Reviving Dead Man's Hand

[Prak]

It sounded like the reason for the classes is being able to say 'Oh, a [some class from D&D] is just called a [some class in DMHD20], with a one-to-one correspondence.

It was. Because this concept reviving is still teetering on the line of "D20 campaign setting" and "it's own thing."

[CatharzGodfoot]

I'm inclined to reply with "Lol, don't care, this is fantasy frontier with guns, not American Frontier with elves" but.... y'know, then I'd be accused of white privilege and neo-racist shit and all that.

Ok, raise your hand if your first response to "Let's play D&D with a western skin!" is "I wanna play an indian!" For all the three people who want to because of Dances With Wolves, Last of the Mohicans or Brotherhood of the Wolf, what you want is Frontiersman, Mountain Man or Hunter. Granted, the first two are anglo-centric terms, but they refer to "guys who live in the woods and can kill you with a tomahawk."

But... ok, first, where do you get the idea that there will be "First Nations" people? Did Trigun have Native Americans? (no, really, I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure it didn't). Were Native Americans a big plot point in Wild Wild West? Did I miss something about elves and orcs running around loin clothes in the pre-colonial era? I know that I'm being really dickishly dismissive, and that, yes, to a certain extent a lot of western tropes deal with NA/FN/Injuns one way or another, but not every single western story does.

What I'm getting from this is 'Not every Western had American Indians, so they're actually completely unnecessary for the genre'.

Which is a spurious argument. The lack of a genre element in some examples of the genre does not make that element unimportant to the genre.

Not all Westerns have trains, or hired guns, or riverboat casinos, or cowboys, or homesteaders, or prospectors, or bank robbers. But when you take one of those things out of a framework designed to create Western stories, you end up with a crippled framework. And none of those things are as important to the genre as the First Nations peoples.

[erik]

Well, Native American presence can be very important or not at all important depending upon what your plans are. If you are using Trigun setting then there are no Native Americans since everyone is descended from crash-landed spacers. If you are using the setting of late 1800's North America West, then Native Americans are likely a factor depending upon where/when in the West you are at, possibly a huge factor.

Perhaps you may wish to refine exactly what it is you are going for. Right now I have no idea what the setting is supposed to be. That list of influences has completely incompatible tropes and settings so I don't know what exactly your end product is supposed to look like.

[Prak]

What I'm going for is "Paladin, Sorcerer, Rogue and Cleric in drovers coats with magic guns in a setting that has as much in common with the American West as Greyhawk does with Medieval Europe."

[CatharzGodfoot]

What I'm going for is "Paladin, Sorcerer, Rogue and Cleric in drovers coats with magic guns in a setting that has as much in common with the American West as Greyhawk does with Medieval Europe."

You'll have to come up with some reason why the frontier was so conveniently depopulated. If the only frontier natives are monsters, it's going to look bad regardless of your intentions.

The First Nations peoples tend to get fucked over in Westerns, and not just in a 'fighting the last losing battles of a century-long war' sort of way. However, that does not mean that they shouldn't be included. Consider this an opportunity to tell stories about heroic individuals fighting to save their families, their livelihoods, and their lives in the face of the crushing progross of an unstoppable evil empire.

[Chamomile]

Making Frontiersman a First Nations Brave is so trivial I'm amazed you haven't done it already. Same with Mountain Man and Shaman. Nailing Brawlers down to a specific origin seems unnecessary. I've had plenty of Monks who weren't from magical Asia. Similarly, nailing Drifter down to a specific motivation seems like forcing Monks to be Lawful. It's a totally unnecessary restriction. What the class actually does is kills things with holy power, and whether you're a drifter or a lawman should be your decision, not the book's. The literal definition of Snake Oil Man is someone who sells stuff that doesn't actually work, so you should probably change that one.

[Prak]

What I'm going for is "Paladin, Sorcerer, Rogue and Cleric in drovers coats with magic guns in a setting that has as much in common with the American West as Greyhawk does with Medieval Europe."

You'll have to come up with some reason why the frontier was so conveniently depopulated. If the only frontier natives are monsters, it's going to look bad regardless of your intentions.

