Please comment on all parts of this post, reasoning, motivation, execution in mechanics, everything. :)

Okay, so I've been playing some dungeon crawl games with my brother and sister, using the D&D Adventure Game. My brother is complaining that combat lasts too long with nothing happening. (Characters and monsters tend to have a 25% chance to hit, and believe me, you notice the 3 times that you miss way more than the one time that you hit. Ends up making combats seem really reall long. You feel like you're hitting once out of every 7 rolls, instead of every 4.)

I'm complaining that the game feels more like tactical token management than a dungeon RPG.

There's a description of a scene in the T&T rulebook where a dangerous monster is chasing a party of delvers through a dungeon. The delvers duck for cover in a room, slamming the door behind them. As the monster pounds its way (rapidly) through the door, the delvers quickly slam some pitons into the door frame and string some wire. Then the magic user casts a spell on the monster that makes it go berserk... charging a-HEAD and decapitating itself on the wire. (Heh heh heh!)

That's the kind of dungeon delving I want to encourage - focusing on dungeon exploration and innovative ideas, rather than milking your movement allowance so that you can put your token on just the right square to get a bonus to your roll (or whatever).

At this point, please interject your own ideas as to why the D&D Adventure Game has this problem. My own idea is that all the niggly combat rules make it so that blow by blow combat is the focus of the game. In a game where it feels like you miss 6 times out of 7, extra little niggly bonuses are important, and you do what you can to get them.

Now, what I want really *is* a dungeon crawl, pure exploration of situation and setting, with maybe a bit of character exploration thrown in. This isn't a narrative game... no premise (other than the obvious one), or conscious control of a story. There *should* be fighting, but I want the emphasis to be on exploring the dungeon, figuring out puzzles, avoiding traps, and *outwitting* monsters, rather than just out number-crunching them.

Here are the things I've come up with to support this goal. Please add anything you can think of. :)

Number one, combat should be something that players and characters fear. Not something that they necessarily avoid, but something that they have great respect for, so that they'll try to manipulate the dungeon environment to the best of their ability to get as much of an edge as possible. Note that I said dungeon environment, not game mechanics. Pitons and wire, not 5% mods.

Number two, combat should not be the arena in which the effectiveness or protagonism of a character is measured. That is, combat should not be set up so that it's very important for the player to milk the system to the advantage of his character.

Number three, relates to number two. I think that this means combat should be something abstract, simple, and quick. Once you actually decide that, yes, the characters really are going to resort to a stand-up fight, it shouldn't be niggly or time consuming to resolve.

Here's what I've done with these ideas:

Combat is handled with a dice-pool mechanic. Each character constructs two pools: the Attack pool and the Defense pool. The combat pools break down as follows:

Skill: Split between both the attack and defense pool. An all / nothing split is allowed (so you can have all out attacks or desparate defensees).

Weapon: Applied to the attack or defense pool, but can't be split. When applied to defense only adds halv value.

Shield: Same as weapon, but in reverse.

Armor: Adds to defense pool only.

(So, we've got some player skill involved here (splitting skill, deciding on defensive of offensive posture), hopefully enough to keep it interesting for the amount of time a combat takes.

At the start of the combat "actual" initiative rules are used to determine how the different sides square off (who faces who), if either side was surprised, how situation affects the combat (different weapon reaches, terrain advantages), and so on.

Every round each character rolls his pools. Successes in the defense pool cancel successes in the opponent's attack pool. Any uncanceled attack successes represent "damage" done to the opponent. (This means that simultaneous kill scenarios can happen.) Damage isn't necessarily actual physical damage, but may also represent loss of ground, fatigue, etc. The victim loses a number of dice from next turn's pools equal to the damage he took. (He gets to decide how the damage is distributed between his pools.) When a character runs out of dice he's out of the fight. After the combat is over rolls are made to determine how hurt "out" characters are (if they are at all... they might just be winded, unconscious, etc.)

When two characters face a single character the two characters combine their attack pools, but not their defense pools. The single character must decide how his attack pool will be split (if at all) between the two enemies.

So, what do you think?

Paganini's goals:
> ...focusing on dungeon exploration and innovative ideas...

> Now, what I want really *is* a dungeon crawl, pure exploration of situation and setting, with maybe a bit of character exploration thrown in.

