How To Make Pathfinder Good (in like 6 or 7 easy steps)

It has come to my attention that there are people who still play Pathfinder.

I get it, I guess. There are some things I genuinely like about the system. The way it facilitates gonzo parties made up of PCs out of the monster book is kinda cool. The threefold save system is a genuine innovation, even if the rules don't leverage it as much as they could (more on that in a minute).

The core issue with the game, for me, is the crunch. The sheer number of rules creates two problems for me: how long everything takes in comparison to most other D&D retroclones, during character generation, actual gameplay, and DM prep, and mechanics that reward system mastery more than player creativity. The first problem makes the game hard to run, and the second makes it not feel worth it to run.

So I started thinking about how to turn Pathfinder into a Good Game (as arbitrarily defined by me).

Not just like, playable, actually good, like what would it take to turn this into something I would choose to play?

STEP 1. FIX SKILLS
Throw out the entire skill system as written and make the threefold saving throws do double duty. Fortitude still means fortitude but now it also means “stuff fighters are good at” like athletics or horse riding. Reflex maps to thief stuff, will maps to wizardpriest stuff. Now whenever you need to make a skill check, the DM tells you which ability score to add to which saving throw/skill score and you add that to a d20.
You can still keep class skills for the sake of niche protection by assigning advantage to those tasks as a class ability. So rangers, druids, and barbarians get advantage to checks involving nature stuff, bards get advantage to rocking out while everyone else does the work, etc. Rogues would get advantage to thief stuff *in addition to* having really high reflex saves and usually having good dexterity.

STEP 2. FIX FEATS
…by eliminating them.
This would run the risk of nerfing fighters. You can avoid this by letting them use ad-libbed mighty deeds like in DCC, just replace the funky DCC dice chain with 5e-style advantage like so:
fighter pc: i wanna charge the ogre and knock his ass off the cliff
dm: roll two d20s. if one hits, you do normal damage. if they both hit, it does normal damage and also knocks his ass off the cliff
fighter pc: fuck i rolled a 1 and a failure
dm: he sees what you’re doing and steps aside at the last second and your ass goes off the cliff
ex-fighter pc: dammit. oh well at least you adopted those house rules from that blog that make chargen take ten minutes even for drunk noobs. imma be a troll bard this time 

what the fuck would a troll bard write songs about

STEP 3. MAGIC ITEMS
Ignore all of the generic magic items in the book and most of the unique ones. They all suck. +x longswords are boring and trying to hide that with extra description or history just makes it worse.
Instead, come up with unique items whenever possible. If you need a random table of semi-generic items like the rulebook provides, recycle the more interesting feats you threw out in Step 2. A scimitar that lets you do a whirlwind attack or a wand that lets you extend or empower spells would both be more fun than the equivalent lower tier magic items in the book. Remember, items that give players new options are always more interesting and fun than items that just make them 5% or 10% better at what they already do.

I FORGOT STEP 0. ELIMINATE ALIGNMENT WITH PREJUDICE
The first thing everyone everywhere should throw out of their game is alignment. It’s terrible as written and I would argue that it doesn’t add anything valuable enough to make it worth keeping.
cons (if run by the book): eliminates interesting gameplay that results from moral ambiguity, can lead paladin types to adopt genocidal attitudes toward creatures listed as evil in the monster manual, prescribes and/or judges pc actions based on an outmoded Abrahamic conception of morality, limits roleplaying opportunities for players that want certain powers (why the fuck can’t there just be a paladin of Tiamat or a drunken master that’s just a regular monk without the alignment restriction you don’t need a whole new class for that shit if you just don't put the restriction in), allows the party or even NPCs to skip situations where they would otherwise need to use roleplaying and player skill to determine if someone is evil or not like why even have investigations and trials at all you know what I mean, probably a lot more but I'm done with this list
pros: uh it makes smite and detect work

