Rules Musings - On Colossal Foes

Introduction

Something’s been a-tumble inside the brainbox right from when I thought about the particularities of hunting large game. When men set out to battle giants, what music should be stirred by the felling of tyrants? Being more prosaic, I don’t appreciate the lack of tactical variety arising from combat with foes drastically larger in size than player characters.

This is not about pushing an agenda that large creatures should by rights be tougher to beat, rather that, as a challenge, they should feel different and require a distinct approach rather than the mended old hat of getting the cudgels out and whacking away at the ankles of the Hp piñata until it keels.

Plucking right from the stories, monstrous creatures of legend are something that garden-variety folk heroes run away from and which only epic Heroes will tackle willingly, though even then more than likely through some use of cunning for tipping the scales.

In DnD all that is absent: the gameplay surrounding combat with large monstrous opponents mostly plays like Times New Roman twelve, wrong-headedly reduced to a slugging match with a large juicy bag of Hit-points saddled with a bad action economy, leading to the mechanical juncture of monstrous foes, due to being single targets, being actually easier to face than an equivalent challenge made of multiple smaller ones (the DMG’s guidelines on CR copping admission to this very fact). Occasional legendary and lair actions feel like just a tacked-on mitigation device. Being one to go looking for trouble where there is none, I’ve been thinking up ways to change this.

The aim is set on differentiating low from high-level play tiers in a shape that pays homage to the epics and brings up monstrous foes into more credible threats without resorting to the dreaded one-shot kills, since squashing player characters like so many rude cockroaches is probably what the wrong dosage of game-realism would bring about.

Artist's Rendition

To avoid sysiphean roadblocks such as messingly tampering with individual MM entries, here are some blanket-rules. These all presume that the PC protagonists are human or near-to-human sized. I am, of course, still grossly abstracting and not at all accounting for a wide range of variables, such as large sized but lightweight creatures, as I want to keep the system nimble. These rule proposals are intended for bulky, giant-like foes, such as Ogres and Cyclops, against whom adventurers ought to be required to employ specialized weaponry (reach, ranged), as well as different tactics.

The Crunchy Bits

Colossal Foes (creatures Large-sized and greater):

- Inflict incidental damage, as their shifting bulk makes them dangerous to stand around: At the beginning of the monster’s combat round, any normal or smaller sized character within 5’ suffers d4 points of Incidental Damage (bludgeoning), unless the character passes a [Dexterity save (DC 8 + Monster’s Dexterity modifier)]; the incidental damage die grows by 2 sizes for every size category above Large.

- Have greater odds of inflicting deadly wounds: Player Characters checking for Death and Dismemberment roll one less d6 on the table;

- Are fearsome and awe-inspiring: Characters wishing to face them in combat must pass Fear (PCs) or Morale (for NPCs) checks, unless they have significant experience overall (Character Level above creature’s CR) or have victoriously faced down such a creature before;

Heartbreaking Departures

Moving even further afield from the traditional rules basis, one can distill the quintessential failure of suspension of disbelief surrounding large foes: that their attacks somehow care about whatever armor a puny and minuscule target happens to be wearing at the time they smash into its skull with a tree trunk. It’s just such an oliphant in the parlour that, once noticed, it never then ceases to gnaw at you with its mocking tusks. Roger G-S’s sadly fallowed Roles, Rules and Rolls has an excellent post on the matter. 

It is known before cramming any wedge between DnD and abstraction that it'll turn into one of those “carefully pick your battles” type of thing: is it still even DnD once such changes are contemplated?

Seeing how the current ruleset would have a Dexterity 3 fighter in plate mail avoid attacks from giant kin better than a Dexterity 18 unarmoured combatant, I as gamerunner am decidedly not confortable with chalking this all up to abstraction, so I don’t see how it can be otherwise.

Tin-tanks ought to do good against hordes of smaller foes. Against creatures that can shade them from the sun? Not so much. After casting for alternatives (monstrous attacks resolved through DEX saves, for one), landed on this:

- Attacks from Huge and Gargantuan creatures upon normal-sized and smaller characters ignore any mundane armour worn and instead treat the target’s Dexterity attribute total as its Armor Class.

[Independent of, but relevant to the above: I don’t intend to have monsters – especially ponderous and lumbering ones – frequently boast a proficiency modifier on attack rolls as I’ve found 5E to have made the target numbers for hitting attacks exceedingly low and easy to obtain.]

