I raise you this:
Dinosaur Riding Barbarians
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Stahlseele
- King
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@Dogbert
I raise you this:
I raise you this:
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
I've decided I want to go with a class-based d20 system. Mostly because the amount of material to pull from for class-based tactical games is much larger, and this game clearly needs to be pretty tactical. While investigation/tracking, stealth, and political intrigue have their place, the main attraction here is giant dinosaurs, and those giant dinosaurs are used for pretty much only two things: Carrying heavy loads to and fro, and combat. So a tactically-focused system is yes which means I am rolling with d20. Having also been reading the class/resource discussion in OgreBattle's compilation of Den design notes, I've been thinking of how to apply them to the classes I've got.
Some of them are extremely straightforward. The Captain from Dinosaurs is pretty much exactly the Marshal from Frank's post and therefore uses Tides of Battle (which is "Winds of Fate painted tactics colors" for those who don't know the post I'm riffing off of here), because that's the only resource scheme that makes even a little bit of sense for a tactically-flavored buffbot. Most commands require a minor action, controlling your dinosaur requires either a move or minor action (will probably make it possible to exchange move actions for minors and standards for moves), so the captain will direct his dinosaur, use a buff, and have one action left over to make an attack. If he's not riding a dinosaur, he can use that action to move around instead. The Paladin's Inspirations could also work here, except that I like Tides of Battle better for being nearly the same thing but slightly easier to explain.
The Ranger from Dinosaurs doesn't have quite the same flavor of the Assassin but they certainly both use Precision. They spend somewhere between a swift and a full round action plotting, and then they can use any of their tricks that require that much or less time plotting to use. Like Captains, they can use their swift actions to get their dinosaur to carry them around while reserving their move actions to plot an attack, and the standard to fire it off. When on foot, they'll want to reserve the move action for actually moving most of the time and use the swift to plot a slightly less impressive selection of attacks. They can also plot for a full round, and if they're riding the giant dinosaur then someone else can keep the mount moving while they do so, although they still have to skip a turn.
The Warlock is definitely using the Sorcerer's Backlash. The original post's Warlock used Price, and the paragraph on that one was left hanging but the basic idea is clear. While I like the idea of having to pay individual prices for every spell in the abstract, I honestly think it's wasted on a world where there are one or more other routes to magical power. The Warlock paying a price to get his magical effects for me calls to mind Once Upon A Time's first season mantra of "all magic comes with a price" and loses a ton of its thematic punch when it's no longer a universal law.
Warlocks in Dinosaurs can, with access to proper materials, cast as a full round action instead of a standard action as a minor ritual, which makes it easier to swallow the backlash. Ritual components are heavy and this is a game that cares about carrying capacity, so while you can bring a few spells' worth with you in a components pouch on foot, this is mainly to encourage the Warlock to sit on top of a giant dinosaur and cast as a full-round action out of a chest which is fifty times heavier and more expensive than a regular components pouch and contains an arbitrarily large number of ritual components.
Additionally, if the Backlash overkills you (that is, doesn't just deplete your hit points but sends you quite deep into the negatives), then your spell completely fails. This is an important caveat because ritual spells have Backlash orders of magnitude higher than standard spells (ritual spells have logistical Backlash that is given in double digit numbers, with the understanding that the tactical Backlash is about a thousand times higher and therefore off the RNG by miles) and require tons of material components and voodoo dancing assistants to successfully cast, and you can't sacrifice your Warlock to cast ritual-strength spells without any logistical backup. But you can sacrifice your Warlock to cast overcharged tactical-strength spells, because that would be awesome.
The Raptor Knight uses something similar to Rogue Catches, but instead of satisfying the conditions and then using his power, he uses a minor action to set up an ability which then goes off as part of a standard action on his next turn if it is not interrupted. Interruption always comes with some kind of price, either just in the form of a wasted action or in the form of targeting enemies to you don't want to or moving where you don't want to be. Some of them allow the Knight an attack of opportunity on the interrupter. These are called Forks.
In particular the Raptor Knight has the Tome Knight's Designate ability and a similar ability which allows him to do truly monstrous amounts of damage so long as he #1 has a straight-line approach to melee range of the designated enemy of at least thirty feet to build up momentum like a charge and #2 he isn't successfully attacked by anyone between designating and making his charge. This lets the Raptor Knight do preposterous amounts of damage to an enemy giant dinosaur (who is very unlikely to successfully hit an opponent who is so much smaller) but only if the giant dinosaur's raptor cavalry and/or infantry escort has already been cleared out.
This gets us into the two who aren't so obvious. The Shaman isn't obvious because there are three different resource schedules he could use. The Druid's Spirits are definitely up his alley, but replace the Elementalist's elements with some spirits and their Channeling resource works just as well. Likewise, reflavor the Enchanter to be more about binding spirits to magical charms tied to the item you're buffing and the Shaman could use Discharge. This last one would move the Shaman out of debuffing and into buffing, so while that's on the table as another class to throw in before I finish, I'm giving it a pass for my main six. In the Druid version, the Shaman calls on spirits and exactly one of them shows up each round and grants the Shaman access to his full powerset. In the Channeling version, the Shaman can try and channel certain spirits and is guaranteed access to at least one power from those spirits' sets, but the dice determine exactly how many powers he gains. The latter has less overlap with the Captain so I'm leaning in that direction. Regardless, his spellcasting should be somehow enhanced by riding the giant dinosaur just like the Warlock.
The Beastmaster isn't obvious because neither of the three potential resource schedules fit him very well. He could use Fury, since he is a big, tough fellow who is expected to go charging into battle with his pets, and damaging his pets builds up Fury in the Beastmaster. This doesn't give the Beastmaster a whole lot to do with his actual pets, though his Fury-fueled abilities might buff them.
He could also use Essence, the Necromancer's resource schedule, which is built for minions and could be refluffed as the Beastmaster having some magical connection with his pets (or even just shifting focus from directing them to caving enemy's faces in), but this flavor feels like a bit of a stretch. It very much feels like looking at a concept and some mechanics and then papering over the fluff to make them fit rather than fitting the mechanics to the concept.
He could use Hero feats, although that's supposed to be reserved for a guy who's easy to run and tying those into someone who has a ton of pets who presumably interact with those feats in some interesting way (perhaps having a bonus tied to the number of pets flanking an enemy or within line of sight or whatever) would build up the complexity past the drop-dead simple stage pretty quick.
Finally, Rogue Catches could work, using positional Catches that can be satisfied by the Beastmaster's pets. For example, if a pet can charge to attack an enemy, and that enemy would be flanked by the charge, then the pet can Pounce. Since the Beastmaster commands somewhere between 2 and 5 pets, he can set these sorts of things up on his own and that can help give the feel of coordinating pack hunters. I lean towards the last one because it just feels the coolest to me, but I'm rather uncertain especially since the Knight already uses a variant on Catches, and for this one it's not a situation where I can ultimately just flip a coin since both are good. Figuring out the Beastmaster is my main priority right now.
Some of them are extremely straightforward. The Captain from Dinosaurs is pretty much exactly the Marshal from Frank's post and therefore uses Tides of Battle (which is "Winds of Fate painted tactics colors" for those who don't know the post I'm riffing off of here), because that's the only resource scheme that makes even a little bit of sense for a tactically-flavored buffbot. Most commands require a minor action, controlling your dinosaur requires either a move or minor action (will probably make it possible to exchange move actions for minors and standards for moves), so the captain will direct his dinosaur, use a buff, and have one action left over to make an attack. If he's not riding a dinosaur, he can use that action to move around instead. The Paladin's Inspirations could also work here, except that I like Tides of Battle better for being nearly the same thing but slightly easier to explain.
The Ranger from Dinosaurs doesn't have quite the same flavor of the Assassin but they certainly both use Precision. They spend somewhere between a swift and a full round action plotting, and then they can use any of their tricks that require that much or less time plotting to use. Like Captains, they can use their swift actions to get their dinosaur to carry them around while reserving their move actions to plot an attack, and the standard to fire it off. When on foot, they'll want to reserve the move action for actually moving most of the time and use the swift to plot a slightly less impressive selection of attacks. They can also plot for a full round, and if they're riding the giant dinosaur then someone else can keep the mount moving while they do so, although they still have to skip a turn.
The Warlock is definitely using the Sorcerer's Backlash. The original post's Warlock used Price, and the paragraph on that one was left hanging but the basic idea is clear. While I like the idea of having to pay individual prices for every spell in the abstract, I honestly think it's wasted on a world where there are one or more other routes to magical power. The Warlock paying a price to get his magical effects for me calls to mind Once Upon A Time's first season mantra of "all magic comes with a price" and loses a ton of its thematic punch when it's no longer a universal law.
Warlocks in Dinosaurs can, with access to proper materials, cast as a full round action instead of a standard action as a minor ritual, which makes it easier to swallow the backlash. Ritual components are heavy and this is a game that cares about carrying capacity, so while you can bring a few spells' worth with you in a components pouch on foot, this is mainly to encourage the Warlock to sit on top of a giant dinosaur and cast as a full-round action out of a chest which is fifty times heavier and more expensive than a regular components pouch and contains an arbitrarily large number of ritual components.
Additionally, if the Backlash overkills you (that is, doesn't just deplete your hit points but sends you quite deep into the negatives), then your spell completely fails. This is an important caveat because ritual spells have Backlash orders of magnitude higher than standard spells (ritual spells have logistical Backlash that is given in double digit numbers, with the understanding that the tactical Backlash is about a thousand times higher and therefore off the RNG by miles) and require tons of material components and voodoo dancing assistants to successfully cast, and you can't sacrifice your Warlock to cast ritual-strength spells without any logistical backup. But you can sacrifice your Warlock to cast overcharged tactical-strength spells, because that would be awesome.
The Raptor Knight uses something similar to Rogue Catches, but instead of satisfying the conditions and then using his power, he uses a minor action to set up an ability which then goes off as part of a standard action on his next turn if it is not interrupted. Interruption always comes with some kind of price, either just in the form of a wasted action or in the form of targeting enemies to you don't want to or moving where you don't want to be. Some of them allow the Knight an attack of opportunity on the interrupter. These are called Forks.
In particular the Raptor Knight has the Tome Knight's Designate ability and a similar ability which allows him to do truly monstrous amounts of damage so long as he #1 has a straight-line approach to melee range of the designated enemy of at least thirty feet to build up momentum like a charge and #2 he isn't successfully attacked by anyone between designating and making his charge. This lets the Raptor Knight do preposterous amounts of damage to an enemy giant dinosaur (who is very unlikely to successfully hit an opponent who is so much smaller) but only if the giant dinosaur's raptor cavalry and/or infantry escort has already been cleared out.
This gets us into the two who aren't so obvious. The Shaman isn't obvious because there are three different resource schedules he could use. The Druid's Spirits are definitely up his alley, but replace the Elementalist's elements with some spirits and their Channeling resource works just as well. Likewise, reflavor the Enchanter to be more about binding spirits to magical charms tied to the item you're buffing and the Shaman could use Discharge. This last one would move the Shaman out of debuffing and into buffing, so while that's on the table as another class to throw in before I finish, I'm giving it a pass for my main six. In the Druid version, the Shaman calls on spirits and exactly one of them shows up each round and grants the Shaman access to his full powerset. In the Channeling version, the Shaman can try and channel certain spirits and is guaranteed access to at least one power from those spirits' sets, but the dice determine exactly how many powers he gains. The latter has less overlap with the Captain so I'm leaning in that direction. Regardless, his spellcasting should be somehow enhanced by riding the giant dinosaur just like the Warlock.
The Beastmaster isn't obvious because neither of the three potential resource schedules fit him very well. He could use Fury, since he is a big, tough fellow who is expected to go charging into battle with his pets, and damaging his pets builds up Fury in the Beastmaster. This doesn't give the Beastmaster a whole lot to do with his actual pets, though his Fury-fueled abilities might buff them.
He could also use Essence, the Necromancer's resource schedule, which is built for minions and could be refluffed as the Beastmaster having some magical connection with his pets (or even just shifting focus from directing them to caving enemy's faces in), but this flavor feels like a bit of a stretch. It very much feels like looking at a concept and some mechanics and then papering over the fluff to make them fit rather than fitting the mechanics to the concept.
He could use Hero feats, although that's supposed to be reserved for a guy who's easy to run and tying those into someone who has a ton of pets who presumably interact with those feats in some interesting way (perhaps having a bonus tied to the number of pets flanking an enemy or within line of sight or whatever) would build up the complexity past the drop-dead simple stage pretty quick.
Finally, Rogue Catches could work, using positional Catches that can be satisfied by the Beastmaster's pets. For example, if a pet can charge to attack an enemy, and that enemy would be flanked by the charge, then the pet can Pounce. Since the Beastmaster commands somewhere between 2 and 5 pets, he can set these sorts of things up on his own and that can help give the feel of coordinating pack hunters. I lean towards the last one because it just feels the coolest to me, but I'm rather uncertain especially since the Knight already uses a variant on Catches, and for this one it's not a situation where I can ultimately just flip a coin since both are good. Figuring out the Beastmaster is my main priority right now.
Last edited by Chamomile on Mon Jun 15, 2015 6:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I remember the cartoon of that, and now I really want a Cadillacs and Dinosaurs rpg.Stahlseele wrote:@Dogbert
I raise you this:
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
No clue, but apparently there actually is a Cadillacs and Dinosaurs campaign setting for the Twilight 2000 rules. No clue what the system is like yet, though.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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momothefiddler
- Knight-Baron
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- Joined: Sat Feb 22, 2014 10:55 am
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This made me happier than it had any right to.Chamomile wrote:Interruption always comes with some kind of price, either just in the form of a wasted action or in the form of targeting enemies to you don't want to or moving where you don't want to be. Some of them allow the Knight an attack of opportunity on the interrupter. These are called Forks.
More generally, I'm currently willing to give the game a shot. Oddly, I wasn't terribly interested until this last post, but for whatever reason I have a much better sense of the flavor and expected gameplay now and I'm pretty interested.
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momothefiddler
- Knight-Baron
- Posts: 883
- Joined: Sat Feb 22, 2014 10:55 am
- Location: United States
I'm not sure exactly. Rereading the original post it does toss out references to the scale of things but it wasn't until
Also the warlock ritual chest imagery (and my own brain adding various magical symbols painted directly onto the back of the dino) helped a lot.
But mostly I think what would have made this post a good pitch/intro for me is the rapid examples of what each person is doing so that I get a good sense of the grand team and their massive dinofights.
that I really visualized it as more than like two giant dinos and maybe one or two raptors running around.This lets the Tome Knight do preposterous amounts of damage to an enemy giant dinosaur (who is very unlikely to successfully hit an opponent who is so much smaller) but only if the giant dinosaur's raptor cavalry and/or infantry escort has already been cleared out.
Also the warlock ritual chest imagery (and my own brain adding various magical symbols painted directly onto the back of the dino) helped a lot.
But mostly I think what would have made this post a good pitch/intro for me is the rapid examples of what each person is doing so that I get a good sense of the grand team and their massive dinofights.
So I've decided Shaman will use Channeling to help keep him as distinct as possible from the Captain, and Beastmaster will use positional Catches because that helps to evoke pack hunting best. Barbarian Fury and Hero Feats will probably be added in at some point because those are pretty distinct from the other classes.
Classes sorted, continuing on: Action resolution. Action resolution will be using the most popular and common core mechanic both on this board and in general, both because of its proven capability and the wealth of successes and failures to learn from provided by its popularity. By which I obviously mean d100 roll under. While I'm not nailing down classes just yet, I am pretty positive that classes will provide mainly two things: A list of unique tricks following a certain resource schedule, like the Warlock/Shaman spells, the Ranger precision strikes, etc. etc., which are horizontal in nature. The ability you pick up at level 10 could've been the trick you picked up at level 1 and vice-versa. And second, a certain number between one and three of key skills you start trained in to a certain level between apprentice and master. Everything else - HP, attack rolls, AC, etc. etc., is entirely in skills. The entirety of the bonuses that PCs can expect to see range from -1 to +10. That is for the entire campaign, and you'll probably be at or near +10 in things that you are specialized into almost from the beginning. It's like 5e D&D, except that it is intentionally true that real ultimate power is measured in hectarchers (riding brachiosaurs) rather than godslaying superpowers.
Skills benefit from being either apprentice (+1), journeyman (+2), or master (+4) level. They can also have an equipment bonus of -1 (for no tools) to +2 (for masterwork). Feats which are either universally available or available to certain classes can provide either a +1 or occasionally a +2 to a group of skills for being extra strong or extra fast or whatever. That puts the cap at +8, with another 2 points reserved for ability-based bonuses, whether that's the Ranger sacrificing a move action for a +2 to-hit on his aim or the Captain providing a +2 to evasion by playing his Take Cover battle order or whatever. Theoretically you could break the soft +10 cap by combining a Captain's inspiration bonus with, say, a Beastmaster's positional bonus, but since the Captain is the only one who can hand out buffs and he can only do so randomly I don't think I need to be especially concerned about that.
