Totally unique and original GLOG fighter

Hopefully you caught the sarcasm in the title. The GLOG fighter has been done before.

Oh boy, has it been done before.
Goblin Punch Goblin Guts Fighter
Goblin Punch The Lamb Fighter
Coins & Scrolls Fighter
2 Goblins in a Trenchcoat Fighter
Princesses & Pioneers Fighter

It has even been done as a template/subclass a la GLOG wizards.
Whose Measure - How to Design GLOG Fighters
A Distant Chime - Fighter Disciplines

I'm sure there are many more. These are just the ones I'm most familiar with. (Read: stealing from.)

So I really, really do not need to write my own. But every time I try thinking about something useful, game-able, etc... I end up thinking instead about how to adapt the common fighter stuff to the peculiarities of my version of the GLOG. So here:


FIGHTER

Starting Equipment: sword (d8), bow and arrows (d6, ranged), chainmail (2 armor), good boots
Starting Skill: d6 1-2: farmer, 3-4 soldier, 5-6 sailor

+1 HP per template

A: tricky, parry
B: threat assessment, notches
C: sentinel, impress
D: extra attacks

Tricky
You have advantage on combat maneuvers.

Additionally, whenever you roll minimum damage on an attack, you can attempt a free combat maneuver.

Parry
You can sacrifice a piece of combat equipment (weapon, armor, shield) to reduce incoming damage by 1d12.

Threat Assessment
For every 10 minutes of reconnaissance or 1 turn of combat, you can ask a GM a question about your opponent's fighting capabilities.

Additionally, if you make eye contact with a person, you can tell how many sapients they've killed: zero, one, or many.

Notches
Whenever you defeat a powerful (boss type) monster, you learn a new fighting technique. Each technique is a custom ability negotiated with the GM. Ideally, these are inspired by the monsters you've defeated. You can use each technique once per day.

Sentinel
When someone retreats from you, you can make a single attack against them.

Impress
Whenever you win a fight against nontrivial foes, people who don't like you make a new reaction roll with a +4 bonus. This even works on people you just defeated in combat, unless you caused them undeserved or disproportionate harm. Hirelings get a new morale roll -or- save vs fear.

Extra Attacks
You can attack up to 5 different targets each turn. You MUST declare all your targets up front and roll all your dice at once or else forfeit your extra attacks for the turn.





DESIGN NOTES

I am generally following the building blocks laid out in the latter 2 links. I want this fighter to be a satisfying baseline to guide creation of more specific variants.

Starting Stuff
I wish the starting equipment and skills were more interesting but I was sick of holding up the post for something small. Extra HP and good equipment make the fighter survivable.

Tricky
In my hack, you perform combat maneuvers with a STR or DEX roll and suffer a dramatic reversal if you fail. If you have a situational ADV in combat, you can apply it to damage or a maneuver or trade it to try both. ADV helps the fighter avoid that reversal. And situational ADV isn't wasted because they can pick one of the other options.

The free maneuver (as in: succeed or nothing, no risk of reversal) is meant to encourage the fighter to try out-of-the-box stuff. Think of this like the DCC deed die. I prefer to trigger it on minimum damage rather than max damage because it makes a good consolation prize. That way, the fighter is consistent rather than spiky and can narrate that the low damage was really just a feint to set up the maneuver.

Parry
This is classic. 1d12 repeatable may be too strong but I think it is worth a try; I just have to make sure the fighter can't walk around with too large a supply of replacement armor. To nerf it I could drop it to 1d6 or limit it to once per combat.

Threat Assessment
For example: how many HD does it have, how many mundane attacks does it have, how much damage does each attack deal, does it have any special attacks, does it have any immunities or vulnerabilities?

Notches
My take on notches demands that players and GMs collaborate to customize their game. I think of this as the fighter equivalent to the Wizard's ability to mutate spells (and I want to come up with a similar ability for the Specialist... diegetic advancement rules everything around me). Examples below.

The superpower-iness of the techniques can be negotiated based on genre and table preference. A boring solution is a list of uses of "+1d6 damage" or "guaranteed successful combat maneuver." But I prefer my fighters to become like Sekiro or Megaman -- equipped with special tools that let them replicate supernatural or quasi-magical abilities.

Ideally, the fighter will also be able to think of some out of combat uses for their techniques.