The First Nations peoples tend to get fucked over in Westerns, and not just in a 'fighting the last losing battles of a century-long war' sort of way. However, that does not mean that they shouldn't be included. Consider this an opportunity to tell stories about heroic individuals fighting to save their families, their livelihoods, and their lives in the face of the crushing progross of an unstoppable evil empire.

Ok, that's fair. Would it actually be an overly bad idea to use goblins, kobolds, orcs, etc as the first nations analogue, so long as one doesn't paint them as "they're mindless savages, just there to be killed" but actually fleshes them out as interesting races that are available for play?

Making Frontiersman a First Nations Brave is so trivial I'm amazed you haven't done it already. Same with Mountain Man and Shaman.

If I were to call the Barbarian Archetype "Brave" we get into unfortunate implications territory, and means that it has to be refluffed for non-native characters. When you look at what a druid does (other than the spellcasting), that's a classic mountain man, though also has shades Magical Indian type characters. Shamans just are a tribal concept, and can totally be worked in that way. I'm totally open to FN/Euro Settler neutral names for such archetypes.

Nailing Brawlers down to a specific origin seems unnecessary. I've had plenty of Monks who weren't from magical Asia.

Sure, but what I'm actually nailing it down to is people who turn to prize fighting to make ends meet, which was typically later immigrants from areas such as Ireland.

Similarly, nailing Drifter down to a specific motivation seems like forcing Monks to be Lawful. It's a totally unnecessary restriction. What the class actually does is kills things with holy power, and whether you're a drifter or a lawman should be your decision, not the book's.

Drifter is the literary archetype which fits paladins best, so when I was doing the one to one correspondence thing, that's what I called the paladin archetype. It's honestly pretty much the same exact thing as a knight errant, which is what paladins are.

The literal definition of Snake Oil Man is someone who sells stuff that doesn't actually work, so you should probably change that one.

This is true, but in a fantasy setting, snake oil could well be a magical reagent. Snake Oil Salesmen sold tonics that were supposedly miracle cures. Wizards can brew actual potions. It works.

[Chamomile]

Using Snake Oil Salesman to mean "actually does cure people" instead of "pretends to cure people but doesn't" is a waste of conceptual space. Don't waste your readers limited tolerance for new concepts on redefining old words when there are other words that work just as well. Hell, you could just call them "Magicians" and since this is fantasy people will assume that actual magic is probably involved.

Paladins are called Paladins and not Knights Errant. The traditional player Paladin might be basically a knight errant, but I've had Paladins who were guards, military officers, administrators, and other non-errant positions. I've also had Paladins who were knights errant for wildly different reasons from one another. You are hammering an entire class down to a very specific adventuring motivation, and that's bad. If I want to be a holy gunslinger who's legally employed to keep the law in a specific area, I should be able to do that without having to argue with my GM over whether or not he actually counts as a Drifter if he doesn't drift. None of his class mechanics have anything at all to do with drifting.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Would it actually be an overly bad idea to use goblins, kobolds, orcs, etc as the first nations analogue, so long as one doesn't paint them as "they're mindless savages, just there to be killed" but actually fleshes them out as interesting races that are available for play?

Only if you also have humans. That's half the point of all the fantastic races in Frank's take on DMH.

[Username17]

I'm not so sure about dice pools in this context. Maybe for combat, but it seems like the wrong direction for skills.

This is a game where you want people to lasso a tornado, or swim up a waterfall, or do other crazy off the chart stuff. Which means that often they should be straight off the RNG. The guy who can lasso a tornado shouldn't even have to roll to lasso a normal horse. Conversely, you don't really want "bring a mob of random people, hope one of them gets lucky" as a tornado-lassoing solution.

Actually pushing things completely off the RNG is bad for a whole host of reasons. Die rolls you can't fail are not good things to put into your system. If you wanted to have a strict hierarchy of people who could swim up waterfalls and people who could not and you didn't give a fuck about rolling athletics tests, you'd make "waterfall swimming" an ability that was tagged or not - no die roll required.