So here's the skill list:
Classes sorted, continuing on: Action resolution. Action resolution will be using the most popular and common core mechanic both on this board and in general, both because of its proven capability and the wealth of successes and failures to learn from provided by its popularity. By which I obviously mean d100 roll under. While I'm not nailing down classes just yet, I am pretty positive that classes will provide mainly two things: A list of unique tricks following a certain resource schedule, like the Warlock/Shaman spells, the Ranger precision strikes, etc. etc., which are horizontal in nature. The ability you pick up at level 10 could've been the trick you picked up at level 1 and vice-versa. And second, a certain number between one and three of key skills you start trained in to a certain level between apprentice and master. Everything else - HP, attack rolls, AC, etc. etc., is entirely in skills. The entirety of the bonuses that PCs can expect to see range from -1 to +10. That is for the entire campaign, and you'll probably be at or near +10 in things that you are specialized into almost from the beginning. It's like 5e D&D, except that it is intentionally true that real ultimate power is measured in hectarchers (riding brachiosaurs) rather than godslaying superpowers.
Skills benefit from being either apprentice (+1), journeyman (+2), or master (+4) level. They can also have an equipment bonus of -1 (for no tools) to +2 (for masterwork). Feats which are either universally available or available to certain classes can provide either a +1 or occasionally a +2 to a group of skills for being extra strong or extra fast or whatever. That puts the cap at +8, with another 2 points reserved for ability-based bonuses, whether that's the Ranger sacrificing a move action for a +2 to-hit on his aim or the Captain providing a +2 to evasion by playing his Take Cover battle order or whatever. Theoretically you could break the soft +10 cap by combining a Captain's inspiration bonus with, say, a Beastmaster's positional bonus, but since the Captain is the only one who can hand out buffs and he can only do so randomly I don't think I need to be especially concerned about that.
So here's the skill list:
Acrobatics
Since the game doesn't have STR or DEX scores (though it has feats like "extra strong" or "extra fast" which both provide non-stacking bonuses to this skill) there isn't any reason to split Acrobatics and Athletics. Acrobatics is your ability to get from point A to point B.
AC (which could use a better name given that armor has nothing to do with it) is equal to 10 + Acrobatics. Acrobatics takes penalties from armor from -1 to -4. There is a +2 bonus for each size smaller than Medium, and a -2 penalty for sizes larger. AC, but not Acrobatics in general, benefits from parry bonuses, but not from armor. Acrobatics is also used as a Reflex save.
Animal Handling
This is used for appraising the value of dinosaurs. A DC 15 check will tell you if the dinosaur is of greater, lesser, or about average quality. On a DC 20 you just hand the player the entire sheet. Which reminds me, some kind of dino-generation scheme that allows you to generate up a dino a minute so that players can go shopping for them is needed for the finished product.
Animal Handling can also be used for Ride checks to direct a mount in combat or other dangerous situations, which is DC 12 if it's properly trained for battle (just high enough that you need to some kind of advantage to take 10, but not so high that anyone who's reasonably trained can't manage), and the Beastmaster is going to use it for a lot of his abilities probably. The Raptor Knight can probably use it to activate some of his mounted Forks, too.
Blacksmithing
Used to craft various weapons and armor and also to appraise them. Blacksmithing gets the same gig as Animal Handling with a DC 15 to get a general read on quality, although they just don't have enough variety for the DC 20 to do anything. The range on these tools only goes from -1 to +2 and the -1 is nothing at all, so there is no range outside of lesser, average, or greater.
Blacksmithing can also be used to actually make weapons, armor, and tools (whether or not you have those tools' associated skill). It is generally a DC 10 to craft shoddy quality goods, DC 15 to craft standard quality goods, and DC 20 to craft a masterwork. These DCs are increased by 5 for weapons/armor, i.e. the things players actually want. Crafting requires half the cost of the item, but crafting a masterwork doesn't cost any more in materials. The reason masterworks tend to be more expensive is because even very skilled blacksmiths only produce them half or, in the case of weapons/armor, a quarter of the time, and scarcity drives up cost.
Combat
This is added to both your to-hit roll and your damage rolls with all sorts of weapons, melee and ranged, one-handed and two. Two-handed weapons also benefit from the 1.5x bonus to damage from Combat. Each size category larger than medium increases the damage bonus from Combat by 1.5, but leaves the accuracy bonus alone, and in fact being a size category larger inflicts a -2 accuracy bonus in general. Each size category smaller than medium halves the bonus, which means that tiny creatures must be a master to get a damage bonus and diminutive or fine creatures can't get them at all. On the other side, a master-level large creature gets +6 damage and a huge gets +9. The half-again bonus for two-handed (or equivalent, since huge creatures aren't humanoid) applies, so for a huge creature it would be +14 total (you always round up fractions). Inherent bonuses (like those given by great strength feats) are calculated before multipliers, but other bonuses are added in after. This is because inherent bonuses will basically never be added midway through a battle, but morale bonuses, flanking bonuses, etc. etc. might be, and you don't want to have to stop and recalculate multipliers in the middle of combat. Much easier to just slap the +2 on even if that means that a hypothetical sapient tyrannosaur would barely even notice a morale boost from the Captain. That's not a thing that's actually supposed to be possible so I don't really care.
Those with apprentice-level Combat can wield martial weapons, journeymen gain proficiency with one exotic weapon of their choice, and masters gain proficiency with two more exotic weapons. I haven't yet decided if I want combat feats to be generally available with certain ranks of Combat as pre-requisites, or if I want to make a Hero class who uses feats.
If you're fighting with a proper weapon, you get a +1 to accuracy and damage. Only shoddy weapons leave you at the standard +0, and improvised weapons like using a rake as a spear give you a -1. If you aren't proficient with a weapon you're using, you take the standard -4 to accuracy, though not to damage.
Deception
Deception is rolled against Investigation for lies, disguises, and forgeries. If you beat their check, they buy it. There are bonuses of up to +5 for lies which the subject wants to believe or which build on things they already believe, and penalties of up to -5 for lies that they're predisposed not to believe or contradict things they already know, with a special mention of -10 for lies which are completely outrageous but hey, scam artists have gotten away with some pretty crazy stuff so it's still possible.
Endurance
Endurance is rolled as a Fortitude save. It also contributes to your carrying capacity in a way that I haven't entirely sorted out, and gives you bonus HP equal to your Endurance bonus times your size multiplier, which for Medium creatures is 5. Apprentice-level Endurance HP is less than a single swipe from an enemy with a common quality longsword doing 1d8+1 damage by default and journeyman Combat skill giving him another +2, but journeyman Endurance is enough to resist a solid swipe from a mook, and master Endurance grants a total of 20 HP, which is enough to take two or three mook swipes or one from a masterwork greataxe wielded by a warrior with master-level Combat, a +1 from exceptional strength, and a good damage roll.
Speaking of HP, your bog-standard mook is going to have about 8 of it. That's enough that a single longsword blow with master-level Combat will probably bring him down. Armor acts as DR, not AC, so if you stick that mook in some scale mail he's now heavy infantry who can take two of those sword swipes even if you don't give him some training to give him apprentice-level Endurance. PCs will want to be able to take at least two blows from a competent enemy even if untrained in Endurance, and a master-level warrior with a +1 longsword deals 9.5 damage, which means PC health should start at around 20 (and go up to 50 with Endurance and Endurance-related feats - health doesn't accrue with levels automatically). Some amount of bonus HP may end up being a class feature to all classes, with certain classes getting 5 more or less than others and thus coming out to 15 or 25 by default, or people with PC classes might just be set to 20 HP by default while NPCs start out with 8.
Armor DR is generally the same as the AC bonus would be in D&D, although the setting is less medieval and more ancient so a lot of armors aren't around. Padded armor gets 1 DR and is worn by a lot of cannon fodder soldiers, light leather is 2 DR and is popular with town guard, heavy leather is 3 DR and is popular with raptor cavalry because raptor carrying capacity is not actually that great, scale mail is 4 DR and is heavy infantry standard, I don't know what you call the hoplite's cuirass+greaves+helmet+leather skirt getup but that is the 5 DR benchmark, and the Roman lorica segmentata is the high mark of armor available at DR 6. Plate armor is definitely not around but chainmail (with DR from 4 to 6 depending on how much of it you use) is somewhat anachronistically available, because it doesn't muck with balance and a game about humans riding dinosaurs doesn't have much room to complain about anachronism.
Size also grants DR, if your skin is sufficiently leathery. Medium creatures with leathery skin are covered in what is essentially actual leather armor and have DR 3, but at large it's DR 5 and an extra 5 DR for each size after that. What this means is that a standard giant dinosaur has DR of 10, which means that they can be nearly immune to mook weapons by being literally nearly immune to mook weapons instead of having triple digit HP. The average large-size creature has somewhere around 30 HP, and the average Huge size (that is, a giant dinosaur) has 45 HP. Large creatures gain 7 HP per Endurance bonus, and Huge get 10, so a giant dinosaur with master level endurance has 85 HP. If it's a diplodicus it also gets +2 to Endurance for being a diplodicus (it has the "incredible constitution" feat for being a diplodicus), so giant dinosaur HP tops off at 105.
How do you kill something with DR 20 (after worn armor) and HP over 100? Well, I'm okay with diplodicuses being super hard to kill because that's sort of their niche, mechanically. But there are mainly three ways to go about killing giant dinosaurs in general. Number one, find a way to ignore that DR. Trikes and Raptor Knights alike can ignore DR while charging. Number two, find a way to do damage every round. This is a sub-category of number one, in that DoT ignores DR. Rending attacks from allosaurs or from flinging raptors at the problem until one of them crits, or poison from trikes or lances, will bleed the diplodicus for 10% of its HP each round (just move the decimal of its max HP over by one, there's your DoT). Number three, just be a t-rex and deal a preposterously large 4d12+21 damage, or 47 on average. A rex is still going to require multiple rounds to chew through a fully armored max-health diplodicus, but comparatively fewer than someone who does light damage and relies on 10% DoT to kill them, and certainly less than anything other than a small army of raptor lancers dealing 16 damage on average per strike (2d8+7), even accounting for the fact that they get to ignore armor. Although a trike can deal an average of 30.5 damage per round (3d8+17) and gets to ignore DR on a charge, which comes out to pretty similar to the rex damage, but it also has to be charging every time whereas the rex can close to melee and stay there while biting.
Engineering
This can be used to construct walls and buildings and such, but the material cost and man hours required are far outside the scope of most campaigns and once you actually have that kind of material you probably don't spend your time directly managing projects, instead just overseeing them from afar. But a logistics level character who personally directs work crews in the construction of the Taj Mahal should hopefully be possible.
The main purpose of this skill, though, is to rig up the load on a giant dinosaur so as to reduce the weight. While rigging up a hypothetical load of goods (meaning, this can be done before actually purchasing said goods) you can make an Engineering roll to distribute them such that your giant dinosaur can carry more than it ordinarily would. The base check is at DC 10 for a 10% increase in carrying capacity, and an additional 10% at every 5 points higher. Each load must be rolled for separately, as this is the skill of expertly distributing weight based on how it will move with the dinosaur's stride and so on, not just making a harness that helps in general.
A giant dinosaur harness is a thing you can craft with this skill, though (you can also just buy one). It requires a DC 15 check and gives you a +1 bonus to this skill. On a DC 20, you've crafted a masterwork harness that gives you a +2. The harness obviously only helps if it is actually on the giant dinosaur, and you cannot use a harness for one type of dinosaur on another. A masterwork harness is custom-fit for a specific giant dinosaur and provides only a +1 when used on another dinosaur, even one of the same species. Instead of crafting a normal harness, you can try to craft an adjustable harness. This increases the DC by 5, but allows the harness to be transferred to dinosaurs of other species. A masterwork adjustable harness provides a +2 bonus for all dinosaurs of any species, not just the one it was made for.
Engineering can also be used to craft locks, in which case it is a DC 10 to make a lock with a DC 10 to open, a DC 15 to make a 15, and so on up to DC 25.
Finance
Persuasion covers haggling for good prices. This skill is about making the numbers on a sheet add up (considering renaming it to "accounting"). It allows you to decrease the loss of money and food by keeping careful track to make sure none of the money goes missing and carefully rationing the food. At the end of each week when these things are marked off, you can roll a Finance check at DC 15 to decrease the total amount lost by 10% (as with most things of this nature, just move the chop the last number off the total and that's how much you decrease it by). For every 5 points you exceed the DC, you increase the amount saved by another 10%.
Medicine
This skill covers human medical treatment. Treating dinosaurs uses the same system, but requires you to use whichever is lower of your Medicine or Animal Handling skill. Ordinarily when injured you recover 10% of your health each week of rest (as with DoT, just move the chop the last number off of your max health and that's how much you recover per week). A DC 15 check allows you to speed the healing of another by an additional 10% of their max health per week, and 10% again for each 5 points you beat the DC by. If you fail the DC by 5 or more, you accidentally make things worse and nullify the weekly healing. For each additional 5 points you fail the DC, you cause 10% damage instead. If you're treating yourself, the DC is increased by 5.
You can also roll Medicine to treat poisons and disease. A doctor can roll their Medicine to save on behalf of their patient against the poison's or disease's DC, and the patient can take the higher of the doctor's Medicine check or their own Endurance check.
Occult
This covers a general knowledge of both religion and magic, because those are the same thing. Since I haven't yet decided how prevalent I want magic to be, the utility of this skill is still pretty up in the air, but you definitely roll it as part of your spells, so Shamans and Warlocks definitely want it in spades. Not sure if it has any use outside of that. I am considering the possibility that anyone should be able to cast cantrips just by rolling high enough on this skill.
Intimidate
If you succeed on an opposed Intimidate vs. Willpower check, an opponent will grant favors as though they were one step higher on the attitude chart than they actually are and take a -2 morale penalty to opposing you. For every 5 points you beat their Willpower, they take an additional -1 morale penalty to all skill rolls opposing you and shift one more step up the attitude chart. Just like Persuasion, the attitude shift is not persistent, and neither is the penalty.
Investigate
Investigation covers searching for things, catching on to lies, seeing through disguises, discovering hidden doors or traps, and so on.
Larceny
Larceny is for picking locks and pickpocketing. Pickpocketing is a roll against the target's Perception while locks have DCs that range from 10 for cheap, simple locks on up to 25 for masterwork locks. Lock technology is lagging behind lockpicking skill by quite a bit, which is why even an apprentice larcenist can pick locks up to DC 20 if they're willing to pour half an hour into it by taking 20. The dream is that someone will notice the break-in before that happens. DC 25 locks are valuable because they require at least two of exceptional talent, deft skill, and a good set of tools to get inside.
Perception
Perception is used to spot things rapidly, whereas Investigation is used to search for them. As such, Perception is mostly just a save vs. pickpocketing and ambushes.
Perform
I haven't figured out how much a coin is actually worth or what things are priced at, so I have no idea how to properly price the perform skill. I would also like there to be a way to increase the payout per person by having lots of people perform together so that an alarmingly badass theater troupe is a supported concept, even if it's not a focus. But right now I have zero actual rules for this skill, just notes on what outputs I want from it.
Persuasion
Persuasion is used to make people your friends and inspire them to greatness. Persuasion can be used to haggle, in which case it is an opposed check. For every five points you beat the opponent, you get a 10% discount, and for every five points you lose, you get a 10% price hike. You can still choose to walk away completely after failing to haggle for a good price, but you can't try to haggle again. You can't take 10 on haggling, but if there are at least 20 different merchants selling the item you're looking for (which will typically only happen if you're looking for something fairly common and are in a major market) you can take 20.
Persuasion can also be used to improve someone's attitude towards you. You roll Persuasion opposed to their Willpower and if you beat their roll, their attitude improves by one step for the purposes of whatever request you're making on them. For every 5 points you beat their roll, you improve an additional step. For every 5 points you fail, you go down a step. To reiterate, this only applies to the specific request you are making of them right now (including tiny variations of this, no cheating by asking for 200 gold, then asking for 201 gold, then asking for 202 until you get lucky). If you need to convince your friend to make a really risky investment in your caravan and you accidentally imply that their wife is hideous, their business is doomed to failure, and their only hope of having any success is to just give their money to you and let you handle things, they might get angry and throw you out of their house but they will probably not permanently become your sworn enemy.
What attitude you're at with NPCs by default, how to permanently shift that attitude, what attitude is required for any given favor and how many favors are required to shift you from one attitude to another, etc. etc. are all completely MTP right now. I am open to suggestions. Diplomacy is an old bugbear and this is a game that actually revolves quite a bit around negotiations both on the merchant level and the international relations level at different points, so I am totally willing to stuff anything mechanically sound in here, though I am not super hopeful about getting results.
Poisons
A poison will usually cause a debuff to all skill checks, 10% DoT (just chop the last digit off of your HP total and that's the damage per round) until they make the save, or in one very rare case, instant death. At some point I will have a list of poisons which have separate DCs for properly identifying and concocting poisons. The only DC I have right now is that it's a DC 10 to safely apply poisons to a weapon and outside of combat you're expected to take 10 and succeed automatically. This normally takes a full round action, but you can do it as a standard action at DC 15, as a move at DC 20, and a swift at DC 25. You must declare what sort of action you're using before applying the poison, and if you fail the DC, the poison is successfully applied but you have accidentally poisoned yourself.