If this ends up being too many techniques, I'll probably make the fighter roll over their number of techniques on 1d6 to earn a new one.

Sentinel
As goblins in a trenchcoat explained in their fighter, opportunity attacks are a pain but more manageable as a fighter ability. I'm not sold that this ability is actually interesting enough but

Impress
I wanted a minor noncombat ability at this level. More recently I'm convincing myself that impress is really strong. I like it though so I'll probably keep it and nix sentinel if anything.

Extra Attacks
A single extra attack is just a boring damage boost. Multiple extra attacks makes the fighter a force capable of taking on overwhelming odds. So I like this better.

I require all the dice rolled at once because I hate how extra attack slows down combat.





EXAMPLE TECHNIQUES

Mundane

1. Golem - You slam your weapon into the ground and adjacent enemies must save or fall prone.
2. Cyclops - You can throw a weapon (or rock) without penalty.
3. Manticore - You can throw up to 3 knives at 3 different targets simultaneously.
4. White Ape - You reach out and snatch your enemy’s weapon; they must save or be disarmed.
5. Giant Turtle - You forgo attacking to hunker down behind your shield and cannot be damaged this round.
6. Minotaur - You can perform a charging attack, moving far and breaking past obstacles. You deal +1d6 damage to the target and yourself.
7. Mimic - You can create perfect camouflage to set up an ambush or augment a retreat.
8. Chimera - You can change the form of your weapon instantly, from something slashy to something stabby or smashy or whatever (bloodborne style).
9. Spartan King - You kick the shit of your enemy as part of your attack; they must save or be pushed (off of something tall, if you’re even a little clever).
10. Giant Tiger - You twist in the air and land on your feet like a cat. No falling damage this turn.

Quasi-Magical

1. Beholder - You lock eyes with a spellcaster and cancel their magic for a turn.
2. Rust Monster - You grab an enemy's metal equipment and they must save or it is sundered.
3. Medusa - You lock eyes with your enemy and they can’t move for a turn.
4. Dragon - You breath fire, dealing 2d6 damage in a blast.
5. Vampire - You regain HP from damage dealt by your attack.
6. Displacer Beast - You turn into a log, reducing incoming damage by 1d6 and moving.
7. Water Elemental - You attack underwater without penalty and can breath water for a round (replenishing your held breath sonic the hedgehog style).
8. Sphinx - You ask the enemy a question and they must answer truthfully or take +1d6 damage from your attack.
9. Angel - You slap an ally and they heal 1d6 HP.
10. Air Elemental - Your attack creates a slashing gust of wind, turning a melee attack into a ranged attack.

Light-as-encounter-chance /and/ different kinds of light

Reminder: the players (usually) need to see

Last post, I rambled at length about how the players need light to play. That isn't required reading but it is helpful context.

So I showed this idea to my player / GM / buddy (I'll call him Mike, because that's his name) and he thought it was a bit cool but also a total waste of time because, in 5e, the light cantrip and darkvision make torches pointless.

Why does light in 5e matter to my GLOG hack? I haven't convinced my players to switch over... yet. But they trust me to create new procedures and house rules for my 5e game, especially where the system is lacking. Cough dungeon procedures cough.

I realized 5e wants the same thing I want. That is, the players are only ever trapped in the pitch dark under special circumstances. The designers achieve this by giving almost everyone the light cantrip or darkvision and almost never mentioning light again.

So I have revised my facetious d6 table:

d6 reasons the players can see in the dark well enough to play

1 light cantrip
2 darkvision
3 ceiling enchanted to show the night's sky
4 veins of glow-in-the-dark ore running through the dungeon
5 bioluminescent moss growing in the dungeon
6 faint ambient light from somewhere deeper in the dungeon

You have been visited by the glowing jellyfish of being able to see where you are fucking going.
Repost or it will sting you.

Solving problems with problems

Problem 1. Players need info to play and they need light so I can give them info. Therefore, I don't want the tension of running out of torches to come from the sucky play experience of being stranded in the dark.

Problem 1.5. Just handwaving away darkness feels lazy.

Problem 2. The light cantrip and darkvision trivialize the need for light in 5e.

Problem 2.5. The only meaningful light rules in 5e encourage the GM to hide information from the players. In dim light they get a penalty to perception. That is bad. See problem 1.

Problem 2.9. I absolutely cannot be bothered to track the fact that torches (or the light cantrip, or whatever) cast bright light for 30 feet and then dim light for another 10 feet. That is fiddly and bad. See problem 1.

