ONI PUNCHER: V1

Here's a sweet-ass PDF of ONI PUNCHER, the game of punching Oni in the face while being a badass samurai. It's a single page, and includes all of the basic rules of the game. Will there be more advanced rules? Will there be sample adventures, and lists of magic items or bad guys for you to use, or of NPC samurai and shamans and sorcerers for you to use?

There might be. Why do you ask: Isn't this game good enough for you? You haven't even played it yet. Don't be like that.

Punching Index Cards

Vertical index cards, my white whale

I'm the kind of guy who, when he wants to get down to some really good thinkin', has to pull out a pen and paper instead of typing it on a computer. I've lost track of the number of half-filled notebooks that've been blackened by the ravages of my chewed up ball-point pens. And I've lost track of the number of times I've picked up some ancient notebook, only to be appaled by the horrible, juvenile, blatantly unoriginal scribbles I've found within for projects abandoned years ago. You just can't keep writing in a notebook that's that embarassing. You just can't.

So I find myself doodling on index cards, instead. They're just about the right size to get some really good ideas down, you can re-order them however you want, and (maybe most importantly) you can toss them out without having to rip pages out of anything. Index cards are the best.

I remember finally taking index cards from the preparation phase to making them a part of one of the two only 4e games I've actually run, when I would write quests on them, or give important items out as an index card. The response was phenomenal. It wasn't a line in some backpack somewhere, it was an index card that had to be taken care of, managed, and looked at. You got to be a little posessive. When you had a +2 fire staff, you're not letting the guy next to you take it, you're letting him look at it, and that's how the players acted. If you let him look at the card, you're letting him take your item- and they can see it just fine without touching it, thank you very much. The quests cards were about as useful. They saw the quest to discover the origin of the weird sacrificial dagger they'd found, right next to the "exterminate goblins" quest and the "help the caravan get out of here" quests. It was a sweet feedback loop, too. The players would be interested in something in passing, and then suddenly, I'm flipping them a quest card across the table. Now, they're getting experience for being interested in things, they're being rewarded for engaging with the game world, and they've got a very convenient reminder in case they get bored or overwhelmed.

I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that index cards have improved my game since the first time I tried them.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I plan on having index cards feature prominently in Skeleton Puncher. My motto is "If I can't fit it on an index card, it's getting thrown out." Character sheets can fit comfortably on an index card. Backpacks can hold ten regular-sized items- or the number of lines on an index card that's been cut in half. The game's resolution system? Again, could be written on an index card.

I've heard it said that there could (and possibly should) be hundreds of small retroclone games, each one an ideal as expressed by a DM. I hope the rest of the world thinks the same way, because if Skeleton Puncher keeps going on like it has, it's going to be so idiosyncratic that you and I will practically be best friends if you read the book.

Reinventing the Dragon

Dragons are an interesting, iconic monster that's remained popular outside of our favorite hobby. There's just something about dragons that makes people want to get tattoos of them on their bodies, or wear weird silky shirts with a repeating dragon motif, or put oddly-shaped purplish dragons on their cars. Dragons are "cool."

Normally this is where I'd put something that reeks vaguely of counter-culturalism, but whoa. Dragons really are cool. At least, the well-drawn ones are. There's something about a swift-winged engine of destruction that stirs the imagination, and you just can't help it. You can't help but like dragons.

And since I had fun re-imagining the "Tarrasque" the other day, I'm going to have a bit of fun reinventing the classic, iconic D&D Dragon. And it needs it.

I'll admit, I don't have the original D&D rules for Dragons, but I do have the Swords and Wizardry rules pdf here in front of me, and it does do something pretty cool- it makes dragons' health and attack rolls almost the same across age categories. The only things that change are the physical size, the health, and the damage of their breath weapons, which is pretty cool. Unfortunately for my tastes, it still has color-coded dragons while still making the colors of dragons very similar. It doesn't conflate type with personality, though, which is awesome. I never quite understood why every red dragon should be fiendishly intelligent and also act exactly the same as every other red dragon, for example.