The main characteristic of dice pools that I've seen is they produce very flat results. The difference between 6 dice and 21 dice (which is an awkwardly large amount to roll) is five hits. So you need to map your results to a chart, not apply them linearly, if you want to support a wide range of skill with less than a bucketful of dice. And then, a lucky roll will put you well above your weight class, so the "bring a mob, one of them will roll high" thing comes back.

That characteristic is variable depending on how you set the base TN. Let's consider the guy who probably succeeds at threshold 2 and the guy who probably succeeds at threshold 5. At TN 5, that's 6 dice and 15 dice - and they succeed 65%, 2% and 98%, 60% respectively. That is, our guy who probably succeeds at threshold 2 has a very tiny chance of succeeding at threshold 5 (about 2%). But if we made it TN 4 instead, those levels would be 4 dice and 10 dice respectively - and then they'd succeed 69%, auto-fail and 99%, 62% respectively. By lowering TNs and dicepools, you reduce peoples' ability to roll exceptionally high, which in turn puts the higher thresholds more out of reach to lower dice pool characters.

However, dicepools still always have the following features:

• No matter how good you get at any task, you still have a chance (however small) of failure.
• The better you are at things, the more variance your results have.

As for First Nations peoples in Westerns, can you name a single Western that took place in the actual West that didn't have First Nations people in it? The Lone Ranger had Tonto, Quick and the Dead has Spotted Horse, Shanghai Noon has Little Feather, even True Grit has the kids. To get "Westerns" that don't have First Nations people in them you need to go to Asian cinema like The Good , The Bad, and the Weird. And even though that is set in Manchuria, it still has Kamchatkans and Mongolians who are similar in many respects to Native Americans.

-Username17

[Grek]

Prak, your design goals are fucking retarded. What you're saying you want is a d20 based Weird West game that uses renamed and refluffed D&D classes. You're using the Dead Man's Hand setting name, but nothing of the mechanics or settings laid out in the original thread. Seriously, what the fuck. You're not "tightening the focus and going in a slightly different direction", you're literally just using the name.

So, that aside, we actually do need to nail down the fluff for this project if it's going to go anywhere. Since you apparently hate the original DMH project's idea of having no humans and a but load of original race ideas, let's do the opposite and have every national background has a roughly equal distribution of races. Maybe everyone's human, or maybe there's just as many orcs in the Settler side as on the native side. Whatever. The key point is that we don't go around saying that indians are goblins hurr hurr because that's racist as fuck.

This does pose the question of how we split up nations beyond simple geography, but fortunately for us that's a simple question to answer: We split the the nations up by magical tradition. As a short list, we've got

[*] The First Nations had a mix between Divination, Illusions and Animal Transformation magics, depending on tribe.
[*] As in the original DMH thread, using excesses of magic creates pools of magic in the environment that attracts disaster if you don't periodically do something to deal with the problem. Caster shells are pretty tame, in that they just go rotten and spotaneously detonate if you let them go bad, but Necromancy, Divination and most of the other big magics go crazy if you start using them systematically like the South and the Cherokee analogues ended up doing. Specifically, necromany makes for undead uprising and plagues, while divination eventually turns the tide of fate against you until you meet your doom.
[*] The Lakota and the Iroquois analogues avoided doing that, but also lost their wars to the settlers in the process, since the whites didn't have any compunctions against using dangerous caster shells or, in the case of the South, undead smallpox on the natives.
[*] The South is run on evil enslavement magic. Specifically, slave ships go sailing over to Africa, murder a village of Africans, bind their souls in ghost metal chains and sail west with them to sell on plantations. The wailing spirits of the dead are beaten with enchanted whips and force them to work growing crops under an eternally bleak and gloomy sky. Because being pro-slavery is essentially a "You should leave the table and never come back" RP decision, we're free to demonize the slave owners as much as we wish.
[*] The North is big on magitech and is the region from which all enchanted goods flow. Your caster shells, the magic railways, the steal shovels, whatever magical gizmos you have get made up in the North. This means that the North is probably pretty steampunky, which is an acceptable result.
[*] Just like in Real Life, the South left the Union when it started to look like their slave trading was about to get banned, and the North invaded to reclaim the South and to abolish slavery. The Post-War South is full of old burned down manor houses that are haunted by the ghosts of slaves that have yet to move on.
[*] After the banning of slavery, alot of the necromancers down South headed west and turned to cattle driving instead. With undead cattle. Undead horses to run all night, undead oxen to plow fifty acres in a day by working all hours, that sort of thing.
[*] The Pope, the Patriarch and the King of England all claim to have the power to excommunicate someone from the Church and thus cause them to be unable to summon angels and to be shunned by all true celestial beings. They also claim that the apparant angels being summoned by the other denominations and by the protestants are infernal corruptors in angelic disguise.
[*] Spain's big thing is summoning and conjuring spirits. According to religious law, you're only supposed to summon angelic beings, and the nobility is said to have Celestial blood. They have an unusually large number of clerics and holy men, but also have very racist policies about miscegenation between Spanish and natives.
[*] Mexico rebelled against Spain for similar reasons as they did in Real Life - the Mexican clergy and Nobility wanted more independance from the Pope and Crown respectively, rather than having to wait for month long sea voyages to get a message to the Old World and back. Texas rebelled from Mexico because the Catholics hated slavery and the business interests moving into Texas wanted to bring their slaves. Again, just like real life.
[*] The Chinese are masters of alchemy and know how to brew all sorts of potions, oils, balms, etc. This includes potions that let people grow gills and live underwater for months at a time, work supernaturally long hours and live to unnaturally long ages by drinking mercury.

