[Europol-X] Career preview - Soldier

Soldier

Project advancement

I've started the first play test round with friends, even though the system is not totally finished (but I know where I wanna go), because it's motivating for me to have a kind of urgency...

As sure as 1+1=2 , they chose careers that I had not developed, so I had no "Past problems table" for them, therefore I let them roll on the existing tables (I present here the 5th - I do not post all of them on the blog), and luckily they rolled some entries that were not too specific to the career and generic enough to be adapted easily on the fly...

The Soldier Career

Europol-X recruits for their cell on two criteria:

• You had contact with an unexplained phenomenon and survived
• You have interesting skills

In the case of a soldier, it can be both, since their skills are always in high demand (in RPG at least), and in Europe (where guns are much less  available than on the other side of the Atlantic), it is rarer to find shooters without a military background (shooting ranges exist, and so does hunting, but you don't get to practice outside a controlled environment).

The Table

As always, remember that the "past problems" are optional... You can also just use them as inspiration for your character's past, but having troubles to add to the game will help your DM (or GM, or Storyteller, or Control, whatever you want to call them) personalize your troubles and make them feel more real. Up-close and personal, if you will...

My players

The characters that have been created are:

• A marketing Expert that was Head of Marketing at the Royal Dutch Shell (the oil company), where he has a lot of enemies - (expert in Manipulate skill) - He has a 12 y.o. daughter in a closed private School in Switzerland. A lawyer wants to put him in Jail because he influenced his star witness in a case against Shell.
• An intrusion specialist - like a white-hat-hacker, but for security systems (expert in Sneak skill), from Frankfurt. Her ex boss still long for their past relationship, and his secretary hates her for her special status in his eyes. She was abducted as a child and the only surviving abductor just got out of jail.

Plot Preview

Next week, they'll be confronted with the corpse of a Duplicate (a dupe) - Half robot / half human creatures that can copy the apparence (and therefore steal the identity) of any corpse...

Quick question

If I were to create a tipee/patreon page for this project, would you be interested?

Discord

If you wanna join my Discord ("from outer space games" is the name my publishing entity), click here:

From outer space games Discord

[Europol-X] Career preview - Olympic Fencer

 Europol-X's system is starting to really take form.

I will not post all the "past careers" (you should still want to buy the book someday 😁) but from time to time, so you see the work advances.

Remember that the "past problems" are optional... You don't have to have one, and it doesn't have to be one from the list, but they are a good help to help create some drama for your storyteller (or DM, or GM, whatever you call him).

This is the 3rd career from the twelve I want to develop (one per skill).

This time with the illustration included

By the way, I've opened a discord around my creations (all of them, not only what's posted here), so if you like my work and use this platform, come over and chat !

https://discord.gg/usYXJG7zBu

[Europol-X] Career preview - Brute

Brute

 I've decided to create a system extra for Europol-X.

It is heavily inspired by 5E and the Year Zero engine.

4 Attributes, 12 skills (3 for each attributes).

And a previous Career, for before you joined your EU-X-cell. These can be compared to the backgrounds of the 5th edition, but without a feature.

I present you the first Career, the "Thug" which can be any kind of very bulky and physically imposing character, specialized in demonstrations of shear strength.

I will probably make an illustration for the rest of the page...

Anyway, tell we what you think of this ! 

And happy start in the new year !

And I've opened a discord around my creations (all of them, not only what's posted here)
https://discord.gg/usYXJG7zBu

Edit: I renamed the Career Brute bc of the negative connotation that Thug has gained in the last few years

Ruleset Review: Microlite 20 fifth - adamantine edition

Review: Microlite 20 fifth - adamantine edition 

Lately, i've been working on translating, editing, layouting and co-creating an OSR game. Its pitch is "The "Ravenium Rush" brings hundreds of new settlers on the "Satanic Planet", but only a few will survive the horror, the demons, and the corporate greed..."

With my creation mate (he created the setting), we decided we wanted an OSR system.

I had my eyes set on EXTINCTION, which is an really really good hack of the Black Hack for Space-Horror like Alien (the movie), with a touch of other Sci-Fi influences (blade runner, for example).

We could have tried to make a module for  EXTINCTION, but we wanted our system to be under the hood.

