I realize this may be crazy, but I'm considering converting a HeroQuest campaign into a Donjon campaign.

I was thinking of doing something like this for the Spirit Magic Practitioners and figured I'd post it here to see if anyone sees any problems/has any suggestions:

Each Practitioner would have a Befriend Spirits or Deal With Spirits ability (depending on whether it's secondary or primary). The practitioner can use this ability as if it were a looting test to get a Spirit in a ritual. Spirits fall under "Other" as equipment, so each Practitioner will only be keeping one spirit from adventure to adventure for at least the first few levels.

What do you think?

This works (and yes, it's crazy), but I'd add this:

If the spirit-thing is a Primary Ability, then the practitioner can use it whenever he is in a "spirit-rich" area. This should be determined by the group: you might let each practitioner have a different restriction based on culture, or your world might have certain defined areas.

Examples:
By practitioner: Only when fasting in smoke tent, only at ancestors' graves, only after defeating something in combat (spirits determined by dead)

World-defined: spirit-rich nodes located in secret places, only in pure elemental places, only after defeating something in combat.

The Secondary Ability type would also have a restriction, but would also limit the type of spirits: for example, a cat-spirit practitioner could only bind spirits of cats he defeated.

Wow. The R really *does* stand for quality.

Thanks!

Doing Spirit Magic that way didn't work out very well. :(

The practitioners in my group just thought regular magic was much better and they'd rather use that. Oh well.

We did have some other questions though:

1) Can you use successes to add dice to a looting roll?

2) Can you put up spells on yourself for extended durations? For instance, one sorcerer wanted to put up some "force armor" to protect him all day long. The rules mention putting penalties on opponents, but can you put bonus dice on yourself? (like the example of force armor would give you extra dice on your roll to resist damage)

3) There was one more which I'll post when I remember it or after I get a chance ot check my notes.

1) Successes adding on looting rolls. You most certainly can do this. For the Spirit Magic idea, it's imperative.

2) You can put spells on yourself for extended durations, with bonus dice on yourself working just like penalty dice on opponents. The length of the spell ups the difficulty, as mentioned on the spell difficulty chart. This is why Spirit Magic works, I think: a spirit'll hang around for an entire adventure, with no added difficulty for the caster. Making a spell last for an adventure is much harder.

Hmmm, we had some big issues with a spellcaster who had the word "Find" getting a lot better loot than anyone else... I'm not sure it's wise to allow successes to add to looting rolls. Is it something that works out more in the long run due to the restrictions on how many items you can keep?

On spells for the whole day: So can a sorcerer cast "buff" spells all day long? And have a spell that gives him armor, another that increases the damage on his weapon, another that helps him dodge, another that helps him hit, etc. etc.? It seems like magic is already powerful enough and that this might put things over the top. What am I missing? And if he fails his roll to gather power, should I have stuff attack in order to catch him without his buff spells?

"Buff" type spells should be hard to cast to begin with: the difficulty modifiers for spell length are pretty steep, as I recall. If you want to change it so that they're harder to cast, have spell penalties be cumulative. That is, if a caster is "maintaining" a 3-die spell, any rolls for new spells will be against the number of dice for the new spell + 3.

Actually, we weren't finding extra spell dice needed to really constitute "difficulty" for us.

As 1st level characters, our dedicated sorcerer had 5 Cerebrality and 4 Cast Spells and the non-dedicated magic types (a worshipper of a spider-god and a common magic specialist) had about 6 dice combined. The dedicated sorcerer rolling 9 dice versus my 1 die (Easy plus Donjon level 1) usually meant that the sorcerer had 4-6 spell dice. (One day uses up 2 spell dice) And even if he only got 1 spell die, since he didn't have to specify the spell before drawing the power, he could cast something else and then try again.

This made it pretty easy to put up a buff spell as he could typically get about 5 dice and use two of them for duration, leaving him with 3+9=12 dice to cast the spell.

One of my players reminded me of the question I forgot to ask:

Can you stack items? If you have +1 Plate and a +2 Shield, do you get 8 bonus dice from that? (4+2+1+1) If not, do you have 5 or 6?

Up front: these are great questions, questions I honestly didn't ask too much when developing the game.

You can stack items, though: that's a definite.

