Normal Humans

The subject of the "normal human" monster entry in the OSE rulebook came up in the OSR Discord. I started riffing with Carson and this happened.

Normal Human

A normal human. Just a normal human. Just a perfectly normal human.

Lady Apidae by Nandrysha

HD 1 (4 HP), AC 12 or worn armor, speed 30', 1 weapon attack, morale 7.

A Normal Human always rolls the average result on every die, rounding whichever way benefits it most.

Normal Humans are all but impossible to detect in groups. When entering a crowd of more than 10 people, a Normal Human has a 3 in 6 chance to blend in flawlessly (and since they always roll average, this roll always succeeds). However, any PC with at least 10 Wisdom will feel an indefinable wrongness when interacting with a Normal Human on its own.

If you tell a Normal Human your real name of your own free will, it will begin to steal it. Each day, every numeric value on your character sheet--ability scores, hit points, etc.--will move 1 closer to average. When they all reach average, you become a Normal Human permanently, and the Normal Human that stole your name replaces you completely. Killing the Normal Human trying to steal your name before the process completes halts it and reverses the effects, but finding the specific Normal Human you need to kill is always harder than it should be. You could've sworn this was the right one, but it must have been another one--they're so hard to tell apart....

Thoughts on Moldvay Basic, Part the First

I figured it was about time I got around to actually reading B/X. It's always held up as the lingua franca of OSR, after all, and no matter how different I want my own rules to be, I feel like I should be familiar with what we're all ultimately referring back to. I've played OSE before using the free player quickstart rules, but that's my only exposure. I'm not going to do a full review or anything, but I figured I'd jot down some things that stood out to me as I went.

I'm reading the Moldvay version of the Basic Rulebook, pdf purchased from DriveThru. I like the art, and it's cool to see a lady magic-user as the adventurer of primary focus doing cool shit, even if that dress is...yeah.

Part 1: Introduction

I actually really like how the book explains the basic concept of the game, what it's about, the roles of the players and DM, what winning and losing mean and don't mean. It's fairly concise and gets the important stuff across well. I guess I assumed stuff this far back would have clunky ways of explaining all this stuff, since I still think of RPGs as a New Thing at this point and assume, I guess, that a lot of the language we use to describe it now still didn't exist.

The fact that all creatures besides the PCs are technically considered monsters is hilarious to me. Especially since the book explicitly says "yeah, totally normal humans you meet in a dungeon are absolutely monsters." Also interesting is the fact that the book calls out talking to "monsters" in the exact same way it does stealth or combat, not just as a "hey, once in a while you might meet monsters that are willing to negotiate." Like, it seems to suggest it's totally viable to play the game intending to talk and negotiate with just about everything you meet in the dungeon. I knew talking to monsters was always part of things, but I hadn't thought of it as something people would expect to be doing as much as or more than fighting or evading stuff.

The fact that the book needs to devote an entire section to explaining all the different ways it uses the word "level" is also hilarious.

Part 2: Player Character Information

The way the book talks about ability scores definitely doesn't give me the impression that they're not supposed to matter. I know by this time, ability scores have much broader mechanical effects than the very earliest version where I understand they literally only affected experience gain for certain classes. But still, hearing some people talk, you'd think making them do more is a newfangled concept.

The option to raise your prime requisite by reducing your other scores is also something I always forget about--I feel like I've only ever seen it reproduced in OSE. I'm not really sure why it seems so consistently abandoned otherwise. It seems like it doesn't interfere with what makes random ability scores good (quick to generate, no decision-making required, can inspire unorthodox characters), it's not super fiddly, and it's surprisingly grounded in the fiction as explained by "you train to improve at one thing and sacrifice development in others." I kind of like it. Probably still just keep my "swap two scores if you want" that I stole from LotFP, but still.

Okay, I'll defend thieves as a class all day, but yeah, the thief skills as implemented in here fucking suck. "Hear noise," so only thieves can say, "Hey, I'm being quiet and listening for monsters coming?" Most of them you can at least justify by them being specialized skills (lockpicking, picking pockets) or saying thieves can do them under exceptional circumstances or are just better at them than everyone else (hide in shadows, climb walls), but listening, really? Come on.