The majority of poisons are either fast-acting fatal poisons that deal damage over time each round until you make the save or slow-acting sickness-inducing poisons that cause a persistent debuff which can be saved against using Endurance once immediately, then again at the end of the day, and after that only on a weekly basis. A very rare poison immediately kills anyone who fails the save. I'm reconsidering whether this last one should exist. While the idea is very much that either one specific boss enemy or one specific party member will have a single dose, my fear is that if the enemy uses it then it will come off as anti-climactic and if the party gets their hands on it they'll never use it for fear of needing it more later.
Stealth
Stealth is rolled opposed to Perception in order to be hidden. It's a -10 penalty to hide from someone who already knows where you are, but it can happen. Someone does count as knowing where you are if you attack them, whether you hit or miss, but does not count as knowing where you are if you #1 break line of sight and #2 can move at least one square without re-entering line of sight. If someone is being flanked by at least two people neither of whom is you, they don't count as knowing where you are for purposes of stealth checks even if they have you in line of sight, although they can still attack you on their turn (unless you successfully hide).
Situational penalties exist and go all the way up to -10 (potentially on top of the penalty for someone knowing where you are already), which can render hiding from anyone but the blind near impossible, but it is still only near impossible and players are entitled to give it a shot even if the guards are staring right at them in a featureless, perfectly lit corridor.
Survival
Survival can be used to track people based on the terrain. It's a DC 10 check to track them through mud, sand, or snow, a DC 15 check to track them through grasslands or forests, a DC 20 check to track them through mountains, and a DC 25 check to track them through a river or a city. Someone who's trying to avoid being tracked can also roll Survival opposed to the person tracking them. If you're in hard-to-track terrain already, this does mean that going out of your way to hide your tracks will probably only make them more obvious. Whether you're relying on a static DC or rolling to set it, you take a -2 penalty for every four creatures in your party. Every size category larger than medium makes a creature count double, and every size category smaller makes them count half.
You can also use Survival to hunt, which decreases the food required by an amount I haven't determined because I am still working on the food consumption system, and to find shelter, which relies on a system for surviving harsh environments that I also haven't figured out yet.
Willpower
Willpower is used as a save against social and magical effects, and is also used by Warlocks to prevent them from being burnt up by their Backlash.
Since the game doesn't have STR or DEX scores (though it has feats like "extra strong" or "extra fast" which both provide non-stacking bonuses to this skill) there isn't any reason to split Acrobatics and Athletics. Acrobatics is your ability to get from point A to point B.
AC (which could use a better name given that armor has nothing to do with it) is equal to 10 + Acrobatics. Acrobatics takes penalties from armor from -1 to -4. There is a +2 bonus for each size smaller than Medium, and a -2 penalty for sizes larger. AC, but not Acrobatics in general, benefits from parry bonuses, but not from armor. Acrobatics is also used as a Reflex save.
Animal Handling
This is used for appraising the value of dinosaurs. A DC 15 check will tell you if the dinosaur is of greater, lesser, or about average quality. On a DC 20 you just hand the player the entire sheet. Which reminds me, some kind of dino-generation scheme that allows you to generate up a dino a minute so that players can go shopping for them is needed for the finished product.
Animal Handling can also be used for Ride checks to direct a mount in combat or other dangerous situations, which is DC 12 if it's properly trained for battle (just high enough that you need to some kind of advantage to take 10, but not so high that anyone who's reasonably trained can't manage), and the Beastmaster is going to use it for a lot of his abilities probably. The Raptor Knight can probably use it to activate some of his mounted Forks, too.
Blacksmithing
Used to craft various weapons and armor and also to appraise them. Blacksmithing gets the same gig as Animal Handling with a DC 15 to get a general read on quality, although they just don't have enough variety for the DC 20 to do anything. The range on these tools only goes from -1 to +2 and the -1 is nothing at all, so there is no range outside of lesser, average, or greater.
Blacksmithing can also be used to actually make weapons, armor, and tools (whether or not you have those tools' associated skill). It is generally a DC 10 to craft shoddy quality goods, DC 15 to craft standard quality goods, and DC 20 to craft a masterwork. These DCs are increased by 5 for weapons/armor, i.e. the things players actually want. Crafting requires half the cost of the item, but crafting a masterwork doesn't cost any more in materials. The reason masterworks tend to be more expensive is because even very skilled blacksmiths only produce them half or, in the case of weapons/armor, a quarter of the time, and scarcity drives up cost.
Combat
This is added to both your to-hit roll and your damage rolls with all sorts of weapons, melee and ranged, one-handed and two. Two-handed weapons also benefit from the 1.5x bonus to damage from Combat. Each size category larger than medium increases the damage bonus from Combat by 1.5, but leaves the accuracy bonus alone, and in fact being a size category larger inflicts a -2 accuracy bonus in general. Each size category smaller than medium halves the bonus, which means that tiny creatures must be a master to get a damage bonus and diminutive or fine creatures can't get them at all. On the other side, a master-level large creature gets +6 damage and a huge gets +9. The half-again bonus for two-handed (or equivalent, since huge creatures aren't humanoid) applies, so for a huge creature it would be +14 total (you always round up fractions). Inherent bonuses (like those given by great strength feats) are calculated before multipliers, but other bonuses are added in after. This is because inherent bonuses will basically never be added midway through a battle, but morale bonuses, flanking bonuses, etc. etc. might be, and you don't want to have to stop and recalculate multipliers in the middle of combat. Much easier to just slap the +2 on even if that means that a hypothetical sapient tyrannosaur would barely even notice a morale boost from the Captain. That's not a thing that's actually supposed to be possible so I don't really care.
Those with apprentice-level Combat can wield martial weapons, journeymen gain proficiency with one exotic weapon of their choice, and masters gain proficiency with two more exotic weapons. I haven't yet decided if I want combat feats to be generally available with certain ranks of Combat as pre-requisites, or if I want to make a Hero class who uses feats.
If you're fighting with a proper weapon, you get a +1 to accuracy and damage. Only shoddy weapons leave you at the standard +0, and improvised weapons like using a rake as a spear give you a -1. If you aren't proficient with a weapon you're using, you take the standard -4 to accuracy, though not to damage.
Deception
Deception is rolled against Investigation for lies, disguises, and forgeries. If you beat their check, they buy it. There are bonuses of up to +5 for lies which the subject wants to believe or which build on things they already believe, and penalties of up to -5 for lies that they're predisposed not to believe or contradict things they already know, with a special mention of -10 for lies which are completely outrageous but hey, scam artists have gotten away with some pretty crazy stuff so it's still possible.
Endurance
Endurance is rolled as a Fortitude save. It also contributes to your carrying capacity in a way that I haven't entirely sorted out, and gives you bonus HP equal to your Endurance bonus times your size multiplier, which for Medium creatures is 5. Apprentice-level Endurance HP is less than a single swipe from an enemy with a common quality longsword doing 1d8+1 damage by default and journeyman Combat skill giving him another +2, but journeyman Endurance is enough to resist a solid swipe from a mook, and master Endurance grants a total of 20 HP, which is enough to take two or three mook swipes or one from a masterwork greataxe wielded by a warrior with master-level Combat, a +1 from exceptional strength, and a good damage roll.
Speaking of HP, your bog-standard mook is going to have about 8 of it. That's enough that a single longsword blow with master-level Combat will probably bring him down. Armor acts as DR, not AC, so if you stick that mook in some scale mail he's now heavy infantry who can take two of those sword swipes even if you don't give him some training to give him apprentice-level Endurance. PCs will want to be able to take at least two blows from a competent enemy even if untrained in Endurance, and a master-level warrior with a +1 longsword deals 9.5 damage, which means PC health should start at around 20 (and go up to 50 with Endurance and Endurance-related feats - health doesn't accrue with levels automatically). Some amount of bonus HP may end up being a class feature to all classes, with certain classes getting 5 more or less than others and thus coming out to 15 or 25 by default, or people with PC classes might just be set to 20 HP by default while NPCs start out with 8.
Armor DR is generally the same as the AC bonus would be in D&D, although the setting is less medieval and more ancient so a lot of armors aren't around. Padded armor gets 1 DR and is worn by a lot of cannon fodder soldiers, light leather is 2 DR and is popular with town guard, heavy leather is 3 DR and is popular with raptor cavalry because raptor carrying capacity is not actually that great, scale mail is 4 DR and is heavy infantry standard, I don't know what you call the hoplite's cuirass+greaves+helmet+leather skirt getup but that is the 5 DR benchmark, and the Roman lorica segmentata is the high mark of armor available at DR 6. Plate armor is definitely not around but chainmail (with DR from 4 to 6 depending on how much of it you use) is somewhat anachronistically available, because it doesn't muck with balance and a game about humans riding dinosaurs doesn't have much room to complain about anachronism.
Size also grants DR, if your skin is sufficiently leathery. Medium creatures with leathery skin are covered in what is essentially actual leather armor and have DR 3, but at large it's DR 5 and an extra 5 DR for each size after that. What this means is that a standard giant dinosaur has DR of 10, which means that they can be nearly immune to mook weapons by being literally nearly immune to mook weapons instead of having triple digit HP. The average large-size creature has somewhere around 30 HP, and the average Huge size (that is, a giant dinosaur) has 45 HP. Large creatures gain 7 HP per Endurance bonus, and Huge get 10, so a giant dinosaur with master level endurance has 85 HP. If it's a diplodicus it also gets +2 to Endurance for being a diplodicus (it has the "incredible constitution" feat for being a diplodicus), so giant dinosaur HP tops off at 105.
How do you kill something with DR 20 (after worn armor) and HP over 100? Well, I'm okay with diplodicuses being super hard to kill because that's sort of their niche, mechanically. But there are mainly three ways to go about killing giant dinosaurs in general. Number one, find a way to ignore that DR. Trikes and Raptor Knights alike can ignore DR while charging. Number two, find a way to do damage every round. This is a sub-category of number one, in that DoT ignores DR. Rending attacks from allosaurs or from flinging raptors at the problem until one of them crits, or poison from trikes or lances, will bleed the diplodicus for 10% of its HP each round (just move the decimal of its max HP over by one, there's your DoT). Number three, just be a t-rex and deal a preposterously large 4d12+21 damage, or 47 on average. A rex is still going to require multiple rounds to chew through a fully armored max-health diplodicus, but comparatively fewer than someone who does light damage and relies on 10% DoT to kill them, and certainly less than anything other than a small army of raptor lancers dealing 16 damage on average per strike (2d8+7), even accounting for the fact that they get to ignore armor. Although a trike can deal an average of 30.5 damage per round (3d8+17) and gets to ignore DR on a charge, which comes out to pretty similar to the rex damage, but it also has to be charging every time whereas the rex can close to melee and stay there while biting.
Engineering
This can be used to construct walls and buildings and such, but the material cost and man hours required are far outside the scope of most campaigns and once you actually have that kind of material you probably don't spend your time directly managing projects, instead just overseeing them from afar. But a logistics level character who personally directs work crews in the construction of the Taj Mahal should hopefully be possible.
The main purpose of this skill, though, is to rig up the load on a giant dinosaur so as to reduce the weight. While rigging up a hypothetical load of goods (meaning, this can be done before actually purchasing said goods) you can make an Engineering roll to distribute them such that your giant dinosaur can carry more than it ordinarily would. The base check is at DC 10 for a 10% increase in carrying capacity, and an additional 10% at every 5 points higher. Each load must be rolled for separately, as this is the skill of expertly distributing weight based on how it will move with the dinosaur's stride and so on, not just making a harness that helps in general.
A giant dinosaur harness is a thing you can craft with this skill, though (you can also just buy one). It requires a DC 15 check and gives you a +1 bonus to this skill. On a DC 20, you've crafted a masterwork harness that gives you a +2. The harness obviously only helps if it is actually on the giant dinosaur, and you cannot use a harness for one type of dinosaur on another. A masterwork harness is custom-fit for a specific giant dinosaur and provides only a +1 when used on another dinosaur, even one of the same species. Instead of crafting a normal harness, you can try to craft an adjustable harness. This increases the DC by 5, but allows the harness to be transferred to dinosaurs of other species. A masterwork adjustable harness provides a +2 bonus for all dinosaurs of any species, not just the one it was made for.
Engineering can also be used to craft locks, in which case it is a DC 10 to make a lock with a DC 10 to open, a DC 15 to make a 15, and so on up to DC 25.
Finance
Persuasion covers haggling for good prices. This skill is about making the numbers on a sheet add up (considering renaming it to "accounting"). It allows you to decrease the loss of money and food by keeping careful track to make sure none of the money goes missing and carefully rationing the food. At the end of each week when these things are marked off, you can roll a Finance check at DC 15 to decrease the total amount lost by 10% (as with most things of this nature, just move the chop the last number off the total and that's how much you decrease it by). For every 5 points you exceed the DC, you increase the amount saved by another 10%.
Medicine
This skill covers human medical treatment. Treating dinosaurs uses the same system, but requires you to use whichever is lower of your Medicine or Animal Handling skill. Ordinarily when injured you recover 10% of your health each week of rest (as with DoT, just move the chop the last number off of your max health and that's how much you recover per week). A DC 15 check allows you to speed the healing of another by an additional 10% of their max health per week, and 10% again for each 5 points you beat the DC by. If you fail the DC by 5 or more, you accidentally make things worse and nullify the weekly healing. For each additional 5 points you fail the DC, you cause 10% damage instead. If you're treating yourself, the DC is increased by 5.
You can also roll Medicine to treat poisons and disease. A doctor can roll their Medicine to save on behalf of their patient against the poison's or disease's DC, and the patient can take the higher of the doctor's Medicine check or their own Endurance check.
Occult
This covers a general knowledge of both religion and magic, because those are the same thing. Since I haven't yet decided how prevalent I want magic to be, the utility of this skill is still pretty up in the air, but you definitely roll it as part of your spells, so Shamans and Warlocks definitely want it in spades. Not sure if it has any use outside of that. I am considering the possibility that anyone should be able to cast cantrips just by rolling high enough on this skill.
Intimidate
If you succeed on an opposed Intimidate vs. Willpower check, an opponent will grant favors as though they were one step higher on the attitude chart than they actually are and take a -2 morale penalty to opposing you. For every 5 points you beat their Willpower, they take an additional -1 morale penalty to all skill rolls opposing you and shift one more step up the attitude chart. Just like Persuasion, the attitude shift is not persistent, and neither is the penalty.
Investigate
Investigation covers searching for things, catching on to lies, seeing through disguises, discovering hidden doors or traps, and so on.
Larceny
Larceny is for picking locks and pickpocketing. Pickpocketing is a roll against the target's Perception while locks have DCs that range from 10 for cheap, simple locks on up to 25 for masterwork locks. Lock technology is lagging behind lockpicking skill by quite a bit, which is why even an apprentice larcenist can pick locks up to DC 20 if they're willing to pour half an hour into it by taking 20. The dream is that someone will notice the break-in before that happens. DC 25 locks are valuable because they require at least two of exceptional talent, deft skill, and a good set of tools to get inside.
Perception
Perception is used to spot things rapidly, whereas Investigation is used to search for them. As such, Perception is mostly just a save vs. pickpocketing and ambushes.
Perform
I haven't figured out how much a coin is actually worth or what things are priced at, so I have no idea how to properly price the perform skill. I would also like there to be a way to increase the payout per person by having lots of people perform together so that an alarmingly badass theater troupe is a supported concept, even if it's not a focus. But right now I have zero actual rules for this skill, just notes on what outputs I want from it.
Persuasion
Persuasion is used to make people your friends and inspire them to greatness. Persuasion can be used to haggle, in which case it is an opposed check. For every five points you beat the opponent, you get a 10% discount, and for every five points you lose, you get a 10% price hike. You can still choose to walk away completely after failing to haggle for a good price, but you can't try to haggle again. You can't take 10 on haggling, but if there are at least 20 different merchants selling the item you're looking for (which will typically only happen if you're looking for something fairly common and are in a major market) you can take 20.
Persuasion can also be used to improve someone's attitude towards you. You roll Persuasion opposed to their Willpower and if you beat their roll, their attitude improves by one step for the purposes of whatever request you're making on them. For every 5 points you beat their roll, you improve an additional step. For every 5 points you fail, you go down a step. To reiterate, this only applies to the specific request you are making of them right now (including tiny variations of this, no cheating by asking for 200 gold, then asking for 201 gold, then asking for 202 until you get lucky). If you need to convince your friend to make a really risky investment in your caravan and you accidentally imply that their wife is hideous, their business is doomed to failure, and their only hope of having any success is to just give their money to you and let you handle things, they might get angry and throw you out of their house but they will probably not permanently become your sworn enemy.
What attitude you're at with NPCs by default, how to permanently shift that attitude, what attitude is required for any given favor and how many favors are required to shift you from one attitude to another, etc. etc. are all completely MTP right now. I am open to suggestions. Diplomacy is an old bugbear and this is a game that actually revolves quite a bit around negotiations both on the merchant level and the international relations level at different points, so I am totally willing to stuff anything mechanically sound in here, though I am not super hopeful about getting results.