Dragons in the Rules Cyclopedia, however (that is to say, basic D&D), are split into three age categories (small, large, and huge), and divided by color. As far I can tell, the dragons are all pretty much the same except for their alignments and exactly what they spit, but I'll be damned if I'm going to do anything more than skim over the unwieldy, three-page-long rules for Dragons. It also goes into rules for Crystal Dragons, which apparently are so named for their ability to breathe total nonsense at people in addition to breathing regular dragony things like fire or lightning bolts or whatever.

In 3rd edition, of course, everything goes crazy and each individual type of dragon has separate stat blocks detailing its every statistic for each of 12 sizes and if I'm not going to read the Rules Cyclopedia, I'm sure as shit not reading any of those monstrosities.

For my approach, I'm not going to do any of that. I couldn't care less about color-coded dragons. To me, a Dragon is an enormous lizard of any color (but usually reddish) that breathes fire. They might be intelligent, and they might not. Some Dragons are burninating assholes, and some are wise demigods. The difference is in their personalities, because Dragons are intelligent and know that they can get away with terrorizing you and your livestock because they're much bigger and more powerful and as long as they're careful you'll never find them outside of their almost inaccessible lair- or that because they're bigger and more powerful, you really should accept them as a demigod, bring them offerings of food and maybe some gold, and then go away before he torches your head.

To this end, I'm thinking of maybe three types of Dragons.

Masterwork Weapons

I've been playing around with an idea in my head- what if, instead of having a "plus" level and (maybe) a unique power to magical items, what if you did away with the plus altogether?

What if the big draw was the fact that it was magical, instead?

I haven't playtested it, but I can't imagine that there'd be any real problems simply porting it into a game. You could shift the bonuses to attack and damage on to the fighters' base values (so that a fighter who's "supposed" to have a +1 sword and armor could have an innate bonus to attack, damage, and armor class instead), and then have the occasional monster reduce damage if it was struck by a non-magical weapon. Something like how (as I understand it) certain monsters in OD&D simply couldn't be hurt by anything but magical weapons.

So there'd be value in a "boring" magical sword, for example- it'd still have the properties of a "magical" item (being constantly razor-sharp, resistant to breakage, resistant to magical destruction)... but you could have a normal smith create it. Hello, masterwork weapons. Nice to see you again. Why don't you take a seat.

You'd have to modify store-bought adventures and settings a little, sure, but it wouldn't be hard. Just take the boring swords and axes that don't get any cool powers and make them masterwork weapons. Now they're well-forged weapons with a certain value, but it makes sense that there's stacks of them lying around instead of being kept in a box while the enemy warriors are running around with mundane weapons.

In this scheme, there would be two categories of magical weapons and armor: the "regular" masterwork type that's a cut above regular weapons without contributing to power creep, and then "unique" items that are sentient, or return when  thrown, or whatever it is they do. And here's the real benefit: The items are important for what they do, instead of what stats they boost.

It's something to think about, anyways.

Horror of the Deeps

One of my favorite ideas that never quite went through was for a world I was designing with my brother via wiki. I don't think I ever settled on a name, but the basic idea was that alignments are tied to elements, and that the combination of alignments meant that people had a certain combination of elements. Humans, being basically neutral, had a healthy mix of each (unless they went through some extreme rituals), but extraplanar beasts had some serious differences.


In this scheme, I wanted to go with Fire for good, evoking the common images of cleanliness, purity, and warmth- I was heavily inspired by the Zoroastrian tradition (as explained by Wikipedia), wherein they would have simplistic rituals involving fire.

This leaves Evil with Water, naturally enough. What, life-giving water is given a bad rap? Yes, absolutely. And here's why.

With fire, you know what you're getting. It's clear-cut and simple. With water, its flat surface hides great depths, with foreign monsters in a bizarre world. It's dark down there, hostile to life itself. It's Lovecraftian, where the shores are mistrusted due to the fishmen coming up from the depths to hunt humans for food. Fishermen and sailors are the bravest folk of all.

