Mutants & Masterminds Condition Cards

 

Something new here at the end of 2020 - something very useful in play! 

A lot of the action in M&M involves inflicting various conditions on PCs and NPCs. It's one of the reasons M&M is one of the few games where I like to keep  a computer handy but that's more for me to use as the GM. It's still tricky sometimes for the players to keep track of who is in what state and being able to hand them a card with the details on it is a huge win for everyone at the table.

There are three "types" to help make the searching a little quicker and they are otherwise self-explanatory. Including the "supersedes" note is a great touch. It's nice to be clear on exactly how things can get worse for our heroes.

As "conditions" have become a more common concept in RPGs over the last decade I have picked up similar types of products for Pathfinder and for D&D 5E and we use them in just about every session.

"...OK and now you're blinded"

"Uh, is that a -2?"

"Here"

(Problem solved)

Now you absolutely do not need these to play the game. They are a "bonus" if you have a few extra bucks but they are one that in my experience is well worth it. They end up around $20 in a nice plastic deckbox with shipping and having gotten my hands on them I can recommend them without hesitation if you play M&M with any regularity.

 

Greatest Hits #31 - Ye Olde Fumble Table

In honor of the kind of year 2018 has been for me, this is the most appropriate way to end the year:

In the interest of contributing something at least semi-useful to other people I present Ye Olde Fumble Table.

This is something I put together back around 2001-2002 when I was running a 3rd Edition campaign every two weeks with 6-8 players and we thought the game just cried out for something to balance out the spectrum with the Critical Hit rule. I'm not as big on things like this now as it can slow down the game but we did have quite a bit of fun with it. If I end up running Pathfinder or a 3.5 game again at some point I might break it back out and expose a new generation to the joys of damaging oneself. I believe v1.2 was the final version after we discovered some results needed more clarity or to be simplified.  If anyone is interested I can probably turn this into a PDF and put it up on Dropbox or Google Docs in a more printable format than this.

Looking over it again for the first time in a while, this really would not e difficult to translate into 4th Edition - all those wonderful conditions could fill out a fumble table quite nicely. Hmmmm.

Stat Trackers for 5th Edition D&D

In a lot of RPG's it's important to track initiative and there are a lot of ways to do it from pen & paper to mag-boards to computer tools. I've used a variety of methods over the years but when we started playing 5E I went with the fairly popular "hanging cards over the top of the DM screen in order" approach. It's simple, inexpensive, and requires no hardware other than a DM screen, which I already had.

Then some guys ran a kickstarter for an improved version of everybody's homebrew solution: trackers pre-printed with monster stats! Now there were form-style printable sheets sort of like this available but for even less prep these are pre-printed which means I don't have to go through and transcribe the Monster Manual - instead I have a 300+ of these things ready to go. For roughly the cost of a 5E book I have all of that plus a bunch of blank monster trackers I can use for IP-restricted monsters and homebrews. I also have a bunch of blank character trackers so I can keep my PCs' stats available too if I so desire. Honestly I almost never track my PC stats in any game - that's their job, not mine - but I may give it a try since these make it so easy. Here's what it looks like in action:

The purple sticky notes are where I'm recording the actual initiative number. I'm not sure this is really something I need to do anymore as there aren't really ways to change it once it's rolled - just ways to shift who goes before who. It's a holdover habit from older editions and maybe this tool will help me let go of it.

As the frost giants were beating down the gate to Bryn Shander I had their stats right there in front of me and I DID NOT HAVE TO OPEN A SINGLE BOOK TO RUN THIS ENTIRE FIGHT!

That's huge. I had the adventure in front of me, but it basically sets up the scene, the goals, and the aftermath. I did not have to look up anything specific to the fight itself and could focus almost entirely on what's going on and not what the numbers are.

This is exactly what I'm looking for when running a game.

For 4E and for previous 5E runs I would typically put together the monster stats I knew would be appearing and print them out on individual sheets. This saved me from using books or flipping through adventures or using a laptop for stats. This tool is a step beyond because I still needed to track initiative separately from those sheets and this accomplishes both with one item and leaves one less thing to clutter up my table space.

I'm very happy with this product.

One other note: Part of what makes this possible is the simplification of the statblocks for 5E. I think it would also have been possible for 4E as those were similarly clean. There's no way this would work as well for Pathfinder because a lot of the bigger and more advanced monsters have extremely long statblocks, sometimes a page or more for the heavy hitters. It's a good example of an unanticipated benefit to simplifying things where it makes sense.

Solutions to potential future issues: Say I want to run multiple frost giants on individual initiative but I only have the one card? Photocopy the tracker, add a colored post it or sticker dot that corresponds to a colored dot on each individual frost giant mini.

If you're interested they are now "Top Dog Games" and have a website here where you can order them. I don't know them personally or have any involvement with them - I just like what they've done.