Reading the cleric makes me think I need to start treating undead as more special. So many dungeons put skeletons everywhere as the standard mook enemies. I've done it. Though my current setting doesn't really have undead anyway.

Halflings having Strength as a prime requisite is again hilarious.

I can't believe magic-users can't use staves as weapons here. If anything, that seems way more iconic than daggers. Though thinking about it, I actually don't even know if there are rules for staves in this book.

"[Thieves] do steal--sometimes from members of their own party." Oh, they...actually just say it. Welp.

I was prepared for the alignments to be less stupid than they're sometimes made out to be; they are not, and honestly even worse than I expected. "A Chaotic character does not work well with other player characters"--why have it as an option, then? I guess people saw player conflict as a more normal part of the experience? I dunno, I don't mind PvP in something like Apocalypse World because in that game, players have ways to avoid losing their character in a way that isn't interesting to them. In OSR, having to be prepared for my PC to be murdered by somebody else's doesn't sound like a fun addition to things, the game's already deadly enough. I feel like if you wanted to have this style of alignment, it'd be best to establish it as something the players should hash out amongst themselves and come to an agreement on what they're open to--a fully Chaotic party could be a great time if everyone knows that's what they should expect. 

I still can't wrap my head around alignment languages. Best explanation I can come up with is that they're just meant to facilitate communication between PCs and monsters, to avoid too many cases of the PCs wanting to talk to something but not sharing a language with it. But it still feels goofy to me. And situations like the one avoided by alignment languages can present an interesting challenge--how do the PCs communicate to a monster that they want to parlay without a shared language? How do they make themselves understood? Those are answerable questions. I want players to describe their characters scratching pictures in the dirt with a stick to communicate with the deep faeries, that sounds awesome.

"Note that playing an alignment does not mean a character must do stupid things. A character should always act as intelligently as the Intelligence score shows..." (Emphasis mine.) Hmm, evidence of an intention that characters be defined in the fiction to some extent by their ability scores, in contrast with the attitude some OSR folks seem to adopt today. I'm biased, of course, since I like ability scores.

Oh, no combat staves listed in the weapons, yup. I feel like Gandalf definitely thwomped someone with his staff at some point, but I haven't read the books in a while.

I'll try and continue with the rest of the book in further posts.

My (Better) Damage Mechanics

I'm alive.

I don't like hit points. They're fictionally confusing (meat points, etc.), and worse, they're boring. You always know how many HP you have, and that means you always know exactly how much damage you can survive. As you level up, combat becomes theoretically more survivable, but also consistently takes longer while you and your opponent remain equally matched. I don't like players being able to rely on that; a fair fight should never be that safe or predictable.

This is what I'm going to use instead from now on.

Damage

Hit points no longer exist. Damage still works the same way: attacks deal points of damage equal to the roll of a damage die (or dice) based on the attacker's weapon. A dagger deals 1d4 damage; an axe, spear, staff, or arrow deals 1d6; a sword deals 1d8 (because of its bigger cutting edge than an axe--the downside is that it's way more expensive, not useful as a tool, can't be thrown, etc.); a two-handed polearm, battleaxe, or longsword deals 1d10.

Wounds

Instead of taking away HP, damage causes wounds. A wound is always a physical injury in the fiction--if you're wounded, you've been cut, bruised, burnt, or whatever in a concretely established way.

Normal humans have 4 wound slots: 1 light, 1 moderate, 1 severe, 1 critical (named so as to correspond with the standard Cure spells). Light wounds are painful and hampering, but will get better on their own with time and rest. Moderate wounds are more painful and hampering and need treatment to heal, but aren't life-threatening. Serious wounds are "you're bleeding out": you're unconscious or otherwise incapacitated, and if you don't get help within the next few minutes, you'll die. Critical wounds are certain death--if not instant, then imminent enough to leave time for little more than dramatic last words, and beyond the help of any healer.