You can make smite and detect work without alignment though.
1. Any divine powers like smite evil that are designed to encode crusader-like values into lawful good religions now affect enemies of the PC’s specific faith. What qualifies as enemies is pretty much up to the PC and DM to determine as they go, once the religion has been sort of outlined ahead of time.
2. Any arcane spells or abilities like detect evil are now just called “detect” (for example) and the PC would have to say what they want to detect when they cast it. It’s up to the DM to make on the spot rulings about what sorts of things are too specific or not specific enough to target with the spell, but any of the creature types should probably be fine. Like:
wizard pc: alright we don’t know where the wounded minotaur is hiding so i cast detect evil
dm: good and evil are societal constructs and have no place interacting with a form of magic that focuses on rearranging the fundamental structure of the universe
wizard pc: fine, nerd. i cast detect monstrous humanoid
dm: you sense that the minotaur has stuffed himself into a barrel that kinda seems a little too small for it

or even just:
wizard pc: wait i think this npc is a demon in disguise. detect outsider

STEP 4. FIX XP
The challenge rating system that by-the-book XP is based on is too much damn work. It can make DM prep take forever just to plan out an encounter that, in more rules-light versions of D&D, you’d be able to randomly generate on the fly. It also tends to make it difficult to assign XP rewards for any traps or puzzles that are interesting enough to not fit into the strict guidelines presented in the rulebook.
This is one of those problems that has annoyed so many people so much that there are easily hundreds of totally valid takes on how to fix XP on blogs and social media. I won’t pretend that the way I’ve started handling it is the best for everyone, but this is how I run it in most of my D&D-like games:
-Your PC levels up every time they achieve a set number of challenges. I’ve been going with 13 for good luck. If I ever decide that I want progression to move faster or slower, that’s the only number I’ll need to adjust.
-Valid “challenges” are obstacles that pose a legitimate threat to either the party’s safety or their goals, and require some level of player skill to negotiate. So solving any puzzle door would qualify, and so would figuring out and negotiating a trap, as well as winning any genuinely threatening combat encounter (defined as beating anything with more hit dice than you have levels). Slaughtering a village of goblins won’t give a level 7 paladin any XP unless there’s like a surprise dragon or something.
-I also count spending 100 monies on just partying in between adventures as a “challenge” for leveling purposes to encourage situations in which players must roll to see what their PCs did while blackout drunk.

STEP 5. UN-NERF HUMANS
I just realized that getting rid of skill points and feats kinda fucks humans over since that’s all they normally get at chargen. I say just start ‘em off at level two and be done with it. If nothing else, that should encourage players who don’t care what race their PC is to just pick human and move on.

STEP 6. LET’S FUCK WITH RACIAL ABILITY SCORE ADJUSTMENTS WHILE WE’RE AT IT
Almost all the races in the game (pretty sure this applies to every non-human, right?) get a +x bonus to one or more ability scores and a -x penalty to others. Which I guess is alright, but it’s kinda more fun to interpret those bonuses as extra dice. So like an elf would get to roll 4d6 for dexterity but only get 2d6 for constitution.
I’ll admit that this one is more optional really (all of these are optional dummy). I like it because the whole point of allowing players to role-play as non-human species is to add variety, so any change that accentuates that variety by making differences more extreme is worth making.

Okay now I’m getting into aesthetic preferences instead of just ways to make the game run more smoothly so I’ll just quit while I still feel like I’m ahead.

What a Hack

I like The Black Hack. I like it enough that it's become my go-to game, but not so much that I don't feel the need to change parts of it.

Mostly so I can throw away the piece of scrap paper I wrote this stuff down on, I present to you my house rules for The Black Hack. My personal Black Hack Hack, with short explanations of just what the fuck I'm thinking. If you haven't read TBH, these might not make any sense.

REACTION ROLLS

Rather than the d8 table in TBH, I prefer the bell curve you get from the classic 2d6 reaction table, and also would prefer charisma to be factored in. So I did the math to work (roughly) the same probabilities you get from the 2d6 into TBH’s core d20 mechanic:

Any time an NPC's reaction is in question, roll 1d20 and subtract your charisma score from that. Assign advantage or disadvantage based on particularly smart or dumb roleplaying.

-10 and lower: helpful

-9 — -5: friendly

-4 — 4: neutral

5 — 9: unfriendly

10 and higher: hostile

Notice that this makes the relevant ability score (CHA) way more important than it is in other D&D games, just like everything else you can do in this game.