> There *should* be fighting, but I want the emphasis to be on exploring the dungeon, figuring out puzzles, avoiding traps, and *outwitting* monsters,...

> ...combat should be something that players and characters fear...

> ...they'll try to manipulate the dungeon environment to the best of their ability to get as much of an edge as possible.

> ...combat should be something abstract, simple, and quick.

I think you should work on how you can get players to create this:

> There's a description of a scene in the T&T rulebook where a dangerous monster is chasing a party of delvers through a dungeon. The delvers duck for cover in a room, slamming the door behind them. As the monster pounds its way (rapidly) through the door, the delvers quickly slam some pitons into the door frame and string some wire. Then the magic user casts a spell on the monster that makes it go berserk... charging a-HEAD and decapitating itself on the wire.

The above description doesn't seem like a dice pool system involving swords, shields and armour.

Andrew Martin wrote: Paganini's goals:
I think you should work on how you can get players to create this:

Me wrote: There's a description of a scene in the T&T rulebook where a dangerous monster is chasing a party of delvers through a dungeon. The delvers duck for cover in a room, slamming the door behind them. As the monster pounds its way (rapidly) through the door, the delvers quickly slam some pitons into the door frame and string some wire. Then the magic user casts a spell on the monster that makes it go berserk... charging a-HEAD and decapitating itself on the wire.

The above description doesn't seem like a dice pool system involving swords, shields and armour.

Paganini wrote: (Characters and monsters tend to have a 25% chance to hit, and believe me, you notice the 3 times that you miss way more than the one time that you hit. ...

Jack Spencer Jr wrote:
Anyway, let me first start with the obligatory discouraging word on retreading the dungeon crawl yet again. When are people going to stop doing D&D all over again?

Jack wrote:
Reduce combat to a si mple stat which gets modified by armor and weapons and stuff. This way, you make it abundantly clear that combat is not at all what the game is about. You could even remove fortune from combat so that you get stuff like the monster's fighting skill is higher than the player's. The player gets wounded. Next round, they die (depending on number of wounds and stuff) This'll get them to think of options besides sitting there like medieval Rock'em Sock'em Robots smacking each other in the face.

Paganini wrote: If you don't think I'm on the right track, how would you go about it?

Argeed. Minimal or non-existant combat. I know you'd said you wanted combat, but let's face it, unless you openly encourage, read: force players into doing that other cool stuff you want, then your game will simply drift back into being D&D again. Worse, because you won't have as detailed a combat system, it'll be D&D's drooling idiot cousin!

By way of example, let me try my hand at this. This'll be rather long, so be prepared.

First off, characters have two stats: Wits and Luck.

Wits is a measure of basic survival instinct, cleverness and general resourcefulness.

Luck is just that. I decided to add this since you brought back old T&T memories

There is also a combat stat. More on this later.

Characters are defined by classes for simplicity's sake.

Fighter: Big, kinda dumb but really strong.

Magic User: Really smart not so strong.

Thief: Between Magic User and Fighter on strength and intelligence, but fast, baby.

That's enough for our purposes here. It's important to note that dumb <> low Wit It is quite possible to be stupid but have the wits to survive.

Combat:

Pretty simple. Each character has a Combat rating. When there are monsters in the same area as the PC's the PCs take a wound for every turn that the monsters are there.

Monsters also have a combat rating. All the players have to do is exceed this number to kill it. However, they still take a wound for that turn.

example, a fighter with a combat rating of 12 enters a room with four kobalds, CR 4. The fighter can kill all of the kobalds handily, but will take four wounds doing so.

Wounds are taken right off of Wits. For every wound taken, the PCs are -1 Wits. After this, they're surviving on their Luck. More on this later.

This is bad since all starting characters have 3 Wits at the begining of the game. This means the fighter in the above example probably died. There is a saving grace, when the PCs first encounter a monster (or group thereof) they get a free reaction. Reaction as in they can't use it to kill stuff but they can put a plan into effect. (e.g. "Holy crow! Ogres! Let's beat feet!") If this plan can keep the PCs out of combat or can take the monster out of action, then they do not gain a wound.