In this scheme, the Elemental Plane of Water is a place of great evil, of treachery, and of demons. In this world, the Horror of the Deeps is a lord amongst demons, a king of the great fishy hordes.

Houserule: Wounds

Lord Chivalrous suddenly wonders whether
he left the kettle on.

One of the things that's bothered me for a long time is the treatment of hit points in D&D; specifically, how hit points are simultaneously health and not-health. They represent your ability to not get killed, luck, divine intervention, and sheer pluck. They also represent your ability to take hits, roll with punches, and sheer stubbornnes.

And there's nothing innately wrong with that. There's no real reason that you can't be the final arbiter of your character's skill, that two Fighters with 10 hit points can't be narratively different, with one not even noticing the stab wound in his arm as he kicks the orc in the chest, and the other skillfully dodging under the minotaur's clumsy, overhand hack and body-slamming the brute. Mechanically, according to D&D, there's no difference. And that's pretty cool, actually.

But there is something innately dissatisfying with the idea that this abstract representation takes so long to heal up. 1 hit point a day? Seriously? What am I "healing", anyways? Conan famously requires nothing more than breathing room and a swig of wine to ignore his wounds, and that's the sort of thing we should emulate, not Final Fantasy time and money drains.

In short, I've been considering adding Wounds to Labyrinth Lord, and they'd work fairly simply. You keep track of your Wounds separately, with each one reducing your maximum hit points by one. You take a wound whenever you get damaged by something. (Alternately, you could take a Wound for every 4 damage you take. Or, if you like, damage equal to half the class' hit dice size- so every 2 points for wizards, 3 for clerics, and 4 for fighters. This helps your tougher classes stay in the fight longer, if you're so inclined.) In this way, a hit means a hit, and Wounds represent real, physical damage. Whether you get hit by a stray arrow, an orc's sword, or the like, Wounds hurt, and they need to be healed.

To make up for your rapidly dwindling health, you regain all of your Hit Points by simply catching a breather of a minute or two. But not your Wounds. Your Wounds disappear at a rate of 1/level every time you get a good night's sleep. So, in other words, your Wounds represent the very real scrapes, cuts, bruises, gashes, concussions, and other sundry ailments that a life of hardship and pain brings. It represents the fact that even a knife cut hurts.

Clerics and other sources of healing magic can heal Wounds at a rate of 1 Wound per 5 HP healed, if they so choose. Of course, their healing is still useful, as it keeps a man from dying in combat, and is extremely useful for bringing a man up from the prone position, so to speak.

So you're tougher, and you can fight for longer in a day, but you still can't fight forever like some adventurers in "other games" can. But you're not any stronger in a straight fight than generic LL, so it's not like you have to redesign fights, encounters, or any sort of adventures. It puts a higher cap on what you can accomplish in a day, and that's always a Good Thing.

Dark Skies Above Us

A Crayonian Sorcerer, perhaps?

You may not have noticed, but I've started working on V2: Dark Skies Above Us. It's in extremely preliminary stages at the moment, little more than a couple of ideas floating around in my skull. With any luck, it'll have more juicy goodness without all of that overly crunchy crap, and it'll probably be a little more dungeon-crawly. V1: Servants of Plague didn't have much dungeon crawling at all, featuring a more open-ended, go wherever you want sort of area with slight limitations. (For example, I added a key to get above the giant garbage pit of the first floor that was being carried by the patrolling Orc Sergeant, since my players blitzed the keep and I didn't want them to ignore all the rest of the stuff.)

Since this seems like as good of a place to say it as any, my Player Character Hack is also almost done. It really needs a name, which is unfortunate, since nothing really seems to fit it well. There's just something about names... If my home campaign world had a name, it'd be easier, since then it'd be "GAMEWORLD COMPANION" instead of being called absolutely nothing, or worse, "Crayonian Classes." How pretentious can you get?

