguer times may well challenge the collective notion of where exactly is the light emanating from. Like I wrote before, if the party’s not illogically drawing a blatant full radius from a rearguard-borne torch, err on the side of generosity.

That said, the “who” part remains important, due to the fact of having to give up a hand slot. This’ll mostly mean no use of two-handed weapons without dropping the light source.

Additional Light Sources

Opening the possibility of more than mere redundancy in clustered lighting:

- Multiple significant (i.e. stronger than a candle) light sources in overlapping proximity increase the ambient dim light radius by 5’ for each additional light beyond the first.

I pondered several things but went with the flat & gross simplification. As of yet I'm playing it cautious with this one, just adding the bare minimum to the weaker typed light radius, but there ought to be something here to further develop past being conservative and without compromising "realism" (adding more radius per light or  enough sources eventually adding to the bright radius).

When does the Light run out?

Three general ways:

- When delving: Encounter Roll enriched with the relevant entries (one for solid fuel sources like torches/candles, the other for oil-based lanthorns/lamps);

- Flat time counting if travelling or doing something more stable and time-consuming than outright exploration.

- A (pseudo)breakage roll (automatic, d2, d4 and d6 for each successive light source type) to extinguish the flame whenever there’s an occurence to justify it, such as the light being forcibly dropped, a gust of wind or some spell effect; Particularly strong winds may snuff lights out with no recourse to a roll.

Closing Thoughts - Some notes on behaviour

Though things will not constantly reach this level of deviousness, due to variables such as creature organization, courage, intelligence and inherent behaviour, always consider the possibilities of:

- Attacks with missiles from beyond a (not necessarily the) party's sight;

- Staging hit and run attacks that exploit a party’s limited light radius;

- Hazing explorers with noises outside their sight distance, leading the characters to make mistakes or panic;

- Attacks that deliberately target the light bearer;

- Creatures (such as wildlife or certain cave dwellers) who will shirk the light or exposed flames and ostensibly avoid confrontation on these grounds.

Proceed to part three: Searching

Them Bones of Adventure - I: Climbing

Introduction

I’m of the opinion that good rules make for better rulings.

Starting with this post is a short series dedicated to the tentative procedures I intend to use to adjudicate some of the most common feats in an explorer’s violent and risky existence. With these I aim to establish a working basis from which one can branch out into competent, cohesive and engaging rulings at the table.

The corresponding chapters on the fifth edition PHB and DMG take the carefree and heartwarming approach of letting all of these concerns be suspended on the individual referee’s goodwill. As you may have surmised already, I’m not a very big proponent of goodwill, if only because I think it hurts one's game.

My two main vectors of approach are concerned with hitting a sweet spot on abstraction vs. gameability and a relative minimization of referee interference. I understand we never quite get rid of arbitrariness and that as long as we stick to logic that is not a problem. But if you’re going to have characters cracking their bones and ending their miserable lives in play, you’ll find good value in having the degree of insulation afforded by the players knowing damn well what they sign up for when choosing a risky course of action.

As before, the result of all this will then spill onto a couple of sheets dedicated to general table rules, but since they’re not yet done I’ll be colatting them from posts such as this one.

Let us then begin with Climbing.

As explorer feats go, this one’s not terribly common; many DMs usually opt to make all their dungeons level with the ground or sunk in the convenient way of underground parking garages. Let’s be perfectly clear on this: dungeons feel a lot more like dungeons if the characters have to negotiate serious obstacles to access them and if, once inside, they can feel the press of all that rock above them, reminding that there’s one (or more) hundred-foot climbs separating them from actual freedom. It then ceases being just a question of running for your life if shit goes sour, rather it becomes a matter of needing the full extent of your athleticism and teamwork to even be able to exit the dungeon, let alone doing it while chased or laden with plunder.

Personally, I wouldn’t think to run a dungeon feature – rock spire, canyon wall, deep crevice, reversed gravity room – much less a whole vertical dungeon, without a significant and robust rule basis.

Speaking of holy grails, this can also play a part in making the wilderness a more gameable place, as natural features can become tangible situations to be tackled rather than always folded into simple narration or a slowed rate of progress on the map.

The Crunchy Bits

Main Tool of the Trade – Rope

When purchasing, note how much weight it can hold by its breakage die; for simplicity, its cargo potential can be based on how many people it can hold (typically, half the breakage die total so three grown men for a d6) and extrapolate anything else you might need from there. Note that this is information that the players know, so that important decisions can be taken, instead of activating handwavium or blind guessing. It’s the characters’ lives literally on the line and they’re no amateurs.

In any event, rope breakage should only be tested directly in selected instances, such as when the cargo capacity is clearly exceeded.

Unchallenging Climbs

In usual circumstances, with no threat to life or limb, only the lead climber ever rolls; once he secures a workable rope rig topside any subsequent climbers can be deposited leisurely in the arms of abstraction, elapsing time but dispensing with further rolls.

Conversely, horizontal movement along safety rigging, slow descents with aid from rope and climbing small distances – up to 10’ – can all be handled well by the simple-simon 5E rules of ascent and descent being made at half-speed.

Free Climbing

Assign an openly known DC based on how hard to climb the surface is, keeping it at a low threshold (DC 4-8).

The climber tests his Strength (Athletics) to make headway:

- On failure, the character is stymied by lack of footing, a patch of loose rock or shortness of breath; he makes no progress this round.

- On success, he ascends a number of feet corresponding to the modified roll’s result. On a natural 20, add another d20 feet of progress.

