B is for Bonuses

Okay, so which one of us has the "craft: raft" skill, and which one has "boating"?

Unlike both OD&D and AD&D, B/X has a universal set of ability bonuses that begin at relatively low numbers (13 instead of 14-16 for AD&D). It does not, however, develop any kind of universal skill system. As per previous editions, the kind of actions players might typically take in the course of adventuring (other than combat) operate on an ad-hoc basis:

• Literacy and Languages: Determined by Intelligence and race
• Stealth (aka surprise): 1-2 on 1d6 (33%)
• Stealth (aka evasion in the wilderness): 10-90%, depending on relative party size
• Search (secret doors, traps): 1 on 1d6 (16%) (1-2 for elves and dwarves for secret doors; 1-2 for dwarves on traps - 33%)
• Listen: 1-2 on 1d6 (33%)
• Climb: No odds given, but presumably possible for any character with the right equipment
• Foraging/Hunting: 1 on 1d6 (16%)
• Maintain Course (the opposite of becoming lost): On a 1d6 - 2-6 (83%) in clear or grasslands; 3-6 (67%) in woods, hills, mountains, oceans, and barren; and 4-6 (50%) in swamp, jungle, or desert.
• Diplomacy: 9 or better on 2d12 indicates a favorable reaction, with 12 or better indicating a very favorable reaction

With the exception of diplomacy and languages, none of the above "skills" are modified in any way by a character's abilities or class, and only a few are modified by one's race.

In addition, certain classes and races get additional (non-magical) abilities:

• Thieves of course get their special abilities, which increase with level.
• In addition to a better chance to detect traps, dwarves have a 1-in-3 chance to find slanting passages, shifting walls, and new construction.
• Halflings can hide in shadows in a 1-in-3 chance underground, and hide in natural foliage 90% of the time.

Frankly, the skills listed cover about 90% of what a party of PCs is likely to do in the course of your typical dungeon-crawl or hex-crawl. The time honored roll-a-d20-under-the-appropriate-ability method really does cover most of the rest. 

However, there are some limitations to the above:

First, there's little ability to improve one's skills as time goes on. Granted that most of a chracter's time is going to be spent improving skill intrinsic to their profession (class), but why would a 1st level magic-user and a 12th-level fighter have exactly the same chance to find food in the wilderness or sneak up on a band of orcs? 

Second, there's no real ability to customize one's character for a given background. Granted, B/X doesn't exactly focus on role-playing as an art of character study. What a PC does once play begins is far more important than what he did before first entering the dungeon. Even so, why should a city-born wizard be able to hunt just as well as the barbarian warrior?

For that matter, why should a whole party wearing plate armor have the same chance to surprise as a lone character in no-to-light armor?

Now in my younger days, that never bothered me. Negotiating ad-hoc bonuses for your character based on background, abilities, and situations was all part of the game when I grew up. But my best player, who pretty much cut his teeth on 3e, wanted to have a better quantifiable idea of what his character could or could not do--and be able to customize his character for a particular concept.

Okay, fair enough. The question was how to do it without devolving into the granularity of d20 D&D, which I really don't have any patience for anymore.

Well, the first question is whether to keep the various d6 rolls, or to come up with something else. After some thought, I decided to take a bit of advice I heard way back in my days of reading all the various OD&D boards and blogs and fall back on the ol' 2d6, using the reaction chart as a base:

2          Critical Failure

3-5      Failure

6-8      Neutral (or a minor success on an easy task)

9-11    Success

12       Great Success

A bit of calculation showed that when rolling an unmodified 2d6, one had the following percent chance to roll the following numbers and above:

2 - 100%

3 - 97%

4 - 92%

5 - 83%

6 - 72%

7 - 58%

8 - 42%

9 - 27%

10 - 17%

11 - 8%

12 - 3%

In other words, rolling a 10 or above on 2d6 had about the same chance as rolling a 1 on a 1d6, rolling a 9 on a 2d6 had a slightly smaller chance than rolling a 1-2 on a 1d6, and so forth. Using 2d6 instead of 1d6 gave a bit more granularity.