Anyways, the part that's taking so long is replacing the art I'd taken from sources on the internet and from my hard-drive's art archives, and replacing it with free, open-domain woodcut art. It takes a while, especially when there isn't really any art for wizardly type guys unless they're being hauled off by demons or some other such silliness. I suppose that could work, technically, but I'd be much happier with some other line art like the art I've been using, such as the nice artwork that I've used at the beginning of this blog post. Anybody know any kind-hearted fantasy artists?

Minus the Plusses

I have a feeling that magic items may be more interesting sans modifier. Take away the plusses and minuses, and you get away a large part from the "magic item store" problem that many people have run into, and the stinginess inherent in the thought that multiple magic items will "ruin" campaign balance.

For example, imagine a Holy Avenger without its plusses; a sword that "merely" penetrates the defenses of magical evil creatures and is able to dispel magic. Or, one of my personal favorites, the Frost Brand. Minus its bonus to attack and damage, it would merely shine when freezing cold, possess the power to put out fires, and deal extra damage against hot creatures.

Of course, magic items are still sharper and more deadly than nonmagical ones, and they have a certain property that allows them to strike more often by virtue of being of superior balance or enchantment. It perhaps isn't too much to allow magical items to grant a blanket +1 to attack and damage, or maybe +2. Maybe even +1 to attack and +2 to damage?

The net effect should be to roughly equalize all the magical items, and to make properties more important than bonuses, such that situation and player preference is more important than superior bonus, and to make the game incapable of providing magical items that characters discard at the first opportunity upon finding a brand new magical item and the problems that brings to any sort of self-consistent gameworld.

Why are all the good names taken?

The more work I put into my homebrew game, the more frustrated it gets that it doesn't even have a name. It has a codename, and that's about the extent of it. You see, I'm trying to avoid:

• Alliterations. Dungeons and Dragons, Labyrinth Lords, Tunnels and Trolls; while they're all classic games, they're not what the game should be compared with. This game isn't classic, and it's not particularly old-fashioned, although older roleplaying games are its main focus. It also has a good mix of some independent games, Forge-style, if you will. But trying to have a slightly silly name reminiscent of the old classic isn't something that I relish. To people that like D&D, they'll still play D&D. For people that don't like it, they'll have to waste their valuable first impression time on insisting that it's not like D&D even though it has an alliteration.
• Long, Wordy Names. I haven't the testicular fortitude to name a game something like Lamentations of the Flame Princess or Descent: Journeys in the Dark (which isn't strictly a roleplaying game, but c'mon), or Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. They imply a certain grandiosity that makes one think of five hundred page games with complex, interlayering rules that I dislike. If my game gets to be more than 50 pages, I'll be shocked and probably have to cut something. My inspiration is the Little Brown Books, not the Encyclopedia Britannica that is 4th edition D&D. Long titles suggest long-winded writing, and a certain lack of economy of words.
• Acronyms. GURPS is a horrible name. Horrible. I don't care what it stands for, when one says the acronym it sounds like a vulgarism for vomit. And if you say it out, it's another Long, Wordy Name. 
• Colons. White Wolf lives off of acronyms, and they make buyers sound like idiots. What do they call a game about Vampires? Vampire: The Masquerade or Vampire: The Requiem. I realize that the game is marketed towards people who are interested in a "gothic roleplaying game", but the game would have had a much, much better title of just "Requiem" or "Masquerade." For another stinker, try "Mage: The Awakening." Again, just Awakening would have been a much, much better name. I just don't understand the point of having such a formulaic name. No, "Subject: The Descriptor" is straight out.

I'm currently toying with sticking one-word titles on top of my rough draft and seeing what sticks. For example, the name "Portcullis" makes it sound like a game about defending keeps and "Iron Gauntlet" makes me think of power metal and arcade games.

Clearly, naming a game is an art more than a science, and unfortunately, I'm a poor artist.