Rifts House Rules - My Combat Cheatsheet Part 3 - 2015 Edition

Most of this page is taken up with the two critical hit tables - one for humanoid, one for vehicles. I spent a lot of time working these out and tried to come up with some concrete effects that could be fun in the game and give players a chance to decide when enough was enough and it was time to retreat. It also gave a parallel path for driving off NPC bad guys beyond just mowing through hundreds of MDC and many minutes of playing time. If you can blow out the power plant or kill the fire control or the main weapon systems, then the fight may well be over. It also gives a chance for some characters to shine by getting damaged systems back online - "Scotty I need warp power in 3 mniutes or we're all dead" just made the fight that much more interesting than yet another session of shaving down 500 MDC on that Northern Gun Explorer Bot.



The E-clip section is there because I don't like the pricing structure in the main book. I also wanted options for bad things to happen in combat and some specificity in charging up e-clips in the field.

The Armor Goop is my own creation from back in my first campaign in the early 90's. In a mega-damage world, your body armor effectively becomes your hit points, as no normal character can withstand even a single point of MD. Considering that a typical rifle does 4d6 MD per attack and a fairly standard set of MD Body armor has 50 points, with 80 being a "heavy" suit, it only takes one firefight to shred your armor. The armor repair rules in the book are limited and ridiculous and make no sense as far as field repairs so I decided we needed a "healing potion" for body armor, ala D&D. Thus, armor goop: It comes in a 1-meter tube (like a toothpaste tube)  about 6 inches in diameter and there's a spreading tool attached to the cap. After opening the cap the user can squeeze out the goop and spread it around with the tool. It takes about an hour to fix one suit of armor and the goop sets in about 4 hours. It fixes all but 1d6 of the damage to the armor, so the 50-point suit will have from 44-49 points after being "gooped" If it's gooped again before being repaired in a shop, it loses another d6.

The whole point of this is to allow players to have more than one combat before heading back to town to buy new armor, or having to haul around multiple sets of it. It does still put a clock on the players in that it's not a 100% fix, so they will eventually have to get some work done, but it prevents the momentum-killing post-combat regroup and retreat - instead the party just patches up overnight then continues.

Anyway that's the end of the Rifts bit for now. If anyone is interested I can put them up on a file site if they need a better copy. As you might guess I really do like a lot of the ideas in Rifts I just don't like the mechanical execution and expression of some of those ideas. Even when I'm not running or playing it, the ideas never stop for long. I've recently been re-reading the old Marvel Super Heroes RPG (FASERIP) thinking about using it as the introductory supers game for the apprentices, and it struck me that it might  be worth a shot at converting RIFTS to FASERIP. I'll let you know how that goes.

PDF link is here.

2015 Notes

I was pretty proud of "armor goop" when I thought of it. It solved a lot of problems.

The critical hit system is one more element aimed at making combat more than just an auction of people shouting numbers and throwing dice. It gives crits a meaning beyond "hey I did double damage" or something similar. Plus it can make a situation that looks like foregone conclusion a lot more interesting when the enemy's fire control is blown out due to a lucky shot. It can require some interpretation in some cases, but that's part of the fun, right? I would probably have refined it more given more time but it was a solid starting point.  

I also might have tried a fate point/force point/bennie like system that (among other things) would let players invoke a crit automatically - or fix one if they needed to. It would take some tinkering to get it right but it would help offset the worst  parts of the random side of the game. 

Rifts House Rules - My Combat Cheet Sheet Part 2 - 2015 Edition

Page 2 of the Cheatsheet covers the ranged attack modifiers, size modifiers (something else Rifts really needed), then the Defense and Damage process and tables.  So someone shooting will mainly look at page 1 while someone being shot will mainly look at page 2 - the goal was to not have to flip back and forth a whole lot.

A lot of this is purely my own addition to the game, and it can look like a lot but it's really not bad once a player has been through the sequence one time. Plus it's a lot more organized compared to the by-the-book system. Additionally my players like to know where they hit that giant robot - cockpit, gun, arm, leg. I have also found that hit location sometimes helps a fairly lethal game - it's better to lose an arm than the whole character most of the time, and in a world of magic and super-tech replacing it isn't all that hard. 

I will say that looking at it now that the DR/armor piercing thing might be a little more detail than I would want if I started a new campaign tomorrow. It is cool, but it is one more step in resolving combat that might be better left out. I wanted vehicles and robots to have more to them than a big gun and a 500 MDC main body, so detail was what I was looking for at the time - it might not be everyone's cup of tea. 

There's also the system damage section it makes more sense with page 3 which has the crit charts. More on that tomorrow.

PDF link is here.

2015 Notes

By section:

• Ranged Modifiers - these are from the d20 SRD
• Size Modifiers - also from d20
• Defenses - mostly from Rifts with some details added in
• Damage - Rifts + an Armor Penetration system. These used to be a fairly common mod for Rifts but I don't see them as much anymore.  
• Hit Locations - mostly Battletech
• System Damage - mostly homebrew with elements of multiple space combat games as inspiration

The AP system does add a level of complication to the game but I wanted to give certain weapons a reason for being "better" than a comparable weapon that did the same or more damage. Now there is a reason why railguns and plasma cannons are so widely referred to as "heavy weapons" in the game. Also, it makes magic and psi  that much better than the standard game and in my experience they needed some help. 