So what if I converted all of those skills a chance on a 2d6 instead of the various other dice?

• Stealth (aka surprise): 9 or higher to surprise, with characters using light to no armor able to add the bonus of the least dextrous character in the group to the roll. This would give those fighters with a high dexterity a good reason to forgo heavy armor in certain situations.
• Search (secret doors, traps): 10 or higher. Dwarves and elves get a +1 to detect secret doors, and dwarves also get a +1 to find traps.
• Listen: 9 or higher.
• Climb: Still subject to having the right equipment and a bit of fiat.
• Foraging/Hunting: 10 or higher.
• Maintain Course (the opposite of becoming lost): 7 or higher, with a -2 penalty in woods, hills, mountains, oceans, and barren, and a -3 penalty in swamp, jungle, or desert. (Maybe even a -4 penalty in the jungle.)

Per the pattern set by the given skills, anything easy takes a 7 or better, anything moderately hard takes a 9 or better, and anything hard takes a 10 or better. Skills directly related to a particular ability (like the stealth/surprise check above, or diplomacy/the reaction roll) can be modified by the bonus for that ability.

Okay, but why bother? Simply put, because the slightly greater granularity gives me a bit of room to introduce other bonuses and penalties. For example, foraging might only take a 10 or better in the light woodlands, but in the desert might take an 11 or even 12 (especially to find water). But on the other hand, I could introduce backgrounds that give characters small bonuses to those kinds of checks: Perhaps a person with the desert nomad background gets a +2 to forage in the desert, giving him the same or better chance of finding food and water than most other characters have in their home territories.

So how would this map to the various skills found in 3e?

Appraise - 10 or better on 2d6, modified by Int

Balance - 2d6 modified by Dex, DM sets target number based on circumstances.

Bluff - Use Reaction Table, modified by Cha

Climb - Almost always possible if character has right equipment and enough time

Concentration - No such skill; being hit always disrupts a spell

Craft - I'd have to work this out based on character background; most PCs would have spent the majority of their lives in their chosen class/profession

Decipher Script - Thief ability

Diplomacy - Use Reaction Table, modified by Cha

Disable Device - Thief ability, or by player correctly figuring out the trigger

Disguise - Use Reaction Table, modified by Cha, penalty based on absurdity of disguise

Escape Artist - Saving throw vs. Paralysis, modified by Dex, at a -4 for rope and a -8 for shackles.

Forgery - Special circumstances, requiring DM fiat

Gather Information - Ye old "rumor" table

Handle Animal - Reaction Table, modified by Cha or Wis (whichever is higher)

Heal - Modified by Int, 10 or higher heals 1 hp, 12 or higher heals 1d4; one chance per wound only

Hide - Modified by Dex, roll depends on amount of cover available. Only thieves and halflings can hide in nothing but shadows

Intimidate - Target rolls against their morale, modified by intimidating character's Cha and circumstances (actually heating irons in front of a prisoner subtracts 2 from their morale)

Jump - DM fiat, depending on Str, Dex, and how much is being carried

Knowledge - Frankly, I think PCs should have to learn most of their knowledge by actually playing,and we all know that if the knowledge is essential to letting the adventure continue, the DM will make sure somebody knows it. But for those occasions where a roll is needed, 10 or better, modified by Int.

Listen - 9 or better

Move Silently - Use surprise (9 or better, modified by Dex if wearing light or no armor); only thieves can move with absolutely no sound at all.

Open Lock - Thief ability

Perform - Reaction Table, modified by Cha

Profession - Like Craft, depends on PC background, but few would have gotten past the apprentice stage

Ride - All PCs are assumed to be able to ride, and all fighters and clerics can use a warhorse in battle. 

Search - 10 or higher. Dwarves and elves get a +1 to detect secret doors, and dwarves also get a +1 to find traps.

Sense Motive - Role play it out.

Sleight Of Hand - Thief skill (pick pockets), though in certain circumstances, let a PC roll 10 or better, modified by Dex. (Yeah, Bilbo, trying to pick that troll's pocket was a great idea.)