I've then looked around at other influences, because I felt that I would only want to copy EXTINCTION and add here and there some bits and odds, if we were to go "the Black Hack way".

So I needed some other basis to have my mind crunch on.

I decided to look at 5E clones/simplifications and so on, because I really like the 5th Edition and its elegant mechanics (and newer people to the hobby were more keen on trying something based on what they know).

1.) What is it?

"Microlite 20 fifth - adamantine edition" is the latest incarnation of the microlite series of D&D simplifications. Microlite has a good reputation, this version is 17 pages long (including a character sheet and the "OGL licence" for the 5E)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J_gPJjuDygOQWnVKXyLcAuGcIUNHeSsf/view

2.) When did I hear about it for the 1st time?

On the RPG forums and discord I delve, Microlite is often cited as a reference for D&D simplifications (there's a microlite 74, one on D&D3, another on D&D4, and this one simplifying D&D5 [There are more than just those])

3.) What did I expect?

I expected somthing easy and streamlined vaguely related to the 5th Edition. For Vanilla Fantasy.

4.) What did I find?

A stremlined and simplified version of the Basic Rules of 5E. Which means it's open source content, for the vast majority. 

It keeps the 5E feel and its iconic mechanics (advantages, Bounded accuracy) but refines it to its most simple core:

You now have only 3 Attributes and 4 skills, along with 4 classes. Still it is very well designed and written, making the core shine like a 100 GP pearl (yeah, identify is important).

It allows itself the luxury to add monster creation rules that generates 1-line-stat-blocs, encounter building guidelines, and an appendice to introduce more classes.

I really liked the quick and simple ruleset.

It's not as deadly as an OSR, but you could apply some rules from 5E-HARDCORE-MODE from Runehammer to spice up / OSR up the game experience.

5.) Will I use it ?

I need to convert my co-autor to base our game on this, but I'm really tempted to create a game based on this motor. I would make it less simple in the end, but I hope it would be an upgrade on the basis, not an over-complexification.

If he's not up for it, maybe I'll build a game around it for this blog. Or rebuild around this ruleset my SciFi project "Stellar Fiefdoms"

6.) Would I recommend buying it?

Well, since it's free, you should definietly grab a pdf. Then print it as a pamphlet at work (it's 16 pages, once you remove the page 16 where the licence is), read it in the train back home and play with your hastily got together friends and neighbourgs.

Maybe also print a one-page-dungeon?

Disclaimer:

Some of the links included in this article are affiliate-links.

One day, I will have a few dollars credit on Drivethru and I'll re-buy an item on Pay What You Want (PWYW) I found very useful there. So somehow this is supporting indie creation, right?

Any of you played with Microlite 20 fifth?

What is you go-to 5E related system?

Do you jerry-rig your 5E?

[OSR] Gold as XP (1/3) - Theory

"Gold chains in tiny wooden chest" by Marco Verch

Background

The “Gold as XP” was my biggest WTF in AD&D, when I discovered it about 20 years ago.
It was for me an aspect of the meta that I completely rejected. I hated levels back then, because a level based progression was not logical in my eyes (a leap in power every 3-4 scenarios? I preferred a little step after each adventure, like in skill based systems)
Levels were not logical, and getting a level because you accumulated money felt like complete nonsense...

Developments

Lately, as I reflected more and more upon the tropes of D&D (OSR and 5E brought back D&D in my life), and accepted them as they were, I tended to analyse (or read analysis of) the meta behind the game design. Then did “Gold as XP” only start to make sense.

Function

It is a very simple tool to emulate a "rag to riches"-campaign that focuses not only on monster-slaying for advancement. Why? Because killing the Monster™ is suddenly optional to get XP. Stealing their loot, tricking them into giving you their riches, parleying for a part of their treasure, all these options are suddenly as valid as killing them. They are also less risky, but on another meta-roleplaying-level also much more interesting. It’s even stated clearly like that in the mythical Redbox’s player’s book: ‘Did you notice that you get a lot of experience for treasure, and not much for killing monsters? It's better to avoid killing, if you can, by tricking monsters or using magic to calm them down. You can sometimes avoid the risks of combat.But you will have to fight many monsters to get their treasures’ (Mentzner: 1983, p. 12).