[Prak]

Yeah... even Dusk til Dawn (according to TV Tropes it counts, I don't know) had weird aztec vampires...

On Snake Oil Men, basically, yes, they were known to be charlatans. More than that, however, they were weird guys who rolled into town, providing free entertainment as they brought along freak shows, stage magicians, musicians, etc., and just kinda stepped on stage to hawk their product every now and then. They had brightly painted carts, and sold shit that might as well be magic. I still don't see the problem with saying "in this world, it actually works" or at least "Alright, the cheap crap doesn't work, but they do have more expensive stuff that does."

And yeah, the game could even just call paladins paladins, it really doesn't matter. (although I'm pretty sure that example is a drifter character...)

[erik]

Prak, your design goals are fucking retarded. What you're saying you want is a d20 based Weird West game that uses renamed and refluffed D&D classes. You're using the Dead Man's Hand setting name, but nothing of the mechanics or settings laid out in the original thread. Seriously, what the fuck. You're not "tightening the focus and going in a slightly different direction", you're literally just using the name.

+1, however, since it was your name in the first place, I guess that's your right. It just threw me and likely other people for a loop since I identified that name with the previous project's product.

In this case it looks like you are probably best served by taking the base D&D classes and just reskinning them with some gun tricks and trench coats. When you reskin classes you could take the opportunity to give something useful to the crappy non-casters, while concurrently paring down the casters to more thematic selections.

Ideally you keep things roughly on par and the new gun rules don't completely invalidate all the monsters. Then you are spared the onerous task of creating new classes AND new monsters.

I would probably not use Grek's setting advice solely because I would not make any allusions to actual historical peoples or geography, and instead go full blown into a Trigun like setting (though hopefully with more terrain types than "just dirt") with its own geography, cultures and problems. There's crazy powerful bandits and of course monsters and gangs.

I wouldn't even bother with non-human races. It'd be damn hard to avoid the racist underpinnings of casting ethnic groups that actually existed as non-humans, especially if they are one of the non-pretty non-humans (i.e. not elves or halflings). Westerns don't have aliens, generally.

Then you might be able to have a d20 pseudo-western that isn't balls.

[Chamomile]

The brightly painted carts and wagons and freak shows and etc. are all incidental. They're things that snake oil salesmen typically did, but the actual definition of "snake oil salesman," the one that is still used today, is someone who sells things which are fake and do nothing. You are naming your class with a word that is the opposite of its actual definition because of some incidental baggage that most modern players aren't even familiar with in the first place. It is seriously exactly the same as calling the class Charlatan and then saying that in this world "charlatan" means "wizard." It's pointlessly confusing.

[Josh_Kablack]

As to Native Peoples vs colonists, the obvious thing to do if you want a D&D game that doesn't play to the stereotypes is to invert a key part of the historical situation.