Poisons
A poison will usually cause a debuff to all skill checks, 10% DoT (just chop the last digit off of your HP total and that's the damage per round) until they make the save, or in one very rare case, instant death. At some point I will have a list of poisons which have separate DCs for properly identifying and concocting poisons. The only DC I have right now is that it's a DC 10 to safely apply poisons to a weapon and outside of combat you're expected to take 10 and succeed automatically. This normally takes a full round action, but you can do it as a standard action at DC 15, as a move at DC 20, and a swift at DC 25. You must declare what sort of action you're using before applying the poison, and if you fail the DC, the poison is successfully applied but you have accidentally poisoned yourself.
The majority of poisons are either fast-acting fatal poisons that deal damage over time each round until you make the save or slow-acting sickness-inducing poisons that cause a persistent debuff which can be saved against using Endurance once immediately, then again at the end of the day, and after that only on a weekly basis. A very rare poison immediately kills anyone who fails the save. I'm reconsidering whether this last one should exist. While the idea is very much that either one specific boss enemy or one specific party member will have a single dose, my fear is that if the enemy uses it then it will come off as anti-climactic and if the party gets their hands on it they'll never use it for fear of needing it more later.
Stealth
Stealth is rolled opposed to Perception in order to be hidden. It's a -10 penalty to hide from someone who already knows where you are, but it can happen. Someone does count as knowing where you are if you attack them, whether you hit or miss, but does not count as knowing where you are if you #1 break line of sight and #2 can move at least one square without re-entering line of sight. If someone is being flanked by at least two people neither of whom is you, they don't count as knowing where you are for purposes of stealth checks even if they have you in line of sight, although they can still attack you on their turn (unless you successfully hide).
Situational penalties exist and go all the way up to -10 (potentially on top of the penalty for someone knowing where you are already), which can render hiding from anyone but the blind near impossible, but it is still only near impossible and players are entitled to give it a shot even if the guards are staring right at them in a featureless, perfectly lit corridor.
Survival
Survival can be used to track people based on the terrain. It's a DC 10 check to track them through mud, sand, or snow, a DC 15 check to track them through grasslands or forests, a DC 20 check to track them through mountains, and a DC 25 check to track them through a river or a city. Someone who's trying to avoid being tracked can also roll Survival opposed to the person tracking them. If you're in hard-to-track terrain already, this does mean that going out of your way to hide your tracks will probably only make them more obvious. Whether you're relying on a static DC or rolling to set it, you take a -2 penalty for every four creatures in your party. Every size category larger than medium makes a creature count double, and every size category smaller makes them count half.
You can also use Survival to hunt, which decreases the food required by an amount I haven't determined because I am still working on the food consumption system, and to find shelter, which relies on a system for surviving harsh environments that I also haven't figured out yet.
Willpower
Willpower is used as a save against social and magical effects, and is also used by Warlocks to prevent them from being burnt up by their Backlash.
This is the kind of neat and original idea that could be a huge success on a well managed kickstarter.
Just saying.
Just saying.
The traditional playstyle is, above all else, the style of playing all games the same way, supported by the ambiguity and lack of procedure in the traditional game text. - Eero Tuovinen
Without a direct combat use for intimidate, is it really necessary to separate it from Persuade?
I think you could just make "intimidating" a modal state for Persuade where you're getting some bonus in exchange for a short term effect and attitude swing or something similar.
Also, I think your best bet for persuasion is to make caravan negotiations a mini-game that is separate from the standard diplomacy interface. It might have input points for persuasion, finance, animal handling, blacksmithing and possibly engineering, and you can toss a few specific class abilities at it from each class to keep everyone involved.
That doesn't entirely solve the diplomacy problem, and it creates a bunch more work, but it does ensure you have functional systems for the two biggest things the game will be about doing.
I think you could just make "intimidating" a modal state for Persuade where you're getting some bonus in exchange for a short term effect and attitude swing or something similar.
Also, I think your best bet for persuasion is to make caravan negotiations a mini-game that is separate from the standard diplomacy interface. It might have input points for persuasion, finance, animal handling, blacksmithing and possibly engineering, and you can toss a few specific class abilities at it from each class to keep everyone involved.
That doesn't entirely solve the diplomacy problem, and it creates a bunch more work, but it does ensure you have functional systems for the two biggest things the game will be about doing.
I've considered having Intimidate and Persuade function as the same skill. The reason they're not in this draft is mainly because my current inability to properly model longterm interactions is crippling what should be the main distinction between threatening and charming someone, in that threatening someone is probably easier because you are player characters and therefore very scary, but that's going to have bad consequences for you in the longterm. Also, Combat and Acrobatics are skills used to determine your to-hit and armor class, so decreasing those is definitely a combat application, though in order to keep the Shaman king of debuffs it's not going to be much of a combat action.
I also don't want to dump too much into the caravan negotiations thing. While every campaign is expected to have some kind of dinosaur caravan at its heart, for some people they are a mercenary caravan fighting wars while others are shipping in supplies from the edge of civilization to expand the frontier and lay claim to valuable territory and only some players are taking valuable things from one center of civilization where they are abundant through some dangerous wilderness to another center of civilization where they are scarce. While being profitable is key to just about every campaign, being profitable via buying low and selling high is only one means of accomplishing that.
I am considering changing the way appraisal works for the Blacksmithing, Animal Handling, and Poisons skills. Instead of the GM rolling some dice on a system I haven't worked out yet to generate wares which you then inspect, appraisal should just allow you to make a check against a DC set by a chart that compares what you're looking for to the size of the town you're currently in. So looking for a normal sword in a small town might be DC 15 while looking for a masterwork in the same town would be DC 20. Preferably the GM makes this roll and an opposed Deception roll from a merchant in secret. If the merchant wins, then the GM tells the player he's found something when in fact he has found something of one level lower which the merchant is merely claiming to be exceptional. Also I think I'm going to try and come up with some quality tags that can be attached to weapons and armor, with masterwork weapons having a positive quality, common weapons having a positive and a negative quality, and shoddy weapons having only a negative quality.
Dinosaurs will definitely have this in the form of a list of feats which they can have a certain number of based on their quality, probably from one to three, in addition to any feats they get automatically based on being a diplodicus or tyrannosaurus or whatever. Then you can have +5 to the DC to finding a dino with a specific quality and another +5 for every additional specific quality, to find a dino with at least two qualities, another +5 if it's three, and a +5 if you're looking for a giant dinosaur instead of a mount or a pet, and another +5 if you need it to be a specific species, with again the base DC set by what town you're in. Small town might start you with a base DC of 15, so finding dinosaurs at all is tricky and means hunting around nearby farms to see if anyone's selling, because the town doesn't even have a dedicated dinosaur merchant. A metropolis with hundreds of thousands or millions of inhabitants will have a base DC of 0, so finding a giant dino of a specific species is practically automatic and finding one with three qualities including one in particular you want is DC 25, very difficult but doable. The DC is lowered by 5 if the place specializes in the kind of good you're looking for, which means hitting a DC 30 in Dinopolis gives you a giant dinosaur of a species of your choice with three qualities each of which is specified by you - basically you get to build exactly what kind of dinosaur you want without making any compromises whatsoever. Good on you for rolling a nat 20 with just about every possible bonus rolling behind you.
I also don't want to dump too much into the caravan negotiations thing. While every campaign is expected to have some kind of dinosaur caravan at its heart, for some people they are a mercenary caravan fighting wars while others are shipping in supplies from the edge of civilization to expand the frontier and lay claim to valuable territory and only some players are taking valuable things from one center of civilization where they are abundant through some dangerous wilderness to another center of civilization where they are scarce. While being profitable is key to just about every campaign, being profitable via buying low and selling high is only one means of accomplishing that.
I am considering changing the way appraisal works for the Blacksmithing, Animal Handling, and Poisons skills. Instead of the GM rolling some dice on a system I haven't worked out yet to generate wares which you then inspect, appraisal should just allow you to make a check against a DC set by a chart that compares what you're looking for to the size of the town you're currently in. So looking for a normal sword in a small town might be DC 15 while looking for a masterwork in the same town would be DC 20. Preferably the GM makes this roll and an opposed Deception roll from a merchant in secret. If the merchant wins, then the GM tells the player he's found something when in fact he has found something of one level lower which the merchant is merely claiming to be exceptional. Also I think I'm going to try and come up with some quality tags that can be attached to weapons and armor, with masterwork weapons having a positive quality, common weapons having a positive and a negative quality, and shoddy weapons having only a negative quality.
Dinosaurs will definitely have this in the form of a list of feats which they can have a certain number of based on their quality, probably from one to three, in addition to any feats they get automatically based on being a diplodicus or tyrannosaurus or whatever. Then you can have +5 to the DC to finding a dino with a specific quality and another +5 for every additional specific quality, to find a dino with at least two qualities, another +5 if it's three, and a +5 if you're looking for a giant dinosaur instead of a mount or a pet, and another +5 if you need it to be a specific species, with again the base DC set by what town you're in. Small town might start you with a base DC of 15, so finding dinosaurs at all is tricky and means hunting around nearby farms to see if anyone's selling, because the town doesn't even have a dedicated dinosaur merchant. A metropolis with hundreds of thousands or millions of inhabitants will have a base DC of 0, so finding a giant dino of a specific species is practically automatic and finding one with three qualities including one in particular you want is DC 25, very difficult but doable. The DC is lowered by 5 if the place specializes in the kind of good you're looking for, which means hitting a DC 30 in Dinopolis gives you a giant dinosaur of a species of your choice with three qualities each of which is specified by you - basically you get to build exactly what kind of dinosaur you want without making any compromises whatsoever. Good on you for rolling a nat 20 with just about every possible bonus rolling behind you.
Last edited by Chamomile on Sat Jun 20, 2015 1:49 am, edited 1 time in total.
Been thinking about chain and plate armor and have decided how to work them into the game as possible options while still keeping the general aesthetic of the game decisively pre-medieval. A chain shirt provides DR 4, a chain jacket DR 5, and a chain hauberk DR 6, equal to scale, hoplite, and lorica armor respectively, but their armor check penalty is more forgiving. In order to find chain armor you require an additional 10 on the DC when rolling Blacksmithing to look for goods. So finding chainmail at all in a small town requires a DC 25 check, finding masterwork requires DC 30. It crops up now and again from when some caravan gets ambushed by bandits, a chainmail-clad warrior flees the scene of the battle and gets picked off by wild raptors two days later, and then one of the locals stumbles across the remains including mostly-intact chain. But only if you're lucky and you know where to look.
You can make chainmail yourself and it is actually cheaper than making equivalent standard armors, but it requires masterwork tools and a blacksmith who already knows how to make it to instruct you. Alternatively, if you are at least journeyman-level Blacksmithing skill, and that you have had at some point a piece of chainmail to reverse-engineer. Alternatively to that, if you have master-level Blacksmithing all that's required is that you be familiar with the concept of chainmail. You don't have to actually have any in your workshop, but you do have to have seen it up close for at least a few moments. Staring at an enemy wearing it during a parley counts, but fighting him doesn't, because you've got other things on your mind in a fight.
Player characters are usually well-traveled and can reasonably declare that they've had such a passing encounter with chainmail before, even if they weren't master-level smiths at the time and couldn't analyze its construction. They have the knowledge now to make use of the memory. The main point of all these requirements is not to prevent PCs from making chainmail if they want to, but to explain why it remains scarce. It's a trade secret, apprentices don't have a prayer of getting it right without being instructed directly by a smith who knows how to make it, journeymen need a working example in their workshop continuously during the smithing process to work off of, and chainmail is rare enough that neither of these happen very often, so chainmail is primarily the realm of masters. Even then, few masters travel the world as much as player characters, so the majority of them don't have the direct experience necessary to reverse engineer it. Add to that the fact that you require masterwork tools and that an NPC smith with both of those but no other bonuses will only reach a +6 on the roll and create shoddy work or total failures as often as proper chain or masterwork and chain is scarce enough to drive the prices far above those of equivalent DR armors despite having a cheaper material cost.
I'm also considering having spare parts be used to maintain armor. Every so often you need to check off some spare parts to repair armor or else it degrades one step from masterwork to standard, standard to shoddy, or from shoddy to completely destroyed. I'm worried this might be a bit too finnicky, though this game already tracks weekly food and monetary expenditures, so adding in one more thing you need to keep in stock wouldn't be a huge difference. The cost of the parts needed to keep your armor repaired is based off the material costs of forging it, so chain is cheaper and more reliable so long as you've got someone who can actually forge the stuff. No roll is required to repair, but you do have to be at least apprentice-level to repair armor in general and familiar with the secrets of chainmail to repair chain specifically.
So chain is an armor option that's moderately superior to more standard armor and requires a moderate amount of luck or character resources to make/find. Now let's talk about plate. Because plate armor turns people into walking tanks and will turn a brachiosaurus into a god, and that is actually really cool but if it's going to rub shoulders with a world where your standard heavy infantry is still wearing Persian scale armor or Greek cuirasses, there needs to be some steep entry requirements that prevent an otherwise very pre-medieval setting from ever looking like Arthurian romance. So plate armor requires masterwork tools. You also have to be a master-level blacksmith to even try. The crafting DC is 5 higher because all plate counts as masterwork, which also means that making masterwork plate is impossible. The costs are steep for DR 7 half-plate and obscene for DR 8 full-plate. The DC for finding them is a total of twenty points higher (including the five point increase for it being masterwork automatically), which makes it basically impossible outside of major cities (who have a base DC of 0 and therefore a DC of 20 for finding plate armor) and even then not easy.
You can make chainmail yourself and it is actually cheaper than making equivalent standard armors, but it requires masterwork tools and a blacksmith who already knows how to make it to instruct you. Alternatively, if you are at least journeyman-level Blacksmithing skill, and that you have had at some point a piece of chainmail to reverse-engineer. Alternatively to that, if you have master-level Blacksmithing all that's required is that you be familiar with the concept of chainmail. You don't have to actually have any in your workshop, but you do have to have seen it up close for at least a few moments. Staring at an enemy wearing it during a parley counts, but fighting him doesn't, because you've got other things on your mind in a fight.
Player characters are usually well-traveled and can reasonably declare that they've had such a passing encounter with chainmail before, even if they weren't master-level smiths at the time and couldn't analyze its construction. They have the knowledge now to make use of the memory. The main point of all these requirements is not to prevent PCs from making chainmail if they want to, but to explain why it remains scarce. It's a trade secret, apprentices don't have a prayer of getting it right without being instructed directly by a smith who knows how to make it, journeymen need a working example in their workshop continuously during the smithing process to work off of, and chainmail is rare enough that neither of these happen very often, so chainmail is primarily the realm of masters. Even then, few masters travel the world as much as player characters, so the majority of them don't have the direct experience necessary to reverse engineer it. Add to that the fact that you require masterwork tools and that an NPC smith with both of those but no other bonuses will only reach a +6 on the roll and create shoddy work or total failures as often as proper chain or masterwork and chain is scarce enough to drive the prices far above those of equivalent DR armors despite having a cheaper material cost.
I'm also considering having spare parts be used to maintain armor. Every so often you need to check off some spare parts to repair armor or else it degrades one step from masterwork to standard, standard to shoddy, or from shoddy to completely destroyed. I'm worried this might be a bit too finnicky, though this game already tracks weekly food and monetary expenditures, so adding in one more thing you need to keep in stock wouldn't be a huge difference. The cost of the parts needed to keep your armor repaired is based off the material costs of forging it, so chain is cheaper and more reliable so long as you've got someone who can actually forge the stuff. No roll is required to repair, but you do have to be at least apprentice-level to repair armor in general and familiar with the secrets of chainmail to repair chain specifically.
So chain is an armor option that's moderately superior to more standard armor and requires a moderate amount of luck or character resources to make/find. Now let's talk about plate. Because plate armor turns people into walking tanks and will turn a brachiosaurus into a god, and that is actually really cool but if it's going to rub shoulders with a world where your standard heavy infantry is still wearing Persian scale armor or Greek cuirasses, there needs to be some steep entry requirements that prevent an otherwise very pre-medieval setting from ever looking like Arthurian romance. So plate armor requires masterwork tools. You also have to be a master-level blacksmith to even try. The crafting DC is 5 higher because all plate counts as masterwork, which also means that making masterwork plate is impossible. The costs are steep for DR 7 half-plate and obscene for DR 8 full-plate. The DC for finding them is a total of twenty points higher (including the five point increase for it being masterwork automatically), which makes it basically impossible outside of major cities (who have a base DC of 0 and therefore a DC of 20 for finding plate armor) and even then not easy.
So let's work out the remaining holes in the trade system. Towns can have one or more abundances and scarcities. When a resource is abundant, you get a +5 to haggling checks to buy it and a -5 to sell it. When it is scarce, the reverse. Resources are pretty broad: Food, construction material, blacksmithing goods, dinosaurs, and luxuries. Each resource can have a subtype, which is identical functionally but counts as a different resource for purpose of abundance or scarcity, meaning that you can have a trade route that exchanges gold for wine even though those are both luxuries. Some subtypes are marked as inferior, and you can only get a bonus for those if the city you are in not only has a scarcity of that resource type, but also no trade route to a city with a standard quality good. For example, tin goods are inferior to the standard blacksmithing goods, so you only get a bonus to selling tin goods at cities that have not only a blacksmithing goods scarcity but also no trade routes to standard quality blacksmithing goods. Other subtypes are superior. The lost city of Atlantis has orichalcum, for example. You gain a +5 to haggling checks to sell a superior good anywhere that doesn't have that good, even if they have no scarcity, and that stacks with the bonus if they do have a scarcity. Superior goods also drive out standard ones just like standard drives out inferior, so you get no bonus from selling standard goods even if there's a scarcity if that city has a trade route with superior goods.
