Dark Fantasy X 1.3.1

A few days ago, I showed my "professionally" printed version of the rules, and talked about my disappointment in how it turned out. I decided that I want to revise the document from landscape to portrait and print it out (on a printer, not sent to some crappy Chinese printing service) and just put it in a report cover with a sliding bar like you can buy for a couple of bucks at Wal-mart or Staples or whatever. While I was at it, I might as well revise a few things in the rules anyway. I did this over the first couple of days of the holiday, but I also made some small revisions since doing so, bumping me from version 1.2, which was printed, to 1.3.1. However, I'm not going to upload or print the documents just yet, because I put a 2023 copyright on them. Plus, just in case I decide to make another minor update before going official. But let's talk briefly about what I did that was new or changed.

First, I changed the Hardcore Mode to Nightmare Mode. This is a minor cosmetic change, but since Hardcore Mode is the name of an actual product that modifies 5e, I thought a more generic Nightmare Mode, which sounds like the highest difficulty setting on any number of video games, would work better.

I'm actually not quite sure why I included this option at all. No doubt, I got caught up in listening to podcasts from OSR-adjacent people, like Professor Dungeon Master, or some of the others of his ilk, and thought it would be fun to include an option for the truly hardcore version of the rules that feels more like B/X or even OD&D. On the other hand, it's not like I actually have any interest at all in playing with that option. What can I say? I guess even I'm not immune to getting swept up in zeitgeists, even when it's not really my jam. That said, now that the options exist, I don't see any reason in removing them, even if I'll never use them. 

Secondly, I included a new bunch of little sections of alternate rules. These are neither more nor less difficult; they're just different, and in some cases, I might even almost prefer them to my original rules, so they have much more currency with me as the designer and owner of the game—I could totally see using these rules. Let's go through them a little, shall we?

• For people who are anxious about rolling stats, I included a default array. Given that there's only three stats in m20 games, I went with -1, +1 and +3. Not a bad option, actually. I don't know what the odds are of rolling that or better, but I'd propose that the default array is probably on the high side of average.

• The class customization was officially turned into a alternative rule rather than a default one.

• Swashbuckling armor class alternative was introduced; for this rule, your starting gold is reduced, and you don't really have armor or shields on the equipment list. Rather, you apply your To Hit Melee score as a bonus to 10 to calculate your armor class. This is arguably better than the armor version, in terms of what the AC score is, and how it progresses, but game balance isn't going to be thrown off because of it, because the game isn't balanced to a razor's edge anyway; it's pretty forgiving, as any game based on rulings instead of tight rules is inevitably going to be.

• Three different new alternate initiative systems are spelled out. The default initiative is similar to initiative in OD&D and B/X; each side rolls a d6 for it each round. I've also introduced the concept of having no initiative at all, of the 3e and 5e style initiative, and simply doing initiative by DEX score. To be honest, I'm kind of indifferent to all but the 3e and 5e style initiative. Even though I've used that extensively over the last two decades, I think it's too complicated and takes too long, and I no longer prefer it to simpler alternatives. But in situations where I have a really small group of only 1-3 players, it would probably still work fine.

• An entirely new spellcasting resolution system is described, in which you make a spellcasting check (Magic To Hit roll vs a DC of 10 + (2 x spell level)). In this alternative system, there's no hit point damage representing the spell tiring you out or draining your energy; you can cast them much more often and frequently. There's also no sanity check unless the spell fails (in the default system, the sanity check is separate from the spellcasting phase, and even successfully cast spells could have a sanity cost to the spellcaster.) However, critical failures (natural 1) on this check are significantly more dramatic, including a sanity check at disadvantage, and the spell will either 1) backfire on the caster, and his party if it's an area effect, 2) bring extradimensional monsters in to attack the spellcaster and anyone who attempts to defend him, or 3) a totally different spell will go off (maybe even one the spellcaster doesn't know) and may well effect a different target. It's up to the GM to make sure that this is just as inconvenient an option as the first two. In other words, spellcasting becomes less costly when it works fine, but it also becomes like a game of Russian Roulette every time a spell is cast, and the spellcaster himself (or his party) will self-regulate the use of magic to real emergencies, because of the inherent risk. A natural 1 may not seem like that bad of a risk, but it will happen, on average, once every twenty spells cast. That's quite a bit, and because the results are so much worse than in the default rules, spellcasters are highly incentivized to be cautious in the use of their magic.