For example: instead of having the newcomers as technologically superior and out to exploit the resources of the natives, start off with a situation where the natives are technologically superior but resource poor and build the setting out from that assumption. (This would dovetail nicely with Tolkein-esque elves)

For example: instead of the frontier being the far fringes of civilization next to the savage, untamed wild - the frontier is all that survives of civilization after The War Back East ended in cataclysm. Thus the settlers aren't trying to displace the natives, they are trying to assimilate into the natives.

[Grek]

erik's request not to use real geography and history is a fair request. If you want to go that way, you could to the fantasy spaghetti western route and have a depopulated Europe be the Frontier, colonized by a magically powerful and technologically advanced Mali Empire invading Italy from the south, Aztlian conquistadors making a landing in Britian from the west and the Chinese marching into the Balkans from the east.

[Prak]

Look, there are precisely two reasons I was thinking of using d20:
1) Western Paladin is an awesome concept, and not much work. "You can smite evil with ranged attacks." done.
2) Every fucking person I know who games, knows the d20 system, at least in passing.

That said, the ones who are resistant to new systems tend to be dicks, so maybe it's time I stop gaming with them.

SO, yeah, reviving DMH and not being retarded.

AS for system, which has the benefit of a public domain system (Thanks, Frank!) which means if I get something coherent out of this, I can try to get a bit of money.

And we're going to start the proper revival of this with something like the game design flow chart:

Step One: Name the Party
No one cares. But posse would be stupidly appropriate.

Step Two: Write a Six Person Party
First thing-everyone is expected to carry a gun, and use it, unless their player decides to focus on tomahawks, which should be a valid and interesting choice. The main point is "There is no DMF or Gunslinger role, because everyone fucking fights"

• Wilderness Guide- He knows how to hunt, fish, find and make shelter, and the 427 uses for bulette hide. Typically the one who'll be carrying around a tomahawk, and maybe a bow. Could be a FN guy, or a mountain man, or whatever. May have a Cool Pet.
• Outlaw- When you need to get into the criminal mind, it's handy to have one on your side. The Outlaw is skilled at stealth, card games, cheating, and dirty fighting. This actually gives him something of an edge, because there's a reason dirty fighting was invented, it works.
• Magician- The guy who casts the spells that makes this more than just Valley of the Gwangi: the RPG. He could be a necromancer with his own undead posse, an illusionist with a bit of battlefield control, or an abjurer who enchants your duster to be bulletproof. What he probably shouldn't be is an evoker, because we want him to use guns. He can use magic guns that fire lightning bolts and fireballs and shit, but he should have a reason to carry a gun.
• Lawman-Maybe he actually has a badge. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe he serves the law of the land, maybe he serves the law of the gods. This is the guy who has the power to smite evil and heal through laying on hands, or the knowledge of the bare bones legal system of the frontier, and possibly both. Probably both, because "Knowledge Law" and "Bounty Hunter" aren't big enough hooks to hang a character on, while "Paladin" is.
• Saloon Rat- Where the Outlaw knows how to play and cheat at cards, the Saloon Rat knows how to use a game of cards as a business meeting. The Saloon Rat is a lovable rake who is known in all the towns, and well liked. He's your face.
• Smith- The group's gadgeteer. He can make simple items, guns, steamtech, and if he teams up with the magician, magic ones. He's likely to be the strongest guy in the group.

They can all fight. The Smith makes shit in down time, and talks shop, meaning that if the party ever needs something fixed or made, he does it, or gets them a cheaper rate if he can't. The Outlaw rubs elbows with the criminal npcs, and can make the party some money. The Saloon Rat talks nice to people, and can find jobs that don't require tying up the Lawman and leaving him in a trunk while the rest "go and be badguys." The Wilderness Guide keeps them fed and not lost and knows about natural creatures. The magician knows about arcane monsters, and makes potions and shit. The Lawman knows about bounties, gangs, and demonic threats.

Step Three: Write a Three Person Party

• Wilderness Guide
• Saloon Rat
• Magician

The Saloon Rat can talk to anyone, the group just misses out on Dirty Fighting bonuses and "Lemme go talk to my old band." The Magician can make spell shells, potions, enchant dusters and all that, the party just buys all their goods. The Wilderness Guide pulls in some spirit magic or something for all your "slaying unnatural beasties" needs.