This was my first realisation that this “Gold as XP” rule was not as stupid as I thought: it was never meant as a tool to explain level advancement, but as a tool to create a certain atmosphere at the table.
My next realisation was that “Gold as XP” doesn't mean you have to give XP when you award treasure, you can award XP for spending gold instead.
Which sounds much more logical to me, but also for some tweaks in the atmosphere at the table, with only a simple few coefficients between what gold is spent on and the XP awarded.
a few examples:

• You want a sword'n'sorcery kind of game? Make a coeficient x2 on Carousing (which is a political neutral way of saying "Sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll"). You'll have feasts that would attract Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser...
• You want to emphasize empire building in your game? Make a coefficient x1.5 on building costs, x3 on buying titles (some societies would make you a baron, if you were ready to pay the price), and x2 on armies, followers, hirelings and torchbearers. As soon as they can afford one, your players will hire some swordbearers and start a company...
• You want an arthurian kind of game? Make a coefficient x2 on religious offerings, bathes and x4 on money patroning for the arts (or spent on creating works of art), and maybe 1.5 on horses and other materials for joust.

I want to test it! How exactly does it work?

I decided to test this mechanic in its own setting, using D&D 5E as a basis (OSR is very attractive, but 5E attracts more players).
Examining the experience table from 5E for an "XP=Gold" campaign, i realised that it works with my vision of a medieval-fantasy world.
If a poor person lifestyle’s costs 14 silver per week, we can imagine them making 15 silver a week (money was tight for poor people in the middle ages), reaching 300 spent gold pieces would mean 200 weeks of labour to get to lvl 2 - nearly 4 years. Without adventuring.
(On the other hand, D&D3, with a 1000 XP necessary for lvl 2 would not work for me - unless using a silver-base for XP, as used in Lamentations of the Flame Princess [LotFP])

Using the “downtime rules” from Xanatar’s guide to everything, working can bring up to 25 gold per week (you’d have to be VERY lucky though) it would mean 12 weeks (3 months) of work to reach lvl 2, but it is very unlikely to happen.

Crime and Pitfighting are much more lucrative, but more dangerous. Still, a very lucky and ambitious thief could reach lvl 3 within one week, and a pit fighter lvl 2 within two weeks.
The other “money making”-activities described there are somehow on the same level.

Should “downtime activities” then be banned? Well by no means, but their gains shouldn’t be taken into account for determining XP.
LotFP does this very explicitly, and goes even further, restricting the gold affecting XP gain to the Treasure found during the adventure. Loot selling? Pickpocketing? Quest rewards or salaries? These will make you wealthy, but not experienced.(Raggi, James Edward IV. "Lamentations of the Flame Princess - player core book: Rules & Magic." (p. 33-34))

This is a very good rule of thumb and a perfect way for the DM to “control” the flow of XP… At least under the assumption that the XP gained is equal to the amount of gold you bring “back to town”.

I decided that I want another assumption for my campaign: "XP=Gold spent"(and it might well be an error and unmanageable, since it needs to be tested: I could not find a source using this method yet…).
Which means i’d have to find a way to not reward “solo-play” actions, particularly from a rogue or bard (the petty thieving and gambling that a lot of young/beginner players seem to always want to try is an example of what I mean here). Luckily, 5E has a tool for this: the aforementioned downtime activities.
These are explicitly for a time outside adventures (this again is an excellent and subtle game-design answer to a recurring problem that 5E mastered).

Implementation?

I will implement a system of coefficients for spent gold that will affect the amount of XP gained for these expenses. This will be discussed in the 2nd part of this article “[OSR] Gold as XP (2/2) - Praxis”.

Just for fun

To conclude with a funnier tone, the devious and sadistic DM in me really wants to give around 275 Gold per player as a reward for their first adventure and watch them divide their treasure… Will one player sacrifice himself so that the others might all get their level 2? Will they all stay level 1? Will they choose one or two of them that will reach level 2 and the others will get their level the next time? Metagame meets sadistic DM at its best.