Problem 3. It needs to still be tense to run out of torches.

(1) is solved by (2). We don't even have to hand wave anymore -- almost everyone will either have the light cantrip or darkvision or both. Those that don't can carry a bag of adventuring candles (0 inventory slots, burn so slow they effectively last forever).

(2) is a little trickier but we can side step it. I don't care that the players have disadvantage on perception checks in dim light because I am not going to ask them to roll perception checks. They just get all the info they need.

For the same reason, I don't care how far out their bright light goes before turning into dim light. Effectively, their light illuminates the room they're in. (As always, dramatic exceptions may apply.)

Think about how much information the players need.
They need more than that, way more than that.

(3). Is solved by having dungeon procedures. In this case, by porting the light-as-random-encounter-chance procedures from my GLOG hack into my 5e game. To make that work, we need just 1 house rule.

Minimal light (from the cantrip, darkvision, candles, etc) sucks. 

It's shoddy, poor-quality crap. It's just barely enough to see well enough to play. It doesn't help you avoid ambushes. You can call this whatever you want. No light (as opposed to darkness), low light*, minimal light, dim light*, bad light. I like glow light.

Torch light (torches duh, lanterns, bonfire, etc) is the good shit. 

This is what the rules are talking about when they refer to having a light source. Monsters can't surprise you if you have good light. You can call this whatever too, but torch light seems obvious to me. Other possibilities include bright light*, good light, fire light.

* If you don't mind the namespace collision with existing 5e jargon.

At this point it might sound like I've recreated the "dim light" conditions from 5e that I was JUST decrying. I haven't and here is why: dim light in 5e is fiddly (need to track how far it goes) and prohibitive (hides information) whereas this is tense and player-driven (you don't have to pay the torch tax, you can just deal with the increased random encounters).

Here is a cool thing, it scales upwards and sideways.

Different kinds of light 

Moonlight. As glow, triggers lycanthrope.
Ghost light. As glow, reveals otherwise-invisible incorporeal undead.
Light from the living stars. As moon, triggers eldritch mutations.

Sun light. As torch, blinds drow and kills vampires.
Octarine light. As torch, makes magic go wild.
The true light of heaven. As sun, harms demons and prevents falsehood.

Okay, great. You can see but the orcs are not scared of your candle. On the surprise round, the fang-toothed orc splits your head with his axe. What do you do?

d8 more kinds of light that could have cool effects  

1 mage light
2 light from hellfire / dragonfire / soulfire
3 pale light
4 octarine lite
5 the false light of heaven 
6 null light
7 dwarven machine light
8 magical darkness 

 

d6 reasons the players can still see in the dark

... because otherwise they can't play the damn game

Rambly Intro

Skip ahead for my GLOG hack light procedures. Skip again for the table I promised in the title.

I am still thinking about Part 1 of my Lair of the Lamb game. The excellent new dungeon by Arnold K of Goblin Punch starts with the players in complete darkness -- they must navigate the first few rooms by smell until they find a torch.

At first I was thinking about the smelly rooms because it's a good example of intersection clues. The players get a hint of what is in each direction so they can make a meaningful choice about which way to go. That’s something I’ve been focusing on while making dungeons for my 5e game.

Further into the dungeon, the players find a torch and the smell key disappears. I started thinking, “what the hell am I gonna do if they run out of light.” I have some ideas; I can just run the game for them without describing what they see, for one… but I don’t expect it’ll be too fun.

Brief Aside. I am working from these premises:

• The game is fun when the players are forced to make meaningful choices. (If possible, I’d prefer to skip the minutiae of tracking things until we arrive at a meaningful choice.)
• The players need enough information (lots!) so they can understand what choices are being presented to them.

So the scarcity of torches is good! It demands the players make a meaningful choice every round:

“Do you linger to spend more time on <whatever>? Your torch is fading and you’ll have to check for random encounters next round.” 

This might be a no brainer to folks familiar with old school dungeon crawling. But it's a good meaningful choice. Consider another:

“You’re standing in the pitch black. You can’t see shit. Do you crawl blindly towards the barnyard smell or the vinegar smell? (Either way you’ll be fumbling in the dark and probably bump into anything you would rather not bump into.)”