LEVELING UP

I like that TBH’s “system” for advancement is more freeform than traditional XP, but it goes a little too far in that direction for me. This is my compromise:

PCs gain a level every time they complete seven distinct challenges. Challenges include any task with a legitimate chance of failure and adverse consequences. They include, but are not limited to:

• combat, when total HD of opponents is greater than or equal to character level
• obstacles and hazards negotiated
• manipulation of NPCs
• secrets discovered

This allows PCs to advance more quickly than in D&D. You could slow it down by making it every 13 or so challenges if you wanted to.

WEAPON/ARMOR RESTRICTIONS

There are none. This negates an advantage of playing a fighter (or warrior or whatever), but the next thing kinda makes up for it.

COMBAT MANEUVERS

This is any attack that puts the enemy at some mechanical disadvantage rather than doing direct hit point damage. This includes attempts to stun, push, trip, or disarm opponents, among other things.

Fighters roll with advantage when making or defending against this type of attack, unless their enemy shares this advantage and they cancel each other out. This is to make combat marginally more tactical for players who like that sort of thing, without forcing anyone who isn't interested to learn how it works.

ABILITY SCORES

I assigned abilities to specific tasks, in some cases changing the ability’s function entirely. The biggest change is reinterpreting wisdom as awareness of one’s surroundings and nothing else.

• Strength: saves vs. paralysis, melee attacks, athletics (sprinting, climbing, etc.), breaking shit
• Dexterity: ranged attacks, acrobatics (jumping, tumbling, etc.), stealth
• Constitution: saves vs. poison, death, disease, and fatigue
• Intelligence: spellcasting checks (for both arcane & divine casters), languages (which works like the skill in LotFP), tinkering
• Wisdom: saves vs. deception & illusion, reflex saves, dodging physical attacks, perception, initiative
• Charisma: saves vs. charm effects, reaction rolls

This is the biggest change really, because some of it contradicts basic assumptions that apply across editions. Suddenly your low intelligence, high wisdom cleric is an untouchable duelist but useless as a spellcaster. I kinda don't care though? My rationalization here is just that I like it better; mapping the ability scores this way makes sense to me. I guess I could let players rearrange their stat line if this was ever a source of confusion.

And that’s it for now. I might get rid of clerics and start using a different magic system at some point, but I’m leaving that stuff alone for the moment. I'm using the equipment lists from LotFP for stuff that's missing from TBH but that doesn't really count.

Dirty Fighting (simplified combat maneuvers)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about my house rules, and I’ve had the chance to run a few sessions since then. I had to adjust the math regarding non-combat skills, so I'm going to update the character sheet and ref screen sometime this weekend (which, as you know if you’ve been following along, is all you really need to play). I also changed the ref screen’s monster panel to reflect my Brinewald: 1631 adventure.

I think that means I accidentally made a 5-page quickstart package. Well, minus the pregens anyway….

Anyway, an issue I didn’t quite expect came up during a solo game. Which is awesome, because learning is the best. The issue had to do with what 3.x called “combat maneuvers” and my house game calls “dirty fighting,” which is probably the most important house rule I use. This has been my most direct way of making fighters fun to play, and of making the combats themselves less abstracted and more interesting than “okay now it’s my turn to roll… shit, missed, your turn.” Basically, fighters of any level get 5e style advantage to any attack they make that changes the nature of a fight instead of doing HP damage: disarms, judo throws, grappling, anything else the PC can think of that would shift the odds in their favor.

So the issue was this: Ashley was playing as a solo fighter/thief type to help me playtest Brinewald. She ended up going after the bandit cave, which ended up with a one on one fight vs the bandit leader. According to my dirty fighting plan, this should have been awesome, but Ashley never chose to do anything but basic attack rolls. When I asked her why later, she told me that she would have been all about throwing this dude to the ground, but that a quirk of the mechanics would make this a pointless tactic.

As she saw it, the situation would be: BL attacks Ashley, rolls damage, Ashley throws BL, then it’s his turn and he stands right back up and attacks. Even if he doesn’t stand up until the next turn, that would only mean that he and she both lost a turn, rendering the dirty fighting technique completely useless. If this had been a group game, she would have gone for it, since it would have given all of her allies an advantage to their attacks, before their enemy could stand back up.