Speak Language - Covered under Int ability

Spellcraft - Covered under cleric, magic-user, and elf classes

Spot - Handled by modifying your chance to be surprised.

Survival - As above for foraging, hunting, and avoiding getting lost.

Swim - All characters are assumed to be able to swim. Swimming for long distances, in rough seas, or cold water will start to require the character to roll saving throws vs. death modified by Con to avoid drowning.

Tumble - Depends on what the character wants to do. A lightly-armored PC trying to tumble past an opponent might make a save vs. wands modified by dexterity to avoid taking a hit. 

Use Magic Device - Thief ability

Use Rope - Like any real adventurer couldn't. Why do we need this skill again?

So, can PC's improve their skills? Sure. Instead of having the rangers of the Kalalali Forest give the PCs gold and magic items, what if they trained them to have a +2 chance at their forage and find direction checks over the course of a summer? Instead of making improving skills an automatic at any given level, why not let the PCs seek out training and/or sacrifice XP to learn them. That way, those who want to completely focus on their class (like that wizard who is utterly obsessed with learning that next spell) don't have to make the exchange?

Obviously, this is an idea in progress, but I think it has a lot of merit. I'll let you know how it does in play.

A is for Alignment

Despite being originally marketed as a system-neutral world, the Kingdoms of Kalamar were definitely built around the tropes of AD&D, including its nine-point alignment system.

Now, in B/X D&D, there are only three alignments, or rather two alignments and a middle ground: "Law (or Lawful) is the belief that everything should follow an order, and that obeying rules is the natural way of life. . . Chaos (or Chaotic) is the opposite of Law. It is the belief that life is random, that chance and luck rule the world. . . Neutrality (or Neutral) is the belief that there is a balance between Law and Chaos." (B11)

The problem is that, as described at least, these are specifically called "ways of life" (B11), but as described seem more like philosophies than sides to be aligned with. There is no sense of cosmic importance attached, and therefore no reason (other than tradition) that these "ways of life" should come with their own special languages.

Curious, I pulled my old Holmes' edit of D&D. He doesn't describe what alignment means at all, but merely tells you what the five alignments in his edition are (LG, CG, N, LE, and CE), that each has an alignment tongue, and some rough examples of what playing an alignment might mean in play (chiefly that torturing opponents for information isn't exactly compatible with the concept of "good."

OD&D's Men & Magic was even less helpful, simply calling alignment a "stance" and giving no guidelines at all beyond a listing of the various monsters in each of the three original alignments. My understanding is that this was because OD&D's predecessor, the fantasy supplement for Chainmail, used alignment mostly as a guide as to what kind of creatures each of the players could select for their wargame scenarios. OD&D simply assumes a passing familiarity on the subject.

Not getting much guidance from any of the sources that led up to B/X, I actually consulted the dictionary. The definition that best fits the D&D scenario is "a state of agreement or cooperation among persons, groups,nations, etc., with a common cause or viewpoint." In other words, it's an alliance or a side.

My biggest problem with the 3x3 alignment system is that it loses all sense of being about different sides that a character is aligned with and instead becomes a personal moral preference. In my experience, most PCs gravitate towards the Neutral Good to Chaotic Neutral range, since it lets them pretty much do whatever they want and call it "playing my alignment." Chaotic Good becomes, by default, the "true" good alignment, with Lawful Good relegated to Lawful Stupid.While the Kingdoms of Kalamar don't entirely fall into this trap, there are hints of it, with most of the best gods for adventurers falling into that Good-to-Chaotic corner.

So then, do I simply adopt a 3x3 alignment system for my particular B/X game, or do I stick with the rules as written? Or, perhaps, should I adopt the five-point system of Dr. Holmes?

It was while reading over the Delving Deeper booklets (originally put out by Brave Halfling, but they seem to be dropping the line, sadly) that I had a bit of an epiphany. In the Monster and Treasure Reference, I found the following chart which, rather than treating Neutrality as simply the middle ground between Law and Chaos, treated it as its own distinct side. While I found some of their choices on where exactly to put some of the creatures questionable (orcs are less Chaotic than hobgoblins?), the concept of having Neutrality mean something different than unaligned really clicked with me.