Each point of damage fills a wound slot. If you're unharmed and take 1 damage, you become lightly wounded; 2 damage, moderately wounded; 1 and then another 1, moderately wounded. When you're lightly wounded, you take -2 to all ability checks, attack rolls, and saves. When you're moderately wounded, you take -4. When you're seriously wounded, you go down and can't do anything more strenuous than crawl; if you aren't stabilized within 1+Con modifier minutes (minimum 1), you bleed out and die (you can also make one last dramatic attack or check, but then you die immediately). A PC with medical skills can stabilize a serious wound with medical supplies and a successful Int check; this takes a turn, during which the patient doesn't bleed out, but if the healer fails, the patient dies when the turn ends. A stabilized character is still seriously wounded; they can stand up and walk, but nothing more strenuous than that (which includes carrying a heavy load of gear).

Note that all this means being stabbed with a dagger has even odds to fatally wound you and a 1-in-4 chance to kill you outright (assuming the attack hits). A single spear thrust has a 2-in-3 chance to fatally wound and even odds to kill instantly.

Hit Dice

Everything that would normally have hit dice (so PCs, humans other than 0-level commoners, and monsters other than those with 0 HD) still does. Instead of rolling your HD to determine your HP, you keep them as a pool of dice.

When you get hit, before damage is rolled, you can spend any number of your HD to try and turn the blow. Roll those HD, add your Con modifier to each, and reduce the damage of the attack by the total. Any damage that gets through wounds you. All HD you roll are "exhausted." When you rest in a relatively safe, comfortable place for a night (so outside of the dungeon), you regain all exhausted HD.

Exhausting HD represents fatigue, minor scrapes and bruises, and diminishing luck, the way losing HP normally does when they're not used as meat points. The difference is that you can never know exactly how much luck you have left. If you're a 6th-level fighter up against a farmer with a spear, you can fight conservatively by only spending 1 HD each time the farmer hits you, but he might still get a lucky jab past your guard (you roll low on your HD, he rolls high for damage) and end you right there. The only way you can be completely sure of your safety (assuming you have a Con modifier of 0) is to blow all 6 of your HD the first time he lands a hit, leaving yourself exhausted and vulnerable if he manages to hit you again. If you're up against another 6th-level fighter, things become even less predictable--even if you both fight conservatively, the duel might drag on for many rounds or end in a single lucky strike.

This is a lot of text, so have some Berserk to break it up. Guts is probably fucked here
even with normal HP, but with these rules, he's fucked sooner.

Recovery and Healing

A light wound will heal in a week of normal (non-adventuring) activity, minus days equal to your Con modifier.

A moderate wound needs treatment to begin healing. A PC with medical skills can do this with medical supplies and an hour's work, or you can go to a doctor. Once treated, a moderate wound becomes a light wound after d6-Con modifier weeks (minimum 1) of non-adventuring activity, at which point it heals as a light wound. If you spend your recovery time on full bed rest under the care of a skilled healer, it's d4 weeks instead of d6.

A serious wound that's been stabilized can be treated like a moderate wound, and heals the same way (after which it becomes a moderate wound, which then has to heal up to a light wound). However, serious wounds leave lasting marks. Whenever you're treated for a serious wound, reduce a random ability score by 1d4 and gain a distinctive scar. (I'd ignore the ability score loss if your rules don't have PCs' ability scores increase as a standard thing; the new version of my hack I'm working on probably will, so this is meant as the main counterbalance to that.)

Instead of their normal effect, Cure spells heal wounds of their corresponding level immediately, skipping past the levels below to restore the subject to full health. Cure Serious Wounds doesn't prevent ability score loss (if you're using it) or scarring. A Cure spell won't do anything for a wound greater than its effect--Cure Light Wounds can't reduce a moderate wound to a light wound. Even magic has its limits. As a tradeoff, because wounds don't scale with level like HP, all Cure spells stay consistently useful at all levels, instead of Cure Light being obsoleted by Cure Moderate and Cure Serious.

Next Time

Like I mentioned, I'm working on a new build of my hack. I kind of want to put it in zine form this time; regardless, I'll probably post it here in full once I have it in something like a usable state. Meanwhile, I'd like to start putting some of my general rules ideas up here. Stay tuned if you like reading the words that come out of my head.