Had she decided to use a DF technique, I would have made sure that it made a legit difference in the fight (even in the solo game) with an on-the-spot ruling, but I guess that wasn’t obvious at the time. So the point of this post is to codify the mechanical effects of a few dirty fighting techniques in my game, which no one reading this is likely to be playing. Hooray!

Throw/Trip: I’ll start with this, mostly because all my players know at least a little bit of judo, which creates an expectation that I make it effective and realistic. Probably the easiest thing to do would be to simply declare that anyone who’s just been thrown also loses their next turn.

That’s sort of accurate, too, but not quite. You’d have to get pretty lucky to pull off an effective weapon attack while prone, but it’s easy to take down a standing opponent from the ground, as long as you can figure out how knees work.

This guy's a big dork but he's doing it right. See also Lesnar vs Mir (UFC 81) a.k.a the funniest fight I've ever watched. Except maybe for Quan Mi Bit from St Louis vs anyone....

So maybe prone characters still have options, but they’re limited. Mostly these will be common-sense judgement calls I make at the table, since there’s no way I’ll think of everything the players might, but some general guidelines would be helpful:

• Crawl at 1/4 normal speed or stand up. Either of these provokes a free melee attack from anyone in range.
• No attacks with melee weapons.
• Unarmed attacks (almost certainly kicks rather than punches, knees, or elbows) are okay, but they give the target a free attack. See Disarm, below.
• Missile attacks are fine. I’m pretty sure you could even use a bow if you were on your back instead of your belly, but I could be wrong on that one.
• While we’re at it, +1 defense bonus vs. missile weapons.
• -1 defense penalty vs. melee weapons.
• Some dirty fighting techniques can still be attempted with no penalty. Not disarms though, they usually involve footwork.

Also if you throw a person next to a volcano or something, you get to decide where they land (within say 10’, let’s not get crazy here).

I’m never going to remember all those, but I’m pretty sure they’ll seem just as obvious to me when they come up in-game as they do now. I really should figure out how to get all of this onto my DM screen, though. I’ll probably make a third panel for it, if I can figure out what else to even put on there.

Disarm: Oddly enough, this is actually kind of tricky. In standard D&D the advantage would be obvious, since damage is determined mostly by choice of weapon, and unless you’re playing as a kung-fu monk (even then in some circumstances), fighting unarmed is a terrible idea. I use class-based damage, going with the idea that someone with combat training/experience is more dangerous with a pencil than an untrained person is with a sledgehammer. The trained warrior looks at a person and sees a collection of vital areas, any one of which could be used to take an opponent out of the fight. The nerd with the hammer is just swinging more or less blindly at a human-shaped silhouette.

This also means that fighting unarmed isn’t too different, mechanically speaking, than fighting with a weapon. You can kill a man by punching him in the throat just as surely as by stabbing him there. So how do I maintain this realism without making weapons and disarm attempts useless? By thinking about reach. When fighting unarmed against an armed opponent, not being injured becomes a much larger priority than causing injury, and their striking range is wider than yours. Unless you happen to knock out your target in a single strike (which is never a guarantee, I don’t care who you are), you’re opening yourself up to get stabbed. Unless of course you disarm your attacker first.

So mechanically speaking, unarmed attacks do just as much damage as attacks with weapons, but they also give your target a free attack (only if they're armed though).

Your opponent also gets a free attack if your weapon is on the ground and you try to retrieve it. If you're hit, you're prevented from picking up your weapon this round.

Example: Your thief is fighting a duel with Sir Asshole, who wins initiative and successfully disarms you on his first turn of combat. Now it’s your turn, and you have a couple of options. You could use your turn to scramble for your weapon, but you won’t get a chance to attack during this round, and there's a chance of failing to retrieve it. Alternatively, you could roll with it and try an unarmed attack. You hit, but you only roll a 2 for damage, and Sir Asshole gets to attack you back during your turn, hitting you for 3 damage, then gets to attack again on his own turn, possibly doing even more damage, before you get to attack again. Essentially, he gets two attacks to your one every round, until you get your weapon back.

Of course, a third option would be to disarm Sir Asshole and level the playing field.

Grapple: The only times this has been used so far in my game were attempts to tie up NPCs for torture enhanced interrogation techniques. My players are terrible people, which is probably why we get along so well.