As always, if you disagree with anything, of find anything useful, start a conversation in the comments. I approve non-spam messages quite quickly :)

D.R.E.A.D. [Rant]: Bags of holding & Fantasy economy

Rant: Bags of holding are hampering my suspension of disbelief

Whispers of Oak Elvish pouch by Gwillieth / Aelin Laer original image

The bag of holding is an iconic part of D&D.
It’s really important to parties, because adventurers needs to be able to move a large sum of coins, which can amount to an uncarriable weight.
Assuming a 9g (0.32 oz) for a GP like in the Forgotten Realms, the weight of gold you’d need to carry around to buy a plate mail is around 15 kg of gold (33 pounds)…

The Good bag,

The bag of holding is a very good way to tackle the “apothecary accounting”-syndrom out of the character sheet and the game. Some kind of gameplay will insist on encumbrance and weight, but the less hardcore players will want to not take care of such trivial and boring details.
The players will also try to invent and use their magical objects in a non-intended way. This is part of the fun of roleplaying and adds magic to the game, so I'm delighted about such thinking.

The Bad bag,

The problem is not the bag in itself, but the players that want to push the limit always farther, and fill 62 cubic feet of water into storage in the bag, just in case. Soon they’ll build a contraption with automatic water filling the bag, bring that water 100m high, have the water power up a mill, and have another bag fill and repeat. I get it that magic can create an infinite movement that can be harnessed, but is it still a game of adventure?
So it’s important to keep in mind the limitations of the bag and to be extremely strict to players abusing the bag. Retrieving stuff from the astral plane can make for exciting adventures anyway…

,And the Ugly bag

My main problem with the bag of holding, is one of coherence.
D&D uses a dreamt middle-age as it’s background, with a lot of hierarchical structures borrowed from european feudal times. One aspect that is seldom taken into account (Eberron being the exception here - but Eberron is not medieval anyway), is that magic should normally have an influence on a lot of aspects of society. And it would have an enormous influence on the economy.
Town incomes in the middle ages were massively relying on taxes. Taxing wares at the town entrance was an important part of the financing of the “community” and the reason why wares from far away were so expensive was not only because of their scarcity and the danger that was inherent to move them. Taxes were a big chunk of the price of these wares.
Based on contemporary scientific studies, it’s recommended that horses should not be loaded with greater than 20% of their body weight. So a normal 545-kilogram (1200 pound) horse, then would be best off carrying no more than 109 kg (240 lbs) of tack and rider. A merchant could ride his horse and load it with 16 bags of holding and still be able to travel.
Do you see the need for a cart?
Declaring the wares would be funny too: I’d show my players how the town guards would turn the bags of holding inside out to empty them and then inventorize the content to calculate the taxes.
Smuggling would be on the rise, too. It’s much easier to smuggle wares in, if they are conveniently all fitting in a small bag or two… It does not have to be illegal wares, either. Evading taxation would already be a good deal enough to try to do it. Even bringing flour to a bakery would be interesting (one bag nearly completely full of flour would be around 900 kg / 1980 pounds of flour).
A combination of teleportation circle and bag of holding is a sure way to get rich, as a merchant (but wouldn’t it be a common merchant trick? Would that not mean a lot of transformation to society?).

Conclusion

I really love the bag of holding as a tool for adventurers, and at the same time I hate what the bag does to my suspension of disbelief.
One of the reasons for this hate is the fact that the bag of holding is an uncommon magic object. To avoid that the bag has such an influence on society and economics, it needs to be MUCH less available (I actually don’t want it to be banned)

What does it mean for D.R.E.A.D.?

It means that on the continent of Perfu, only a few bags of holdings are known to exist. I would rank up the rarity of the object to very rare (but not legendary) instead of uncommon, and put a price tag around 25.000 Gold to it.
The artificer class would not be allowed in this world anyway.

Your thoughts?

Do you have any comment on this rant?
Do you know of a particularly good use of the bag of holding, that I missed to refer to?
Did your party use this magical object very creatively and you want to share?