Whenever the PCs put a zany scheme into effect, the GM will call for a Wits roll. The Players roll 1d6 per Wit point. A roll of 4 or better is a success. The GM sets a difficulty number from 1 to 3 which requires that many successes from the dice roll.

example: the fighter is running from the kobalds instead of fighting. The player pulls out a banana and tosses the peel over his shoulder. The GM decides it's a difficulty 1 to get at least one of the Kobalds to slip on the banana peel with every additional success meaning another kobald trips over the one that slipped. The player rolls and gets 3 successes. Three kobalds fall prone but one continues to give chase.

Luck is used to help boost rolls. Players start with 4 Luck or can roll 1d6 if they're greedy and stupid. (Try for that 6...uhp...oh..one. Too bad) The player may risk as much of their Luck as they wish on each dice roll. It's probably a good idea to have two different color dice for this. They get 1d6 per Luck risked. Successes on the Luck dice are treated normally.

Example: back to the fighter, the four kobalds and the banana peel. The fighter risks a point of Luck and manages to get four successes. Now all four kobalds are lying in a heap on the floor. The fighters options are varied. He could run up to the prone kobalds and fight them. Prone kobalds can't fight back so he can dispatch at least one of them. Problem is, they keep trying to get up. The GM rules it's a difficult 3 roll to keep tripping the kobalds so he can kill them all without injury. If he ever fails this roll, the kobalds will be standing and hit hit right then. No free action, he had his free action.

Problem is, rolling Luck is risky. Successes and non-successess 2 & 3 don't mean anything. They're simply returned to the player's Luck pool. But one's are handed over to the GM. The GM must keep track of which player gave him how many dice this way. This dice is now Bad Luck and the GM can use it against the player at any time they so choose. For each point of Bad Luck, the GM can make a success a non-success. THe GM can't make it a 1 and keep up the Bad Luck Pool. Let's be fair.

example: back to banana peel boy. Let's say that he rolls only his Wits and only gets one success. But earlier, he had a bad run-in with a carrion crawler and has a point of Bad Luck. The GM decides to spend it here and now NONE of the kobalds slip. All four are still chasing him. Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn!

When a character has no Wits or Luck left, it dies. When a character still has Wits but no Luck, it's no big deal except that they've just run out of Luck. When a character runs out of Wits but still has some Luck they are now living on their Luck. This is not a good thing. How this works is now whenever the PC would take a wound, instead of Wits (which they're out of), it comes off of Luck. Thing is, now before they lose that die, they must roll it. If it's a success, no big deal. They just lose it like any other wound. If it comes up a non-success, then they turn it over to the GM as Bad Luck *AND* they still need to roll another die like this because of the wound. It suck to be living on your Luck. Try not to do it.

Equipement: I'll bet you were wondering where our fighter friend got the darn banana. Well, equipement is a little looser in this system. Instead of going to the market and buying a ball of string or elven ear wax because, hey, it could come in handy, you instead buy Items.

All characters are assumed to have the proper armor and weapon as per their class. In fact, this is figured into their CR already. There is not difference between weapons, like say, a dagger or a broadsword. Like the lady said, it's not what you got it's how you use it. In other words, the classes who know what their doing with the weapon have the higher combat rating. The only way to adjust the combat rating is to find magic weapons or armor. In both cases, it just adds to the CR.

But for other stuff, the Players buy Items or Item Points. Each Item point cost 100 gp. Easy as pie.

In order to carry these items into the dungeon, they need something to carry it in. A small pouch may hold 2 Items points. A medium-sized backpack probably 8. A large backPack could hold 12 Item Points. These containers cost 10gp per Item Point they can hold. (e.g. pouch 20gp, Med. Backpack 80gp, Lrg backpack 120 gp.

Overloading on the containers is a bad idea.. You can't have more than one backpack, even if you have more than one back. If you have more that one pouch, big or small, the GM may, at their own discretion, roll a point of Bad Luck to see if you lose one by splitting the numbers on the dice between your pouches. You WILL lose a pouch if the GM decided to do this. It's just a question of which one. If you have two, on 1, 2, 3 you lose one pouch, on 4, 5, 6 you lose the other. The only way around this is hirelings, but I'm not writing rules for them here.