To draw this to a close, my hope’s to remedy the disconnect imposed by the excessive abstractions of armour class and to allow the unarmored combatant a time and a place to shine, introducing a tactical situation where having armor will be, if not an outright liability, at least completely irrelevant. If on the one hand I feel pretty strongly about applying the above rule or some variation thereof to Huge-plus sized critters, I stop short as regards Large monsters, as they don’t fray the rope of credibility quite as much and – in more practical terms – as it could turn armour useless against too vast a portion of the playing field.

General Rules Revisited - Death and Dismemberment

Reassessing my incipient proposal for a Death and Dismemberment Table. Although much of the thinking behind the original proposal still sticks, two things immediately jumped out: its lethality is through the roof and it is lousy with fiddly die rolls. I want to rein in the killing potential, streamline the design and make it more evocative all in one fell swoop.

Even for a game where the deliberate choice has been made for character death to be on the cards, I made the egregious mistake of viewing several degrees of results as distinct, whereas their empirical value ranks them right alongside with death. Let’s face it, if a campaign is low level and the setting presents magic as scarce, a severed limb result is about as good a character send-off as full fledged death.

After accounting for a whole party as frame of reference, with each character making multiple rolls as time goes by, one would soon enough find the group turned into a roving gang of cripples, akin to the remnants of the Grand Armée.

I also want a more elegant, tiered single table that accounts for a greater variety of circumstances, reflecting the fact that opponents of immense size or hazardous catastrophes are much more likely to cause grievous injury and death than the brigand's knife thrust.

The Many Faces of Death

Once a game’s been decided to allow for character death, it can either be done in a dry fashion or through a table such as the one that follows, which implies subscribing to a certain aesthetic, rather than simply bidding a character farewell once the last hit-point drains off. The major purpose of a dismemberment table, other than scratching that jig-ai itch, is upping a combat’s tension without pulling the plug too soon, all the while keeping a measure of meaningful decision in the hands of those seated alongside the referee. Some of the results are harsh but it must be kept present that the alternative would be the simple death and nothing else.

After pushing down the table’s bottom tier, the lower rungs gave me room to play with some branching types of death, from slowburn agony to the goregrind excesses, allowing last ditch heroics at first and aknowledging that healing magic and even resurrection may fail, being negated in the most grievous of cases.

Dosis Facit Venenum

With the recalibrated version, a standard roll is vastly less likely to see a character perish. The chance is there: tucked away at the fringes of probability and yet centerstage on the player’s thoughts when rolling, which is just the way it should be.

The most likely results are deliberately plotted to be a recoverable string of consequences, the intent being that the average roll’s result should not be too punishing, that a harried character may, excepting for truly ill luck, escape the occasional brush with death with little to weigh him down for it. It being true, however, that once a character starts rolling repeatedly, he is liable to lose something he'll later miss and be eventually cut down. The one safeguard at the end of the Hp rope is there to signal to the player the kiddie gloves have come off, allowing a last call to reassess.

The Crunchy Bits

The Wounded Condition

On some of the more dire table results, the character will become Wounded, becoming subject to the following penalties until the character is magically healed or the injury’s healing time has run its course:

- Disadvantage on attack rolls;

- Base exhaustion level increased by 1 per wound;

- Certain physical tasks may now require a roll (at referee’s discretion);

The Table

Base Assumptions

- Rolling on the table is a player-character’s privilege (or, at the least, a levelled character privilege). NPCs, once stripped of hit-points, are simply dead.

- The table presumes the character to be near to man-sized.

- All saving throws requested by the table are rolled for at the end of the character’s combat turn, unless specified otherwise.

- Any uses of non-specific healing magic deliberately applied to lingering injuries may instead restore no hit-points and deduct the spell’s level from the number of days remaining until the wound is healed.

When to Roll - Outside of Combat

Situations may crop up, however rarely, where a character’s misfortunes will merit resolution through a direct roll on the table, bypassing Hp entirely, depending on whatever proves the most adequate abstraction.

When to Roll - In Combat

- If a character has no Hp left, every attack or non-incidental source of damage that connects means a roll on the table.

- An attack partially absorbed by any remaining (or regained) Hit-points allows a Constitution Saving Throw of DC equal to the excess damage.