Well that’s what the comment section is for 😉

DREAD's rules: on second thoughts, Level Cap at lvl 9

Change of mind: let’s cap level advancement at level 9

odin's last words to baldr

I really love the roleplaing community on the interwebz.
I miss the days where most of our hobby was united in G+ and the reach of blogs was multiplicated by posts on G+. The G+ comments were directly on the blog, the discussion was alive.
The discussion still exists though, but more in niches.
Out of the discussion concerning the last Blog post I made (DREAD's rules: Level Cap at lvl 8), I came to realize that my first instinct (to cap at level 9 and not 8) was a better idea.
So this post is about taking some part of the last post and retconning to "Hey, I always meant 9" and accepting that i was wrong and letting everyone access the thoughts of some gamers/readers with more rules-wisdom than I have.

Why level-cap-at-lvl-8?

My main idea to cap at lvl8 was to exclude the "circle of teleportation"-spell. The other reasons are still valid at lvl 9.
The save reason is even more valid at level 9, because the main 2 Saves of a character will improve.

Why level 9 then?

Well, to be honest, the main reason is bounded accuracy, its increase to be exact. Reaching +4 accuracy makes it a good "last goodie", but also makes expertise even more relevant.
Barring all casters from level 5 spells just for one spell also felt half-brewed.
Barring players from "Greater Restoration", for example, seems a bit brutal in a setting with powerful monsters with possibly long lasting negative effects from their abilities.

Spells restrictions:

So I went through the lvl5-spell-list and decided to ban 2 spells from my game (officially, at least - no one knows what happens in the secluded glens of the elves or on the peaks inhabited by the remnants of the cloud giants' empire):

• Circle of teleportation (“Tree stride” seems not too game breaking in comparison - and having elves creating Tree-Jumpways as a kind of secret quick-travel road seems to me like the kind of thing being with centuries of life-span could invest themselves into)
• Raise Dead (Reincarnate is fun, in my opinion, and finding a lvl 9 druid will be a challenge, if you have no favors left with the elvish courts)

Reincarnate will get a new table, the races listed being not all accessible in this setting

DREAD's rules: Level Cap at lvl 8

Level Cap at lvl 8

PLATE V BAS-RELIEFS AT AN ENTRANCE TO A SMALL TEMPLE (NIMROUD)

Why limit your players to Level 8?

First the TLDR-answer: 

• sweet spot of 5E
• less important save rolls
• no "Fast-travel"-teleportation
• mono-classing is a better option
• main attribute 20 reachable

A bit more detailed:

• In my experience, reaching lvl 11 in D&D5 changes everything, and it means that the characters suddenly reach a much higher level of power.
• In my opinion, it is much more difficult to offer the players a good challenge without going much over the top in the plot after level 10.
• The Tier 2 of D&D5 (lvl 6-10) is in my opinion the sweet spot of the edition: Challenges are possible, even with a lot of low level enemies, but it is possible to estimate the risks of such an encounter.
• My practical observation is that after that, the outcome of encounters seems to become much more random, since saves then become so much more important and decisive. If you fail your first save in the round of combat, then you're out. If more than half the party fails the save, then the encounter is doomed to be mortal (sometimes even for the whole party). Since i'm a very unfortunate player, I tend to sit more than half of the time at the table side without being able to do anything. And that's a fun killer, in my opinion.
• Capping the level at 8 doesn't completely takes saves out of the equation, but makes building encounters without having to rely on saves much easier to build. And if the opponent is a spellslinger, the max difficulty to resist his spells should be around 16 (still high, but doable).
• So why not capping at level 10 ? - that wouldn't change anything for the spell saves... My main reason is lvl 5 spells, particularly "circle of teleportation". I don't want travel to be instantaneous over long ranges (1] I want the travel element of the game to stay something challenging and 2] I don't want to think about the societal and economical consequences of the existence of such a magical wonder)
• Level 8 also means the second ability increase for mono-class characters or balanced 2-class characters, and this is the opportunity to reach 20 in your main attribute in my campaigns (I either use shared randomized attribute pools [numbers are random, but all players use the same pool of random numbers], or point buy with 16 as highest limit). I feel this "natural customization limit" of the characters needs to be reached. After that, only magic and alchemy can help your alter ego getting better.

Does that make sense to you?

Edit: apparently it didn't completly fit and some of your remarks made me modify the cap level to 9:
DREAD's rules: on second thoughts, Level Cap at lvl 9