The System Damage ... system came about in an effort to make combat more interesting than just blowing off chunks of MDC. That makes for a boring fight. it is more to keep track of and it can get hairy for the DM if he has multiple vehicles and bots in play but that's what tracking sheets are for! This lets opponents knock out weapons and sensors and propulsion systems the way things happen in modern sci-fi shows and movies where people need to "get things back online" in the middle of a fight. It makes all those system, engineering, and repair skills useful in combat. It forces interesting decisions - if the robot's big gun is knocked out do you a) stay back and concentrate on fixing it, b) retreat, or c) stop worrying about it and charge in with giant robot fists? That's much more fun than "there's another 75 MDC". 

Main sources here: d20 SRD, Battletech, various Traveller space combat systems, and Rifts Ultimate Edition.

Rifts House Rules - My Combat Cheat Sheet - 2015 Edition

Having settled the ability score issue, I decided that initiative was getting to be a problem as it's not unusual for characters to start with 4 to 6 attacks and for creatures and NPC's to have just as many. If you just cycle through them one after another then having multiples doesn't really make a difference. If each character gets all of their attacks at once they can explode for horrendous amounts of damage before some characters get a chance to act. Plus either approach can get fairly chaotic with an 8-player group which was what I was running for at the time.  This was unsatisfactory and demanded a better solution.

I looked through my numerous books and decided that the minion of splugorth had the most attacks of any creature they were likely to run into at 15 - that's 15 attacks per 15-second melee round. I dusted off the Hero system Speed Chart, extended it from 12 segments to 15 and there I was. For my Rifts, # of attacks was now = to Hero's Speed stat and I had a nifty chart to go along with it. Since I was going to have to hand it out to my players anyway I decided to go ahead and make it a full-blown combat cheatsheet, which is what you see here.

By section:

• Initiative is just explanatory
• Movement is 100% Rifts, I just added the formula for figuring MPH vs. in-game speed
• Attacks is a checklist to make sure no modifier is left behind
• Other Actions is to remind players there are things to try besides pulling a trigger
• Attack Actions spells out the process for Melee, Single Shots, Bursts, Missiles, and called shots, because sometimes it's nice to have a clear list of these kinds of things and people tend to forgo them if they aren't sure how they work. 

PDF link is here.

There is more to the cheatsheet - more on that tomorrow.

2015 Update: There's not much here I would change if I was still going to use the original system. Like any set of house rules this is seasoned to my personal taste and I'm sure additional playing time would have generated some additional changes. That said it puts just enough sanity, or enough "system" in place over the base Rifts system that it was comfortable for me and my players to use. 

I had considered going even further into the Hero system adjustments and incorporating specific combat maneuvers with set modifiers  (Block, Move Through, Haymaker, etc) but I decided not to at that point. For anyone interested in adding more "system" to the game, that might be a direction to consider. 

Main sources here: d20 SRD, any Hero rulebook, and Rifts Ultimate Edition.

One note from experience - you can use a grid to show relative positions in combat but much like a superhero game the speed and ranges involved in a typical Rifts combat mean that heavy/tight usage of the grid is pointless. 

Rifts Flashback - Stat Sheets

In 1990-91 Rifts was only the main book + the Sourcebook + Vampire Kingdoms, at least for a time. We were having a lot of fun with it but even then I was trying to find a way to manage the numbers in combat and help players keep track of their vehicle stats. Now I didn't have a PC but I did have my aging Commodore 64 and an alternate operating system that had gotten popular a few years before - GEOS.

GEOS turned the C64 into a very Mac-like device (well, 1980's Mac) with WYSIWYG word processing and some paint type programs that were pretty cool for the time. Availability met opportunity and I started making reference sheets:

There's a lot of stuff to keep track of but I managed to fit it all on to one sheet. Ranges, sizes, damage capacities, weapon details - whew! This was for one of my player groups.

This one was mainly for me. Sheet protectors and overhead markers made them reusable.

Another one for one of my players occasionally used for opposition as well. I was clearly having fun with  different font styles and sizes.

The skelebot sheet got used a lot as I thought they made great opponents plus I had visions of the future war scenes in Terminator 2 which was a big deal at the time. Admittedly at 5 attacks per round they could get pretty nasty but I only had to have one mostly-dead party to figure that out. Not running a full squad of 8 made a big difference.

With the sheet protector approach these sheets were still clean and used through most of the 90's.Heck, they're still clean now! They're just printed on that really thin fan-fold paper we used to use back then so they've yellowed and faded a bit. I've cleaned them up just a little in the scans here, but not too much. The C64 itself was lost in a fire a few years later but the sheets live on!

Anyway, this is what cutting-edge game aids looked like about 1991!

There IS a Hero System Combat Manager!

On a prior zero-prep post I made this comment:

"If there was program like Combat Manager for Hero System, I would run a lot more Champions than I do."

Well, it turns out they have one now. The Hero store has it here. It is linked to Hero Designer, but if I decide to dive back in to Hero in a significant way I would want that anyway. 

There is a video of it in use here. It's interesting. The interface is pretty plain, but it looks like it works well enough.