This is still a good meaningful choice. But only because the dungeon is designed around it. Otherwise it would be:

“You’re standing in the pitch black. You can’t see shit. Do you crawl blindly north, east, south, or west?”

That choice sucks. I hope it's obvious why... if not, it's been discussed before, more than once. I was more scared of my players running out of torches than they were. Because if the players can't see, it's damn hard to give them enough information to play the game.

Designing A Thing

GLOG Hack Light Procedures

I want to come up with light procedures for my GLOG hack that reinforce the push-your-luck aspect of torch management. Requirement:

• I don’t want to have to narrate the players fumbling aimless in the pitch dark. (Except, sometimes, when I do.)
• I need it to be easy enough that I won’t forget to use it.

Another Aside:

I really like the Death & Dismemberment approach to running out of terminal resources. LINK again. I used it for a West Marches game last year. But it doesn’t work in every scenario… For example, it create a perverse incentive in The Lamb if running out of light forcefully ejects the players from the dungeon they’re trying to escape.

Okay so here it is. Using Necropraxis' overloaded encounter die and light-as-random-encounter-chance from Goblin Punch's encounter stew, simplified as much as possible.

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The fact that the players can't be surprised normally is a feature, IMO. It makes the difference between abusing the minimal light hand wave and actually carrying torches really stark. Plus, you can always make "chance of surprise" a feature of specific monsters. Finally, I like plugging light management into random encounters because they both sources of time-as-tension.

Enter: 5e Light Cantrip

Oh fuck that ruins the whole idea... uh, COMING SOON

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d6 Reasons the players can still see in the dark!
1-5 bioluminescent moss growing on the wall
6 ambient light from somewhere, idk

Play Report: The Lamb

I got the chance to run Arnold K's funnel dungeon Lair of the Lamb this past week. It is a fantastic funnel and intro dungeon with a "you're trapped with the minotaur" twist.

My primary game right now is a 5e Pirate game but I am always trying to squeeze in one shots to try out my GLOG hack. This was a match made in heaven. Though, spoiler alert, we didn't finish the dungeon and will be back for a second shot. (The play report should make plenty of sense even though I used my own hack. But just FYI, I use Into the Odd style damage (no to hit roll and armor as DR).

Since my players aren't veterans, I ran the game more as an intro-to-OSR dungeon than a funnel. I gave my players a bunch of randomly generated characters -- "half level" adventurers instead of "zeroth level" peasants. Basically, they each had 1 really niche ability.

The only character to use their ability more than once was Jack Jackson, 1/2 level scout. He could spend a turn listening at doors to hear what was going on two rooms away.

The Ear hearing things 2 rooms away.

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TL;DR Questions to Arnold's survey

What path people take through the dungeon?
They looted GOATS, VINEGAR, CHESTS. They spent some time messing with the TUMBLERS to no avail. Then they got to PIT and searched BONE PILE for rope to free Akina. Then they bargained with Danjo. To be continued.

How many secrets did they find?
So far, they've found The Skull of Davok and Shadrakul's spell book.

Is the Lamb too threatening? Not threatening enough? Did they kill it?
They are perfectly terrified of the lamb. It killed someone who dared to mess with right away. It killed someone else who tried to sneak too close.

How much pressure was there for light sources?
At first, they were so concerned with water that they didn't care about light. Once they got a torch they really felt the pressure not to linger. They got lucky in the BONE PILE and managed to find a torch that let them keep searching.

How much pressure was there for ropes and weapons?
Once they met Akina they were laser focused on rope. They don't seem to care about weapons. Maybe because they think the lamb is un-killable?

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Actual Play Report:

Jack Jackson, Paul Drone, and Ursula Wellington wake up in BOWLS in their burlap sacks as the Lamb is coming into the room. Paul has the knife so he tries to fight the lamb and is promptly eaten. This set a good precedent and the players were appropriately scared of the lamb from that point on.

Jack and Ursula snuck out of the room and into GOATS. They wanted to milk the live goat for hydration so I let them hydrate 1 PC. They chose Jack. Ursula went back into BOWLS to retrieve the knife.

Ursula is killed by the lamb, of course. Now they're really scared of the thing. But she managed to free some replacement characters who snuck into GOATS -- enter Nacho and Ivan. Ivan's shitty little half-level ability is something to do with butchery so he convinces me to let him try to hydrate by drinking the goat's blood. After some dice rolls, he hydrates but the lamb is alerted and starts stalking them.