What to Roll

A player rolls 3d6 on the table, minus one d6 for each of the below circumstances:

- Opponent is a Monstrous Creature (of Large size or larger);

- Attack is a Critical Hit or a Coup de Grâce;

- Damage rolled exceeds the character’s maximum hitpoint total;

In a pique of irony, the dismemberment table was itself mangled by the mobile formatting. Expand.

On Getting Too Old For This Shit

A player is completely free to roll up a new character at any time and retire his old persona, returning him to the coils of the setting, to become a living entity much like any other in the world, probably allied with the party, possibly otherwise. The logistics of the open table then dictating how the economy of coincidence is to thrust the newly-minted protagonist onto the world’s stage.

Them Bones of Adventure - XVIII: Experience

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

Introduction

Like spice melange, the Xp must flow.

And flow it should, from multiple wellsprings.

Advancement mechanics act as player behaviour drivers and what they reward ultimately serves to define what a given running’s all about. This informs my interest in affording a modicum of choice between options rather than reducing the whole process to a simple univocal “gain” mechanic, certainly not limited to death-dealing.

We’ve all been there, done that and gotten the mythril t-shirt. The plan’s to keep it old school, with some twists. I’m doing like the Inca civilization here so no invention of the wheel at all: Xp is to come mainly from loot, with second fiddle reserved for death-defying stakes through combat and some residual thought given to hazard and survival.

A World of Dunces

The game’s setting will operate on the presumption that NPCs have no inherent level. Being levelled implies a world of potential simply beyond the reach of most mere mortals, it implies that more can be attained, that the peak of one’s abilities and condition has either been pushed up way past the cloud cover or altogether removed, the way to demigodhood laying ripe for the paving.

Of course, enemies – sentient ones – can acquire greater skill in arms and resilience, but I feel no need whatsoever to align and harmonize these facts into a coherent system of levels common to all characters.

Are You Experienced?

I’ve toyed and tinkered with mechanical ways of keying a character’s starting Xp to his age or stats but ended up bowing to the simple gaming truism of “a player begins a game with zero points on the scoreboard”.

No matter a character’s age, physical potential or status, it must be assumed all the time up until now was spent accruing the life experience to make it to first level. Not all of that time need have been necessarily productive, as achieving first level simply represents the moment the spark of greatness is ignited within the character.

Casualties of Cool

Straight from the page, narrativism is very much ingrained in the 5E rules through the whole bonds/weaknesses/bullshit (basically WoD’s lunch money) and the Inspiration award which, despite its name, is a rather uninspired mechanic.

My head's banged on this wall enough times to get a Pollock out of it: to award or not to award Xp for roleplay, for treasure, for quests, for accomplishments, for milestones, for tardiness (don’t laugh, I’ve seen it done), for mapping, for journal keeping, for fetching the DM some cigs.

In short, I’ve seen Xp used in completely tone-deaf ways and its attribution attached to totally arbitrary acts and game-removed situations, some of them verging on homework assignment.

My own attempts to establish a clean procedure for awarding rewards for roleplaying (as, for the longest time, I was wedded to the idea) made me stumble on several blocks that ground at me until I gave it all up:

- The slippery slope of reward relativism (“X’s move was cool, but not as cool as that other maneuver made by Y two turns ago, and even less than that other stunt Z pulled last session”).

- The related fact that every time a would-be referee acts as an arbitrary fountainhead of Xp this deepens the Player-DM rift, as it forces table conformity to one person’s aesthetic vision and quantification of coolness. The mantra for me being that a referee should primarily provide challenges. Rewards, if any, should always come indexed to the challenges provided, never to be pulled out of thin air.

- The fact that it is an inherently dissociated mechanic.

- Being new player unfriendly. This one was the deciding factor, as a long lasting game thrives on the capacity for absorbing fresh blood and nothing feels more cliquish than a group that knows which DM-buttons to push for extra sugar cubes while the newcomer is left to conform or see his progress impaired.

Ultimately, my desire for making the game an open table is what sold me on the idea that rewarding roleplay, while not inherently wrong (I’ve done it in the past, which means I’m obliged to stand by it to the death), definitely requires a narrative-driven running, with both a talented (well, willing) table of players and a stable ensemble of characters who can mature without bothersome stuff like getting the loving shit murdered out of them in the midst of their precious growth process clouding up the proceeds.

