Let me just consult my House Rules....

Now, I know I wrote down an amendment to that rule somewhere.....

I find it impossible not to tinker with roleplaying or wargaming rules.

I'm beginning to think my players might be losing patience with this trait of mine. The rolling eyes, the heaving of sighs, these are all subtle signs and hints.

Too bad.

Bridge Weight Limit — Generic Wargames Rules Fiddling

Bridges could be given a weight limit, which is not revealed to the player(s) until they actually try the bridge out. So maybe they'll be able to get their heavy armour across, or maybe not -- and lose a tank into the bargain.

It would be easiest with an umpire, but it could be done by using a stack of "weight class" chips or cards marked YES or NO, with each card equating to, say, ten tons. You arrange the stack according to the heaviest weight class vehicle on the table, and with NO cards from the level where the bridge will collapse. When you drive a tank over the bridge, you take the appropriate number of cards from the stack and read the last one. If it says YES, you made it. If not... say goodby to that precious tank, and the bridge.

You can add another card to the stack, right at the YES/NO transition, a MAYBE card which gives you a 50/50 die roll to get your vehicle across. So, maybe you'll get your first Tiger over, but what about the next? Or the next? You'll just have to gamble, or find another sturdier crossing point.

It wouldn't be appropriate to give every single type of bridge a weight limit, unless maybe you're habitually playing games with a Maus trundling about the place. I shouldn't imagine that most undamaged rail bridges, for example, would be likely to have any trouble carrying even a heavy tank. However, I am not a civil engineer, so I'm really just pulling this stuff out of my arse.

Depending on how pernickety you wanted to get, the same system could be used with different granularity for different classes of bridge. Each chip/card could, for example, equate to one ton instead of ten for lighter bridges. And the number of MAYBE die-rolling cards could be increased for bridges in poor repair.

Have you ever been experienced?

Well, I have.....

I've been sort of keeping an eye on the upcoming Pathfinder 2 FRPG rules. I'm not particularly interested in ever running a Pathfinder campaign; the rules are far too pernicketty and Byzantine for my taste, but I do like to see which ideas are worth nicking.

One that piqued my interest is their new level progression rules. Every level requires a base 1,000 experience points to advance. First to second level? A thousand. Fifteenth to sixteenth level? Still a thousand. If the GM decides they want progress the game faster or slower, they can just adjust that base number up or down, but it still remains the same for every level.

Naturally, this would require considerable judgement by the GM. If that first-level party defeated a Hideous Bugblatter Beast of Thraall, it would be worth a lot more experience to them than to the fifteenth-level party. The number of experience points granted for any given session would be highly situational, and to a certain degree subjective.

I haven't actually seen the PF2 playtest documents (yet) so I don't know what, if any, guidance is given to the prospective GM in this respect. I assume there's some.

Anyway, it's an idea that I rather like.

It would be possible to transfer it to AD&D, but it wouldn't be a seamless transition: the AD&D level progression rates are a bit.... peculiar. Some classes progress much faster than others initially and then slow right down, some get a speed boost at the mid-levels. Pretty much every class has its own particular level progression numbers for any given level. Frankly, it's a bit of a mess. Once upon a time I worked out line graphs to chart the relative advancement rates of all the classes, but where that work is now I have no idea.

To an extent it could be modified for AD&D by giving each class its own base advancement rate to reflect the relative effectiveness of the class: I'd probably set Fighters as the standard, at 1,000xp per level, while Rangers might be 1,100 and Paladins 1,250. Thieves would be faster at, say, 900, while Magic-users and Clerics I'd probably set at about the 1,100 to 1,300 level.

The thing that I like best about this system is that a player will always know, at a glance, how close they are to advancing in level. No more need for XP charts at all.

---

Later....

I started to work out the relative progression speed of the various classes by taking the number of XP required for each to reach level 10 (from OSRIC) and turning it into this bar chart.

The results surprised me quite considerably.

I'd never really taken any notice of this before; I was vaguely aware that Thief progression was quite fast, but I'd always assumed that the Fighter was one of the more average classes in that respect. I was quite wrong.

THE AVERAGE IS 330,000 xp

Druids, Thieves and Illusionists all scamper up the level hierarchy in the blink of an eye compared with pretty much everybody else. Clerics, Fighters, and Paladins trail behind, progressing excruciatingly slowly comparatively.

To be frank, I can't really see why, except maybe to make pretty lame classes like Illusionist attractive to players — but then, Druids are pretty goddam scary, so why would they need to be helped along like that? It can't be because of the characteristic requirements of the class — Paladins are really crippled in that way, yet they advance the slowest of them all. I suspect the relative progression rates were set pretty much at whim.