Step Four: Write an Adventure
Cattle Drive
The party has been hired to provide protection during a cattle drive from Nevaria to Oretown. Between the two towns is a long stretch of wilderness known to be the home of several outlaw gangs, lots of monsters, and some magical weather.
The Outlaw can put out the word to a handful of the gangs, and ensure that they won't attack his gig, but not all of them, and one or more may even just say "fuck you, thanks for letting us know that gold on the hoof is coming through!" The Magician can enchant the cattle to make them a bit tougher, and the Wilderness Guide and Saloon Rat can help deal with the cattle, the WG because he knows animals, and the SR because, yes, he really is that damned pretty. The Lawman will be helpful for preparing for hits from the gangs, knowing who's out there, and the Smith can make repairs if anything breaks.
The cattle drive starts, and you start checking to see what pops up. There is an initial attack, either local bandits or a monster. If bandits, it may well end in "Ah, shit, we didn't know you were working this, Ray!" as they see the Outlaw and stop. If it's a monster, the party can intercept and fight, then catch back up, and hope that nothing took advantage of the distraction.
Then they get into the actual territory of the other type of threat, wilderness if you started with bandits, a vast rocky landscape dotted with bandit dens if you started with a monster.
After you get through that, they run into magic weather, where the magician and wilderness guide work together to navigate, or even dispel it.
Then you want something surprising. One of the gangs that the Outlaw thought was his buddies ride up and start cut cattle out of the herd. The party has to stop them, round up the cattle, and run the last leg of the drive.

Step Five: Campaign Advancement
The players will stop several big evils, each time being led to think that they're going to finish it, only to find out that there's an even more powerful big bad. Most advancement is going to be through magic weaponry, and other cool stuff but at a certain point, that stuff needs to be acquired in Tall Tale fashion. New steeds should be roped tornadoes and floods. New pets should be stone bears and celestial horses that the master wrestled. That kind of shit.

Step Six: Base System AS's.

[Leress]

Western Paladin?

[Prak]

Image isn't working, Leress

[Leress]

Fixed.

[Prak]

Not quite what I had in mind, but yes.

[Chamomile]

Okay, going with an After Sundown rip. I'll take a look at After Sundown's raw mechanics, which is difficult since they are laid out in the most confusing and difficult to reference format conceivable, second only to writing it all backwards in pig latinized Norweigan.

I'm just going to throw up whatever I happen to find and think of. Most of this will probably suck.

Skills: Most of these can remain unchanged. Here's a workable skill list for DMH.

Physical: Athletics, Combat, Ride, Larceny, Perception, Stealth, Survival
Social: Animal Ken, Bureaucracy, Empathy, Expression, Intimidation, Persuasion, Tactics
Technical: Artisan, Mechanics, Medicine, Operations, Research, Rigging, Sabotage

Nearly identical, just swapped drive for ride and electronics for mechanics. Which is supposed to be a steampunk-y type thing. I'd like to replace Operations with something, but I don't know what.

There are six kinds of monsters and three different sorceries. We have six roles already, but I don't see how you could combine several of them with three separate power sources. Going with, say, arcane, divine, and primal, the Lawman doesn't work anymore, even though he is an awesome archetype, because he can't really be anything but divine. The Magician is pretty much just arcane and maybe also primal, if you squint.

The three sorceries I can still see working, though, because the roles seem to fall into most of them pretty evenly. Wilderness Guide is strongly primal, Lawman is strongly divine, Magician is strongly arcane, and the other three have no strong affiliations with any of them. Plus, a lot of the After Sundown abilities can be ported over directly or almost directly. Reverse the polarity on a lot of Infernal stuff and it works just fine as divine, the Astral stuff is practically primal already, and the orphic stuff just makes up the necromantic bit of our arcane powers, which is 1/3 of the powers we're covering so far.

I have no idea what the six monster types from AS could possibly translate to in DMH, though. Might just have to abandon that part of AS entirely.

