Dungeon Chatter

Dungeon Chatter Podcast Episode 5: E is for Experience In this episode, Travis and Victoria discuss experience points, milestones, leveling up, and becoming harder to defeat. Podchaser RSS Link https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/dungeon-chatter-rpg-podcast-724742 Works Discussed TTRPGs:  AD&D, Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP), Rolemaster (RM), Generic Universal Role Playing System AD&D 2nd edition, Unearthed Arcana, MERP, RM, World of Darkness, GURPS, Shadow Run Video Games:  Darkest Dungeon Literature:  Rilke Concepts:  Experience for killing stuff, possession of magic items, "defeating" enemies, experiencing the dungeon, using skills, failing, Milestone Leveling vs. Experience Leveling. Show Notes For the second show in a row, I think this was our best sounding podcast, from a technical point of view. There are fewer pops, too, this time around. Mostly Travis’s fault. The Pitch Blood of Heroes: Experience as...

Combat and Conversation 2: Advantages (First Strike) Travis Joseph Rodgers In the last blog, I presented a general system for quickly resolving combat. There, I assumed that the combatants were equal in all regards. Because combatants are not often equal in all regards, in this section I introduce some new wrinkles – advantages. If someone has an advantage in a combat, the advantage can likely be categorized in one of the following ways: one opponent has greater effective strike range (RANGE), one has greater speed (SPEED), one has greater accuracy (ACCURACY), one has greater capacity for devastation (DAMAGE), one has different capacity to deal damage of a certain type (TYPE), one has greater ability to dodge (DODGE), or one has greater ability to “shrug” (ARMOR) damage or “deal with”/"soak" damage despite being struck (HEALTH). There may be further types of advantage, like situational and positional advantages, but for the time being let’s suppose that we can reclass...

We are officially on iTunes, and our first four episodes are now posted! You can check them out at the link below: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/dungeon-chatter-rpg-podcast/id1435743168 Episodes A is for Armor B is for Blood of Heroes C is for Character Creation D is for Damage

Split Die Pools / Multiple Actions Travis Joseph Rodgers The Dungeon Chatter system uses a d20 base roll with a modifier of XD6. So a roll at "minus 3" means that you're rolling 1d20 minus 3d6. A "10" is always a success, a negative number is always a critical failure, and a 20 is always a critical success. I've just introduced rules for split die pools. I've done it with the following three rules: Rule 1. Skill Required Your relevant skill must be above 0. A zero represents familiarity but lack of skill, so if you're only familiar with something, you can't try to trade off skill for speed/frequency. Rule 2. Buy Frequency /Spend Skill You can double your actions (from 1 to 2) by rolling each check at two less than your total pool. So, if you have a +3, you can roll two +1 actions (+3 - 2 = +1). If you have a +2, you can roll two +0 actions. If you have a +1, you can roll two -1 actions. You cannot roll two actions if you have bel...

Combat and Conversation 1: The Basics Many who play RPGs love the combat experience, especially when it’s rife with opportunities for cool combat maneuvers and support options. Yet every wrinkle added to the mechanics of combat threatens to add more time and more complexity. Every addition to complexity and time should probably be regarded, at least prima facie, as undesirable in the system. Many who play RPGs also enjoy the conversational component of the RPG, even when the mechanics there are only lightly involved or wholly uninvolved. In this blog post, I begin a (hopefully brief) series of posts thinking through simple, conversational combat that affords options and flavor to players without adding so much to the machinery that it becomes a detriment to player enjoyment. A Simple Model Suppose two evenly matched foes face off. A simple d20 could model a range of combat outcomes, like the following: D20 Roll           ...