Now it works with 5th or 6th edition, as does Designer. I own 5th but have never really done much with it and skipped 6th entirely. I was thinking 4th would be my preferred flavor of Champions if I started something with it but the availability of these does make that call a little tougher.  I'll have to ponder this one for a while.

The Random Nearby Vehicle Generator

How relevant is this? Looks like they've been throwing cars since the beginning!

Along a similar line of thinking as last week's Random Female Bystander Generator I give you another occasionally useful gap-filler: The Random Nearby Vehicle Generator! Sure, it's not quite as much fun as hitting on helpless NPC's but it can add a little color to your fight the next time the brick wants to throw a car at someone. Dress up those otherwise dull descriptions of everyone's favorite improvised weapon with the tables below:

What is the closest vehicle to the character?
1 Compact Car (Civic, Corolla, Focus, Beetle, 1-Series, Soul)
2 Average Car (Accord, Camry, Taurus, Malibu, Mustang, 3-Series, )
3 Large Car (Town Car, Crown Victoria, S-Class)
4 Minivan/Small SUV (Caravan, Odyssey, Escape, Liberty, RAV4, X3)
5 Pickup/Large SUV (F-150, Silverado, Explorer, Tahoe, G-Wagen, Hummer)
6 Special

This should cover most of the vehicles on the road with #6 allowing for the unusual stuff. When interacting with vehicles in an RPG one important consideration is weight: Compacts weight from a little less than a ton to about a ton and a half, Average runs about a ton and a half to two tons, Large runs two tons plus, Minivans and small SUV's run about one and a half to two and a half, Pickups run about two and a half to four, while Hummers are three tons plus. So yes, sometimes strength matters a great deal, at least for non-bricks. 

There's no tank on the table. Those aren't really a random kind of thing in most cities.

Special Vehicle Table
1 Motorcycle
2 Classic Car/Exotic Car ('57 Chevy, '65 Mustang, Ferarri 455, Lamborghini Diablo)
3 Limousene
4 Bus (City/School/Tour/Greyhound)
5 Cement Tuck/Garbage Truck/Dump Truck/Fire Truck
6 18-Wheeler (Box Trailer, Flatbed Trailer, Tanker Trailer)

This set of options should pretty much cover everything else. Motorcycles are typically less than half a ton, Limos are generally two tons plus, a bus weighs 10-20 tons, a cement truck weighs 10-35 tons, the traditional garbage truck weighs 20-30 tons,  dump trucks are 10-40 tons, fire trucks are 15-30, the cab of an 18-wheeler weighs 10-15 tons and can haul up to 40 tons.

Lift with the legs!

What color is it? (2d6)
2 Primered/so dirty you can’t tell
3 Gold
4 Green
5 Red
6 Black
7 White
8 Silver
9 Blue
10 Yellow
11 Orange
12 Unusual Paint Job

Unusual Paint Jobs
1-2 Metallic (roll again for color)
3 Stripes! - roll again for colors
4 Logo or ad-wrap - pick a local company or organization
5-6 Multicolored - roll again twice

Should cover it, edit to taste. Based on some of the more recent reports as to the most popular colors of new cars.

Lift with the ... yeah

Distinctive Feature
1 Smoking, probably sounds bad too
2 Thumping Stereo
3 Custom Wheels
4 Dark Tinted Windows
5 Lowered or Lifted
6 Custom Exhaust - kinda loud

Use as necessary to embellish. You might not find a thumping stereo on a cement truck, but then again you might.

Looks like we're going to need to use Extra Effort

Condition
1 Pristine - looks brand new
2-4 Looks pretty good
5 Battered, beaten, used hard
6 Rustbucket

It may not happen a lot but your players will remember for a long time the day they ran into a rustbucket Ferrari.

Call it half of normal vehicle weight

Think of this as an opportunity to throw a little bystander roleplaying into a combat encounter because every one of them has a driver somewhere. Maybe the exotic car driver is an associate of the millionaire secret ID of one of the players. Maybe the hapless dependent NPC of a character just happens to be sitting there in their car. Maybe the female cement truck driver starts arguing with the brick about just what he is up to. Maybe the worried classic car driver asks one of the PC's to move his baby to safety. Is the bus full of senior citizens on a tour or are they really Viper agents in disguise waiting to unload a full broadside on the unsuspecting heroes - those "hunteds" or enemy complications can be a real pain sometimes.

The Random Female Bystander Generator

Not a bystander!

Sooner or later it happens: The characters save the day, pause to catch their breath, look around, a crowd has gathered ...

Player: "A crowd huh? Are there any girls hanging around?"

DM: "Sure"

Player:"I walk over to the nearest one"

DM: "OK"

Player:"Is she hot?"

DM: -sigh-

This leads into a stressful and often unpleasant side plot as the player attempts to make a love connection for his character and the DM, having spent tons of effort detailing the villains and scenes and plots for the evening has nothing left to make this poor potential DNPC stand out from the crowd. The roleplaying fiend soon loses interest and an opportunity is lost. It mostly seems to happen in Superhero and Modern games but I've seen it happen in almost every genre at one time or another.

Bystander!