The unit of carrying capacity is the half-stone, which is seven pounds. That's the weight of the average sword and the smallest weight that PCs should care to track, and it also fits nicely into the 21 pounds of food that a human eats in a week (on the trail when packing light, four pounds is more common when every side dish isn't eating into your profit margins).
Now, D&D has an enormously long list of gear and almost all of it is pretty much useless. Seriously I think this thing may have been assembled by referencing the newer and more complex versions of Oregon Trail, which is a fine starting point but since D&D isn't a computer game they really should've consolidated some of these options. And that's what we're going to do.
Armor: Padded armor weighs half a stone, leather weighs one, heavy leather weighs one and a half, scale weighs two and a half, hoplite weighs three and a half, and and lorica segmentata weighs two and a half. Armor parts, a collection of leather strips and metal scraps that can be used to patch up damaged or degraded armor, weigh half a stone for ten. Armor needs to be repaired at the end of the month or it will degrade from masterwork to standard, from standard to shoddy, or from shoddy to being totally destroyed. Padded armor requires no parts to maintain, but still takes a DC 10 check (if you're trained at all, you can take 10). Leather takes one part per month to maintain, heavy leather takes two, and both of them require a DC 12 check to maintain. Scale and hoplite armor takes four parts and requires a DC 15 check. Finnicky lorica segmentata requires five parts and a DC 18 check to maintain.
Chain shirts weigh one stone, require two parts, and a DC 15 check to maintain. Chain jackets weigh two stone, require three parts, and the same DC 15 check. Chain hauberks weigh four stone, require four parts, and still only take a DC 15 check. Though much heavier than the segmentata lorica that provide the same protection, a hauberk is easier to maintain and slightly less costly in terms of parts. I really hope I'm not getting that completely wrong. Plate armor weighs five and a half stone, requires seven parts and a DC 20 check to maintain.
Padded and leather armor inflict no penalty to Acrobatics. Heavy leather, scale, and segmentata inflict a -1. Hoplite armor inflicts a -2.
Backpack: Backpacks give you a bonus to Endurance for purposes of how much weight you can carry. A medium creature can carry one and a half stone ordinarily, plus additional stone equal to half their Endurance bonus. This means that without any kind of backpack, someone can only carry one stone. A human-size backpack weighs less than half a stone and thus doesn't count against your weight limit.
Large size creatures like utahraptor can carry seven stone, and additional stone equal to their Endurance bonus times two. This means a utahraptor without a saddle (which serves as a backpack for them) can carry only three stone, seven minus two from no tools and minus two due to the -1 Endurance penalty inflicted by their chicken legs. With a standard saddle they can carry only seven, or 98 pounds, not quite enough to carry a full grown human, which is why riding raptors require endurance training. With a standard saddle and master training, the maximum weight a raptor can carry is 15 stone, 210 pounds, enough for an average human plus weapons and light armor, but most riding raptors can only carry 11 stone, barely enough to carry a rider at all, which is why lightweight riders are prized for cavalry and heavily armored raptor riders are very rare. Large-size hadrosaurs like telmatosaurus are quadrupedal instead of chicken-legged, giving them a bonus where utahraptor has a penalty and bringing the average telmatosaurs carrying capacity up to 15 and the maximum to 19 (without the benefit of masterwork saddles).
A giant dinosaur can carry a colossal 75 stone by default, which sounds enormous but is actually paltry compared to their absurdly heavy body weight (tyrannosaurus is one of the lightest giant dinosaurs around and weighs in at 1420 stone - diplodocus weighs about twice as much). The square-cube law is a harsh mistress. In any case, giant dinosaurs carry 25 stone extra per point of Endurance bonus. With journeyman endurance, a +1 saddle, and its chicken leg penalty, a tyrannosaur can carry 150 stone. The average person is ten stone, and the average party member is likely carrying a stone of weapons, two in armor, and maybe two more in various odds and ends for fifteen stone total. A tyrannosaur saddle weighs fifteen stone, a full party of six weighs ninety, leaving only 45 stone left over, or just a few hundred pounds. A triceratops with the same training but a quadruped bonus instead of chicken leg penalty and the +1 Endurance bonus for being a triceratops gets 200 stone. After its twenty stone saddle and 90 stone of party, it has 90 stone left over, double the tyrannosaur's load. The mighty diplodocus gets a +2 diplodocus bonus where the trike gets a +1, and additionally are frequently trained to master level endurance since that is their primary purpose for a total of 275 stone carrying capacity. After saddle and party, they can carry 155 stone. Depending on exactly how you count it, that's just over or just under a ton, and an extra 15 stone for every 5 points on the Engineering check to place the load for maximum carrying capacity.
Supergiants like brachiosaurus carry 90 stone by default and an additional 30 stone per Endurance point. Since they are all giant sauropods with a +2 inherent Endurance bonus and a +1 to Endurance for purposes of carrying capacity from being quadrupeds, the actual default is 150 stone without a harness and 210 with a harness. At journeyman endurance level, the brachiosaurus is already pulling near the diplodocus maximum at 270, and at master can carry 330 stone, over two tons. Brachiosaurus is rubbing right up against the point of diminishing returns, carrying only about 4% of its total body weight under the very best of circumstances.
And note to self: Engineering rolls can't affect the weight of the party. They can't be buried in the saddlebags in order to minimize weight shifting. They have to be on top, and they'll be moving around and adjusting their position a bit while they're there.
Blacksmith Kit: These grant a bonus to the Blacksmithing skill and buck the standard trend of bundling all necessary tools into one pack instead of breaking things up. Technically this does include a forging hammer, a striking hammer, ball peen, tongs, etc. etc. What it does not include is an anvil. Without anvil, a standard kit is considered shoddy and a masterwork is considered standard. You can still find a flat-ish rock and that'll do, but you'll really want a proper, ungodly heavy anvil for best results. The kit on its own weighs one and a half stone. A traveler's anvil weighs seven stone and can give a full bonus for repair, forging weapon blades and heads, and for forging tools. If you want to get your full bonus forging armor, you'll need a proper shop anvil weighing thirteen stone. Blacksmiths doing really heavy duty work, usually architectural work, can have anvils weighing as much as 36 stone, but if you're smithing for infrastructure you don't really need to haul the thing around anyway.
Cart/Wagon: A cart increases the carrying capacity of whoever's dragging it to five times its original amount. A small cart (handpulled) can carry up to 36 stone, a large one (usually pulled by a pachycephalosaurus) up to 72, a small wagon up to 215 (pulled by a large-sized hadrosaur like telmatosaurus), a large one up to 860 (pulled by a parasaruolophus or a triceratops), and a giant wagon up to 2750 (pulled by either one or a pair of sauropods). These do not respond to rough terrain well at all, so while hadrosaur-drawn wagon trains are popular for safe, stable trade routes, the party is probably only going to have use for these if they are in a military campaign and the heart of civilization is just as dangerous (if not more) as the wilderness.
Climbing Kit: Grants a bonus to Acrobatics checks made to climb things. Weighs half a stone.
Disguise Kit: Grants a bonus to Deception checks made to disguise. Weighs half a stone.
Healer's Kit: Grants a bonus to Medicine checks. Weighs half a stone.
Musical Instrument: Grants a bonus to Perform checks. By default weighs half a stone, but can weigh up to two stone depending on the instrument.
Saddle: This grants a bonus to Animal Handling checks for any dinosaur wearing it and also counts as a backpack for the animal. It weighs one stone for a large mount, and for giant dinosaurs it varies based on the type. A tyrannosaur saddle is fifteen stone, a triceratops saddle is twenty, and a diplodocus saddle is thirty. A brachiosaurus saddle is 45 stone.
Scribe's Kit: Contains two wax tablets, a stylus, and a candle. Upon filling up the second tablet, the candle is used to heat the wax of the first and melt it smooth. Grants a +1 bonus to finance and engineering.
Shields: Bucklers provide a +1 parry bonus to your acrobatics, or +2 if masterwork. They weigh half a stone. A hoplon grants a +2 or +3 if masterwork, but grants a -2 penalty to Acrobatics. This penalty does not stack with the penalties granted by armor. A hoplon weighs one and a half stone. Like the hoplon, the tower shield grants a +2 parry bonus or +3 if masterwork, but has only a -1 penalty to Acrobatics. The tower shield weighs one stone, but it requires one part and a DC 12 check. Other shields are extremely solid and do not degrade over time.
Spell Components: Contains various charms, incense, and herbs which must be burnt while mantras are chanted and possibly the ashes flung at something. Grants a +1 bonus to occult rolls to cast spells, or a +2 if a full-round action is spent preparing them. There is no masterwork version of this item, just the ability to cast as a full round action for the +2 bonus. If the warlock spends a full-round action casting, he also gets a +5 bonus to the roll against backlash. A pouch that can be used on a single spell weighs half a stone. A chest containing an arbitrarily large number of components weighs fifteen stone.
Thieves' Tools: Principally lockpicks. Grants a bonus to Larceny. Weight is trivial.
Trail Rations: A week's trail rations is one and a half stone. A single half-stone of rations covers two days. Which does mean the seventh day is free, because some asshole made the number of days in a week a prime number. Each dinosaur has a specific daily ration weight required (for the sake of consistency, the seventh day is always free just like with humans, even though many dinosaurs' weekly feed is so vast that it can easily be divided seven ways into even half-stones while keeping rounding errors pretty minimal), which is usually somewhere in the range of one stone daily and six weekly for utahraptor, 30 daily and 180 weekly for tyrannosaurus, 40 daily and 240 weekly for triceratops, 60 daily and 360 weekly for diplodocus, and for supergiants like brachiosaurus 90 daily and 540 weekly.
You can make a Survival check to reduce the number of rations required per week. The DC is 5 in tropical or sub-tropical jungles, 10 in swamps, mountains or grasslands, and 15 in deserts or tundras. If you meet the DC, you hunt/gather three stone worth of food. For every two points you exceed the DC, you hunt/gather an additional three stone. So a skilled hunter can feed a party of six (counting himself) on a roll of 15 in a jungle, which means he can do so by taking 10 if he's good at it. Jungles and swamps often have a high density of poison wildlife, however, and specific jungles may require a separate Survival roll as a save against accidentally hunting something poisonous. If you fail, you and anyone else you're feeding are poisoned and must soak the poison with Endurance. If you don't have a traveler's kit but you do have a bow, the bow bonus can be used for hunting food, though it doesn't help with shelter. If you're in a DC 5 or 10 area, you can take a utahraptor hunting and increase the amount of food you bring in to its weekly consumption instead of yours. If you're in a DC 5 area, you can take an allosaurus or tyrannosaurus hunting and again you get an amount of food equal to their weekly consumption instead of yours. Herbivores can be turned out to graze (or browse, in the case of sauropods, which is grazing but with trees instead of grass) and halve or completely eliminate their food requirements with the same requirements: Large creatures must be in a DC 5 or 10 area, and giant dinosaurs must be in DC 5 areas. Additionally, grazing herbivores move two-thirds as fast (if eliminating half their food consumption) or one-third as fast (if eliminating it entirely). Unlike with hunting, a human party can't take a cut out of the grazing herbivores' food.
Traveler's Kit: Includes tent, bedroll, flint, one of those cooking kits with the pots and mugs that fit inside one another (what do they call those things anyway?), fishing line/hooks, the whole shebang. We do not bother tracking all of these finnicky details separately. Collectively they weigh two stone. They grant a +1 to Survival checks to find food and shelter. They also allow you to take 10 on finding shelter. The DC to find shelter in grasslands, jungles, forests, and anywhere else that doesn't have an environment that is actively hostile or uncomfortable is 10, so unless you have penalties of at least -2 for some reason having one of these lets you just not care about shelter unless you are in a swamp or there's a lot of snow (whether from tundra, altitude, or season). In this case the DC is 15 and the tent still lets you auto-succeed so long as you have master survival. A journeyman survival is enough if the kit is masterwork and you have a +1 inherent bonus provided by a feat.
Traveler's Kit Addendum: You can fit more than one person into a tent. If you've ever been on an overnight hiking trip with lazy fifteen-year olds, you've seen them pack themselves into a tent like sardines to reduce the amount of weight they have to haul around come sunrise. This addendum kit provides only the small handful of things you absolutely need for yourself and assumes you share common resources like tents and fishing line with someone carrying the main kit. The addendum weighs only half a stone but counts as a full traveler's kit so long as someone in your caravan has a full traveler's kit. A single traveler's kit can support up to five addendum kits.
Venomier's Kit: Gives a bonus to Poison Use. Weighs half a stone.
Weapons: Daggers, hatchets, sickles, clubs, are all less than a stone (though players are kindly asked not to abuse the system by carrying twelve of each). Spears, swords, maces, warhammers, waraxes, are all half a stone. Greataxes, greatswords, lances, pikes are all one stone. Slings and bows weigh less than half a stone themselves, but along with their ammo they weigh half a stone. While arrows are fairly reusable, they do have to be replaced semi-regularly, at a cost of two parts per month and a DC 12 blacksmithing check. Slings fire lead slugs which cost one part per month (the actual metal in a slug is not much different from the amount in an arrowhead, but slingers can make up some of their ammo from smooth stones they happen to find) and only a DC 10 blacksmithing check.
Then in addition to all that you have goods. Which are all sold in half-stone units and mostly important only for the prices you can sell them at if you're merchanting. I'm going to assign actual costs to all these things next, and then see if I can figure out a small sub-system for the "badass theater troupe" angle. I'll also at some point need a chase system and a stealth system, at which point I think I'll be done with basic rules and will be ready to start hammering out full statblocks for dinosaurs and mooks.
The unit of carrying capacity is the half-stone, which is seven pounds. That's the weight of the average sword and the smallest weight that PCs should care to track, and it also fits nicely into the 21 pounds of food that a human eats in a week (on the trail when packing light, four pounds is more common when every side dish isn't eating into your profit margins).
Now, D&D has an enormously long list of gear and almost all of it is pretty much useless. Seriously I think this thing may have been assembled by referencing the newer and more complex versions of Oregon Trail, which is a fine starting point but since D&D isn't a computer game they really should've consolidated some of these options. And that's what we're going to do.
Armor: Padded armor weighs half a stone, leather weighs one, heavy leather weighs one and a half, scale weighs two and a half, hoplite weighs three and a half, and and lorica segmentata weighs two and a half. Armor parts, a collection of leather strips and metal scraps that can be used to patch up damaged or degraded armor, weigh half a stone for ten. Armor needs to be repaired at the end of the month or it will degrade from masterwork to standard, from standard to shoddy, or from shoddy to being totally destroyed. Padded armor requires no parts to maintain, but still takes a DC 10 check (if you're trained at all, you can take 10). Leather takes one part per month to maintain, heavy leather takes two, and both of them require a DC 12 check to maintain. Scale and hoplite armor takes four parts and requires a DC 15 check. Finnicky lorica segmentata requires five parts and a DC 18 check to maintain.
Chain shirts weigh one stone, require two parts, and a DC 15 check to maintain. Chain jackets weigh two stone, require three parts, and the same DC 15 check. Chain hauberks weigh four stone, require four parts, and still only take a DC 15 check. Though much heavier than the segmentata lorica that provide the same protection, a hauberk is easier to maintain and slightly less costly in terms of parts. I really hope I'm not getting that completely wrong. Plate armor weighs five and a half stone, requires seven parts and a DC 20 check to maintain.
Padded and leather armor inflict no penalty to Acrobatics. Heavy leather, scale, and segmentata inflict a -1. Hoplite armor inflicts a -2.
Backpack: Backpacks give you a bonus to Endurance for purposes of how much weight you can carry. A medium creature can carry one and a half stone ordinarily, plus additional stone equal to half their Endurance bonus. This means that without any kind of backpack, someone can only carry one stone. A human-size backpack weighs less than half a stone and thus doesn't count against your weight limit.
Large size creatures like utahraptor can carry seven stone, and additional stone equal to their Endurance bonus times two. This means a utahraptor without a saddle (which serves as a backpack for them) can carry only three stone, seven minus two from no tools and minus two due to the -1 Endurance penalty inflicted by their chicken legs. With a standard saddle they can carry only seven, or 98 pounds, not quite enough to carry a full grown human, which is why riding raptors require endurance training. With a standard saddle and master training, the maximum weight a raptor can carry is 15 stone, 210 pounds, enough for an average human plus weapons and light armor, but most riding raptors can only carry 11 stone, barely enough to carry a rider at all, which is why lightweight riders are prized for cavalry and heavily armored raptor riders are very rare. Large-size hadrosaurs like telmatosaurus are quadrupedal instead of chicken-legged, giving them a bonus where utahraptor has a penalty and bringing the average telmatosaurs carrying capacity up to 15 and the maximum to 19 (without the benefit of masterwork saddles).