If you successfully initiate a grapple on your turn, your opponent can’t do anything but try to escape or reverse positions on their turn, for which they need to make their own grapple check. If you’re still in the controlling position when your next turn starts, then you’ve got a few options, and all of them require another grapple check.

• Tie up or put manacles on your opponent.
• Cause 1d12 damage to your opponent by performing a joint-lock or chokehold. You decide whether the enemy is killed, choked unconscious, or has a limb broken.
• Take something from them; backpack, something they’re holding, jewelry, etc.

Okay that’s all for now go read my older stuff.

2 Page DMG

I decided to make myself a DM screen and see what it feels like to look like I know what I'm doing. I haven't really used one since playing Hero Quest as a tiny person. PDF here.

Darker orange = faster progression, level cap is 10.

Remember when I said I wanted to keep HP low?

It'll be 3 horizontal panels, with the middle panel reserved for 1 page dungeons and the like. I kinda feel like this, when combined with that character sheet I did with instructions on the back, qualifies as a pretty much complete (playable if not in particularly original) game. Just a really simple, rules light skeleton that you could bolt whatever you want onto.

Except for spells. Fuck that, I'm not gonna sit here and try to beautifully reinvent magic missile. You've probably got your own favorite game for spells, I use the ones from Roles Rules & Rolls Roger's 52 Pages RPG, plus these ones I posted the other day. And I wouldn't say no if someone wanted to use some of  the weirder ones from LotFP.

The monster list is by no means complete and these 22 were selected and written with the help of intoxicants which is why it's in no particular order and there's probably mistakes but it's really no excuse for not having a flail snail (wait are they OGL or do I have to do some obvious stand-in like "thought lord"?) or stirge on there. I'm sorry. At least there's an owlbear. I guess I need to do another "volume" sometime.

There are about 12 monsters on the list that would be totally appropriate in a Mesoamerican campaign.

The desecrator is the only monster on the list that might require some explanation; I don't like hags because they represent mommy issues and treat witch hunters as good guys and that's stupid. I also don't really like the powers they've gotten in any D&D game I've seen (which, to be fair, isn't all of them). Desecrators are basically my version of the archetypal wicked old fairy tale witch, but they can also be male in which case they basically look like the cryptkeeper. That "mark of chaos" thing they have as a special quality has a corrupting influence on whatever the desecrator carves it into over time. It's basically a way to explain fun stuff like fucked up haunted woods or caves where the environment itself wants to eat you, and more powerful super aggressive mutant spawn of humans and animals.

Also I'm obviously going to have to draw something cool and/or fucked up for the front, but I'm definitely going to overthink the fuck out of it and procrastinate forever (probably going through several iterations), and I wanted to post the crunchy part now. Mostly I'm pumped because I hadn't even started this thing yesterday morning.

Holy Texts or Amputating My Game at the Cleric

My house game doesn’t have clerics. This is what I use instead.

The Madrid Codex, one of the only three Mayan texts that haven't been incinerated by white guys.

All characters can choose to become part of a religion at any point when it makes sense in the game, including during character creation (only if the players ask; their faith is vague by default). Mages who convert can then opt to trade in the spell book that every mage starts with for a holy text. This text can be a book, scroll, codex, tattoos all over the mage’s skin, a small abstract sculpture, whatever. It contains select spells all the way up to the maximum spell level of whatever game you’re playing, which should be chosen based on how well they conform to the philosophy of that religion.

A copy of the Torah that survived the Kristallnacht Pogrom in Leipzig, Germany.

The word "holy" is actually a little misleading. There's no distinction between divine magic and arcane magic in my game, so these are basically really powerful (but at the same time, limiting) spellbooks.

I use the spells from 52 Pages, which has a pretty flexible system for creating religions with customized cleric spell lists: the spells are divided into schools, and a cleric (or prophet, as that game calls them) of a new religion works with the dm to pick two or three schools of magic that make sense for that religion. You’re also supposed to come up with a guiding motto like “protect the weak” or “get out with the loot” which I don’t like or use, but the spell list part is simple and works perfectly for my purposes.

Catholic crusaders might have access to restoration and abjuration. Druids get restoration and nature.