The decision as it now stands is to keep things on the dry and gamist end of the spectrum, in keeping with the spirit of the original. A scoreboard to track each player’s progress with some spice added while endeavoring to keep subjectivity at bay. By aiming for what some might think of as the lowest common denominator of gameplay, I actively strive to keep the table open, as I’d rather be accused of “the game being all about killing” than have the soliloquist thespian get an unsurmountable edge while the wallflowers get ever more sidelined.

To want immersion one has to be willing to work for it, without having to bribe players into compliance. If someone’s feeling inspired to map, draw, write or in any way contribute to add some ribboning to a campaign, that drive must be genuine, not bought. When all’s said, you can’t put a price tag on enthusiasm.

Despite absence of rewards, emergent roleplay is still possible, as nothing stops me from making voices to my heart’s content and the same going triple for the other players. For narrativism-heavy campaigns, rather than concentrating on numerical rewards, my advice boils down to: always meet the players halfway across the bridge (and be prepared at first to go fetch them to the other shore entirely, too).

A Man Should Have Some Standards

Mine just happens to be silver.

Specifically, LotFP’s 10 copper pieces to the silver piece, 50 silver pieces to the gold piece. This casts the glint of gold back into association with true wealth, giving value back to the bottom tier of coin, instead of mostly pretending it doesn’t exist past expenses one might not even want to be tracking anyway.

Now, if characters are to gain experience for treasures unearthed, this presents a dillema: what is entitled to count as treasure?

The answer is one that sets the goal posts for many a game’s own brand of awkwardness: to award Xp only for treasure extracted from *certain sources* or make it so that only *certain activities* qualify as yielding treasure? The answer, by way of essentialism, is that it cannot really matter how coin is obtained. As only levelled characters have the wherewithal to convert it through training or research into something that will unlock higher echelons of power, this means that a merchant prince, no matter how rich, will ever find himself locked outside the ornate steps that lead to godhood.

In any event, if a party opts in for the mercantilist approach, I have it on more than just hope that I can probably squeeze an adventure out of that.

The Crunchy Bits

Character Advancement Chart

Aiming for a fairly glacial pace of advancement, one that feels earned, as I don’t feel like the quality of a running is ever dependent on the power level of the protagonists but also don’t disregard the fact that a progress measure of some sort is desirable as psychological reinforcement.

Despite not thinking of wide-ranging advancement in levels as a particular requisite of a successfully evolving campaign and preferring the lower levels, it is important for characters to be ever growing in power and prospects and for players to have something tangible to bear witness as a way of score (as in game score), all the more since my intent's on giving player characters recognition for their power, rather than just throw them onto the hamster treadmill of climbing numbers.

Whoever gives credence to the whole “first and second levels are formative” bullshit can just as well start the characters at third, I for one see no need to corrupt the whole growth ladder with facile little baby steps.

Level Attained	Xp Required to make Level	Experience Total
1	0 Xp	0 Xp
2	1.000 Xp	1.000 Xp
3	2.000 Xp	3.000 Xp
4	4.000 Xp	7.000 Xp
5	8.000 Xp	15.000 Xp
6	16.000 Xp	31.000 Xp
7	32.000 Xp	63.000 Xp
8	64.000 Xp	127.000 Xp
9+	128.000 Xp	255.000+ Xp

Prime Requisites

As detailed previously, I’ve decided to attach the old-school experience premiums from high stats to Wisdom and Intelligence, both of which cover different facets of learning and thus relate to experience gain.

This also punishes dumping these same stats, though for even a minimally rounded-out character, it ought to be a wash at worse.

- Both the Wisdom and Intelligence attributes modify the experience needed per level by a percentual point per modifier point, subtracting for positives and adding for negatives.

Lessons in the Steel and the Better Part of Valour

At its core, experience is a reward for stakes. If a character risks life or limb, be it parcels (Hp) or wholecloth, he gets something back from the ordeal.

As such, since combat is to be deadly and the same going for hazardous obstacles, with the existence of one’s beloved character not being the least bit insured, avoiding combats or obstacles through diplomacy or cleverness will stand as its own reward, valued in continued survival to fight another day.

Team challenges – Combat, Exploration, Survival, Treasure Hauling

Experience for combat, exploration, survival and treasure hauling should all be divvied up in equal shares by the party, enforcing team spirit. Even if a character is less than competent and plays only a residual part in a fight , wisdom gained from failure, observation or setting a bad example will still resolve into a learning experience.