Also, if we end up going with the card-based advancement like AS, not only do we obviously have to use a poker deck, but it should be standard to draw five cards at advancement, and there should be something special for getting an actual dead man's hand.

[Username17]

Maybe he actually has a badge. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe he serves the law of the land, maybe he serves the law of the gods. This is the guy who has the power to smite evil and heal through laying on hands, or the knowledge of the bare bones legal system of the frontier, and possibly both. Probably both, because "Knowledge Law" and "Bounty Hunter" aren't big enough hooks to hang a character on, while "Paladin" is.

Have you ever seen a Western? Go watch True Grit, or Unforgiven, or Blazing Saddles or something. Do it before you even finish reading this post. Hell, maybe you should watch the entirety of Deadwood. If you can't think of how to hang a character around being a lawman without also making them a preacher, you have a serious shortage of Westerns in your source material.

The vast majority of Marshalls or Bounty Hunters in Western Fiction are not preachers. The Gospel Bills are a tiny minority among the agnostics and even outright nonbelievers. The number of preacher warriors is not zero of course, but it's fairly niche.

I think you honestly have to do some deciding about whether you actually want to do a western at all. Because most of what you want seems to be "D&D, but with pistols and longcoats". Given that as a starting point, why try to make a western instead of trying to remake Iron Heroes, but good? Your goals seem way more compatible with like Musketeers and Privateers and shit. Why are you thinking about the 19th century, when all the tropes you seem to actually want are in the 17th century?

The Golden Age of Piracy and other Swashbuckling sources seem way more suited to what you actually want to do. Since what you seem to actually want is to play a Paladin who has a pistol and a broadsword. That is extremely in genre for 17th century swashbuckling adventure, and totally out of genre for a 19th century cattlerustler epic.

-Username17

[Prak]

Okay, going with an After Sundown rip. I'll take a look at After Sundown's raw mechanics, which is difficult since they are laid out in the most confusing and difficult to reference format conceivable, second only to writing it all backwards in pig latinized Norweigan.

I'm just going to throw up whatever I happen to find and think of. Most of this will probably suck.

Skills: Most of these can remain unchanged. Here's a workable skill list for DMH.

Physical: Athletics, Combat, Ride, Larceny, Perception, Stealth, Survival
Social: Animal Ken, Bureaucracy, Empathy, Expression, Intimidation, Persuasion, Tactics
Technical: Artisan, Mechanics, Medicine, Operations, Research, Rigging, Sabotage

Nearly identical, just swapped drive for ride and electronics for mechanics. Which is supposed to be a steampunk-y type thing. I'd like to replace Operations with something, but I don't know what.

Not a bad start, but Mechanics is actually part of Artisan, according to AS, so Electronics actually gets replaced with Aether, and the description reads:

Aether is the skill used to make the tools of modernity go. Everything from Man Melters to Comfortron 800s uses aether to function. And a character with the aether skill can figure out how it functions and alter it. Characters familiar with the 19th century can probably press buttons and turn on appliances, only modifications beyond normal use require actual skill tests.
Specializations: Gaussing, Vacuum Tubes, Repair, channeling

Operations stays, because with steamtech, and river boats and shit, you'll be operating shit a lot. It actually just absorbs Drive, because they're both the "control large machine" skills, and just talk about different scales of machine.

There are six kinds of monsters and three different sorceries. We have six roles already, but I don't see how you could combine several of them with three separate power sources. Going with, say, arcane, divine, and primal, the Lawman doesn't work anymore, even though he is an awesome archetype, because he can't really be anything but divine. The Magician is pretty much just arcane and maybe also primal, if you squint.

The monsters will be stripped out, and replaced with other stuff, except for Animates, which I want to live on in one way or another, because steam-borgs and victorian gothic robots powered by aether are cool

The three sorceries I can still see working, though, because the roles seem to fall into most of them pretty evenly. Wilderness Guide is strongly primal, Lawman is strongly divine, Magician is strongly arcane, and the other three have no strong affiliations with any of them. Plus, a lot of the After Sundown abilities can be ported over directly or almost directly. Reverse the polarity on a lot of Infernal stuff and it works just fine as divine, the Astral stuff is practically primal already, and the orphic stuff just makes up the necromantic bit of our arcane powers, which is 1/3 of the powers we're covering so far.