So you get that holy text, which comes fully stocked with all the spells that priests of your religion are permitted to use. The text is enchanted to somehow “know” if you stray from the faith by casting a blasphemous non-kosher spell. If you do that, the words of the text will forevermore appear scrambled and illegible to you. Obviously, you can go back to using a spell book and being a regular old mage if this happens. The book also appears to scramble itself for those who haven’t gone through whatever initiation ritual is appropriate for priests of your chosen faith.

A religious text should probably also have some sort of loosely historical parables in it, which should probably provide some useful information. That sort of takes care of itself in my house game. Mages already get advantage to knowledge/lore checks, so maybe I could just say that the bonus is because they’re constantly collecting little scraps of lore and jotting down notes and ideas, and the stories in your holy text would function the same way.

It doesn't look like it has enough pages for 500 years but I'm guessing it's bigger on the inside.

I also don’t use paladins, but I do allow fighter-mage type characters. If you tell me you want to play as a paladin, I’ll tell you to make a “spellsword” (cause that’s what it’s called in my player handout) with a holy text instead of a spell book. Maybe you can go on a quest to find the divine blade of the demonslayer or something if you’re just in it for the smite evil ability.

Now that I think about it, I like using special items to create the equivalents of a lot of the fancier classes (by which I mean anything other than fighter/thief/mage). An axe of berserking basically makes you a barbarian, while a cloak of stealth and a magic bow turns a fighter or thief into a ranger, for all intents and purposes. If I’m drunk and unusually pliable I may give your thief an opportunity to find a magic keytar of illusions or something. I would also be cool with letting a character go train somewhere to get certain abilities. If you can’t create the character you want to play during character generation, start having your character ask around in-game.

Implications of the Cleric Thing

Normally, clerics get their powers directly from their deities, which makes the idea of atheism a non-starter in the campaign world (Lamentations of the Flame Princess sort of addresses this by saying that divine magic comes from some vague notion of faith and that gods still don’t necessarily exist). By the book, it doesn’t really make sense for me to write an npc or for you to play a pc that sees all religions as collections of lies and hates them, or politically powerful clergy members that secretly lost their faith long ago. By eliminating clerics and using holy texts (which don't necessarily imply the existence of a god), I open up the possibility that all religions are, in fact, scams, and leave the nature of life and death just as vague as it is in real life.

Religion no longer implies alignment. I hate alignment so much, for so many reasons. It will probably be its own post at some point. LotFP takes this on too, by explicitly stating that law and chaos refer to cosmic forces and have nothing to do with politics or behavior, and that everyone is neutral except lawful clerics and chaotic mages. I still don’t like it because it doesn’t make sense for them to be on the same team, unless your players bother to come up with something, which my players wouldn’t do. Kind of (by which I mean exactly) like saying that a witch hunter and a witch are lifelong friends without bothering to explain how that happened.

I use D&D 3/D&D 3.5/Pathfinder (3.x)’s threefold saving throw system for skills as well as saves. Eliminating the cleric leaves only three main classes, meaning that Reflex Saves, Fortitude Saves & Will Saves translate to Thief Stuff, Fighter Stuff, and Mage Stuff. This isn’t all that different from a free game I ran for a while called Warrior, Rogue and Mage, and it struck me as a really elegant solution for something that can get pretty messy. WRM sort of failed for me by using those three scores to replace the six core ability scores, and keeping something pretty close to 3.x’s skills and feats, the parts of 3.x I hated most when I was running it. I like the idea better as a threefold skill system.

Monotheistic religions which believe that "there is no god but god" don’t make sense in the setting implied by the cleric rules. Neither do ancestor worship, nature worship, or anything approaching an abstract pursuit of nirvana sans mythology.* Belief and ritual are incredibly diverse throughout the world. To limit the way it works to an odd mix of ancient polytheistic belief and medieval monotheistic practice is to waste a pretty huge opportunity.

One of the most iconic d&d scenarios is the one in which some powerful creature has set itself up as the deity of some cult. I like the idea of the beholdragon or whatever being able to build a cult of empowered priests by creating holy (unholy? whatever, not for me to judge) texts for their followers, which aren’t immediately useful to the party. Or kidnapping the pope and forcing him to do it since he obviously knows how.