• The extended minion concept discussed a few posts ago was edited and introduced as a regular alternative rule in the Monsters and Other Foes section. Now, any combat can be simplified by changing hit points to hits by dividing hit points by 10, rounding, and manually adjusting as needed one or two in either direction. All critical hits and any damage rolls that are in in the top two digits of the damage range count as double hits. This is explicitly spelled out as a shortcut to make combats easier and faster to run, however, not as a full-time replacement system. I also believe, although I didn't really say this, that when using this shortcut, it's a good idea to just do it as the GM as a shortcut and not necessarily tell your PCs when you're using it or when you're not. They don't need to see the sausage being made, and in theory, it only makes it easier on the GM without actually having any noticeable impact on the actual combat.

Thirdly, I made a few minor updates to a number of monster entries. I also added some brief text highlighting how difficult and scary many of the monsters would be even to relatively high level PCs, and suggested that they be used more as module-capping set pieces rather than run of the mill foes, for the most part. By this I mean the actual monsters in the list, of course. An entry like HUMAN, BANDIT wouldn't count as a monster for purposes of this discussion. In fact, I specifically recommended using a lot more human (and demihuman) and wild animal foes for most combats. 

I also generated a bunch of AI artwork files to use as cover art. Most of them weren't really good enough to qualify, but I got about half a dozen that are decent and barring me spending real money to commission some real art, they'll do the trick. 

This is the one I used, but the next one is a close second.

Merry Christmas

Taking a quick break between our family daytime Christmas Eve activities and our evening Christmas Eve activities to post this and do a few other things. Merry Christmas, y'all!

Dark Fantasy X Update

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered up a printing of Dark Fantasy X. It showed up just a day or two ago. I've been re-reading it, now that it's a physical copy, and... well, I'm not entirely happy. For one thing, although the printing cost about $20 (when shipping was factored in, at least) it's not a great print or binding job. I'm also not as happy with the landscape format as I'd thought. I knew that that was becoming trendy, but I imagine that's for pdfs that are being read on a landscape screen. Where, admittedly, it's pretty convenient. 

I caught an error or two, and I've changed my mind about a few other minor details. I'm not sad that I went ahead and got this printing, but I imagine that I might well do a 1.2.1 now, revert to profile view, and print like normal, and just put it in clear plastic report covers/holders like you can buy in any office supplies section of any store that sells office supplies.

Sigh. It's always something. Some of the things I've changed my mind about, however, aren't necessarily changes to the rules (although some are), but some are changes to how I'd run. They're best described in a one or two page add-on for house-rules and guide for running the game. This could include my hit points to hits short-cut, which I think is better described as an optional GM shortcut rather than an actual rule change. A few others would actually include changes to the rules. In at least two cases, it's a trimming of some non-essential fat and taking stuff out of the rules and leaving them to GM interpretation (like spell duration, and monster/foe ability scores, and a few minor details like that. I want to clarify a few unclear things about spellcasting, and put the natural 1 rules in—although again, whether that's a rule-rule, or a house-rule I'm not sure yet. 

Anyway, while it was a nice effort, it looks like I not only went to the wrong source for printing, and got a product that I wasn't 100% thrilled with, but I also jumped the gun and tried to do it a little bit too soon; by the time it got to my house, I'd already thought of changes I wanted to make. 

Which is easier to do, I should admit, when I'm not actively running the game. So that would be the ideal way to stop the churn; actually put it into use, then I'd feel much more compelled to run with the rules as they're printed rather than continue to tinker with them. 