I think I might just compress everything. Probably quite a bit.

---

Even Later....

I've decided I am definitely going to adopt the "1,000 XP per level" system for all classes, for all levels.

I was going to adjust the amount of xp/level required by class according to the advancement rates shown in the existing XP table, but I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why some classes advance at different rates than others. Sometimes remarkably different rates. I can understand the desire of the designers to allow different advancement rates, but there seems to be little consistency to them.

This will mean a little bit of arithmetic to begin with, since we'll need to know what percentage of the XP you need to advance from your present level has already been achieved for each of your classes, to work out how many you've got right now.

It'll also necessitate a change in the "gp for XP" training fees, and I think I'll just set them at a straight 10 gp per XP because it's easy to work out. That will work out considerably cheaper for higher-level characters, but I don't really mind that.

If nothing else, this is going to make it easier for me to assign non-monster-killin' in-game XP rewards. Ten points for Gryffindor, for exceptional pluck!

I think I'll also look at allowing players to spend XP in the same way as Fate Points or Hero Points or whatever you want to call them. I'll have a think about the cost of things like re-rolls and the like; I don't want to make them cripplingly expensive, but neither do I want them to be a trivial cost.

Target Acquisition and Sneakiness in Bolt Action

Something that irks me slightly about Bolt Action is that there's no real mechanic to reflect battlefield concealment or stalking. If you can draw a line of sight between one model and another, then they can see each other plain as day. Cover helps your troops to avoid being hit when fired at, but it does nothing to impede target acquisition in the first place.

I'd like to propose a couple of house rules:

Target Acquisition:

Before one unit can shoot at another, they first have to acquire the target by passing an Orders Test (though if they fail, they don't suffer the usual consequences of failure, they just fail to see the target).

It would be modified as follows:

• Per Pin marker, (-1)
• Acquiring unit is Down, (-1)
• Concealment (see below)
• Target is Down (-2)
• If the target moved more than 3" within the last turn (+2)
• If the target moved less than 3" (+1)
• If a friendly unit in line of sight of the acquirer shot at the target within the last turn (+1).
• If the target shot at another unit within the last turn (+1)
• If the target shot at the acquiring unit at any time from its current position (+2)

Once a unit has acquired another, they maintain acquisition until either they or the target moves out of line of sight.

Concealment:

A unit in line of sight from another, but not yet acquired, can declare itself to be attempting concealment.

Concealment has no effect except to hinder acquisition by an enemy unit.

Roll 1d3 to determine the penalty to other units' acquisition:

• Inexperienced troops are at -2
• Regular troops are at -1
• Veteran troops at -0.

The roll is further modified as follows:

• If more than 3" from any cover, -2
• If less than 3" from cover, but still in the open, -1
• If touching cover, or if the unit is partially in cover, -0
• If the entire unit is in cover (but still in line of sight), +1
• Small vehicle or gun (e.g Bren carrier, jeep, 6 pdr) -1
• Medium vehicle or gun (e.g. truck, half-track, PaK 40) -2
• Large vehicle or gun (tank, 17 pdr, 88mm) -3.

Regardless of penalties, the minimum score is zero — no matter how incompetent your troops, they're not going to become more obvious by trying to hide.

Infantry and man-packed crew weapons can still move up to 3" while attempting concealment, but it will make it easier for enemies to spot you (see above). Vehicles of any kind must remain stationary to be concealed.

Concealment is lost as soon as the concealed unit opens fire, and may not be regained without moving to a new position at least one Run move away.

A veteran infantry unit, Down, in cover, and concealed is going to be quite hard to spot, but as soon as they open fire they'll lose the benefit of their sneakiness.

Limited-Use Magical Doo-Dads

There's a system for determining whether or not your magical gizmo still works or not that I read somewhere some time ago, and that I rather like.

Rather than giving it a set number of charges remaining, you assign to it a die — anything from a d2 to a d1,000,000,000,000.

Every time the macguffin is used, the die is rolled: if a 1 turns up, it fizzles, fails to operate, and is out of charges from that point.

This system has two advantages:

• First, it adds a degree of uncertainty to the use of magical gew-gaws. I don't imagine them coming with a little read-out showing exactly how much fuel is left in the tank, and I don't think the characters using the thing should have that information either.
• Second, it reduces the amount of record-keeping that either the player or the GM has to remember to keep track of.

The easiest thing, from the GM's point of view, is to just let the player know which die they should be rolling to activate the thingumajig. The down-side to that (if it is, in fact, a down-side) is that it gives them some information about the state of charge of the doohickey.

The slightly more tiresome method is for the GM to secretly roll the die every time they attempt to use the framistat. The possibility here is that an unscrupulous GM might take advantage of the secrecy to remove from his or her campaign a magical splandlefloopit that is causing them irritation.