Yeah, I'll have to look at the powers and such. One thing we want is Demonic and Celestial powers, and they should/can be condensed into the same sorcery type, it just needs a term. Divine may work for that. Aether can come from Arcane, so that works. Finally, there is something to be said for lawlessness being primal. So what we're looking at, power source wise, is this:

Arcane- Magicians, Smiths
Divine- Lawmen
Primal- Wilderness Guides, Outlaws

The only odd one out, then, is Saloon Rat, but we can actually combine Saloon Rat and Outlaw into one archetype, Rake, and make it primal, and the archetype of "bad boys." Then we just need a sixth archetype to round things out.

I have no idea what the six monster types from AS could possibly translate to in DMH, though. Might just have to abandon that part of AS entirely.

There are two things that can be done. Currently, there are six archetypes for DMH, which coincides with the six monster types, so what we'd do is change Supernatural Type to Archetype, and each Archetype has three subtypes, like

• Magician
  • Necromancer
  • Abjurer
  • Evoker (I know I said I didn't want evokers, but they can just get a bunch of powers which affect items, and only a handful that are actual attacks)
• Wilderness Guide
  • Shaman- Spirit Speaker
  • Mountain Man- Has a Cool Pet
  • Scout- Wilderness and Ambush specialist

And so on.

Also, if we end up going with the card-based advancement like AS, not only do we obviously have to use a poker deck, but it should be standard to draw five cards at advancement, and there should be something special for getting an actual dead man's hand.

This. Also a Weird West game would be a lot easier to make a custom deck for, and also to find an appropriately thematic deck for until a custom one is made.

Also, there should be something about playing cards with Death. Maybe when a character dies, they're allowed, at some appropriate point, to play a hand of poker (or black jack?) with Death, and if they win, their character revives.

[Prak]

Maybe he actually has a badge. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe he serves the law of the land, maybe he serves the law of the gods. This is the guy who has the power to smite evil and heal through laying on hands, or the knowledge of the bare bones legal system of the frontier, and possibly both. Probably both, because "Knowledge Law" and "Bounty Hunter" aren't big enough hooks to hang a character on, while "Paladin" is.

Have you ever seen a Western? Go watch True Grit, or Unforgiven, or Blazing Saddles or something. Do it before you even finish reading this post. Hell, maybe you should watch the entirety of Deadwood. If you can't think of how to hang a character around being a lawman without also making them a preacher, you have a serious shortage of Westerns in your source material.

I've actually seen two of the three movies you just mentioned. But, you're right, I do have a serious shortage of westerns in my source material. What I meant is that "I know about criminals, and can read a wanted poster" is about as valid a character archetype as "I sword good."

The vast majority of Marshalls or Bounty Hunters in Western Fiction are not preachers. The Gospel Bills are a tiny minority among the agnostics and even outright nonbelievers. The number of preacher warriors is not zero of course, but it's fairly niche.

The vast majority are also not mages or vampires.

I think you honestly have to do some deciding about whether you actually want to do a western at all. Because most of what you want seems to be "D&D, but with pistols and longcoats". Given that as a starting point, why try to make a western instead of trying to remake Iron Heroes, but good? Your goals seem way more compatible with like Musketeers and Privateers and shit. Why are you thinking about the 19th century, when all the tropes you seem to actually want are in the 17th century?

The Golden Age of Piracy and other Swashbuckling sources seem way more suited to what you actually want to do. Since what you seem to actually want is to play a Paladin who has a pistol and a broadsword. That is extremely in genre for 17th century swashbuckling adventure, and totally out of genre for a 19th century cattlerustler epic.

-Username17

Would this be a bad time to mention that I am trying damned hard to not try to find some way to make the setting a Samurai Cowboy thing?

(In all seriousness, I would like to apologize for my being such an obviously frustrating dumbass before. D&D is latched onto my brain like a horny monkey, and I don't know why. I'm going to try to stop being an idiot about this, and look to find some better source material here. ...which unfortunately probably will need to include interrupting my reading list...)