A giant dinosaur can carry a colossal 75 stone by default, which sounds enormous but is actually paltry compared to their absurdly heavy body weight (tyrannosaurus is one of the lightest giant dinosaurs around and weighs in at 1420 stone - diplodocus weighs about twice as much). The square-cube law is a harsh mistress. In any case, giant dinosaurs carry 25 stone extra per point of Endurance bonus. With journeyman endurance, a +1 saddle, and its chicken leg penalty, a tyrannosaur can carry 150 stone. The average person is ten stone, and the average party member is likely carrying a stone of weapons, two in armor, and maybe two more in various odds and ends for fifteen stone total. A tyrannosaur saddle weighs fifteen stone, a full party of six weighs ninety, leaving only 45 stone left over, or just a few hundred pounds. A triceratops with the same training but a quadruped bonus instead of chicken leg penalty and the +1 Endurance bonus for being a triceratops gets 200 stone. After its twenty stone saddle and 90 stone of party, it has 90 stone left over, double the tyrannosaur's load. The mighty diplodocus gets a +2 diplodocus bonus where the trike gets a +1, and additionally are frequently trained to master level endurance since that is their primary purpose for a total of 275 stone carrying capacity. After saddle and party, they can carry 155 stone. Depending on exactly how you count it, that's just over or just under a ton, and an extra 15 stone for every 5 points on the Engineering check to place the load for maximum carrying capacity.
Supergiants like brachiosaurus carry 90 stone by default and an additional 30 stone per Endurance point. Since they are all giant sauropods with a +2 inherent Endurance bonus and a +1 to Endurance for purposes of carrying capacity from being quadrupeds, the actual default is 150 stone without a harness and 210 with a harness. At journeyman endurance level, the brachiosaurus is already pulling near the diplodocus maximum at 270, and at master can carry 330 stone, over two tons. Brachiosaurus is rubbing right up against the point of diminishing returns, carrying only about 4% of its total body weight under the very best of circumstances.
And note to self: Engineering rolls can't affect the weight of the party. They can't be buried in the saddlebags in order to minimize weight shifting. They have to be on top, and they'll be moving around and adjusting their position a bit while they're there.
Blacksmith Kit: These grant a bonus to the Blacksmithing skill and buck the standard trend of bundling all necessary tools into one pack instead of breaking things up. Technically this does include a forging hammer, a striking hammer, ball peen, tongs, etc. etc. What it does not include is an anvil. Without anvil, a standard kit is considered shoddy and a masterwork is considered standard. You can still find a flat-ish rock and that'll do, but you'll really want a proper, ungodly heavy anvil for best results. The kit on its own weighs one and a half stone. A traveler's anvil weighs seven stone and can give a full bonus for repair, forging weapon blades and heads, and for forging tools. If you want to get your full bonus forging armor, you'll need a proper shop anvil weighing thirteen stone. Blacksmiths doing really heavy duty work, usually architectural work, can have anvils weighing as much as 36 stone, but if you're smithing for infrastructure you don't really need to haul the thing around anyway.
Cart/Wagon: A cart increases the carrying capacity of whoever's dragging it to five times its original amount. A small cart (handpulled) can carry up to 36 stone, a large one (usually pulled by a pachycephalosaurus) up to 72, a small wagon up to 215 (pulled by a large-sized hadrosaur like telmatosaurus), a large one up to 860 (pulled by a parasaruolophus or a triceratops), and a giant wagon up to 2750 (pulled by either one or a pair of sauropods). These do not respond to rough terrain well at all, so while hadrosaur-drawn wagon trains are popular for safe, stable trade routes, the party is probably only going to have use for these if they are in a military campaign and the heart of civilization is just as dangerous (if not more) as the wilderness.
Climbing Kit: Grants a bonus to Acrobatics checks made to climb things. Weighs half a stone.
Disguise Kit: Grants a bonus to Deception checks made to disguise. Weighs half a stone.
Healer's Kit: Grants a bonus to Medicine checks. Weighs half a stone.
Musical Instrument: Grants a bonus to Perform checks. By default weighs half a stone, but can weigh up to two stone depending on the instrument.
Saddle: This grants a bonus to Animal Handling checks for any dinosaur wearing it and also counts as a backpack for the animal. It weighs one stone for a large mount, and for giant dinosaurs it varies based on the type. A tyrannosaur saddle is fifteen stone, a triceratops saddle is twenty, and a diplodocus saddle is thirty. A brachiosaurus saddle is 45 stone.
Scribe's Kit: Contains two wax tablets, a stylus, and a candle. Upon filling up the second tablet, the candle is used to heat the wax of the first and melt it smooth. Grants a +1 bonus to finance and engineering.
Shields: Bucklers provide a +1 parry bonus to your acrobatics, or +2 if masterwork. They weigh half a stone. A hoplon grants a +2 or +3 if masterwork, but grants a -2 penalty to Acrobatics. This penalty does not stack with the penalties granted by armor. A hoplon weighs one and a half stone. Like the hoplon, the tower shield grants a +2 parry bonus or +3 if masterwork, but has only a -1 penalty to Acrobatics. The tower shield weighs one stone, but it requires one part and a DC 12 check. Other shields are extremely solid and do not degrade over time.
Spell Components: Contains various charms, incense, and herbs which must be burnt while mantras are chanted and possibly the ashes flung at something. Grants a +1 bonus to occult rolls to cast spells, or a +2 if a full-round action is spent preparing them. There is no masterwork version of this item, just the ability to cast as a full round action for the +2 bonus. If the warlock spends a full-round action casting, he also gets a +5 bonus to the roll against backlash. A pouch that can be used on a single spell weighs half a stone. A chest containing an arbitrarily large number of components weighs fifteen stone.
Thieves' Tools: Principally lockpicks. Grants a bonus to Larceny. Weight is trivial.
Trail Rations: A week's trail rations is one and a half stone. A single half-stone of rations covers two days. Which does mean the seventh day is free, because some asshole made the number of days in a week a prime number. Each dinosaur has a specific daily ration weight required (for the sake of consistency, the seventh day is always free just like with humans, even though many dinosaurs' weekly feed is so vast that it can easily be divided seven ways into even half-stones while keeping rounding errors pretty minimal), which is usually somewhere in the range of one stone daily and six weekly for utahraptor, 30 daily and 180 weekly for tyrannosaurus, 40 daily and 240 weekly for triceratops, 60 daily and 360 weekly for diplodocus, and for supergiants like brachiosaurus 90 daily and 540 weekly.
You can make a Survival check to reduce the number of rations required per week. The DC is 5 in tropical or sub-tropical jungles, 10 in swamps, mountains or grasslands, and 15 in deserts or tundras. If you meet the DC, you hunt/gather three stone worth of food. For every two points you exceed the DC, you hunt/gather an additional three stone. So a skilled hunter can feed a party of six (counting himself) on a roll of 15 in a jungle, which means he can do so by taking 10 if he's good at it. Jungles and swamps often have a high density of poison wildlife, however, and specific jungles may require a separate Survival roll as a save against accidentally hunting something poisonous. If you fail, you and anyone else you're feeding are poisoned and must soak the poison with Endurance. If you don't have a traveler's kit but you do have a bow, the bow bonus can be used for hunting food, though it doesn't help with shelter. If you're in a DC 5 or 10 area, you can take a utahraptor hunting and increase the amount of food you bring in to its weekly consumption instead of yours. If you're in a DC 5 area, you can take an allosaurus or tyrannosaurus hunting and again you get an amount of food equal to their weekly consumption instead of yours. Herbivores can be turned out to graze (or browse, in the case of sauropods, which is grazing but with trees instead of grass) and halve or completely eliminate their food requirements with the same requirements: Large creatures must be in a DC 5 or 10 area, and giant dinosaurs must be in DC 5 areas. Additionally, grazing herbivores move two-thirds as fast (if eliminating half their food consumption) or one-third as fast (if eliminating it entirely). Unlike with hunting, a human party can't take a cut out of the grazing herbivores' food.
Traveler's Kit: Includes tent, bedroll, flint, one of those cooking kits with the pots and mugs that fit inside one another (what do they call those things anyway?), fishing line/hooks, the whole shebang. We do not bother tracking all of these finnicky details separately. Collectively they weigh two stone. They grant a +1 to Survival checks to find food and shelter. They also allow you to take 10 on finding shelter. The DC to find shelter in grasslands, jungles, forests, and anywhere else that doesn't have an environment that is actively hostile or uncomfortable is 10, so unless you have penalties of at least -2 for some reason having one of these lets you just not care about shelter unless you are in a swamp or there's a lot of snow (whether from tundra, altitude, or season). In this case the DC is 15 and the tent still lets you auto-succeed so long as you have master survival. A journeyman survival is enough if the kit is masterwork and you have a +1 inherent bonus provided by a feat.
Traveler's Kit Addendum: You can fit more than one person into a tent. If you've ever been on an overnight hiking trip with lazy fifteen-year olds, you've seen them pack themselves into a tent like sardines to reduce the amount of weight they have to haul around come sunrise. This addendum kit provides only the small handful of things you absolutely need for yourself and assumes you share common resources like tents and fishing line with someone carrying the main kit. The addendum weighs only half a stone but counts as a full traveler's kit so long as someone in your caravan has a full traveler's kit. A single traveler's kit can support up to five addendum kits.
Venomier's Kit: Gives a bonus to Poison Use. Weighs half a stone.
Weapons: Daggers, hatchets, sickles, clubs, are all less than a stone (though players are kindly asked not to abuse the system by carrying twelve of each). Spears, swords, maces, warhammers, waraxes, are all half a stone. Greataxes, greatswords, lances, pikes are all one stone. Slings and bows weigh less than half a stone themselves, but along with their ammo they weigh half a stone. While arrows are fairly reusable, they do have to be replaced semi-regularly, at a cost of two parts per month and a DC 12 blacksmithing check. Slings fire lead slugs which cost one part per month (the actual metal in a slug is not much different from the amount in an arrowhead, but slingers can make up some of their ammo from smooth stones they happen to find) and only a DC 10 blacksmithing check.
Last edited by Chamomile on Wed Jun 24, 2015 7:48 am, edited 4 times in total.
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momothefiddler
- Knight-Baron
- Posts: 883
- Joined: Sat Feb 22, 2014 10:55 am
- Location: United States
You mention that saddles count as backpacks for dinos, but don't include any backpack endurance bonus in your various load calculations as far as I can see. Nope there it is that's fine. You also state that backpacks do not count toward the load, but explicitly count saddles - is that intentional?
Herbivores are... impossible to take anywhere. A trike can carry like five days of its own food and nothing else. A diplodocus is 4-5. A brachiosaur ~4. That's four days' travel one-way, or two if a return trip is necessary. Half speed for half consumption or 0 speed for 0 consumption don't change this ratio at all. I dunno if this was intentional, but I can't say I see the wandering dino barbarians idea fitting in with making mad dashes from city to city. The bravest of them are all "We'll take our mobile fortress south! But if we don't fins another place to buy dino food in four days we're screwed."
Herbivores are... impossible to take anywhere. A trike can carry like five days of its own food and nothing else. A diplodocus is 4-5. A brachiosaur ~4. That's four days' travel one-way, or two if a return trip is necessary. Half speed for half consumption or 0 speed for 0 consumption don't change this ratio at all. I dunno if this was intentional, but I can't say I see the wandering dino barbarians idea fitting in with making mad dashes from city to city. The bravest of them are all "We'll take our mobile fortress south! But if we don't fins another place to buy dino food in four days we're screwed."
Oh, wow, good catch, I completely forgot to do the math on that one. I like the load limits where they're at, so I've fixed that problem by allowing herbivores to move at 2/3s speed while half-grazing and at 1/3 speed while grazing entirely. So long as you keep to climates that can sustain your mount and you're in no rush, you'll be fed indefinitely.
The comment about packs not weighing anything is for backpacks for medium-size creatures. Larger creatures have heavier packs.
The comment about packs not weighing anything is for backpacks for medium-size creatures. Larger creatures have heavier packs.
Last edited by Chamomile on Tue Jun 23, 2015 10:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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momothefiddler
- Knight-Baron
- Posts: 883
- Joined: Sat Feb 22, 2014 10:55 am
- Location: United States
So I stalled on this for a long time because, while crunching the numbers on the economy, I realized that tyrannosaurs would be hideously expensive. There's just no way to raise a ten ton carnivore and have him cost something other than an order of magnitude more than similarly sized herbivores. When I dusted the project off recently, I realized that I'm not sure this is a problem. While having t-rex as one of the basic options (alongside triceratops and diplodicus) was the original vision, I think it works just as well to have tyrannosaurus rex be the mount of kings, an excruciatingly expensive endgame mount. It deals more damage with a bite attack than anything else could ever hope to, and even if it's not worth it on a coin for damage basis, it's still awesome and people will want one.
So here's the price list:
So here's the price list:
Armor:
-Padded: 30 silver
-Light Leather: 45 silver
-Heavy Leather: 80 silver
-Scale: 120 silver
-Hoplite: 120 gold
-Lorica: 100 gold
-Chain shirt: 50 gold
-Chain jacket: 100 gold
-Chain hauberk: 200 gold
-Plate-and-chain: 620 gold
-Plate armor: 1,000 gold
Backpack: 6 silver
Blacksmith Kit: 75 silver
-Traveler's Anvil: 180 silver
Climbing Kit: 18 silver
Dinosaurs:
-Compsognathus: 375 silver
-Velociraptor: 40 gold
-Deinonychus: 75 gold
-Utahraptor: 2,000 gold
-Telmatosaurus: 400 silver
-Stegosaurus: 1,500 gold
-Triceratops: 2,000 gold
-Tyrannosaurus: 30,000 platinum
-Diplodicus: 6,000 gold
-Brachiosaurus: 2,500 platinum
Disguise Kit: 21 silver
Healer's Kit: 18 silver
Mercenaries:
-Skirmisher: 6 silver per day
-Artillery: 15 silver per day
-Heavy Infantry: 20 silver per day
-Elite Infantry: 45 silver per day
-Raptor Cavalry: 10 gold per day
-Elite Raptor Cavalry: 30 gold per day
-Trike Cavalry (includes crew of four): 32 gold per day
-Brachiosaur Superheavy (includes crew of eight): 32 platinum per day
Musical Instruments: 25 silver
Real Estate:
-House: 42 platinum
-Farm: 450 platinum
-Tower: 1,200 platinum
-Fortress: 16,000 platinum
Saddles:
-Medium: 10 silver
-Large: 30 silver
-Giant: 90 silver
-Supergiant: 270 silver
Scribe's Kit: 25 silver
Shields:
-Buckler: 60 silver
-Hoplon: 150 silver
-Tower Shield: 100 silver
Spell Components: 28 silver
Thieves' Tools: 12 silver
Trade Goods:
Lumber: 10 copper per half-stone
Food: 35 copper per half-stone
Salt: 105 copper per half-stone
Iron: 12 silver per half-stone
Textiles: 12 silver per half-stone
Spice: 14 silver per half-stone
Dyed Textiles: 18 silver per half-stone
Tools: 23 silver per half-stone
Silk: 36 silver per half-stone
Copper: 36 silver per half-stone
Gold: 30 gold per half-stone
Gems: 100 gold per half-stone
Trail Rations: 6 silver per week
Transportation:
-Handcart: 65 silver
-Large cart: 16 gold
-Small wagon: 70 gold
-Large wagon: 100 gold
-Giant wagon: 1,200 gold
-Ship: 5,350 gold
Traveler's Kit: 35 silver
Traveler's Kit Addendum: 7 silver
Venomier's Kit: 20 silver
Weapons, Hilted:
-Dagger: 15 silver
-Club: 1 copper
-Sickle: 7 gold
-Gladius: 10 gold
-Longsword: 15 gold
-Sabre: 175 silver
-Greatsword: 25 gold
Weapons, hafted:
-Hatchet: 6 silver
-Mace: 75 silver
-Warhammer: 8 gold
-Waraxe: 10 gold
-Greataxe: 18 gold
Weapons, pole:
-Spear: 25 silver
-Lance: 30 silver
-Pike: 45 silver
-Staff: 9 silver
Weapons, ranged:
-Hunting bow: 8 silver
-Longbow: 12 silver
-Composite bow: 95 silver
-Sling: 1 copper
-Javelin: 20 silver
-Padded: 30 silver
-Light Leather: 45 silver
-Heavy Leather: 80 silver
-Scale: 120 silver
-Hoplite: 120 gold
-Lorica: 100 gold
-Chain shirt: 50 gold
-Chain jacket: 100 gold
-Chain hauberk: 200 gold
-Plate-and-chain: 620 gold
-Plate armor: 1,000 gold
Backpack: 6 silver
Blacksmith Kit: 75 silver
-Traveler's Anvil: 180 silver
Climbing Kit: 18 silver
Dinosaurs:
-Compsognathus: 375 silver
-Velociraptor: 40 gold
-Deinonychus: 75 gold
-Utahraptor: 2,000 gold
-Telmatosaurus: 400 silver
-Stegosaurus: 1,500 gold
-Triceratops: 2,000 gold
-Tyrannosaurus: 30,000 platinum
-Diplodicus: 6,000 gold
-Brachiosaurus: 2,500 platinum
Disguise Kit: 21 silver
Healer's Kit: 18 silver
Mercenaries:
-Skirmisher: 6 silver per day
-Artillery: 15 silver per day
-Heavy Infantry: 20 silver per day
-Elite Infantry: 45 silver per day
-Raptor Cavalry: 10 gold per day
-Elite Raptor Cavalry: 30 gold per day
-Trike Cavalry (includes crew of four): 32 gold per day
-Brachiosaur Superheavy (includes crew of eight): 32 platinum per day
Musical Instruments: 25 silver
Real Estate:
-House: 42 platinum
-Farm: 450 platinum
-Tower: 1,200 platinum
-Fortress: 16,000 platinum
Saddles:
-Medium: 10 silver
-Large: 30 silver
-Giant: 90 silver
-Supergiant: 270 silver
Scribe's Kit: 25 silver
Shields:
-Buckler: 60 silver
-Hoplon: 150 silver
-Tower Shield: 100 silver
Spell Components: 28 silver
Thieves' Tools: 12 silver
Trade Goods:
Lumber: 10 copper per half-stone
Food: 35 copper per half-stone
Salt: 105 copper per half-stone
Iron: 12 silver per half-stone
Textiles: 12 silver per half-stone
Spice: 14 silver per half-stone
Dyed Textiles: 18 silver per half-stone
Tools: 23 silver per half-stone
Silk: 36 silver per half-stone
Copper: 36 silver per half-stone
Gold: 30 gold per half-stone
Gems: 100 gold per half-stone
Trail Rations: 6 silver per week
Transportation:
-Handcart: 65 silver
-Large cart: 16 gold
-Small wagon: 70 gold
-Large wagon: 100 gold
-Giant wagon: 1,200 gold
-Ship: 5,350 gold
Traveler's Kit: 35 silver
Traveler's Kit Addendum: 7 silver
Venomier's Kit: 20 silver
Weapons, Hilted:
-Dagger: 15 silver
-Club: 1 copper
-Sickle: 7 gold
-Gladius: 10 gold
-Longsword: 15 gold
-Sabre: 175 silver
-Greatsword: 25 gold
Weapons, hafted:
-Hatchet: 6 silver
-Mace: 75 silver
-Warhammer: 8 gold
-Waraxe: 10 gold
-Greataxe: 18 gold
Weapons, pole:
-Spear: 25 silver
-Lance: 30 silver
-Pike: 45 silver
-Staff: 9 silver
Weapons, ranged:
-Hunting bow: 8 silver
-Longbow: 12 silver
-Composite bow: 95 silver
-Sling: 1 copper
-Javelin: 20 silver
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deaddmwalking
- King
- Posts: 5354
- Joined: Mon May 21, 2012 11:33 am
The cost to buy one includes the cost of raising one to adulthood. Adventurers are likely to have a significant amount of 'free meat' available as a result of their adventuring. It might be worth including the cost of purchasing an egg or juvenile with information on how long it takes to reach adulthood.
