5e and setting design.

Since I will (hopefully) be starting a 5e campaign fairly soon I have been working on a new setting tailored to the system. This is backwards of my usual approach, in the past I have designed a setting and then tinkered with the rules until they worked for what I was doing. This time I am going based on what setting elements are implied by the rule books. With just the PHB there is not too much to go on but there is certainly enough to get started. I started a thread on therpgsite about implied setting elements in 5e. http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=30470

The thread delivered and quite a few people chimed in listing what setting elements they could tease out of the PHB. I plan on posting my progress on the setting as it develops here. Tomorrow my goal is to get an outline of basic world elements posted here as well as the regional outline of the area potential players will be starting in. I work from the ground up so the largest portion of detail will be on an area roughly the size of a small modern county.

A new campaign.

It looks like our savage Fallout campaign fell apart. A scheduling issue, as usual, did it in. On the good news front I managed to scrape up enough for a copy of the 5e PHB. So with a slight adjustment to our weekly schedule and the possible addition of another player we will be starting up a 5e game within the next few days. There are still a couple of players interested in the Fallout game so we may try and reschedule it as a bi weekly game for those still interested.

Dealing with damage.

One thing that has always bugged me in D&D, and many other games that follow the hit point 

system, is how damage is handled. Typically characters and npcs just soak up punishment 

until they hit the 0 hit point threshold then drop out dead or unconscious. For the purposes 

of book keeping this is a simple and workable system. However for me it is a bit more 

abstract than I care for on a regular basis, or at least for certain types of games. 

Sometimes I like something a bit grittier. The problem with that is that the more detail you 

go into about combat, or any system, the more it will slow down. Any way here is a system I 

have been tinkering with for older editions of D&D and their clones, or even a custom system 

I have been tossing around in the old noggin for a while.

Hit points will be reckoned as being a measure of the characters ability to soak up minor 

blows without serious consequence, call it luck or whatever abstraction you prefer. The 

characters Constitution score becomes the actual measure of their ability to absorb 

substantial physical damage. Divide the players Con score by three and round down or up as 

needed.

The score provided is a measure of how many actual wounds the player can sustain. So for 

instance if Player A is out of hit points and takes another hit for for 3 hit points, he 

will compare to his Con score, in this case 9, so this would be one wound suffered. This 

would leave the player with a total of 6 Con points, and thus two more wounds he can sustain 

before falling out. Now what happens if Player A had sustained say, 6 Con points of damage 

instead of 3? Instead of counting this as two wounds at once this is considered one Shocking 

injury. This is an injury that has immediate effects, not merely the running of blood from a 

deep cut or a broken bone. When a Shocking injury is sustained the player must make a check 

against their Con score by rolling 3d6. If the roll is higher than the players Con score the 

character falls unconscious. Now what happens if say enough damage is sustained to go over a 

Shocking injury and incur a third? At that point the player simply collapses, and must be 

stabilized by either magical or mundane means or lose 1d4 Con points per round.

With this system in place a natural 20 on a to hit roll would mean that the damage rolled is applied directly to the players Con points. Basically a critical is an attack to precise and well timed to be shrugged off as a glancing blow. Now of course I plan to make a table of effects for both regular and Shocking wounds, with effects from regular wounds being less severe and immediate than those from Shocking wounds. All of this needs more fleshing out of course and certainly some testing. I also haven't sussed out what exactly happens when wounds are all maxed out. Does the player drop dead? Or are they out of the fight with Con checks needed each round to prevent death until they are stabilized? Perhaps once a PC has been pushed to this point they may suffer a permanent effect? 

This system will most assuredly end up being more fiddly than the standard system, and I'm ok with that. Sometimes it's fun to play with toys that are a bit more complicated. Of course I am also sure that I'm not reinventing the wheel here and that someone else has done something along these line only better. I'm ok with that as well, sometimes tinkering with rules is just fun. Thoughts?

Savage Fallout in Arkansas... Savaged Arkansas I guess?

Last week my group decided to run something different than one of our on again off again D&D campaigns. We had planned on starting a 5e game but considering I have about two plug nickles to spare for new game books and we wanted to run the game with the full gamut of options we voted to try a different system. I already have a copy Savage Worlds and it looked interesting and versatile enough that we could broaden our horizons a bit setting wise. So we set about another vote to see what kind of setting we wanted play in.

Everyone had been playing through the new Fallout games recently so it was kind of a no brainer to give the setting a try. We deviated a bit in that instead of going with the canonical setting of the video games we went with a Fallout universe treatment of our home state that had been kicking around in my notes for a while now. I took a couple of days and fleshed things out enough to get through our first session and we got started Monday evening. Character creation is a bit slower than I have been used to lately but not too bad, I suppose in that respect retro-clones have spoiled me. We used elements of a couple of different Fallout Savage Worlds books floating around on the web as well a few things of my own devising.

After the players finished creating their characters we ended up with Ermine, a vault dwelling goober with no discernible usefulness in combat. Bootshit (no I'm not kidding), a shiftless raider who sees all problems in terms of how many bullets it should take to solve it, and Jack (that isn't the PCs name I just don't remember it) a waste dwelling scavenger with no particular aims. So we started play with a simple caravan run, the PC's had all tagged along with a caravan headed for Little Rock the chief trade settlement of the Arkansas waste. The journey was uneventful save for a single attack by raiders that was easily dispatched by the players and caravan guards. More than anything else that particular encounter was a good excuse to familiarize ourselves with the mechanics of a new system. Combat played smoothly and was over fairly quickly. I realized within a round that starting characters in Savage Worlds are considerably more potent than a first level OD&D character.

Little Rock in this alternate universe is a river trade hub built in the ruins of the prewar city. It is a frontier style town, rule of law is minimal and it is a hotbed of tensions between competing trade companies. The Capital River company controls a ramshackle dock on the Arkansas River and thus the lucrative trade lane that comes with it. The Delta Overland group controls caravan trade through the town and while powerful in their own right are overshadowed by the Capital River company. There is the salt brining operation controlled by the Conway family which provides the chief export of the city. Last and most certainly least is the corrupt, drunk of a mayor who is owned by the Capital River company.

Upon arriving in town the players made their way to the Adam and Eve tavern, brothel, and all around cesspit. Here they made acquaintance with Gentleman Jim owner, proprietor, and top hat wearing lunatic. Things progressed quickly from there. Bootshit found his way into the towns booming Bare Knuckle fighting scene and made a couple of caps with a quick first round win. Ermine and Jack mingled amongst the tavern patrons on the lookout for interesting rumors. They heard tell of a plant that had produced electronics for the war effort among the gang infested ruins of the outer city and quickly made up their minds that they would find it and pick it clean of valuables.

After searching among the ruins with only the ramblings of a drunk to go on they found the particular blasted heap they were looking for. We left off there for the evening and will pick back up next Monday.

Lets get this show on the road.

This my new gaming blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine. Not much more to say than that is there? I plan on posting just about whatever the hell pops in my head that is gaming related here. Session reports from my latest campaign, setting details from whatever campaign world I'm working on at the moment, personal thoughts on random aspects of the hobby, and god willing even useful content from time to time. Hopefully I will post a few times a week but all things considered I would rather go for quality over quantity.