- Combat experience is divided into equal shares by all the participants and is obtained by driving the opposition to flight, reducing them to surrender or outright vanquishing it.

- Characters that perish during a combat are still entitled their share of the experience, taking it to the grave.

- Opponents who have already awarded their experience won’t provide any further value if faced again on the same day.

Facing hazards and Individual rewards for risk

Despite the game not being centered around them, occasions will arise where an individual challenge involving stakes will be faced (or initiated) by a player character. Coherence obliges that some form of reward be alloted. As such, individual experience will be awarded whenever the possibility of character demise is placed on the table, such as being the lead climber on a treacherous climb, or disarming a trap.

True to concept that the rewards drive the style of play and that the running should focus on group experiences, only residual experience will be granted, as here I’m none too worried if the rewards don't offset the chances taken. Thus, while individual Xp gains will be accorded to whoever braves risks, in scenarios such as that of the thief that recklessly plies his craft putting life and limb on the line, the player will only find himself accounted for, not rewarded.

For braving hazards, much the same schema of reward applies, but naturally extended to all the participants.

Individual & Hazard rewards come in three tiers. These are then either multiplied by the task’s DC (for single round challenges like trap disarming or purse cutting) or the hazard’s dimensions (feet to a climb, yards to a river crossing, hours of ill weather endured, miles of desert crossed, etc.) for prolonged challenges:

1 - If failure costs Hit Points or Exhaustion: 1 experience point per character level;

2 - If failure implies a roll on the Dismemberment table: 5 experience points per character level;

3 - If failure means Death: 10 experience points per character level;

Note that all of these are awarded independently of the character failing or succeeding (though Xp for a failed number 3 would only be of use to a ressurected character) and that a protracted challenge may shift into a more dangerous category at mid-point (such as a climber ascending enough that a fall will mean a guaranteed dismemberment roll).

Though the exact DC may or may not be open information, the player must always perceive in advance, writ large, what stands to be lost from the course of action, before jamming the pins on a blade trap/plunging into a lava pit/being killed by a raging mob/drowning foolishly.

Training Montages

Taking treasure for experience as a given, there still remain some finer points to hone. My wish is for players to have to strategically weigh the benefits between investing in advancement or equipment acquisition that will keep them alive in the immediate future:

- Treasure must be converted to experience points through training.

- Self-training is completely abstracted, with no prescribed behaviour or basic conditions other than some grounding in-world logic for it being considered appropriate to the character’s Class and upcoming level features being trained for. All treasure converted during this time is considered to be fully spent on any and all requirements, from sundry training arrangements to research material, bribes, adequate equipment, sparring partners, etc, with no tangible benefits afforded beyond the experience.

- Spending a whole day training without guidance allows a character to convert 10 silver pieces into experience points.

This is meant to negate the sudden power-jumps that always bothered me about the “wealth for experience” approach.

As the levels climb, a character will doubtlessly need to turn to illustrious martial masters, infamous retired rogues and capricious sorcerous figures if he’s to have any hope of unlocking greater potential before old age claims him. This feature serves both as story-hook by way of advancement as well as carving a place in the world for any retired player characters that using a fully operational dismemberment table is bound to create.

Though it comes as prescribed that a party share all of its wealth equally, the fanning of circumstances provided by training and the realities of character attrition mean that different Xp totals within a party are to be the norm, rather than the exception.

Closing Thoughts – Upward Mobility

Experience originating from Quests, Titles or Achievements will doubtlessly prove necessary for levelling past the initial stages of play. Though I’m as yet emphatically unconcerned with this, my thinking is that these will first need to be purged from their subjectiveness and may provide the characters with a percentage of the experience needed to level up, rather than a lump total.

This frees up my refereeing hands from plotting appropriate rewards to actually be generous, as I’m unchained from obsessing with artificially curbing the pace of advancement since the natural player and character attrition rate already will do a lot of that pruning for me. And as there’s no narrative “arc” dictating that the characters have to be at this or that level to credibly face down the spectre of plotted threats, it’s all on a come, as you are basis.

Of course, all this slow pace of advancement, besides feeling earned, shouldn’t be seen as a window of opportunity for a canny referee to tamper and develop the character classes as the players progress along them, perish the thought!