I didn't feel like drawing a beholdragon so here's one by one "SPipes" on devart.

*Yeah yeah, I know d&d monks are basically buddhist martial artists or at least a collection of modern movie tropes about them BUT I don’t think any d&d edition’s manual treats it as a religion in and of itself. By my house rules, a fighter or fighter-mage with no armor or weapons already functions basically the same way as a d&d monk as far as combat bonuses go. If you got your fighter-mage a holy text with the right spells you’d end up with all the wuxia magic you would need.

One Page Player's Handbook

Like a lot of referees who've played around with multiple editions, I use so many house rules that it's almost a different game (mechanically speaking at least). I designed a player reference that fits everything my new players need to get started on the back of the character sheet I give them. Download here.

character sheet front

Well, almost everything. I didn't address the way magic works. I've been using the spells from The 52 Pages RPG, including the higher level spells in this post. I don't make mage characters pick their spells ahead of time, but they can only cast each spell once per day. There also are no clerics; mages have access to the 52 Pages prophet spells. I've been using the equipment tables from Lamentations of the Flame Princess. If some random internet person wanted to use my system, I guess that person could just go with whatever spells and equipment they felt like.

character sheet back

This is meant to be all you would need to jump into your first game as quickly as possible, but doesn't include things like level progression. Those are all scribbled on random pieces of paper on and around my desk at the moment. Eventually I'm going to pull together some sort of reference for things that won't come up for most players until a couple sessions in. Probably.

Keeping it Real

Most people reading this probably understand that hit points are meant to represent some abstract combination of physical health, stamina, resolve, and some other vague factors. I’ve even seen them referred to as “don’t-get-hit points,” implying that only the killing blow is an actual solid hit. I get that, but I don’t like it.

Hit points and damage are inextricably linked, and the abstractness of HP implies that the damage needs to be equally abstract to make any sense. It’s ludicrous to imagine a human warrior being impaled by multiple spearmen and fighting on, so those spearmen must not actually be stabbing the warrior when they keep rolling 6s for damage. That's why the don't-get-hit justification was needed in the first place.

Just one arrow and Conan is hurt. You are not tougher than Conan. Art by John Buscema

It makes sense in theory, but the way it plays out at my table, it’s pretty clear that damage specifically represents physical injuries. (“Shit, I rolled a 2. I just barely nicked him.”) Therefore, at my game table, hit points don’t actually represent anything other than physical endurance. How much pain can you take before you die or pass out? That’s what hit points are. Which means two things: hit points are way too high and always have been*, and I need something else to represent everything about them that isn’t physical endurance (the don’t-get-hit part of hit points).

One of the few ideas that’s remained consistent across every edition of D&D is the notion that armor keeps you from getting hit, but that doesn’t model reality particularly well either. What armor actually does is keep those hits from doing as much damage as they usually would.

Here, take a look at what bayonet training in the army looks like:

There's more to it than just the pugil sticks but this is the part that's relevant here.

In game terms, those guys are wearing padded armor. +1 AC. Maybe +2 depending on how you handle helmets. Does it look like the padding is making it easier to avoid attacks?

The idea that AC keeps your character from getting hit implies a couple things. One is that all armor, when struck, absorbs all force perfectly and completely. No armor made by human hands does that, but if you accept it anyway, the next logical conclusion is that a better AC just means that more of the body is covered. Which makes sense for the difference between a breastplate and full plate armor but that’s the exception.

So, to avoid having to say things like “The spear tip bounces harmlessly off your leather jacket,” AC means damage reduction at my table. Plate mail doesn’t keep you from getting hit with a hammer but it’s not gonna hurt as much.

Now that I’ve addressed what doesn’t keep you from getting hit, I can talk about what does. It’s exactly the same thing as what helps you hit your own target: training and experience.** Which, in D&D, mean class and level. There’s a number for this that’s been called attack bonus or base attack bonus depending on which edition you’re looking at. For me it’s just combat bonus.

Example: Grok the fighter is attacking Alita the thief. Based on class and level, Grok’s combat bonus is +4. He rolls a d20 and gets 13, 17 total. Alita doesn’t roll anything, just adds her combat bonus of +2 to 10, ahead of time, calling it her defense bonus. So Grok’s 17 beats Alita’s 12 and he rolls 1d8 damage, getting a 4. Alita is wearing padded armor (AC +1), so she takes 3 damage.