Anyway, the coming weekend is the Christmas holiday, of course, so I'm not sure that I'll be sitting down to make these changes then. Then I have family coming into town, and then my daughter's wedding at the end of the next week after that. This may not be imminent, but it'll be soon.

UPDATE: Huh. Those pillows are in worse shape than I thought. To be fair, this loveseat in the basement has been temporarily the storage platform for a bunch of stuff that we gave away to Salvation Army just last week.

Anyway, I've updated the file. I'll print some and put them in clear report cover folders, as mentioned above.

Here it is.

Hero Forge stuff

I decided, on a whim, to try and replicate that guy in the picture from the last post. I knew I wasn't going to be able to do it completely, but I wanted to use him as inspiration. Here he is.

Here's a couple of Hero Forge guys I made based on miniatures I saw on Dungeon Craft's YouTube channel; the alchemists of his urban skullduggery "module", and Johan Munchburger, one of his important NPCs.

Here's a few bandits, again based (loosely) on some miniatures on Dungeon Craft.

The Tower Witch looks nothing like the miniature he painted for his tower witch, but I liked the idea of a haughty witch who refused to leave her tower because she'd be lynched if she did. I also like the idea of witches (and their male counterparts) eventually becoming corrupted into non-humans of some kind. This one seems to be kinda sorta on her way to becoming a succubus, or something very like one.

Her skin turned daemon red, her eyes are weird and gem-like, she's grown huge, curling ram-like horns, and she smirks about as she dresses like a wanton wench.

Speaking of which, here's some results from Gary Gygax's infamous harlot table. Some of these were minis that I'd already designed in Hero Forge and renamed to fit the harlot table. They aren't necessarily meant to be harlots, but action grrls are—by definition—rather unfeminine and thumb their noses at society's expectations of them. Unlike today's broken liberal culture, I recognize that this isn't really a good thing.

Brazen strumpet

Expensive Doxy

Haughty courtesan

Saucy tart

Slovenly trull

I think I may well have posted this before, but here's the politically incorrect "savage Inuto" mini I designed in Hero Forge. I do like making some of the unusual faces, like orcs and goblins, look like people. When the face customization feature comes out next year, that'll be less important, because all faces will look unique.

Minion concept expanded

My printed copy of Dark Fantasy X is out for delivery, so I should get it later today. Sigh. Sadly, I'm now considering a radical alternative to some details in my monster list. Although perhaps this is better as an alternative than as a default anyway.

I've been watching a lot of the early Dungeon Craft YouTube videos in the background while finishing up my work for the year before the holiday starts (officially this afternoon is my last moment of work! Whoop!) Although we do have some differences here and there—he's very sold on a lot of early D&D stuff for system although we both don't really care that much about system and run the game basically the same, while I don't like those systems all that much—and he really likes terrain and I prefer not to use it (although he also recognizes that for many situations, terrain doesn't work in game, and I do like terrain for its own sake, even though I prefer not to use it during the game.) The reality is that we play and run the game almost identically, which is kind of a funny coincidence given those differences and others. Although I've been watching him for many months when he uploads a new video, I never really got into his back catalog of early videos before, so I didn't actually realize this until just now. 

But occasionally he's reached an epiphany about a minor issue here and there that never occurred to me. So, while I heartily endorse the minion concept (monsters that die when hit, regardless of damage) and I also heartily endorse what I sometimes flippantly call Schrödinger's hit points for enemies; i.e., just as the combat is starting to flag and become a little tedious, right as the fun factor peaks, the next hit kills it and ends the combat—I hadn't really quite cottoned on to the idea of replacing enemy hit points with hits. 

This is an expansion of the minion concept. If a minion dies with one hit, regardless of damage, minor sub-bosses can die with two or three hits, regardless of damage. In fact, you can scale this up as far as you want. Cthulhu himself, who has 200 hit points in my monster list, could be converted to a twenty or twenty five hit monster. Not that anyone's going to hit him that many times (if at all) before dying. But you get my drift. If a dragon has 75 hit points, I could convert that into hits, by using the concept that an average damage roll by a player character is—what about 10 hit point or so, flexing up or down by about 3-4 based on level and party composition. A dragon therefore has 7-8 hits, and going to all of the trouble of calculating hit points as they go down is probably more trouble than it's really worth. Does it really matter if my averages are a little off and the dragon needs one or two more or less hits to be killed? No, not at all.