Now I can't fix everything, but I can offer help with the dull drudgery of coming up with a description for a random bystander. Much like a rock concert, the female bystanders seem to generate the most interest from the band players so I present to you the Random Female Bystander Generator: Next time this comes up, grab an index card, a d6, and a pen, make some rolls, and record the results of the tables below:

PDF link is here

The Random Female Bystander Generator  v1.1- A tool for the busy Superhero RPG GM

Is she hot?
1-2 Not Hot
3-4 Not Bad
5 Hot
6 Super Hot

First question on the sheet because it it's always the first one to be asked


How is she dressed?
1 Workout Look
2 Professional Look
3 Casual / Student Look
4 Club Look
5 Disheveled/Just Ran Out for a minute Look
6 Technical - Lab Coat/Scrubs/Hard Hat/Uniform

Maybe they care, maybe they don't, but it helps your description at least


How old is she? (apparent age)
1-2 Looks younger than your character
3-4 Looks older than your character
5-6 Looks about the same age as your character

Even if a hero is 1000 years old he probably looks 30 so let's go with that. Modify as necessary


How tall is she? (assumes heroes tend to be taller than average)
1-4 Shorter than your character
5 About the same height as your character
6 Taller than your character

Again, sometimes they don't think to ask but it can be a memorable feature


What catches your eye about her? (accessories)
1 Cool Shoes (super-high? Bright color? Don't fit with rest of outfit?)
2 Nice Top (bright color? Low cut? High collar? Picture/logo?)
3 Tight Pants/Short Skirt (Ahem)
4 Glasses (cool shades? Some kind of data display? Old fashioned?)
5 Unusual Hair (really short? really long? Odd style? Weird color?)
6 Wild makeup (eye makeup? Colorful lipstick? Visible Tattoo?)

I have included some suggestions but if you have a picture in mind from the other table results then go with it!


Is she available? (probably have to talk to discover, barring rings)
1-2 Married
3-4 Has a Boyfriend
5-6 Single

Now we get into personality, attitude, and reactions. They're going to have to talk to her (or have telepathy) to learn this kind of thing


Is she Interested? (Again, likely conversation-based)
1 She's frightened!
2 Nope, in fact she's visibly angry or annoyed
3 She's just not that interested in you
4-5 She's friendly, so maybe!
6 She's clearly very interested!

A visual clue for the insightful, possibly leading to some conversation - or an initiative roll


How is she doing? (apparent socioeconomic status)
1-2 Economically challenged
3-4 Middle class
5 Well off
6 Local celebrity

This helps with the "what part of town does she live in" question that may arise too


Ethnicty (may vary based on location but here's one based on my location)
1-2 White
3 Black
4 Latino
5 Asian
6 Unusual (unusual ethnicity for the city or nation - or planet)

Adjust to taste and circumstances. If your Great American City campaign is suddenly fighting in Polynesia you're going to need to modify this a bit.


Accessories (besides money, keys and a phone on a 1-4 she is also carrying a ...)
1 Purse/Handbag
2 Briefcase/Backpack
3 Laptop Bag/Satchel
4 Food/Shopping bags
5 Camera/Videocamera
6 Something unusual (survey gear, a small child, a huge stuffed animal, a potted plant,)

Something unusual to help her stand out and it could drive the conversation as well.


Hard Luck Table (On a 1 there's a complication - this may not be readily apparent)
1 She prefers the opposite sex - from your character
2 She's a robot
3 She's an alien
4 She's a magical spirit or construct
5 She's a disguised villain or one in their secret identity
6 That's a man, baby

Lots of fun here. This is really here to give them GM a reason for some mysterious snickering. If the character in question has the bad luck, weirdness magnet, or unlucky in love complications/disadvantages then skip the roll - just give him one of these automatically. At least the first time.

Also not a bystander!

Super Saturday - Old Marvel in New Marvel

Over at Plot Points, an excellent site for the MWP Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game, they have come up with a conversion of the old Universal Table from TSR's Marvel Super Heroes. This thing:

Remember that? The article and MHRP version is here.

Honestly it's not something I was looking for but the cleverness in adapting it over is pretty impressive. I am perfectly comfortable running the Apprentices thru some old Marvel one week and then running some new Marvel another week so it's not a big deal to us one way or another.That said it makes me happy to see someone digging in to the mechanics of both games and seeing what they can come up with.

 It may well be an answer to a question not many were asking, but it's cool nonetheless.

Oh, also they have a pretty solid review of Annihilation (that I talked about last week) so if you're interested take a look here.

Ye Olde Fumble Table

In the interest of contributing something at least semi-useful to other people I present Ye Olde Fumble Table.

This is something I put together back around 2001-2002 when I was running a 3rd Edition campaign every two weeks with 6-8 players and we thought the game just cried out for something to balance out the spectrum with the Critical Hit rule. I'm not as big on things like this now as it can slow down the game but we did have quite a bit of fun with it. If I end up running Pathfinder or a 3.5 game again at some point I might break it back out and expose a new generation to the joys of damaging oneself. I believe v1.2 was the final version after we discovered some results needed more clarity or to be simplified.  If anyone is interested I can probably turn this into a PDF and put it up on Dropbox or Google Docs in a more printable format than this.