This led to me rethinking alignment in Kalamar, first in regards to its deities, and then extending to its more mortal inhabitants.

The alignment of Law encompasses LG, NG, and LN, and is the side of civilization, order, and banality. Most civilized nations in Tellene would be formally aligned with Law, since its in both the best interest of the rulers and the ruled. Law being Law, there is a tight and well-organized order known as the Church of the Law which encompasses all of the faiths in that spectrum. That's not to say that there's a complete unity, however. The Lawful Neutral religions tend more towards disciplines than a belief in true gods, much like Buddhism in our world (there's a reason that the plane associated with Lawful Neutral in the Great Wheel Cosmology of AD&D is Nirvana). The Neutral Good religions, while formally aligned with the Church of the Law, are viewed as schismatics and potential heretics by those of "pure" Lawful Good.

Chaos, Law's mortal enemy, encompasses the Chaotic Neutral, Chaotic Evil, and has some overlap with Neutral Evil. It is the alignment of pure chaos and the demonic, inimical to civilization and possibly to all reality, but nevertheless constantly tempting mortals into its ranks with the promise of pure, unadulterated power. Many otherwise good folk have become minions of Chaos in a moment of weakness. While the powers of Chaos are very powerful individually, their very nature prevents them from coalescing into a form that would utterly destroy Law.

Neutrality is the alignment of nature and Faerie, and encompasses Chaotic Good and True Neutral, with some overlap into Neutral Good. I base this on the fact that B/X elves are listed as Neutral. Though less lethal to mortals than pure Chaos, Neutrality is by no means a safe alignment for the common man, for the Fey powers have their own agendas and their own whims, and many treat mortals as playthings to be enjoyed. Even so, many of the Dejy and Fhokki tribes are firmly aligned with Neutrality, caring not a bit for the stringency of Law but knowing the corrosive effect of Chaos.

In addition to these, there is at least one other alignment. After all, if alignments represent sides in a cosmic struggle rather than merely a spectrum of philosophies, there's no need to limit ourselves to three, or four, or any number at all. While the "Big Three" are the sides most known to the world, there may certainly be others.

Chief among these is the New Order, encompassing Lawful Evil and much of Neutral Evil, and which is not wholly hostile to some of the disciplines of Law(ful Neutral). The New Order, formerly called the Elder Fane, was driven underground and thought destroyed millennia ago, but in recent centuries the Overlord and his entourage were released from their prisons (as those familiar with Kalamar's setting already know). The New Order has aggressively both inserted itself into the institutions of Law so as to subvert them to its own purposes and built kingdoms surrounding the worship of its own dark gods (such as the hobgoblin kingdom of Norga-Krangel or the Theocracy of Slen). Only a few know of its existence as yet, and they have not yet been able to mount an effective resistance.

With three players on the cosmic battlefield, and a fourth on the rise, it should be interesting to see which the PC's align themselves with. After all, Law may not appreciate the activities of lovable rogues--but it may well need them if civilization as the peoples of Tellene know it are to survive.

A Place For Every Adventure (Where I'm Coming From, Part 5)

A couple of things came together to result in this post. First, as I've been working on my Wyrd Kalamar notes and building up my own campaign, I've been spending a lot of time re-reading the Sourcebook and pouring over the Atlas with a particular eye for places that I'd dismissed as being not all that interesting to set a campaign in before, like Paru'Bor (too stodgy for free-wheeling adventurers, I thought). The second was that I really liked the original Blackmoor and Rob Conley's serial-numbers-filed-off Blackmarsh, and wanted to find a place that I could drop it in with some modifications to Tellene.

After some search on the map, I realized that Narr-Rytar was perfect: A city state far in the north on a huge body of water. On the Atlas, you could see where the river suddenly turned twenty or more miles westward, diverting around a low-lying area of streams and lakes that was almost certainly marsh or swamp. The city was surrounded by woodlands of rolling hills, and lay north of a vast mix of woodland and steppe (Dhrokker) which could approximate the Haak. And of course, it lay far off from a "Great Kingdom" that had shrunk from its original size.