So, this alternative, which I think is best to just do as a GM thing and not really tell the players too much about, will do exactly that; monsters hit points can be converted to hits. There are two ways to do this; convert their hit dice to hits, regardless of the actual hit dice, or simply divide the hit point total by 10 and round up or down, depending on taste. The results between the two methods will be pretty different; that same dragon with 75 hit points has 15d8 HD, which means it would have 15 hits. Because d8 is the most commonly used hit dice, and the average of a d8 roll is 5, that means that using the hit dice vs using the divide by 10 method will give you pretty different results; the divide by 10 is obviously going to give you only half as many hits as what is effectively divide by 5. The point, however, is that neither of these is the "correct" way to convert hit points to hits, both are merely reference points. Exactly how many hits you want to get out of your hit points are going to be up to you. In general, I'd suggest that shorter, faster combats are—with rare exceptions—better than longer ones, however. I'd recommend using the divide by 10 method, and then throwing a couple extra hits on top of that if it seems too low for what you're looking for.

Anytime a player character rolls a critical hit, or otherwise rolls in the top 20% or so of his damage range, count 2 hits rather than one. Stefan Clevenger, a 4th level fighter iconic character, for instance, has a 1d8+6 damage range with his longsword. That means that his damage range is 7-14 on a successful hit, with an average of about 11½. Stefan's player, when fighting enemies in game, will roll his damage normally, but a GM who has taken the hits vs hit points shortcut will consider all hits as simply one hit against a monster, unless he rolls a total of 13-14, or gets a critical hit, in which case it will count as 2 hits. If he's fighting, and I picked this monster more or less at random, an elf (sidhe lord) who has 8d8 hit dice, and 40 hit points, I—as the GM—would first have to decide if I wanted a quick or long option, or somewhere in between. The eight hit dice and forty hit points can be converted to 4 hits, 8 hits, or somewhere in between to strike a middle balance. Let's say for the same of argument that I'm going the fast combat style (which is more likely); I'd have the Sidhe Lord have 4 hits. A damage roll of 13 would be two hits.

You can see that the math here is a bit on the loosie-goosey side, which is why it's probably better as a behind the scenes GM shortcut and an alternate rather than a default in the rules. How many hits does this sidhe lord have? Four? Six? Eight? That's a DM decision that needs to be made on the fly as combat starts. Maybe it can even be altered in the middle of combat if it makes the combat more fun. Again, just don't tell the players exactly how the sausage is made behind the screen, though. If you pick four hits and a damage roll of 13 causes two hits, that's the equivalent of turning your damage roll of 13 into 20. Again, a bit loosie-goosey, and don't let the sausage factory come into view.

But it's a great tool for GMs to improve the efficiency and ease of use of the game. Here's the real secret; those hit points that all entries have in the monsters and other foes section? I just made them up in the first place, and then I arbitrarily changed a bunch of them as part of a redesign later. They're not heavily play-tested, and even if they were, they don't represent some magical truth. It's just a number. I've been in too many games (both computer games and regular RPGs) where combats just dragged on. The outcome was not in question, but there was nobody with a sense of editing who could fast-forward through the tedious part of getting there. Even I, as the designer of the game (kitbasher would be a more fair description) can't tell you the "correct" or optimal number of hits to take down a monster. It varies from game to game, and even within the same game, from encounter to encounter. Use your judgement as the GM to optimize each of your own combats. 

And one tool to make that a bit easier is to convert hit points to hits for many if not most of your combats; an extension of the minion principle even to monsters that have more hit points than, say, a goblin would.

George Lucas is a petty, toxic little gamma

This article is ten years old, but holy cow if it doesn't still pack a punch.

https://www.tor.com/2012/03/16/lucas-shot-first-the-surprisingly-powerful-sense-of-betrayal-george-lucas-creates/

Even if it is posted on tor.