My personal choice would generally be the former, but that's mainly because I'm really very lazy.

Bolt Action 2: more rules tinkering

I'm trying to think of a workable mechanism for temporarily linking two units in Bolt Action (2nd Ed.) so that they're both activated as one. The specific circumstance I'm thinking of is where you have an armoured vehicle providing moving cover for some infantry behind it, but there are others where it might also be appropriate.

It's doable by way of the officers' extra orders, but that just makes the order process slightly less piece-meal — even a Major would only be able to get two vehicle/infantry combined units moved per Turn.

It could be run as a variant of the "mounting vehicles" rules, where the infantry don't actually get into/on to the vehicle and the vehicle is then restricted to the move speed of the accompanying infantry. In that case, if the vehicle is destroyed, it wouldn't also take out the infantry (unless it's H.E.)

Unlike the regular "mounting transports" rules, the infantry in this situation would be able to "mount" a moving vehicle as long as it isn't moving any faster than the infantry. I think I'd limit that to 6" (ADVANCE speed), due to the need to coordinate between the infantry and vehicle to maintain cover.

NOTE: I noticed, while reading about mounting transports, that it explicitly states that a unit can't be split between two or more transports.
This is a STUPID RULE, which I fully intend to ignore. For a start, it would make it impossible to represent the British practice of allotting two Bren Carriers to carry one section of infantry.

Anyway, while this might work for the "tank-shield" circumstance, it still doesn't really cater to things like a combined assault. Maybe that's the sort of thing that would best be handled with the officers' extra orders.

Even then, under a strict interpretation of the rules as written, I think the assault would have to be worked through in its entirety when the first unit is ordered in, rather than counting both assaulting units as a single entity for that purpose.

Hit Points For Spell Use

OK, here's my initial plan for hit-point costs for spell-use.

To cast any spell, it costs you (1d6 + spell level) points, which comes off your maximum hit-point total.

Note that point: off your MAXIMUM hit point total. That means that magic use may actually cost you hit-points, but more importantly, it will affect the amount to which you can be cured.

Example: you have 50 hit-points, and you cast three level 3 spells which ends up costing you a total of 20 points. That means that you now effectively have only 30 hit-points. Just like physical damage and fatigue. The difference is that if you then take another 10 points in a fight, and get some magical healing or use one or more of your healing dice, you can't heal up past 30 points — your new Hit-Point Maximum. If you use more magic, your Hit-Point Maximum will drop still further.

Note that if you've taken 10 points of normal damage (to 40hp) and then cast a spell that drops your Hit-Point Maximum to 45hp, you won't immediately lose any more hit-points. It just means that you can't be healed up to your usual 50hp.

If you then cast another spell that drops your Hit-Point Maximum to 39, you'd actually lose that hit-point, because your new Hit-Point Maximum is lower than your current hit-point total.

A spell that requires Concentration to maintain will have to be paid for again if circumstances require a Concentration check (though it doesn't require new verbal, somatic or material components to be expended). If the check fails, you won't lose any hit-points, but of course the spell effect stops.

A Long Rest will return your Hit-Point Maximum back to normal, but nothing else will (unless I make up a spell or magic item or something that will do it).

It's not all bad news though. I'm doing away with spell slots — I think the hit-point cost is limitation enough.

I'll also be designing some magic items that can be used as hit-point sinks (i.e. that can be used to power spells before you have to use up your own precious life force) — probably along the lines of ioun stones and the like — some of which can be recharged, others of which will be disposable items.

---

Modification

I was thinking about what Andrew said about there being no point in ever using a lower-level casting power, apart from the miniscule difference in hp cost, and I think this might answer that:

We return to daily spell-slots as written in the rules, but they are no longer an absolute limitation; they're rather pricing bands or multiples. The casting cost increases if you exceed the number of "safe" slots available, as follows.

Let's say, for example, you have one 4th level slot, two 3rd, three 2nd and 4 1st-level slots.

• You use up your 4th-level slot, at its standard cost of 1d6+4. If you want to cast a second 4th-level spell, the casting cost rises to 2d6+8. If you want to cast yet another, it rises to 3d6+12, and so on.
• You have four 1st-level slots available, so the first four level one spells would each cost 1d6+1 to cast. The next four would cost 2d6+2, and the next four would cost 3d6+3.

Is that clear? It does mean that you'd have to go back to keeping track of how many spells you've cast at a given level, but life is a vale of woe, and man is born to suffering as the sparks fly upward.