Looking over it again for the first time in a while, this really would not e difficult to translate into 4th Edition - all those wonderful conditions could fill out a fumble table quite nicely. Hmmmm.

In-Game Software for 4th Edition and Pathfinder

Well, I'm probably way behind some of you out there, but as a follow-up to my previous software post I thought I would take a look at some more tools for the hi-tech DM. That post was mainly looking at character building programs - and I did go ahead and pick up Hero Lab and DDI - but this week I've stumbled across some in-game tools. For me ... the DM ... finally ...

First up is "4e TurnTracker" which looks to be a very solid piece of work. That start page explains it better than I could but my take on it is that it does so much that I am considering a tryout for it and I have never used an application like this during a session.

The idea that you can go into the monster builder on DDI, set up your creatures, pull them into TurnTracker, and set the up as an encounter is a pretty handy thing. Then you can pull in the PC files from the character builder, hit start, and run the whole fight with full stats for everyone at a glance - that's powerful. To top it off, you can run a "player window" with the limited information available to the players showing on one monitor, while the DM can see it all - wow, that's more than I would expect from a paid program! This one is free.

Little touches are often indicative of quality software. This one will automatically roll a save at the end of a turn if the is a "save ends"condition on a participant. However, if you prefer to roll dice yourself - and I do - then you can type over this result with your own. As a final touch, it retains a history of each combat which can be reviewed and erased later - that's a nice thing to have when recapping a session. Like I said, little touches can make a big difference. I may try it on the Apprentices first but if I do I will provide a full report.

As I delve ever so slowly into Pathfinder it appears that PF is getting a lot of the stuff I was wishing for back when I was running 3rd Edition. Beyond the solid and fully supported Hero Lab for character building there is also  "Combat Manager" which is pretty damn close to an offline DDI equivalent for Pathfinder - thank you OGL! This one is also free.

For starters it has tabs for Feats, Monsters, Rules, Spells, and Treasure which provide a searchable repository of what looks like everything in each category. You can use a drop-down list to narrow things to a certain sub-category of each (for example: Spells can be limited by class, level, or school) or you can just type in a word like "chain" which brings up chain lightning and chain of perdition (?) as results.

One of my biggest pains when running 3E was having a monster statblock that had feats and spells in it which meant I had to look each of those up to see what they did and then try to keep track of them all during an encounter. I ended up making some homebrew spell cards to use with my homebrew monster cards but the feats were always a problem. Although you can't see it in the screen above those things are hyperlinked in Combat Manager. Now Pathfinder already took a very 4E approach to  monster block layouts - add in this capability and I suddenly have a lot more interest in running this game. Note that this is a case where technology is actually solving a problem rather than just being cool! Not that I'm against cool - I think some custom sound effects for each spell and weapon in the game that sounded off when used would be just fine - but things like hyperlinking to special or complicated abilities is a big win for DM's and for speed of play.

The final win with Combat Manager is that it does track combat. You can click and pull in monsters straight from the database and you can advance them (see above) too. Then you can drop them right into combat and track hits and damage and conditions and everything else that goes into a Pathfinder fight. I'm still figuring out how to import party members but I'm sure there's a way.

So beyond character builders - which have been around in primitive form since the days of the Apple ][ and Vic-20 -we now have very solid software for referencing the rules and running combat in our games as well. Do I think they're essential? Of course not! Do I think they add something to the game? I used to think no, but after looking at these two I have changed my mind - they do. I used to think of them as a straightjacket that would limit my ability to change things on the fly. Nowadays though being able to adjust initiative order, apply conditions as needed, and drop in standard or custom monsters with the click of a mouse - well, considering I can pull them in from the list of all the monsters in the game instead of having to jump up and grab a book, the tech is finally reaching a level where it's an actual help and not just a flashy toy.  For DM's running games online or over Skype I can see them being even more helpful in keeping track of what's going on.

I've been fine with character builders for a long time, especially considering they really only come into play before the game session. Some of my players have been using laptops or tablets with character management software or electronic character sheets for a while now. Finally, it may be the DM's turn to go electronic - I wonder how they're going to take that?

Character Builders

I'm seriously considering some character building software. The 4E offline builder opened the door, the ICONS Character Folio opened it a lot more (it's a lot of fun), and now I'm really sliding down the slope.

First, I'm thinking about HeroLab because it seems to be the standard and I could use it for Mutants and Masterminds right now. There are some things I want to convert from M&M 2E and software would make it much easier. The Apprentices impressive lack of ability to keep up with their character sheets for most games is also a consideration here. The character sheet output looks nice too. Beyond that it has sets for Savage Worlds, Shadowrun, and it interfaces with DDI. I might dig into the authoring tools as well and see if I couldn't learn something and tune it up for some other games.