They head to VINEGAR. They're doing everything in the pitch dark and I keep reminding them how hard the dark is making everything but they're utterly focused on hydrating Nacho. He tries to drink the vinegar but fails.

Then they kick the door down to get into CHESTS. They looted everything and released Davok. Nacho tried to bargain servitude for magically being hydrated but Davok explained that the deal was servitude for not having their flesh torn off. Nacho agreed.

The lamb shows up and they're corned in CHESTS. They plead with Davok for help so he... casts emergency exit on the lamb, teleporting it somewhere else.

((( In hindsight, I think I should have insisted that they run past and possibly suffer another casualty. That could've been a good way to teach them that they've been trading safety for thoroughness by exploring every room instead of prioritizing finding a light source. But their pleas were sincere and I figured Davok wants out so he has to help somehow but he can't just fireball the lamb. I decided that he can't kill the lamb for them because of planar politics but that he could do them this one solid. )))

Then Davok goes to sleep to scry the astral plane for his body and leaves clear instruction that he is not to be disturbed. I was thrilled that Nacho leaned into the warlock role without any prompting. He even said, "I will not tolerate a word against my master."

So they head to LANDING, finally getting a torch. They mess about with the TUMBLERS for awhile to no avail. They got much better at interrogating the fiction and moving quickly at this point. But they didn't think to take the pole.

Note they've combined LANDING and TUMBLERS into 1 room and drawn the secret door on the wrong wall. They've also turned the 3 MURAL rooms into 1 long room.  

At this point they've got the helmet, lotus pipe, twine and bell, a bottle, a knife, a torch, a fire-starter.

They moved into PIT and heard that the lamb was in FOUNTAIN. They had a quick exchange with Akina and began searching BONE PILE for rope. They spent an hour doing this and didn't trigger any random encounters but they only got 2 rolls because they left Jack to keep watch. They found another torch and a silver crown. (I think its a necklace or something in the adventure but I accidentally told them crown. Shrug.)

The new torch came just in time.

They searched the bone pellets so they discovered the the secret door to SARCOPHAGUS. Nacho knew right away how to get down but didn't realize he'd be trapped so fell into SHADRAKUL. He took the spell book but didn't mess with the goblet. Somehow he got the feeling it was a trick. The snake didn't attack, more on that later.

They're obsessed with rope now to rescue Akina and Nacho so they keep searching the bone pellets, spending the remainder of their torch. They rolled a 13, so I decided they found rope.

((( Between the rope and the Shadrakul snake, I wonder if I was going too easy on them at this bit. But I couldn't tell if the snake was supposed to be guarding the whole skeleton or just the book or just the goblet. And 13 is missing from the pone pellets random item table. They were playing carefully and with focus so it worked for me. )))

They got Nacho and Akina both out. A passive encountered let them know the lamb was not in the fountain anymore but they had peeked into the MURAL room and wanted to check out the CRACK so they sent Ivan inside. He traded the silver crown to Danjo for some wine to hydrate Nacho. He traded Akina's gold ring to Danjo for the promise that he would return in 2 hours with scuba gear, of all things. They got Danjo's knife as collateral. There were no spider bites, even though Ivan was in the crack for 4 minutes.

That is where we stopped the session (after 3 hours). I haven't figured out yet if Danjo is going to come back with the scuba gear or cut and run. I asked why they wanted that and they've convinced themselves that there will be water based on the fish-with-arms statue.

Ugly blog /and/ hex flower for duels

What is this ugly blog?

This is my attempt to join the OSR blog-o-sphere, particularly the GLOG community. I've been lurking for awhile and I want to actually create some content.

Idea --> Notes --> Prep* --> Game-able Content

* Most of my ideas probably don't even get this far. But even those that do are only useful to me. This is my attempt to push more stuff through this funnel and out the other end.

It will probably always be ugly, though.

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Tax: Here is a hex grid flower for spicing up a duel. I used it last week and my players (a bunch of HEMA nerds) loved it.

Start in the center and roll 1d6. 1: N, 2: E, 3-4: S, 5-6: W. Repeat until someone wins. Wrap around the sides in a way that makes sense to you. I flavored the results according to the fighting styles of the participants in my game but those could be changed out easily enough.

Duelist A is the favorite to win; duelist B is the underdog. In my game, the players sabotaged one of the participants to flip the weighting.