"Sculpt Spells" modification

From the D&D5e PHB, p.117, the School of Evocation:

SCULPT SPELLS
Beginning at 2nd level, you can create pockets of relative safety within the effects of your evocation spells. When you cast an evocation spell that affects other creatures that you can see, you can choose a number of them equal to 1 + the spell's level. The chosen creatures automatically succeed on their saving throws against the spell, and they take no damage if they would normally take half damage on a successful save.

This is a pretty cool ability, and I like it, but I think it's just a little too potent. If a warrior has to think twice about the cost/benefit ratio of shooting arrows into combat, I feel that a wizard should likewise have to weigh up whether or not they really should be dropping a Flame Strike right on their own location.

To that end, I intend to modify it thus:

1. The "pockets of relative safety" become truly only relatively safe. The Evoker can shape their spell to flow around creatures, but the effect is this:
• The creature being avoided gets to add the wizard's spellcasting ability modifier to their saving throw. (If the wizard includes themselves in the spell area-of-effect and already gets to add their spellcasting ability modifier, they don't get to add it again.)
• If they save, they take no damage. If they fail, they still take half damage. If they fumble their save, they take full damage.
2. Creatures in intimate physical contact — e.g., if grappling, or being swarmed by hundreds of flesh-eating beetles — count as a single creature for the purposes of shaping the spell around them. The wizard can choose to affect both of them or neither.

I think this should have the effect that I want, which is basically to keep the ability's usefulness, but remove the guarantees, so that the wizard actually has to consider whether to cast a spell that might damage their allies.

Initiative

While sanding mindlessly today (so much sanding), my mind drifted away to thinking about initiative determination.

I was pondering a slight simplification of the process.

Rather than having everyone roll initiative separately, each side just rolls one d20. Everyone still gets to add (or subtract) their own modifiers for DEX, spell-casting and what-not to the base number, so there will still be a certain amount of variance, but there are only two die rolls that I have to keep track of instead of five or more.

So, the process would go:

1. Declare actions (attack, cast a spell, run away, panic, etc.) 
2. Somebody rolls initiative for your side for that turn (take it in turns, I guess) 
3. Add/subtract modifiers to see if you go before or after the Bad Guys 
4. FIGHT! 

Hopefully this would provide a nice balance between the ultimate simplicity of one roll per side without modifiers, and the complexity of everyone (including the four hundred goblins) rolling individually.

99% of the time, the only important thing to know is whether or not you get to act before or after your opponents; having your comrades actions spread all over the turn order is mostly just pointless and irrelevant.

Lesser Lesser Restoration

 This spell is designed as a stop-gap, temporary remedy for ability loss.

Lesser Lesser Restoration

2nd level abjuration 

Casting Time: 10 minutes
Range: Touch
Components: V,S,M (powdered stimulant herbs mixed with brandy) 

You draw a magical circle of runes and sigils around a creature and, while chanting the verbal component of the spell, have them drink an infusion of stimulant herbs in brandy. The spell will temporarily reverse 1d4 points of one characteristic loss. If more than one characteristic is below its normal maximum, the characteristic to be targeted by the spell must be specified when the spell is cast.

The spell can be cast multiple times on the same recipient, affecting the same or different characteristics each time. 

The spell will not raise a characteristic above its normal maximum, nor does the spell address any underlying condition causing the characteristic loss — it will not, for instance, neutralize poison, nor cure a wasting disease. 

Characteristic points restored by the use of this spell disappear at the rate of one per casting per six hours. 

For example, if the spell is cast twice to restore, respectively, 3 points of STR and 4 points of DEX, after six hours one point each of the restored STR and DEX would be lost. If it were cast twice with both castings affecting STR, after six hours, two points of STR would be lost — one for each casting of the spell.

Casting the spell using a 3rd level or higher spell slot increases the amount of ability points restored by 1d4 per level above 2nd.

Spell-casting house rules

Initiative : minus 1d6 + spell level 

So, if you're casting a cantrip, your initiative score is reduced by 1d6. If you want to cast a level three spell, your initiative count would be 1d6+3 less.

If you take damage, or have to endure some sort of environmental hardship before your initiative comes up, you must make a Concentration save to be able to cast the spell. If you fail, your action is used, and the spell is not cast (though the spell slot, nor any material components, are not used up). You can still move and take reactions and bonus actions if appropriate.

Rituals : casting time one hour per total levels plus 1d4 hours.

For example a level 4 ritual would take 1+2+3+4=10+1d4 hours to cast. Note that partaking in a ritual, either as caster or recipient, does NOT count as resting.

Corruption : casting without a patron or via ritual may result in corruption.

Note: I haven't really thought this one completely through, and I'm not sure quite how workable it would be. I really just want some mechanism that might encourage people to consider before using magic willy-nilly.