Second, I'm thinking about signing on to DDI - despite my dislike of the subscription-based approach - for two reasons: The Monster Builder would save a lot of time on my conversion activities and I still like to have a printed monster sheet in front of me when I play. Additionally I think it's time to pull down all of the 4th Edition material while it's available and I'm running some campaigns. No, WOTC shouldn't pull it all off of the web just because a new edition is coming or after one launches - it's not like there's much expense in keeping it available - but it has happened before and there is some good stuff on there that I don't have. As much time as I spend running 4E games, I feel like it's worth ten bucks to try it out.

Finally I'd like to get Hero Designer just because I like to tinker with Champions characters and that's easier to do in software than on paper. Also it supports 5th and 6th edition and some 5E updates of some of the old 3E/4E characters would be a lot of fun and less time consuming with it. No I'm not running a Hero game (yet) so this would be a total indulgence on my part. I try to have a real use for the gaming stuff I buy, and I try to focus my money on games I am actually running, and this would not fall into that category. I'm still thinking about it. Mostly I'm thinking about which day this week to do it.

If any readers have any personal experience with any of these, I'd be interested in what you have to say. If I proceed with any of them I will share my experiences.

Rifts House Rules - My Combat Cheatsheet Part 3

Most of this page is taken up with the two critical hit tables - one for humanoid, one for vehicles. I spent a lot of time working these out and tried to come up with some concrete effects that could be fun in the game and give players a chance to decide when enough was enough and it was time to retreat. It also gave a parallel path for driving off NPC bad guys beyond just mowing through hundreds of MDC and many minutes of playing time. If you can blow out the power plant or kill the fire control or the main weapon systems, then the fight may well be over. It also gives a chance for some characters to shine by getting damaged systems back online - "Scotty I need warp power in 3 mniutes or we're all dead" just made the fight that much more interesting than yet another session of shaving down 500 MDC on that Northern Gun Explorer Bot.

The E-clip section is there because I don't like the pricing structure in the main book. I also wanted options for bad things to happen in combat and some specificity in charging up e-clips in the field. 

The Armor Goop is my own creation from back in my first campaign in the early 90's. In a mega-damage world, your body armor effectively becomes your hit points, as no normal character can withstand even a single point of MD. Considering that a typical rifle does 4d6 MD per attack and a fairly standard set of MD Body armor has 50 points, with 80 being a "heavy" suit, it only takes one firefight to shred your armor. The armor repair rules in the book are limited and ridiculous and make no sense as far as field repairs so I decided we needed a "healing potion" for body armor, ala D&D. Thus, armor goop: It comes in a 1-meter tube (like a toothpaste tube)  about 6 inches in diameter and there's a spreading tool attached to the cap. After opening the cap the user can squeeze out the goop and spread it around with the tool. It takes about an hour to fix one suit of armor and the goop sets in about 4 hours. It fixes all but 1d6 of the damage to the armor, so the 50-point suit will have from 44-49 points after being "gooped" If it's gooped again before being repaired in a shop, it loses another d6. 

The whole point of this is to allow players to have more than one combat before heading back to town to buy new armor, or having to haul around multiple sets of it. It does still put a clock on the players in that it's not a 100% fix, so they will eventually have to get some work done, but it prevents the momentum-killing post-combat regroup and retreat - instead the party just patches up overnight then continues.

Anyway that's the end of the Rifts bit for now. If anyone is interested I can put them up on a file site if they need a better copy. As you might guess I really do like a lot of the ideas in Rifts I just don't like the mechanical execution and expression of some of those ideas. Even when I'm not running or playing it, the ideas never stop for long. I've recently been re-reading the old Marvel Super Heroes RPG (FASERIP) thinking about using it as the introductory supers game for the apprentices, and it struck me that it might  be worth a shot at converting RIFTS to FASERIP. I'll let you know how that goes. 

Rifts House Rules - My Combat Cheet Sheet Part 2

Page 2 of the Cheatsheet covers the ranged attack modifiers, size modifiers (something else Rifts really needed), then the Defense and Damage process and tables.  So someone shooting will mainly look at page 1 while someone being shot will mainly look at page 2 - the goal was to not have to flip back and forth a whole lot. 

A lot of this is purely my own addition to the game, and it can look like a lot but it's really not bad once a player has been through the sequence one time. Plus it's a lot more organized compared to the by-the-book system. Additionally my players like to know where they hit that giant robot - cockpit, gun, arm, leg. I have also found that hit location sometimes helps a fairly lethal game - it's better to lose an arm than the whole character most of the time, and in a world of magic and super-tech replacing it isn't all that hard. 

I will say that looking at it now that the DR/armor piercing thing might be a little more detail than I would want if I started a new campaign tomorrow. It is cool, but it is one more step in resolving combat that might be better left out. I wanted vehicles and robots to have more to them than a big gun and a 500 MDC main body, so detail was what I was looking for at the time - it might not be everyone's cup of tea. 

There's also the system damage section it makes more sense with page 3 which has the crit charts. More on that tomorrow.

