I am getting tendonitis or something in my right arm, so to retain my ability to play guitar as best as possible I don't really use a mouse anymore. I can type if I'm careful but I have to take breaks all the time. So computer games are right out the window (just when I was getting into Morrowind!), can't really do artwork for my band's albums on the computer, I hardly even look at Facebook (thank god!!), stuff like that.
But I remember a clever mechanic DC:SS (and I assume other roguelikes) had to offset the gross difficulty and no-save-games hardcore-mode lethality, and I think it would be a great thing to port over into D&D, especially in a wilderness hexcrawl or any kind of sandbox game where the PCs will be encountering the unknown and the weird, monsters that nobody has seen before, stuff like that.
It's a simple mechanic - you can 'examine' monsters to get a bunch of information about them. The part I'm concerned with is 'it looks harmless' or 'it looks extremely dangerous'. Now in ToME (one of the best roguelikes ever, I LOVE that game), they get a little more flowery with it, like "a lump rises in your throat as you contemplate your doom"... We don't have to get that crazy.
And I'm not concerned with the other stuff like "it's resistant to poison" or "it's intelligent." My PCs will still have to figure that shit out and take notes like everyone else.
But when you're playing in a game with no orcs, the goblins are six different colours, and there are Moss Hogs and Star Grools and Sublunary Men and Randomly Esoterically Generated Creatures and fuck-all knows what else... This could be a great way to clue your players in. Think about the lich's fear aura, and stretch it all the way down in a continuum to that 1/3 CR giant rat.
Tell the players if they feel scared of it or not. How confident are they that they could take this thing? Add it in to the weird monster description. Spice it up a bit! Your players can't make decisions without having useful information to act upon. This also sets up another great Gygaxian screw-job: get your players used to being told roughly how tough a monster is, then throw one in that is really weak but terrifying, or (even worse) a wienery-looking little monster who is absurdly dangerous.
*****
A digression: it's total insanity that fighters don't have the ability to size up their opponents anyway - or at least I've never heard anyone mention it. Some real people who have never killed anyone can estimate the difficulty of fighting an opponent in hand-to-hand in the modern day. Imagine how good even a 1st level fighter should be at this, having snuffed out many sentient lives at the point of a sword? Maybe we reflect this by giving some class-based details from time to time. Tell the fighter "yeah, he doesn't seem that strong, you can take him." Or the wizard gets "his eldritch aura is so strong it blinds you!" Of course this could be modified by level and other factors (skill checks, if you have those).
*****
This is part of assuming the characters are good at their jobs, and I don't want to get into a huge conversation about it, because some characters are lame scrubs and that's a whole game you can play too, if you want.
No comments:
Post a Comment