Channelling magical forces directly through one's own body, without the buffer created by a ritual or magical intermediary, is potentially hazardous to one's spiritual well-being. There are certain physical signs of magical corruption, but more important are the mental effects: gradually (if it's not already there) the magic-user's alignment shifts around towards chaos and evil.

There are rituals designed to remove magical corruption, or to transfer it to some other unfortunate.

When you cast any spell, make a DC 5 + spell level save vs. your magic-using characteristic. If you fail, you gain one point of Corruption. I'll let you know what that means as and when it occurs.

Note: Warlocks, Clerics, and Paladins are deemed to get their magic through magical intermediaries. Other spell-casters will have to come to their own arrangements if they want a patron.

Note: It occurs to me that this would make an excellent game-mechanical reason for a spell-caster to have a familiar, which would act as a magical conduit as long as it's within line of sight and thus remove the risk of corrupting one's own self with all this magical jiggery-pokery. It would also explain the intimate psychic connection between familiar and "master". I shall therefore Make It So.

Attack Of The Mega-Spells of DOOOOOOM!

As we make our way into my new(ish) D&D5e campaign, I'm finding quite a few things that have changed from Ye Olde Dayes that have a tendency to make PCs into unstoppable superheroes. The new hit-point recovery rules are one, though I don't really have too many issues with that; it improves survivability at low levels and keeps things moving along a bit more than they did when a party had to hole up to recover for a week after half an hour of dungeon-bashing.

The idea of having to take a character down below negative their hit-point total to kill them starts to get problematic once they get past the first couple of levels; a mid- to high-level character pretty much needs have no fear of death from a one-shot unless it's an attack that's doing hundreds of points of damage. Add to that the use of Hero Points to guarantee successful Death Saves, and a PC with more than 30hp or so is pretty much unkillable.... unless.....

Intelligent creatures will be aware of the issue, and if they spend a bit of effort after the PC has gone down whacking away at them to make sure of automatic Death Save failures, then the unconscious PC is in real trouble. This is where being swarmed by vicious little bastards like goblins or kobolds gets very dangerous.

Note: I believe, during play-testing, death was set at negative CON+Level; I'm not sure why they decided on the current system. I suppose to give players as much opportunity as possible to save their characters.

I've previously made my disdain for the new Find Familiar spell known. What a stinker.

Another spell that is giving me pause is Lesser Restoration. This is a real uber-spell. It requires no material component, and it pretty much gives the PC four spells for the price of one 2nd level spell slot: it replaces the old Cure Disease, Neutralize Poison, Cure Deafness/Blindness, and Remove Paralysis. That seems amazingly powerful for a humble second-level spell to me.

I think that what I will do with it is, first, make it a lengthy ritual spell, and second, give it a reasonably rare and expensive material component that varies depending on what it is that the caster wants to heal. That still leaves it a very powerful spell to have in one's repertoire without letting it become overly dominant.

So:

Lesser Restoration

2nd level abjuration
Casting Time: 3+1d4 hours (ritual)
Range: Touch
Components: V,S,M (50gp worth of powdered gemstone, which is consumed by casting the spell — diamond to cure a disease, amethyst to neutralize a poison, aquamarine to cure deafness or blindness, or emerald to remove paralysis.) 

You draw a magical circle of runes and sigils around a creature and, after a period of 4 -7 hours of chanting and magical jibber-jabber, can end either one disease or one condition afflicting it. The condition can be blinded, deafened, paralysed, or poisoned.

I think that should do the trick. At least it will make it a bit less egregious.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Having just finished my initial read-through of the new DMG, there are a few options that I'll be adopting, some of which are new(ish), some of which restore some features of earlier editions.

• Hero Points (p.264) is one — I prefer it to the Inspiration mechanic. I suspect a major use might be to stop people dying of crappy saving throws.
• Healer's Kit Dependency (p.266) — I'll have to sort out just how much, in terms of game mechanics, a Healer's Kit can be used before it's exhausted and has to be re-stocked.
• Action Options (pp.271-272) — Climb on to a bigger creature, Disarm, Overrun, Shove aside, and Tumble are all options I'm happy to adopt. I'm not convinced about Mark, and probably won't use it. I'll also reinstate Cleaving Through because I like the trope of fighters cutting a bloody swathe through legions of mooks, though it may very well make being mobbed a bit less frightening.
• Lingering Injuries (p.272) — I'll use this, but only for when characters are reduced to 0 hit-points but not killed, not also for critical hits. It will mean that restoration/regeneration magic will be more necessary, of course.

I like the Chasing rules (pp.252-255), which will make chasing and escapes a lot more interesting and fun.