- On a fumble (unmodified 1 in d20), something drastic has befallen the character: stricken by exhaustion, equipment failure, sudden loss of climbing surface integrity or prosaic slippage and he must make a Strength or Dexterity saving throw (applying Acrobatics or Athletics), DC equal to 5 plus the climb’s difficulty. If the save is made, apply d4 damage from overexertion; On failing, the character plunges to his doom.

Not covered as yet: more protracted climbing distances will doubtlessly necessitate some form of additional check for exhaustion.

Falling

Death by physics, such as resulting from a fall, is something utterly dispassionate and uncaring, horrible to behold; by all accounts a profoundly stupid way to die no matter the context.

That said, I’m strongly in favour of immodest falling damage. I hate it that RPGs seem to go out of their way to trivialize falls, to the point where the math turns high-level characters into bouncy videogame avatars.

For the time being I simply doubled the PHB’s falling damage into a flat d6 for every five feet. Meaning a 10’ fall does 2d6 damage, still nowhere near to what reality will dish out but perhaps sufficient for the purpose. Also to be considered, the d6 assumes a soft ground baseline. I advocate shifting to 1 damage for water, d4 for sand, d8 for hard stone surfaces and d10/12 for bespeared pit traps

For retainers and assorted chaff, feel free to either snap their neck on arrival or declare the character Wounded and reduced to 0 hp and skip right to rolling on the dismemberment table.

Protected Climbing

If the character makes use of hammer and pitons, plus a person to stand as a belayer on the ground or at a stable midpoint of the climb, the lead climber can make a much safer ascent by means of sticking the pitons into the rock face and relaying the rope through them.

- Make a note or a rough drawing of the climb; should the climber fall, the fall distance will count as being twice the distance to the nearest placed piton. Arrested falls that avoid the ground will deal d4 damage per every five feet.

Example: the climber drives a piton at a given point during a climb, next turn he progresses 13 feet and then he falls. His fall, given the rope is immediately tensed by the belaying companion, will be arrested 13 feet below the anchoring piton, hence resulting in a total falling distance of 26 feet for 5d4 damage, due to whiplash and slamming against the rock face.

A healthy string of pitons at 3-foot intervals will always keep the damage from a fall at a very survivable d4 but then, for a limited stock of pitons, this leads into a necessity of choice, which is just what I want from it.

Abseiling

Rappelling for a swift descent ought to be resolved by a single Dexterity (Acrobatics) check: you’re always going down, it’s just a matter of at what speed. Failure will probably imply some minor (d6) damage from impacts, rope burn or excessive speed on descent, but nothing drastic will happen unless the character fumbles.

Grappling Hook

Using a grappling hook is a good way to beat a short climb, though a character can’t hope to throw a heavy metal hook with accompanying rope chaser at too high a vertical distance.

Simple it goes: [Strength (Athletics), DC = nr. of feet to the desired anchoring point]

- Once you hit, assume that the hook sticks and it ought to be fairly linear from there: use the simple half-movement rules.

- Failures are exactly that and don’t prevent retries in any way, fumbles indicate that the hook got lost or, though I'm wary of recommending this, older editions do it with some hard scene framing, skipping right into mid-ascent, as the anchor dislodges at a random point of the climb (percentile dice being your friend here).

Closing Thoughts - Avoiding the whole thing

As a closing statement, it is my hope that once I've added this layer of gravitas to a lengthy climb, superseding it with a flight spell or avoiding certain death from it with featherfall will become that much more valued as the players come to appreciate the heft of what they’ve avoided.

Proceed to part two: Light 

Beastly Burdens and Deathly Strikes

As a stop-gap to my next series of posts, I thought to tighten a few rivets on my encumbrance and dismemberment modules.

Beastly Burdens

I continue my drive to make Encumbrance relevant by way of unforgivingness.

Without abdicating from abstraction, let us say that I don’t quite like the way encumbrance currently affects physical actions outside of combat.

In combat, sure, adrenaline kicks in and being burdened for the whole of two minutes is not such a drastic thing as it might seem and appears well covered by the existing rules, no, I’m looking at the more sustained kind of efforts, feats like swimming, climbing, hiking and sneaking by.

I _dearly_ wanted One Blanket Rule to bind them all and in the darkness spank them instead of a case-by-case finangling but I just don’t think that does the different situations justice. After all, encumbrance adversely affects both swimming and sneaking in harsh yet completely different ways, one being about reducing water resistance and weight, the other being about silhouette reduction and minimization of noise.

Thus my aim’s to make the following changes, in ascending order of severity:

Hiking/Marching: If a character’s encumbrance total exceeds the difficulty rating of sustaining a forced march, it is used instead.

Climbing: Every encumbrance point past Unencumbered (1/4 the character’s strength total) increases the climbing difficulty class by one.

Swimming: Any encumbrance point increases the swimming difficulty class by one.

Sneaking: Every encumbrance point past Unencumbered and every occupied slot past fast-access increases the fumble margin by one.

Deathly Strikes

Deathly Strikes are those attacks or hazards whose rolled damage exceeds the character’s maximum hit-point total. Things such as falling a great distance or getting squarely (critically) clubbed on the head, the kind of events where getting away with *just* a broken limb is considered fortunate.

These kinds of injuries, since their damage exceeds and defies absorption by the ablative hp total, are rolled on the Death and Dismemberment table with a single d6, excluding the whole upper, more forgiving, side of the table.