As I read The Secret History of Star Wars the first time, I was more and more disappointed in George Lucas himself; the man obviously has some talent, but it's squandered because of his resentment of supposed slights, and the lack of adulation that he got from some of his movies that maybe he liked better than Star Wars. Lucas comes across as the guy who was ignored by the popular people in high school—not actively bullied, but just they were totally apathetic to him and ignored him completely—and now in his old age, he's trying to get revenge on everyone who didn't appreciate him as much as he believes he is entitled to.

There are lots of reasons to be disappointed in Star Wars lately, most of them attributable to Disney and Kathleen Kennedy's even more toxic attitude toward the brand, but before there was Kathleen Kennedy, there was George Lucas. And while he deserves a lot of credit for creating some pretty cool movies ~40 years ago, everything he's done since has eroded that accomplishment. His attitude and statements since are the most damning thing of all.

Basically, George has turned around and made the studio system his justification for going back and editing anything he wants. Those heartless men in their Hollywood suits took something precious from him, denied his right to true ownership, and now he’s taking it back inch-by-CGI-saturated-inch. And the fans who are reediting the films themselves, rearranging the prequels so they make more sense, or knocking out those ridiculous “Noooo“s, well, he’s got news for them:

“On the Internet, all those same guys that are complaining I made a change are completely changing the movie. I’m saying: ‘Fine. But my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it.’ “

Which is, of course, just another way of saying “they’re my toys and I’m the only person who knows how to play with them properly.”

And that’s not a nice thing to say to the people who made your little empire, who paid for every brick and microchip that line the gold-paved road to Skywalker Ranch. We want to love you, George. You created our collective childhoods. What we can’t understand is how you never seem the realize the sanctity of that. Then again, you don’t even seem to understand the how people connect with each other, much less how they bond with and over a work of art.

We know Star Wars means more to us than it does to you, the man who reportedly hated talking to actors until he directed the prequels, who wanted to replace people with effects in his youth and has nearly achieved that goal. We don’t need Boba Fett’s voice to sound like his retconned father’s—that’s not why we loved that over-armed bounty hunter. We don’t need to see Hayden Christensen’s ghost at the end of Return of the Jedi—he’s not the person who Luke held as he died. You’re taking away the moments that reverberated in us, the little bits and bobs that made a silly popcorn film so damn special. And you have the gall to act above it all when you do it.

“Well, it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie.”

Then why do you need to keep coming back to it? It’s not Homer or Milton or even Dante, we all know that, but couldn’t you make an effort to protect it from the ravages of time?

I suppose this line from a recent interview with Oprah should tell us all we need to know:

“Don’t listen to your peers, don’t listen to the authority figures in your life—your parents—and don’t listen to the culture. Only listen to yourself. That’s where you’re going to find the truth.”

That brand of myopia is painful to hear, because it means that a creator who we piled so much love and admiration onto was never really worthy of those sentiments. That he is, in fact, resentfully dismantling something beloved, and in the name of… truth? A truth that he can’t be bothered to share with the rest of us? Movies are supposed to be made for people who watch them, but George has obviously forgotten what business he’s in.

Some more previews of coming attractions

Not sure where I want to use them yet, but I want at least one of the columns of my upcoming two 5x5s to be focused on undead and necromancers. And by that I mean something other than vampires, because I'll have a vampire themed column too in CULT OF UNDEATH.

It probably makes sense for this to be somewhere in CULT OF UNDEATH too, but we'll see. Also; no guarantee that every image here will represent something that shows up; I'm mostly just gathering my resources for potential columns of the 5x5s. Lord Soth and the Nazgûl, for instance, probably are too recognizable to even be used as Hero Forge copycat images without people in my game saying, "Hey, waitaminute..." The cowboy skeleton poker player and the Pirate Lechuck might be too much too, although Lechuck looks like someone who could get around setting to setting and still fit in, at least with that generic undead-pirate look.