Something we haven't been doing, which we should get back into the habit of, is declaring actions before Initiative is determined, for the purposes of spell-casting interruption and so forth. I'd like to get back to using Speed Factor Modifiers (p.271) for initiative too, even if only for spell-casting and potion-glugging and the like.

Apart from anything else,
it gives me an excuse to use
my Judge Dredd playing cards.

I'm also wondering about modifying initiative determination from die rolls to secret card-drawing, and then running each turn through an initiative count-down. We'd use a standard deck of playing cards, with your initiative being the value of the card you draw (1 to 13 — Ace to King) plus or minus any DEX or situational modifiers. Maybe if you draw the Joker, you get to go first OR swap it with another player's (or DM's) card. (?) That would mean that if you have an absolutely vital spell in the offing, you can give the Joker to your wizard and be secure in the knowledge that she's not going to be interrupted in the casting... or not for that turn, anyway.

When the deck runs out, it's shuffled and re-started.

The advantage of all this is that it makes combat ever so slightly less predictable, since none of the combatants will know exactly when any of the others is going to act.

Goblins

Posted on reddit by MrApophenia, which I then found out about from ZakS, who found out about it from danbuter on therpgsite:

“

So I was thinking about goblins in my game, and came up with an idea I thought was kind of fun. Figured I'd post it for anyone who wants to swipe it. 

In my game, I want goblins to be scary, even though they're mechanically identical to the usual low-level baddies. Mostly I'm swiping the Pathfinder mode of Gremlins-inspired craziness for my goblins, but rather than being cowardly, I'm planning to make them gleefully suicidal, with absolutely no concept of self-preservation or survival instinct. These guys will throw themselves at the heroes in giggling hordes no matter how many get slaughtered. 

Then I got to thinking about why they would have this trait, and an idea struck me: Nematodes. Specifically, nematode cannibalism. 

Nematodes are a type of flatworm with an odd characteristic - if one nematode eats another one, it seems to take on the memories of the consumed worm. Yes, really! 

Goblins, it turns out, are the same. Goblins don't fear death because they have a very peculiar form of immortality: As long as a dead goblin is eaten by another goblin, all its memories will be passed on to that goblin - including any memories from previous consumed goblins! And since goblins are voracious cannibals, most goblins remember dozens or even hundreds of lives (and deaths), and see it as little more than an inconvenience. 

A goblin who eats a hobgoblin not only gains the memories of that hobgoblin, but will begin to grow; over the course of about a month, it will become a new hobgoblin, with the personality and memories of the deceased hobgoblin. This is why hobgoblins are always sure to keep some goblins around, despite their contempt for their inferior cousins - when a hobgoblin dies, assuming it's a hobgoblin the others still want around, they'll go grab the nearest goblin and feed the corpse to it. 

However, one hobgoblin eating another is a severe taboo, because of the result - a bugbear, a monstrously huge goblin that hunts and eats other goblins and hobgoblins. (Bugbears tend to be solitary and avoid each other, so what happens if one bugbear eats another is left to the imagination of the GM.)"

Don't bother me, I'm Concentrating

I've been looking over the D&D5e rules for maintaining concentration on spells, and I was a little bit startled at how lax they are. It's assumed that as long as you don't actually get stabbed in the guts, you can easily maintain focus on a spell.

Well, I am a lot meaner than that.

In my game, if you do anything more mentally taxing than walking along a reasonably clear path, you will have to make a DC10 Concentration check to keep a spell that requires concentration going.

Have to jump out of the way of a runaway cart? Concentration check. Being pestered by an annoying beggar-child? Concentration check.  Want to take a swing at an annoying beggar-child? Concentration check. Climb a ladder? Concentration check. Suddenly subjected to very loud noises or flashing lights or other dance-club phenomena? Concentration check. Someone throws a bucket of cold water over you? Concentration check.

If you take damage, the DC for the concentration check is 8+ the amount of damage you've taken. A separate check is required for each individual lot of damage, not for each attack — so, if you get hit by three spines from a manticore's tail for and take 4, 6, and 8 points of damage, you'd make three checks at DCs of 12, 14 and 16 respectively, not a single check at a DC of 30 even though all the damage came from a single attack.

If that seems harsh to you.... well, tough. Suck it up, and stop being such a big cry-baby.

Find Familiar - rewrite

Because I really hate what they've done with familiars in D&D5e, I've rewritten the spell description. It's heavily based in the way it was presented in AD&D2e.

---

Find Familiar

1st level Conjuration (Ritual)

• Casting Time: 2-12 hours
• Range: 1 mile
• Components: V,S,M (10gp/hour of charcoal, incense and herbs that must be consumed by fire over the course of the ritual in a brass brazier)
• Duration: Instantaneous

This spell enables the caster to attempt to summon a familiar spirit to inhabit the body of a small creature, and to act as his or her aide and companion. Familiars are typically animals such as cats, frogs, ferrets, crows, hawks, snakes, owls, ravens, toads, weasels, or even mice, though more exotic creatures are sometimes (rarely) found in the role, such as imps, quasits, or pseudodragons.