That got me wondering just how many other "typical" or iconic settings fit into Tellene. For example, before deciding to break out the ol' KoK books (the Atlas was the winning argument, really), I contemplated digging out the old Greyhawk box. I had both the original and the From the Ashes, the latter of which had a nice 6-mile to the hex map of the area immediately surrounding the titular city, which included a pretty awesome number of biomes for the PCs to quickly wander into. In Tellene, I found Prompeldia, City of Thieves, right on the edge of the Elos Desert, but also near a forest and a northern plains area (Pekal) and within spitting distance of pretty much any race one could care to introduce.

So that brought me back to Paru'Bor. Once I got over my 21st American bias that Lawful Good = stodgy oppression = Lawful Stupid, Paru'Bor's rigid adherance to Law and Truth made a lot of sense. It was, after all, a relatively small nation surrounded by a sea of chaos: Tokis is falling to pieces even as it struggles to conquer Pekal, Pekal is a land of sorcery with a lot of fae in the blood for all that it's an allied nation, Ek'Gakel is falling apart at the seams and overrun by barbarian Dejy, Shynabyth is literally a land of godless barbarians, O'Par is untrustworthy, etc. I suddenly realized that I had a perfect candidate for the "Realm of Man" described in module B2: Keep on the Borderlands. (A module that I've always considered to present the iconic D&D setting.)

Actually, Paru'Bor is also very similar to the Forgotten Realms' Cormyr, which led me to look again at Pekal as an analogue to the Dalelands--a bit more organized, true, but still very similar in geography and outlook, at least if one assumes that the wetter eastern area has a lot of small woodlands and, well, dales dotting the landscape. Of course, Tellene is a bit grittier: Where the Dalelands just had to deal with a couple of rogue city-states, Pekal is threatened by a whole empire.

Geanevue is of course pretty much a smaller version of Waterdeep--no surprise given the hand Ed Greenwood had in its development. The northeastern Renaaria Bay and the Wild Lands likewise make a fine Sword Coast, vikings and all.

Want to run the old Slavers series of modules? Norgra-Krangel makes a good Pomarj, and the city-states of the Elos Desert a good Wild Coast.

The Giants and Drow series? Korak and the Elenion Mountains.

I asked Jolly and his crew on the Kenzerco forums whether I just reading all this into the setting, or whether this entirely intentional for the purpose of making it easier to 'port other campaign material into KoK. David Kenzer answered back just a couple of hours later,

If there are similarities, it's purely subconscious on my part -- I ran greyhawk for many years prior to working on Kalamar. The Kingdom of kalamar itself contains a lot of material from my home game, which was set in the Great Kingdom, but Adama Niepomnik, one of the original K&C Krew, wrote the first draft of that nation, so it's not a perfect analogue either (he ran FR last).

That made a lot of sense to me, as I've done it before myself, even to the point of lifting whole names and concepts into my homebrew campaign without meaning to. I certainly don't think "cribbing" in a fantasy world, whether intentionally or subconsciously is any kind of sin. Pretty much every "vanilla" setting is cribbing from Prof. Tolkien as interpreted through the eyes of D&D, after all. (Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Orcs, even the concept of mixed parties of adventurers, etc.)

Even if certain locales were deliberately patterned after some "iconic" settings, that doesn't make KoK just a pastache of them. Tellene has a far richer sense of place, culture, and history than any other setting (with the possible exception of Harn, which I don't have any personal experience with) as well as a number of unique twists of its own.

And this is what ultimately drew me back to this setting. Remember how I said I had gamer ADD? Still do, and as I said then, given my limited time, I needed a world big enough and diverse enough to be able to satisfy my many impulses, one that at the same time is detailed enough that I don't have to spend vast amounts of time creating local area maps, names, and cultures, but still open enough to give me room to plant my own adventures and ideas. No metaplot. And I found all this in the little collection of books sitting beside my desk.

Okay, enough with fanboying on the setting. Over the next several posts, I'll look at how to take an intrinsically AD&D setting and "convert" it to fit B/X D&D. Less philosophizing and a bit more crunch.