For your game, if you want to use Spirit Magic and make it comparable to normal magic, I would limit normal magic in some way. I've known for some item that it's a bit too powerful in play. I would either:

a) Set the initial roll to gather spell dice vs. a difficulty of Donjon Level + 3, minimum.

b) Increase the opposition dice for longer durations significantly.

Clinton R. Nixon wrote: b) Increase the opposition dice for longer durations significantly.

Can you delay your action?

Clatu (our sorcerer) always wanted to delay his actions (in order to gather magic power and cast at the same time). Is that kosher? It definitely gives an advantage to the spellcasters as they can gather power without having to worry about getting hit.

Apologies on "opposition dice": I don't have the rules with me. I did mean "amount of spell dice you pay for duration."

On delaying actions: yes, you can delay actions. However, everyone else can, too. You must hold power for at least one "click" before you can use it: that is, you could gather power on 13 and cast on 12. Now, anyone holding their action before or on 13 could get a chance to strike you before 12.

The holding-magic-power-backfire rules are specifically there to limit spellcasters. They're powerful, but they can get whomped when they're trying to cast.

Can the PCs exchange items freely? This came up two different ways:

"Sticky Shoes": Jan!o used his Extrude Useful Objects to make sticky shoes out of his vomit. He then put them on and added the shoes' three dice to his roll to cross a bridge over a windy crevasse. Jan!o then passed the shoes back to the others so they could wear them for the bridge crossing.

End of Adventure: At the end of the adventure, everyone erases all but one "other" item. Kilson has three items while Jan!o has none. Is it ok for Kilson to give Jan!o one of his "other" items?

dunlaing wrote: "Sticky Shoes": Jan!o used his Extrude Useful Objects to make sticky shoes out of his vomit. He then put them on and added the shoes' three dice to his roll to cross a bridge over a windy crevasse. Jan!o then passed the shoes back to the others so they could wear them for the bridge crossing.

This is what I get for uncharacteristically trying for brevity :)

Another character had pulled a rope out of his Provisions and they were passing the Sticky shoes back and forth using the rope.


Otherwise I would have. :)

When you succeed at something, can you keep the successes as dice without knowing what you want to use them for?

Example: Clatu uses his Tap ability (defined as a normal ranged attack) on a Broo and gets 4 successes. He uses all 4 successes as bonus dice for a later magical action, but doesn't specify what later magical action, just writes down "Tap Pool: 4 bonus dice" and leaves it at that. He then rolls damage versus the Broo.

This seems like an elegant solution to create a Tap-like ability (he'll use one of his damage successes to state that the damage goes to Cerebrality or to the Broo's Chaos Feature or whatever). But is it kosher?

Trading items: sure. It seems like you have crafty players.

On the Tap: that works fine, but the player has to keep one success to have successfully hit, and therefore done damage. (This is just my ruling, not official rules or anything.)

Clinton R. Nixon wrote: 2) You can put spells on yourself for extended durations, with bonus dice on yourself working just like penalty dice on opponents.

In Donjon, it's the effect that's the key. If you blind someone in Other Games, there's usually a host of effects keyed off of being in the state of being blinded, such as attack penalties, defense penalties for active defense such as dodging, etc. In Donjon, you come up with those end results, whether penalties or bonuses, apply that, then rationalize for the effect as far as the story/game is concerned.

"Kobold is blinded by 3 points/dice" isn't enough of an effect, it has to have the effect specified with regard to directly affecting the target's abilities or attributes. The question is what to penalize where, as you noted. In Donjon, this is weird and yet simple, and is something that takes some getting used to. But think of it this way, these 3 dice need to be applied to something on the kobold to give the in-game effects of the kobold being blinded. Then work back from there.

I can see a few possibilities for this one. You could damage the kobold's Perception with regard to sight-based tests. But that doesn't affect combat much, which is probably the characters' goal, to make the kobold less effective in combat. I'd damage the kobold's Adroitness myself, which affects its combat ability and many other tasks fairly appropriately. In my opinion, of course, YMMV.

Catalyst wrote:
I can see a few possibilities for this one. You could damage the kobold's Perception with regard to sight-based tests. But that doesn't affect combat much, which is probably the characters' goal, to make the kobold less effective in combat. I'd damage the kobold's Adroitness myself, which affects its combat ability and many other tasks fairly appropriately. In my opinion, of course, YMMV.

All too true! :)

But I've seen penalty dice referred to. There must be a definition. Are they:

a) taking dice away; or
b) adding dice to the resistance