A creature acting as a familiar can benefit a wizard, conveying its sensory powers to its master, conversing with them, and serving as a guard/scout/spy as well. A wizard can have only one familiar at a time, however, and he or she has no control over what sort of creature answers the summoning, if any at all comes. If an appropriate animal is supplied by the caster for use in the ritual, it can improve the chances that the spirit (if it answers the call at all) will inhabit the desired form.

The familiar will be of normal human intelligence — 3d6 (3-18) INT. It will normally be longer-lived than the normal animal, but familiars are not immortal, and the bodies will eventually wear out.

The wizard receives the heightened senses of his familiar, which grants the wizard a +1 bonus to Passive Perception.

Familiars have the same hit points and armour class as their animal prototype, plus 1 hit point per caster level.

The wizard can drop into a trance-like state in which he or she can see, hear, smell etc. through the familiar's senses. While in this state, the wizard has no use of their own senses, and cannot move about or perform any other actions. Any damage taken by one member of the link is also experienced by the other.

If separated from the caster, the familiar loses 1 hit point each day, and dies if reduced to 0 hit points. When the familiar is in physical contact with its wizard, it gains the wizard's saving throws against magical attacks. If a magical attack would normally cause damage, the familiar suffers no damage if the saving throw is successful and half damage if the saving throw is failed. If the familiar dies, the psychic shock is intense: the wizard must successfully make an immediate DC 10 CON save or drop to 0 hit-points (at which point they are dying — make Death Saves as usual). Even if he or she survives this check, the wizard permanently loses 1 point from their Constitution when the familiar dies.

When the wizard decides to find a familiar, he or she must load a brass brazier with charcoal. When this is burning well, he or she adds 10gp worth of incense and herbs per hour that the ritual lasts. The spell incantation is then begun and must be continued until the familiar comes or the casting time is finished. The DM secretly determines all results. Note that most familiars are not inherently magical, nor does a dispel magic spell send them away.

Deliberate mistreatment, failure to feed and care for the familiar, or continuous unreasonable demands have adverse effects on the familiar's relationship with its master. Purposely arranging the death of one's own familiar will almost certainly result in no spirit ever voluntarily acting as a familiar again.

A familiar spirit can be dismissed by means of a similar ritual as that which invokes one, whereupon the creature becomes a normal animal once again.

Random Familiar Summoning Results
D20 Roll	Familiar*	Sensory Powers
1-5	Cat	Excellent night vision & superior hearing
6-7	Crow	Excellent vision
8-9	Hawk	Very superior distance vision
10-11	Owl	Darkvision, superior hearing
12-13	Toad	Wide-angle vision
14-15	Weasel	Superior hearing & very superior olfactory power
16-20	No familiar available within spell range
* The DM can substitute other small animals suitable to the area.

Bring wine! Wine for the Blood God!

Painting by Boris Vallejo. Perfect.

NOTE: This is not my idea. I'm stealing this idea from somebody else. Just so we're clear. I don't remember exactly when or where I saw it, alas.

Anyway.

The person who originally came up with this noted that one fantasy trope, presented in oodles of films, comics and novels, is the recuperative power of wine. Any alcohol really. How many times have heroes staggered, bloodied, bruised and battered, up to the nearest bar, quaffed a mighty tankard of wine (or ale or brandy or whatever), slammed down the cup and returned to the fray, rejuvenated?

A LOT. That's how often.

So, I thought I would make it available to players in my campaign as a sort of el-cheapo substitute for healing potions:

• If you heroically quaff a mighty quaff of wine/ale/brandy/whatever, you immediately recover 1d6 hit-points. Huzzah! (Note that this requires actual quaffing, none of this sissy sipping nonsense. Quaffing.)
• The down-side is that you also temporarily lose one point each of  Dexterity, Wisdom and Charisma. Boooooo! Until you complete a Long Rest. Yaaaay!
• If you're on zero hit-points, having a swig of brandy poured down your throat will stabilize you, and you will lose the DEX, WIS and CHA, but you won't actually recover any hit-points on that initial guzzle.

I realise the danger of this turning the party into a bunch of wildly violent and increasingly incoherent alcoholics reeling their way from one encounter to the drunken next, but I like the trope so much that I'm willing to accept that peril.

D&D5e — Inspiration

Inspiration is the term used more or less for what in other games are called Fate Points — points players can use to improve their dice rolls and what-not.