There are two things I’ve noticed about what this means in actual play. For one thing, armor isn’t as important as it used to be. It has an effect, but only if you get hit, which warriors are better at avoiding just because they’re warriors. My character sheets make encumbrance pretty easy to avoid in much the same way the LotFP sheets do, so I enforce it pretty strictly; this means that the pros and cons of wearing any armor at all are pretty situational and often end up being a wash. So Conan can run around in a loincloth and get along just fine. Which is awesome.

I might as well also mention that I nixed armor restrictions while I was at it, since armor doesn’t matter as much (especially since I use early firearm rules that ignore the armor entirely anyway). It hasn’t actually come up in play, possibly because mages and thieves with low strength are taking a bigger hit on encumbrance. I could see a mage using armor to become less a glass cannon and a little more of a tank, but that doesn’t feel like it breaks anything to me. Aesthetically speaking, I see magic users as less Gandalf and more Elric anyway.

John Picacio

So, to summarize the house rules I’ve discussed so far:
1. Class based damage, no weapon or armor restrictions.
2. AC = Damage Reduction.
3. Hitting and not getting hit are both based on Combat Bonus, which is based on class and level.

See? The rule changes aren’t complicated, just the reasoning. Bear in mind that I’m not arguing anywhere that these changes would improve your game, just that they do a better job of modeling reality. Many players and refs prefer to revel in the abstraction. My group has more fun with combat with the changes in place, measured by how into the narration we get and how much time we spend laughing maniacally.

---

*I re-wrote the class progressions, too; my version works as a single table that covers all the classes I use. I’ll type it up and post it at some point and you can see from that how I addressed absurdly high HP totals.

**There’s also a natural ability component, but my take on ability scores is probably a whole other post so let’s ignore them completely for now.

If Merlin Can Swing A Sword Why Can’t I

Weapon lists aren’t a bug, but class-based weapon restrictions sort of are, at least in my games. These restrictions get in the way of letting the players be awesome, which makes them a no-go. (Waitaminute, you’re telling me I have the power to command the underlying forces of the universe through sheer intellectual domination but I can’t figure out how an axe works? I’m gonna go play Stormbringer.) On the other hand, I like to have fairly clear divisions between what each character class is capable of, so I need another way to address that.

Weapon lists come from wargames, where they make sense completely. Your untrained peasants armed with farm tools are probably not going to do well against my untrained peasants with halberds and crossbows. When D&D came along, these lists made for a convenient way to differentiate classes in combat. Clerics are restricted from using sharp weapons in old editions, not because of some holy oath, but because no blunt weapons do as much damage as a two-handed sword.

In D&D, I like the ability to deal damage to be tied more closely to training and experience than to either choice of weapon or inborn advantage. It matches what I’ve learned in both the martial arts and the military a lot more closely that way; knowing where and how to strike an opponent is more important than brute strength or even what you're armed with. A lot of the people I play with have at least some martial arts experience too, so house-ruling the combat to work more realistically removes a layer of abstraction that doesn’t add anything to the game for any of us.

uhhh nipple...?

I can boil most of this reasoning down to two general statements:
1. There’s no good reason my wizard can’t use a sword to kill people.
2. There’s also no reason he could do more damage with it than your fighter can with a dagger, because your fighter should be better at finding, say, my spleen.

My answer is class based damage. Fighters do 1d8 damage regardless of what weapon they’re using, thieves do 1d6, mages do 1d4. This also applies to unarmed combat and improvised weapons, because it is both A) realistic and more importantly B) awesome if your first level fighter is able to throat punch a man to death or take him out with a ladder.

Jackie Chan would've been too obvious. Photo by Laura Johnson.

Sure, my games lose an element of tactical granularity that the weapon lists provided, but it’s like amputating an infected limb; you end up cutting away some of the healthy bit along with the part that’s oozing weird colored pus.

I started to look for an image for that but decided against it. You're welcome.

Yes I know that none of this addresses the point of the “weapon lists are a bug” rant in any way. That’s because role playing is an extremely subjective term and coming up with a universal definition seems not only really really difficult but also without much benefit.