To use equipment, you come up with a plan and decide what you need. Then you spend the IP to have it. Once IP's are spent, they're gone. You must buy new ones. You can keep trak of the object you have, if you want, but you're better off selling these object. The shops will buy back items for 50gp per Item Point. Frickin' crooks! Some Items cost more IP than others. 20' of Rope would be about 1 IP. 100' would probably be 4 IP. I'm not going to come up with a chart for this, so it's GM's discretion again.

When the characters get our of the dungeon, they can advance. They gain points for their dice. They gain one point for every point of Wits, Luck and Bad Luck they still have. You up in levels not based on how much loot you grab or how many things you kill, but how many fingers you still have when you get out, if you get what I mean.

Levels work like this:

Level 1 0pts
Level 2 10 pts
Level 3 20 pts
Level 4 40 pts

And so on. For each level, the PC gets +1 to Wits and +3 or +1d6 to Luck (no doing partial points & dice rolling, either. This means that at very high levels, the PCs will have quite a few dice indeed. I'm considering making a limit of level 10 or even 5, but I think the higher levels will allow for longer sessions and for the players to become complacent until they start running low then they'll panic a bit.

Money can be used to buy Item Points. It's no good going up in levels so you might as well spend it. You can also put it in the Adventurer's Guild Bank for safe keeping. Thing is, you can carry as much cash as you want on your person without worrying about Item Points or encumberance or nothing. Money is sometimes useful in a dungeon when you bribe the Orcs to eat the wizard instead. Besides, you can sometimes buy nifty things in the dungeons that are not available outside of the dungeon. So it's good to have your cash with you. Only trouble is, if you croak, all of your loot stays in the dungeon. Money in the bank gets willed to your next of kin (read: your new character!) so it's a matter of how safe you want to play it or not. (The GM can use Bad Luck on the cash you're carrying, too) You can probably go pick up the cash your old dead character dropped in the dungeon, but more likely the monster used that money on ballet lessons so they can do that tippy-toe jump over the banana peels.

OK, I think this is most of the basics. I wrote this as the ideas were coming to me. Sorry about the piss-poor organization. But this is the kind of thing I think you're talking about.

Are you?

Wow, JB, that was massive! :)

It is and it isn't what I'm looking for. A lot of it sounds very similar to Donjon, which is a great game (that I intend to buy of Clinton EVER GETS OFF HIS BUTT AND FINISHES IT!! :), so that's cool. OTOH, it doesn't really fit the mode I'm going for here. I'm actually having a bit of trouble describing what I want, even to myself. I had an idea earlier today, though, that I'm going to try out.

At the same time, youre idea seems to have the exact balance between combat and non-combat that I'm looking for. Combat is *HARSH* man, phew!

Anyway, the idea I had is that it's a roguelike game that allows environmental manipulation. In a roguelike game, when you find a monster you just fight him until he dies or one of you runs away. Combat is totally transparent (unless you're using some kind of debug mod). The player has no *control* over combat, other than equiping his character and deciding when to stop. At the same time, roguelike games have the exact "map exploration boardgame" feel that I'm looking for. What they don't have is the ability to think outside the box... they're limited by the medium.

Paganini wrote: A lot of it sounds very similar to Donjon, which is a great game (that I intend to buy of Clinton EVER GETS OFF HIS BUTT AND FINISHES IT!! :), so that's cool.

At the same time, youre idea seems to have the exact balance between combat and non-combat that I'm looking for. Combat is *HARSH* man, phew!

Anyway, the idea I had is that it's a roguelike game that allows environmental manipulation. In a roguelike game, when you find a monster you just fight him until he dies or one of you runs away. Combat is totally transparent (unless you're using some kind of debug mod). The player has no *control* over combat, other than equiping his character and deciding when to stop. At the same time, roguelike games have the exact "map exploration boardgame" feel that I'm looking for. What they don't have is the ability to think outside the box... they're limited by the medium.

I just gave Donjon a quicky look-see. I don't see any real similarities except for the whole dungeon thing. But then, there's only so much you can do with that concept. Or such is my take. CLinton can back me up or not, but this is getting off topic since my idea is not what you're looking for.