Any king worth his crown isn't going to pay coin for it. Instead he's going to cancel all beheadings and hangings and use the Tyrannosaur for all public executions. If he has enough, he can raise the beast to adulthood 'on the cheap'.
Any king worth his crown isn't going to pay coin for it. Instead he's going to cancel all beheadings and hangings and use the Tyrannosaur for all public executions. If he has enough, he can raise the beast to adulthood 'on the cheap'.
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momothefiddler
- Knight-Baron
- Posts: 883
- Joined: Sat Feb 22, 2014 10:55 am
- Location: United States
This sounds like a distressingly effective incentive to have a high quota on public executions.deaddmwalking wrote:Any king worth his crown isn't going to pay coin for it. Instead he's going to cancel all beheadings and hangings and use the Tyrannosaur for all public executions. If he has enough, he can raise the beast to adulthood 'on the cheap'.
...I love it.
That's a good idea. I'll work out some egg prices.
Next on the agenda is the game's basic rules. I've got some basic outlines already, but now I need to sit down complete rules for combat, stealth, chases, and diplomacy. Now for the first three I feel like the state of the art is perfectly satisfactory and all I really need to do is take what works and repeat it. Combat has its basic attacks, a handful of special techniques like charges, grapples, power attacks, and so on available to anyone, and then class-specific tricks I'll get into later. Stealth has a couple of different alert levels and failing a check increases the alert level of whoever beat you, fully alert a guard and the alarm goes off and you are no longer in a stealth encounter. For chases I just copy/paste After Sundown and call it a day, with maybe one more tier added when you're at the "we lost him, but look, tracks" level, particularly in the wilderness.
Then there's social encounters. That old bugbear. I am open to ideas as to what to do with that, because I have no clue.
Next on the agenda is the game's basic rules. I've got some basic outlines already, but now I need to sit down complete rules for combat, stealth, chases, and diplomacy. Now for the first three I feel like the state of the art is perfectly satisfactory and all I really need to do is take what works and repeat it. Combat has its basic attacks, a handful of special techniques like charges, grapples, power attacks, and so on available to anyone, and then class-specific tricks I'll get into later. Stealth has a couple of different alert levels and failing a check increases the alert level of whoever beat you, fully alert a guard and the alarm goes off and you are no longer in a stealth encounter. For chases I just copy/paste After Sundown and call it a day, with maybe one more tier added when you're at the "we lost him, but look, tracks" level, particularly in the wilderness.
Then there's social encounters. That old bugbear. I am open to ideas as to what to do with that, because I have no clue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rjpa ... ex_001.jpg
What squawks like a really big chicken with lips, and maybe puts on most of it's 6 tonne weight in three years after hitting puberty at about 14? A T-Rex! Mature at 18, maybe live ten years as an adult, or maybe longer without all the stress fractures and tendon detachments so common in the wild fossils. Ain't science grand?
I bet they were really grumpy teens, what with the growing pains and all. Still, about time they stopped traipsing around after the adults all day. SQUAWK!
I mean, if you're buying eggs, you might have your Father do it for you, when you were born.
What squawks like a really big chicken with lips, and maybe puts on most of it's 6 tonne weight in three years after hitting puberty at about 14? A T-Rex! Mature at 18, maybe live ten years as an adult, or maybe longer without all the stress fractures and tendon detachments so common in the wild fossils. Ain't science grand?
I bet they were really grumpy teens, what with the growing pains and all. Still, about time they stopped traipsing around after the adults all day. SQUAWK!
I mean, if you're buying eggs, you might have your Father do it for you, when you were born.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
Chase
A chase can occur at three ranges, close range, long range, and tracking. At close range, the pursuer has line of sight to the quarry. The quarry can attempt an Acrobatics check at a TN of their choosing. They're the one running, which means they're the one who determines which direction the chase is moving, and can decide whether they want to bolt through a crowded marketplace, climb up the side of a building and into an open window, or hitch a ride on an out of control wagon. The pursuer then has to choose whether to give up or attempt to beat the quarry's roll. Typically there is no reason to give up, but if the quarry attempts a stunt like, say, leaping from one spire of a palace to another, there could be serious consequences for attempting that stunt and failing. If the quarry misses the TN, they fail the stunt. The default consequence of this is that they are automatically caught, but for the spire-jumping stunt it would be significantly more dire. If the quarry makes the TN but the pursuer beats their roll, the quarry is caught. If the pursuer hits the original TN but rolls lower than the quarry's roll, the chase continues at short range. If the pursuer misses the original TN, the chase becomes long range.
At long range, the pursuer is close enough behind to catch occasional glimpses of the quarry, but do not have a steady line of sight with them. If the quarry makes an unobserved turn, they can shake the pursuer entirely. The stunts at this range are most often Stealth or Acrobatics for the quarry and Perception or Investigate for the pursuer. If the quarry fails a TN (and survives the fallout) or the pursuer beats their roll, the chase moves to close range. If the quarry succeeds at their roll and the pursuer fails, the chase moves to tracking range. If the pursuer beats the TN but rolls lower than the quarry's total, the chase continues at long range.
At tracking range, the quarry is out of the pursuer's sight and may in fact be several miles away. The pursuer chases the quarry by looking for signs of passage and determining which direction the quarry has gone, while the quarry attempts to leave as few tracks as possible. The pursuer rolls Investigation in urban areas and Survival in wilderness areas. The quarry rolls Deception in urban areas and Survival in wilderness areas. The effects are the same as at the above ranges, with the chase ending altogether if the distance widens and moving to a long range chase if the distance narrows.
If a pursuit narrows to long range from tracking range, the pursuer can attempt Stealth against the quarry's Perception or Investigation, and if the pursuer succeeds, they are able to ambush the quarry. They may begin a combat with the quarry and gain a surprise round. However, if the ambush fails, the pursuit returns to tracking range.
A quarry may have an end goal they're trying to get to, like a safehouse or other friendly territory, where they can stop fleeing not because they've shaken their pursuer, but because they've reached a safe area. In this case, the quarry needs to build up a total TN to a certain amount in order to reach the safe area. Each time they select a stunt TN and meet it, that TN is added to the total TN. The quarry can take TN 5 stunts to play it safe, but this will give their pursuer more opportunities to beat their roll, so it may be wiser to use higher TN stunts instead. Generally speaking the total TN to reach a safe area should be about 50. If the area is very far away, only tracking range stunts qualify for the total TN. Short and long range chases work the same as if the quarry has no particular safe place to run to.
Stealth
Stealth works in rounds like combat (and in fact can happen simultaneously with combat). Each round, everyone can take a standard action, a move action, and a minor action. Move actions are measured in areas instead of hexes. Moving from one area to another is a move action. Every round you are in the same area as someone you are attempting to hide from, you must make a Stealth check. Observers take a -2 penalty to their Perception check to detect you unless they are standing watch. Standing watch is a standard action, so you can move to a new place, examine it, and use a minor action to munch on a turkey leg and still be able to roll your full Perception to find any sneaking enemies. If a creature hasn't taken their standard action and isn't holding it for any specific purpose, they are assumed to be standing watch by default. Another way of putting it is that characters get their full Perception bonus unless they are using their standard action to do something else.
When you end your turn in the same area as people you are attempting to sneak past or attempt to leave an area that has people you are attempting to sneak past inside it, they get to make a Perception check to spot you opposed by your Stealth check. Each potential guard gets to make an individual Stealth check. Any guard who succeeds goes up one level on the alert track:
Aware: "You there, stop!" The guard is aware of you and can actions against you like normal. If you run, this begins a chase and if you escape, the guard becomes suspicious and will probably return to his post (or he may return to his post as soon as you get to long range or maintain a short range chase for more than one turn). If you fight, the guard will shout an alarm as a free action on his turn and all other guards in the area immediately become aware of you (however if you beat his initiative and kill him before he can act, the other guards are not automatically made aware).
Alerted: "I saw someone! There's someone here!" The guard is alerted to your presence. He can use Investigate instead of Perception against your next Stealth check. He will shout an alarm to anyone he is able to communicate with (ordinarily, this is anyone in the same area as him, but if he has an alarm bell or beacon, he may be able to sound a much greater alarm), and anyone who hears him becomes suspicious if they weren't already. If you succeed on a Stealth check against him, or if you end your next turn in a different room from him, he becomes suspicious instead ("whatever it was, it's gone now"). A guard who has been alerted will be suspicious for the rest of his shift.
Suspicious: "What was that noise?" The guard is suspicious that something might be wrong. If you succeed on your next Stealth check against him, or if you end your next turn in a different room, he will become unaware ("it was just a rat").
Unaware: "God, this job is boring. I hope something exciting happens soon, I don't care what it is." The guard has no idea that you or anything else dangerous is around.
If a guard succeeds by five points, they go up two levels on the alert track, and if they succeed by ten points, they go up three levels on the alert track. Alert levels are a tag attached to a guard, not to a sneaker, so a guard who is alerted to one sneaker may end up becoming aware of an entirely different sneaker, who might not even know the first sneaker existed. Guards may also become automatically suspicious if they're expecting trouble for whatever reason, but no guard can ever remain alerted the entire night and will always go back down to being suspicious if they don't find anything after one round of being alerted.
Combat coming soon-ish. Then I get to figure out social. Hoorah.
A chase can occur at three ranges, close range, long range, and tracking. At close range, the pursuer has line of sight to the quarry. The quarry can attempt an Acrobatics check at a TN of their choosing. They're the one running, which means they're the one who determines which direction the chase is moving, and can decide whether they want to bolt through a crowded marketplace, climb up the side of a building and into an open window, or hitch a ride on an out of control wagon. The pursuer then has to choose whether to give up or attempt to beat the quarry's roll. Typically there is no reason to give up, but if the quarry attempts a stunt like, say, leaping from one spire of a palace to another, there could be serious consequences for attempting that stunt and failing. If the quarry misses the TN, they fail the stunt. The default consequence of this is that they are automatically caught, but for the spire-jumping stunt it would be significantly more dire. If the quarry makes the TN but the pursuer beats their roll, the quarry is caught. If the pursuer hits the original TN but rolls lower than the quarry's roll, the chase continues at short range. If the pursuer misses the original TN, the chase becomes long range.
At long range, the pursuer is close enough behind to catch occasional glimpses of the quarry, but do not have a steady line of sight with them. If the quarry makes an unobserved turn, they can shake the pursuer entirely. The stunts at this range are most often Stealth or Acrobatics for the quarry and Perception or Investigate for the pursuer. If the quarry fails a TN (and survives the fallout) or the pursuer beats their roll, the chase moves to close range. If the quarry succeeds at their roll and the pursuer fails, the chase moves to tracking range. If the pursuer beats the TN but rolls lower than the quarry's total, the chase continues at long range.
At tracking range, the quarry is out of the pursuer's sight and may in fact be several miles away. The pursuer chases the quarry by looking for signs of passage and determining which direction the quarry has gone, while the quarry attempts to leave as few tracks as possible. The pursuer rolls Investigation in urban areas and Survival in wilderness areas. The quarry rolls Deception in urban areas and Survival in wilderness areas. The effects are the same as at the above ranges, with the chase ending altogether if the distance widens and moving to a long range chase if the distance narrows.
If a pursuit narrows to long range from tracking range, the pursuer can attempt Stealth against the quarry's Perception or Investigation, and if the pursuer succeeds, they are able to ambush the quarry. They may begin a combat with the quarry and gain a surprise round. However, if the ambush fails, the pursuit returns to tracking range.
A quarry may have an end goal they're trying to get to, like a safehouse or other friendly territory, where they can stop fleeing not because they've shaken their pursuer, but because they've reached a safe area. In this case, the quarry needs to build up a total TN to a certain amount in order to reach the safe area. Each time they select a stunt TN and meet it, that TN is added to the total TN. The quarry can take TN 5 stunts to play it safe, but this will give their pursuer more opportunities to beat their roll, so it may be wiser to use higher TN stunts instead. Generally speaking the total TN to reach a safe area should be about 50. If the area is very far away, only tracking range stunts qualify for the total TN. Short and long range chases work the same as if the quarry has no particular safe place to run to.
Stealth works in rounds like combat (and in fact can happen simultaneously with combat). Each round, everyone can take a standard action, a move action, and a minor action. Move actions are measured in areas instead of hexes. Moving from one area to another is a move action. Every round you are in the same area as someone you are attempting to hide from, you must make a Stealth check. Observers take a -2 penalty to their Perception check to detect you unless they are standing watch. Standing watch is a standard action, so you can move to a new place, examine it, and use a minor action to munch on a turkey leg and still be able to roll your full Perception to find any sneaking enemies. If a creature hasn't taken their standard action and isn't holding it for any specific purpose, they are assumed to be standing watch by default. Another way of putting it is that characters get their full Perception bonus unless they are using their standard action to do something else.
When you end your turn in the same area as people you are attempting to sneak past or attempt to leave an area that has people you are attempting to sneak past inside it, they get to make a Perception check to spot you opposed by your Stealth check. Each potential guard gets to make an individual Stealth check. Any guard who succeeds goes up one level on the alert track:
Aware: "You there, stop!" The guard is aware of you and can actions against you like normal. If you run, this begins a chase and if you escape, the guard becomes suspicious and will probably return to his post (or he may return to his post as soon as you get to long range or maintain a short range chase for more than one turn). If you fight, the guard will shout an alarm as a free action on his turn and all other guards in the area immediately become aware of you (however if you beat his initiative and kill him before he can act, the other guards are not automatically made aware).
Alerted: "I saw someone! There's someone here!" The guard is alerted to your presence. He can use Investigate instead of Perception against your next Stealth check. He will shout an alarm to anyone he is able to communicate with (ordinarily, this is anyone in the same area as him, but if he has an alarm bell or beacon, he may be able to sound a much greater alarm), and anyone who hears him becomes suspicious if they weren't already. If you succeed on a Stealth check against him, or if you end your next turn in a different room from him, he becomes suspicious instead ("whatever it was, it's gone now"). A guard who has been alerted will be suspicious for the rest of his shift.
Suspicious: "What was that noise?" The guard is suspicious that something might be wrong. If you succeed on your next Stealth check against him, or if you end your next turn in a different room, he will become unaware ("it was just a rat").
Unaware: "God, this job is boring. I hope something exciting happens soon, I don't care what it is." The guard has no idea that you or anything else dangerous is around.