Rifts House Rules - Ability Scores

Rifts and house rules are inevitable in my mind. It feels a lot like the old days for D&D when systems were much more malleable than 4th or even 3rd edition. There are several areas where I feel  some changes make for a better game. One of the changes I have made is to ability scores.
Rifts has always been confusing as far as stats, bonuses, and when they apply, plus the method for rolling is odd. Humans roll 3d6 for each stat but if they score a 16,17, or 18 then they get to add an additional d6. I scrapped this for 4d6 drop the lowest. Rifts actually has some skills (Physical Skills) that can be selected to add to certain attributes, so if you want a Physical Strength of 20 it's easily accomplished by rolling a decent score and then choosing weightlifting, boxing, etc.during skill selection. One problem solved.
Nonhuman races roll differing amounts of dice  - Ogres might roll 4 or 5 dice for strength, Orcs might have 4d6 for Physical Endurance, Pixies might only roll 2d6 for strength - I'm fine with that approach and leave it as-is.
Now that stats are a little more "regular" let's get some decent modifiers for them. I pretty much adapted the d20 ability score modifiers wholesale. My players and I were familiar with them and they do make the full range of scores count for something. So PS of 10-11 = +0, 12-13 = +1, 14-15=+2, etc. A Physical Strength of 40 now has a +15 modifier - but to what?
Rifts has a somewhat arbitrary division when it comes to combat, the infamous "Mega-Damage".  The ideas is that some super-high-tech weapons and powerful magic just operate on a while different scale than conventional weapons like guns and swords. It's an important part of the setting as characters cause superhero levels of damage without technically having superpowers.
For some reason though it was decided that mega-damage guns don't work the same way as regular ones so the Physical Prowess bonus doesn't count when using MD weapons. This makes little sense to me and additionally it makes character abilities like a high Prowess  less important than equipment bonuses like a +1 for a laser sight. The game also forbids adding character strength bonuses to MD melee damage, instead referring to a chart for punching damage based on strength number and type - yes there is "regular" strength, "augmented" strength, and "supernatural" strength - which all kind of matrixes together to tell you whether you do 1d6 or 2d4 or some other slightly different amount of damage.
I scrapped all of that. PS (Physical Strength) adds its modifier to all HTH combat damage. PP (Physical Prowess) adds its modifier to all to-hit rolls and dodge and parry rolls. There, I fixed it.
IQ (Rifts version of Int) and PP both affect initiative rolls.
IQ adds to the base percentages for skills
Mental Endurance (ME) adds to saves vs. fear and magic
Physical Endurance (PE) adds to saves vs poison etc.
Mental Affinity (MA) [Charisma] adds to reaction adjustments
Pretty much what you would expect them to do based on D&D style modifiers.
One reason for adding the strength bonus to all damage is that a mega-damage sword does about the same damage as a D&D sword but the MD armor you have to cut through starts at about 50 points for almost anything and rapidly scales up from there. Rolling 1d8 to beat down 50 points takes a long time. Considering that many PC's will be in the 20+ strength bracket, adding a +5 or +10 to that really helps keep the game from dragging and actually promotes the more frequent use of HTH combat that the game background seems to suggest. It's also one less fiddly rule to worry about.
Adding the PP bonus to all to hit rolls also ensures that hitting isn't much of a problem when you have the 30 PP Juicer going against the 10 PP mercenary. Rifts uses opposed d20 rolls in HTH as the attacker rolls to hit and the defender rolls to parry, high score wins. Classes, skills, equipment, and race can all add various bonuses to attack and to parry so adding in one more bonus from PP doesn't really upset things.
In the end it was more natural to my (then) 3rd edition D&D crew to use these modifiers and it kept combat flowing a little more smoothly. I still wasn't satisfied though as combat  still confused some people as all PCs end up with multiple attacks and hit locations were still causing trouble. More on that tomorrow.

Rifts - An encounter sheet

Here's a sample of how I was handling encounters in my last Rifts campaign. Rifts beasties have a lot of fiddly bits as far as attributes and modifiers, plus the added complication of a hit location system. I used to keep stats on an index card (which I do for a lot of my games) nd then track hit points on my spiral notepad page for that session. This can get confusing however, especially when monster #1 has been shot in the leg, monster 2 has been shot in the head, etc. This doesn't happen in every encounter but it came up often enough that I wanted to get ahead of it this time. This was the result. It allows me to run 12 ghouls on one sheet without having to refer back to other books, and hit locations are covered with ease. I used these guys in one of the early encounters in the campaign and it was much easier than before. Now granted, it was some work up front but I just thought of it as prep time for that session. 

System-wise, this is why I like D&D's monster presentation better in every edition over Rifts. For Rifts I have to know the creatures stats and its attacks, and its HP value for all locations. For older D&D it's something like "8 HD, Bite 2d6, AC7"  for a useable stat block. Even newer versions will have something like "Bite +3 (2d6)" for the attacks. 

Additionally I have come to think that hit point and hit locations are a tough mix. The main advantage of hit point systems is simplicity, giving up some realism. Hit locations give some realism at the cost of simplicity. I liked the approach in both Hero and GURPS where hit locations can give some modifiers but do not require tracking of separate damage totals. Rifts gives totals for some locations but doesn't really give effects tied to those locations other than losing your head = dead. This is the kind of opening that leads to house rules and eventually to conversion.

Anyway, I have a few more like this including a minion of splugorth so if anyone is interested I can post them up too.