Hey JB, don't give it up. I *like* the idea. I'd play that game. It's just not exactly what I'm going for with this idea. Your comment about Hero Quest is right on. In fact, that's where I'm coming from. I just moved my players from Hero Quest to the D&D Adventure Game - that was the spark behind this thread. The two games are very similar in a lot of ways. I was a bit disappointed to find out that the D&DAG, in fact, is worse than Hero Quest in terms of being a boardgame token managing fest. I expected Hero Quest to have a lot of that... it is not, after all, a true RPG. The whole idea of switching from Hero Quest to the D&DAG was to preserve the dungeon mapping core, but gain more freedom. In fact, just the opposite happened! The D&DAG is way more niggly than Hero Quest. I'm getting more "you go there to maximize our dice rolls!" arguments than ever, with no increase in scope for clever innovation. So, I'm thinking "Yeah, I need to minimize the combat mechanics, and make combat more deadly to discourage players from risking their characters.

Actually, you know, I'm almost thinking I'm asking the wrong questions here. Maybe I should put this in actual play, something along the lines of "how can I deemphasize combat in favor of clever schemes in my D&DAG game?"

Well, two sorta off-topic things at first:

I do plan to keep working on this thing, just not in this thread. After I finished I became enamoured with my own creation. All I need now is a title. First time in my life I didn't start with a clever title.

And, why do you keep calling me JB? I'm assuming mistaken identity, but I just want to confirm that.

Now back to our show:

Heroquest was a brilliant design. Very simple, to the point dungeon bashing. Have you ever seen Advanced HeroQuest or WarhammerQuest? I'm not sure if they're more what you're looking for or if you'd find them just as niggling as D&DDAG.

Actually D&D has alway been a very niggling sort of game. You could do yourself a favor and find a copy of the red & blue book Basic & Expert sets of D&D. That's book, not box with the Erol Otis covers. It may be more to your liking.

It'll be weird if that's all you needed, but hey, that's life.

Jack Spencer Jr wrote: Well, two sorta off-topic things at first:
And, why do you keep calling me JB? I'm assuming mistaken identity, but I just want to confirm that.

Not JB! wrote:
Heroquest was a brilliant design. Very simple, to the point dungeon bashing. Have you ever seen Advanced HeroQuest or WarhammerQuest? I'm not sure if they're more what you're looking for or if you'd find them just as niggling as D&DDAG.

Actually D&D has alway been a very niggling sort of game. You could do
yourself a favor and find a copy of the red & blue book Basic & Expert sets of D&D. That's book, not box with the Erol Otis covers. It may be more to your liking.

Advanced Heroquest is great and might actually be everything you asked for and more. D&D and many games with it has this problem with low hit chances which is, quite frankly, insanely boring.

The D&D parameters are directly responsible for this. D&D rolls against a static defense (AC) which doesn't have anything to do with the fighting skills of the people involved. This in an attempt to simulate armour. Of course it feels really ridiculous soon even though you try so very hard to imagine that most of the misses are actually hits glancing off the armour.

Advanced Heroquest has a simple solution. Skill vs. Skill. If the skills are equal, you have a 50% chance to hit. The fun thing about this is in true Dungeon Crawl spirit you can wade through seas of goblins once you've gotten your character to the point where he should kick ass. No more waiting around to roll and miss. Because if that goblin has 5 less in weapon skill (not unlikely) you're gonna hit him every time unless you really mess up (like rolling a fumble).

On the other hand you might not splatter every foe with a hit. Unless you're friggin strong. But if you are you'll notice that every time you get lucky enough to hit (you rarely get a character who's both really strong and really good at fighting) it really goes SPLAT when you hit something with your lucky axe.

And ever better, if you are built like an ox and put on armour on that, you can usually laugh at those goblins even though they hit you with their puny weapons.

Ah. Advanced Heroquest. Great game.

So great in fact that I based the first draft of my combat system on it. Now it's not quite the same, but I still use the D12 and the weapon skill against weapon skill. It's wicked.

Of course I intend my game (Ygg) to work nicely with dungeon crawls in the end too. It's not ONLY for dungeon crawls, but it's supposed to be reducable to (great) dungeon crawls if that is what one wishes for.

Paganini wrote: I like Hero Quest a lot, actually, but my players want character advancement (beyond simply getting better equipment) and I want innovation. I've got a great foundation for map-delving with Hero Quest and D&DAG, but I want to build on that.