If a guard succeeds by five points, they go up two levels on the alert track, and if they succeed by ten points, they go up three levels on the alert track. Alert levels are a tag attached to a guard, not to a sneaker, so a guard who is alerted to one sneaker may end up becoming aware of an entirely different sneaker, who might not even know the first sneaker existed. Guards may also become automatically suspicious if they're expecting trouble for whatever reason, but no guard can ever remain alerted the entire night and will always go back down to being suspicious if they don't find anything after one round of being alerted.
Combat
Combat takes place on a hex grid with each hex being five feet across. Each character in the fight gets one turn with a certain amount of actions, with turn order decided by an initiative roll at the start of combat. Combat continues until resolution, which is usually when one side has been wiped out through some combination of being physically incapacitated, fleeing the battle, or surrendering.
Initiative
At the beginning of combat, every participant rolls their Acrobatics skill. Turn order goes from the highest result to the lowest. If there is a tie, the two tied characters roll an opposed Acrobatics check. The winner goes first.
Actions
Each turn you have a standard action, a move action, a minor action, and a reaction. You may also take a full round action, which consumes your standard, move, and minor action, but not your reaction. You may exchange your standard action for a move or minor action, and you may exchange your move action for a minor action.
Full Round Actions
Charge: You may charge as a full round action. When charging, you must move at least two hexes, may move up to your move speed in a straight line, and at the end of your movement you make an attack. This attack benefits from a +2 bonus to attack and damage.
Defend: You have a +4 bonus to your dodge score until the start of your next turn.
Run: You may move up to four times your move speed as a full round action.
Withdraw: You may move up to your move speed without provoking any attacks of opportunity as a full round action.
Standard Actions
Attack: You attack one enemy within range of the weapon you are wielding. If it's a melee weapon, this is an adjacent hex. Roll Combat opposed to an enemy's dodge score (which is 10 + their Acrobatics). If you succeed, you hit. Roll your weapon's damage die, add your Combat bonus, and subtract the target's armor. Your result is deducted from the target's hit points.
While attacking, you may reduce your Combat bonus to your attack roll for an additional bonus to your damage on a 1:1 basis. You may also reduce your Acrobatics bonus to your dodge score for an additional bonus to your attack roll on a 1:1 basis. Reducing Combat bonus for damage is called power attacking, and reducing Acrobatics bonus for attack is called reckless attacking. Both of these options are part of a regular attack action and you may use both of them on a single attack.
Grapple: You grab someone to prevent them from moving or using their weapons. Make an opposed Combat check. If you succeed, the opponent is grappled. If you fail, they get an attack of opportunity on you. A grappled creature cannot take any actions except to break the grapple. A creature attempting to break grapple rolls an opposed Combat check. On success, the grapple is broken and the creature still has their move and minor actions. On a failure, nothing happens.
Move Actions
Move: You can move up to your movement speed. If you leave a hex that an enemy threatens, they may take an attack of opportunity on you as a reaction. When you end your movement, you may change facing to any direction you like.
Minor Actions
Stand Up/Go Prone: You can rise from prone position to standing or lie down from standing position to prone as a minor action. While prone, you have a +2 bonus to your dodge score against ranged attacks and a -2 penalty to your dodge score against melee attacks, and your movement speed is halved.
Draw or Sheathe Weapon: You may draw or sheathe a weapon or other item as a minor action. Dropping an item is not an action, so you can drop one weapon and draw another as only a single minor action, however if you retreat the dropped item will be lost.
Drink Potion: You may drink a potion as a minor action.
Change Facing: You may change your facing as a minor action.
Reactions
Attack of Opportunity: When an enemy moves out of a hex you can attack in melee, you may use your reaction to make an attack of opportunity on them. This is a single melee attack made as the enemy attempts to flee.
Change Facing: When you are attacked by an enemy, you may change your facing to face towards that enemy.
Size
Medium and smaller creatures take up only one hex. Large creatures take up two adjacent hexes. Huge creatures (including giant dinosaurs) take up four hexes in a diamond formation. This means that large and huge creatures may shift a hex or two while changing facing even if they haven't taken a move action. When measuring a large creature's movement, you measure from the front hex (where the legs are located). When measure a huge creature's movement, you measure from either of the two middle hexes (also where the legs are located). The leg hex you're measuring distance from must be within movement distance of whatever hex that leg ends up in, but the rest of the creature can rotate around that hex to determine facing.
Creatures take a -2 penalty to attack bonus for each size step above medium, and gain a +2 bonus to the same for each size step below, however large creatures also gain a 1.5x bonus to their damage modifier for each size step larger than medium, while small creatures take a one-half penalty. Skill bonuses (as from the Combat skill) and inherent bonuses (as from the Great Strength feat) are affected by this multiplier, but other bonuses are not.
You may only wear armor if it is in your size, and you may only wield a weapon that is at least one size category smaller than you. Larger weapons and armor almost always deal more damage and provide more DR by default, see the equipment section for details.
You may ride a creature that is at least one size category larger than you. When riding a creature, you must ride atop one of its leg hexes.
Facing
(Note to self: Make some pictures)
You may only attack a creature you're facing with the weapon you're attacking them with. Weapons can typically be mounted on either the head, arms, legs, or tail of a creature (provided they have these parts). For a medium or smaller creature (i.e. any creature who fits in one hex), you may attack any creature to your front, front-left, or front-right at no penalty, and you may attack a creature to your rear-left or rear-right at a -2 penalty. You may not attack a creature directly behind you except with a tail weapon. Tail weapons are at a -2 penalty, but they face the opposite direction of head/arm/leg weapons, and thus can attack directly behind or to the rear-left/right at no additional penalty.
Large creatures that are long (where the head is in one hex and the tail in another) creatures can attack creatures in front of or just to the side of their head hex just like medium creatures with head, arm, or leg weapons, and likewise can attack creatures to the rear-left or rear-right of their head hex with head, arm, or leg weapons. Any weapons mounted in the tail hex (which always contains the tail and, for quadrupeds, also contains the rear legs) face from the tail hex in the opposite direction of the head hex at the same -2 penalty as on a medium creature.
Large creatures that are broad (where the left leg is in one hex and the right leg is in the other) may attack the three hexes from just ahead of them to directly to their left with left arm and left leg weapons at no penalty, and may attack their rear left hex at a -2 penalty. Likewise with right arm and right leg weapons on the right side. Head weapons may attack the three squares directly ahead of the creature at no penalty, and tail weapons may attack the three squares directly behind at a -2 penalty.
Huge creatures that are long may attack the front-left and front-right hexes with head weapons at no penalty, or the direct-left and direct-right hexes at a -2 penalty. Their left leg weapons may attack straight left, front-left, or rear-left from the left leg hex at a -2 penalty, and likewise with the right leg. The tail may attack its rear-left and rear-right hexes at a -2 penalty, or its direct left or direct right hexes at a -4 penalty.
Huge creatures that are broad are not currently a thing, so I can put off figuring out how that's going to work until I decide to add giants. Which is probably going to happen eventually.
Area of Effect
(Note to self: Pictures here, too)
Blast: A blast area attack will center on a target hex and expand outward from there a certain number of hexes in all directions. Anything caught within that hex is affected. Many blast area attacks deal less damage based on how many hexes away from the center you are. Just count the number of hexes away from the center to find out where you're at.
Cone: A cone attack will spread from a corner, not a face, of the attack's hex of origin (usually the attacker's hex). A length 1 cone will occupy the two hexes adjacent to that corner, a length 2 cone will occupy the next three hexes after that, a length 3 cone will occupy the next four, and so on, getting both longer and wider as it goes on.
Line: A line area attack will travel in a straight line a certain number of hexes out from the attack's hex of origin (usually the attacker's hex). Anything in that line is affected.
Miscellany
Cover: If you have 1/2 cover, like a low wall or if you're leaning around a corner, you have a +2 bonus to your dodge score against ranged attacks and saves against area attacks. If you have 3/4 cover, like an arrow slit, you have a +4 bonus to your dodge score against ranged attacks and saves against area attacks. Soft cover (i.e. concealment) works just as well as hard cover against ranged attacks but does nothing for area attacks (and also melee enemies can walk right through it no problem). Total cover blocks ranged attacks, including area attacks, altogether when it's hard. Total soft cover (i.e. total concealment) does not block area attacks at all, but ranged attackers must guess which hex you occupy and you still get a +4 dodge bonus if they guess the right hex.
Gargantuan and larger creatures are probably going to need to be a thing (several giant dinosaurs qualify), and they'll have multiple hexes that just don't have any weapon mounts at all. Even a quadruped is gonna have four legs, a tail, and a head, and that's six weapons with nine hexes to fill in, so your larger dinosaurs will have blind spots where medium size enemies can attack and the giant dinosaur will have to move in order to retaliate, which will provoke an AoO. Gives the little guys a bit of an advantage (provided they have the attack power to penetrate DR which, if the dinosaur is armored, they probably won't - unless they're heroes with damage-focused classes). I'll add that in later. Besides that, are there any gaps in the system?
Combat takes place on a hex grid with each hex being five feet across. Each character in the fight gets one turn with a certain amount of actions, with turn order decided by an initiative roll at the start of combat. Combat continues until resolution, which is usually when one side has been wiped out through some combination of being physically incapacitated, fleeing the battle, or surrendering.
Initiative
At the beginning of combat, every participant rolls their Acrobatics skill. Turn order goes from the highest result to the lowest. If there is a tie, the two tied characters roll an opposed Acrobatics check. The winner goes first.
Actions
Each turn you have a standard action, a move action, a minor action, and a reaction. You may also take a full round action, which consumes your standard, move, and minor action, but not your reaction. You may exchange your standard action for a move or minor action, and you may exchange your move action for a minor action.
Full Round Actions
Charge: You may charge as a full round action. When charging, you must move at least two hexes, may move up to your move speed in a straight line, and at the end of your movement you make an attack. This attack benefits from a +2 bonus to attack and damage.
Defend: You have a +4 bonus to your dodge score until the start of your next turn.
Run: You may move up to four times your move speed as a full round action.
Withdraw: You may move up to your move speed without provoking any attacks of opportunity as a full round action.
Standard Actions
Attack: You attack one enemy within range of the weapon you are wielding. If it's a melee weapon, this is an adjacent hex. Roll Combat opposed to an enemy's dodge score (which is 10 + their Acrobatics). If you succeed, you hit. Roll your weapon's damage die, add your Combat bonus, and subtract the target's armor. Your result is deducted from the target's hit points.
While attacking, you may reduce your Combat bonus to your attack roll for an additional bonus to your damage on a 1:1 basis. You may also reduce your Acrobatics bonus to your dodge score for an additional bonus to your attack roll on a 1:1 basis. Reducing Combat bonus for damage is called power attacking, and reducing Acrobatics bonus for attack is called reckless attacking. Both of these options are part of a regular attack action and you may use both of them on a single attack.
Grapple: You grab someone to prevent them from moving or using their weapons. Make an opposed Combat check. If you succeed, the opponent is grappled. If you fail, they get an attack of opportunity on you. A grappled creature cannot take any actions except to break the grapple. A creature attempting to break grapple rolls an opposed Combat check. On success, the grapple is broken and the creature still has their move and minor actions. On a failure, nothing happens.
Move Actions
Move: You can move up to your movement speed. If you leave a hex that an enemy threatens, they may take an attack of opportunity on you as a reaction. When you end your movement, you may change facing to any direction you like.
Minor Actions
Stand Up/Go Prone: You can rise from prone position to standing or lie down from standing position to prone as a minor action. While prone, you have a +2 bonus to your dodge score against ranged attacks and a -2 penalty to your dodge score against melee attacks, and your movement speed is halved.
Draw or Sheathe Weapon: You may draw or sheathe a weapon or other item as a minor action. Dropping an item is not an action, so you can drop one weapon and draw another as only a single minor action, however if you retreat the dropped item will be lost.
Drink Potion: You may drink a potion as a minor action.
Change Facing: You may change your facing as a minor action.
Reactions
Attack of Opportunity: When an enemy moves out of a hex you can attack in melee, you may use your reaction to make an attack of opportunity on them. This is a single melee attack made as the enemy attempts to flee.
Change Facing: When you are attacked by an enemy, you may change your facing to face towards that enemy.
Size
Medium and smaller creatures take up only one hex. Large creatures take up two adjacent hexes. Huge creatures (including giant dinosaurs) take up four hexes in a diamond formation. This means that large and huge creatures may shift a hex or two while changing facing even if they haven't taken a move action. When measuring a large creature's movement, you measure from the front hex (where the legs are located). When measure a huge creature's movement, you measure from either of the two middle hexes (also where the legs are located). The leg hex you're measuring distance from must be within movement distance of whatever hex that leg ends up in, but the rest of the creature can rotate around that hex to determine facing.
Creatures take a -2 penalty to attack bonus for each size step above medium, and gain a +2 bonus to the same for each size step below, however large creatures also gain a 1.5x bonus to their damage modifier for each size step larger than medium, while small creatures take a one-half penalty. Skill bonuses (as from the Combat skill) and inherent bonuses (as from the Great Strength feat) are affected by this multiplier, but other bonuses are not.
You may only wear armor if it is in your size, and you may only wield a weapon that is at least one size category smaller than you. Larger weapons and armor almost always deal more damage and provide more DR by default, see the equipment section for details.
You may ride a creature that is at least one size category larger than you. When riding a creature, you must ride atop one of its leg hexes.
Facing
(Note to self: Make some pictures)
You may only attack a creature you're facing with the weapon you're attacking them with. Weapons can typically be mounted on either the head, arms, legs, or tail of a creature (provided they have these parts). For a medium or smaller creature (i.e. any creature who fits in one hex), you may attack any creature to your front, front-left, or front-right at no penalty, and you may attack a creature to your rear-left or rear-right at a -2 penalty. You may not attack a creature directly behind you except with a tail weapon. Tail weapons are at a -2 penalty, but they face the opposite direction of head/arm/leg weapons, and thus can attack directly behind or to the rear-left/right at no additional penalty.
Large creatures that are long (where the head is in one hex and the tail in another) creatures can attack creatures in front of or just to the side of their head hex just like medium creatures with head, arm, or leg weapons, and likewise can attack creatures to the rear-left or rear-right of their head hex with head, arm, or leg weapons. Any weapons mounted in the tail hex (which always contains the tail and, for quadrupeds, also contains the rear legs) face from the tail hex in the opposite direction of the head hex at the same -2 penalty as on a medium creature.
Large creatures that are broad (where the left leg is in one hex and the right leg is in the other) may attack the three hexes from just ahead of them to directly to their left with left arm and left leg weapons at no penalty, and may attack their rear left hex at a -2 penalty. Likewise with right arm and right leg weapons on the right side. Head weapons may attack the three squares directly ahead of the creature at no penalty, and tail weapons may attack the three squares directly behind at a -2 penalty.
Huge creatures that are long may attack the front-left and front-right hexes with head weapons at no penalty, or the direct-left and direct-right hexes at a -2 penalty. Their left leg weapons may attack straight left, front-left, or rear-left from the left leg hex at a -2 penalty, and likewise with the right leg. The tail may attack its rear-left and rear-right hexes at a -2 penalty, or its direct left or direct right hexes at a -4 penalty.
Huge creatures that are broad are not currently a thing, so I can put off figuring out how that's going to work until I decide to add giants. Which is probably going to happen eventually.
Area of Effect
(Note to self: Pictures here, too)
Blast: A blast area attack will center on a target hex and expand outward from there a certain number of hexes in all directions. Anything caught within that hex is affected. Many blast area attacks deal less damage based on how many hexes away from the center you are. Just count the number of hexes away from the center to find out where you're at.
Cone: A cone attack will spread from a corner, not a face, of the attack's hex of origin (usually the attacker's hex). A length 1 cone will occupy the two hexes adjacent to that corner, a length 2 cone will occupy the next three hexes after that, a length 3 cone will occupy the next four, and so on, getting both longer and wider as it goes on.
Line: A line area attack will travel in a straight line a certain number of hexes out from the attack's hex of origin (usually the attacker's hex). Anything in that line is affected.
Miscellany
Cover: If you have 1/2 cover, like a low wall or if you're leaning around a corner, you have a +2 bonus to your dodge score against ranged attacks and saves against area attacks. If you have 3/4 cover, like an arrow slit, you have a +4 bonus to your dodge score against ranged attacks and saves against area attacks. Soft cover (i.e. concealment) works just as well as hard cover against ranged attacks but does nothing for area attacks (and also melee enemies can walk right through it no problem). Total cover blocks ranged attacks, including area attacks, altogether when it's hard. Total soft cover (i.e. total concealment) does not block area attacks at all, but ranged attackers must guess which hex you occupy and you still get a +4 dodge bonus if they guess the right hex.
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deaddmwalking
- King
- Posts: 5354
- Joined: Mon May 21, 2012 11:33 am
Regarding costs, there are animals that you purchase but are captured in the wild. Elephants are thr best example. The upkeep costs are high, so people capture wild elephants and train them, rather than raising them. My understanding is that Native Americans acquired horses in a similar way.
That could impact coats significantly.
That could impact coats significantly.
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