In 5e, however, players can't amass Inspiration points; they either have it, or they don't. That means that no matter how consistently clever and excellent they may have been, if they use Inspiration at all, they then have to wait for the whimsical GM to arbitrarily decide that they're worthy of having it again.

I don't like that.

Instead, I will allow players to stockpile accrued Inspiration points, with the caveat that if one is used, the character needs to take a Short Rest (about an hour of restful down-time) before another can be used. This should prevent the situation where the party save up all their fate points for the final Boss Fight and then blow them all in the space of a few rounds in a GM-depressing holocaust of automatic hits and saves.

D&D5e — Recovery and Healing

Casualty. by Heather Nicholson

In general, I like the way that hit points in 5e are much more explicitly linked with luck and fatigue rather than with actual cuts, scrapes and bruises, and also the way that recovery of these points is so much quicker and easier. There's less need for parties to be constantly scurrying back to safety after ten minutes of dungeoneering to get themselves healed, and it also means that a party without a cleric (or a guaranteed cheap supply of healing potions) can actually be a viable adventuring party.

That's all very well and good, but what about situations where your character is actually folded, spindled, and/or mutilated? I guess the easiest thing to do would be to reflect that condition with Ability Damage. That has two advantages:

1. It doesn't require the addition of a new damage mechanic to the rules, and
2. Ability damage is scary and hard and expensive to fix, and it can give combat meaningful consequences (and thus a good reason to find ways to avoid it if possible).

A potential down-side is that it could easily lead to the 'death-spiral' effect, which may make sadistic GMs rub their hands together and go "Muahahahahaaaa!", but isn't actually all that much fun to experience in play. It would need to be applied with a bit of thought rather than willy-nilly — I'd probably use it only as a consequence of a critical hit, or of long, bone-breaking falls and the like.

Anyway, the actual focus of this rambling is that I think it is wise to distinguish from the outset between RECOVERY and HEALING.

• Recovery is what your character does when resting, or when a fighter gets their second wind or what-not. If all you're doing is getting back hit-points, you're recovering, not healing.
• Healing is what you have to do to cure Ability Damage (in which I include such conditions as deafness or blindness, or loss of mobility due to injury or disease or whatever).

Magical means of recovery are pretty straightforward to identify: low-level "cure" spells are about it, along with Cure Wounds potions and so forth.

Magical healing, in the sense I've been using it here, is less easily categorized, though it doesn't take a lot of thought on a case-by-case basis. Heal, Restoration and Regenerate are three spells that spring immediately to mind; I haven't looked thoroughly enough through the current spells lists to be definitive. Generally, I'd say that if the wording of a healing spell indicates other effects over and above simple hit-point recovery, it's probably appropriate.

Natural healing can be handled by the GM pretty much as a matter of common sense. Broken bones will take a month or two to heal, while blindness caused by having one's eyes gouged out probably isn't going to get better on its own. Personally, I wouldn't worry too much about gross stuff like secondary infections and gangrene and so forth; it's just not very heroic or mythic to succumb to septicaemia after weeks of lying in your own pus. However, your mileage may, as they say, vary.

D&D5e — Find Familiar... not on my watch!

And so begins the tinkering.

The D&D5e version of the Find Familiar spell is one with which I have many issues. It not only drastically changes the way that the spell works from earlier editions, but it also messes with the nature of familiar spirits as represented in myth and legend.

It really should be renamed Summon Cheap Little Expendable Reconnaissance Robot. Here's the text of the spell as written on page 240 of the PHB, along with my comments.

FIND FAMILIAR

1st-level conjuration (ritual)
Casting Time: 1 hour
Range: 10 feet
Components: V, S, M (10 gp worth of charcoal, incense, and herbs that must be consumed by fire in a brass brazier)

• Waaaaaaay too cheap. 10gp? Pffft! 

Duration: Instantaneous
You gain the service of a familiar, a spirit that takes an animal form you choose: bat, cat, crab, frog (toad), hawk, lizard, octopus, owl, poisonous snake, fish (quipper), rat, raven, sea horse, spider, or weasel. Appearing in an unoccupied space within range, the familiar has the statistics of the chosen form, though it is a celestial, fey, or fiend (your choice) instead of a beast.

• I can see why people would want to be able to choose the vessel for their familiar spirit, but one of the big things about the old version of the spell was the gamble. You got a toad? Suck it up! Also, I'm inclined to have the magic-user have to supply an appropriate vessel animal to be filled, if they want to be able to choose the form the familiar takes. 

Your familiar acts independently of you, but it always obeys your commands. In combat, it rolls its own initiative and acts on its own turn. A familiar can't attack, but it can take other actions as normal.

• That's OK to a degree, but in my view while a familiar is incarnate, it will keep at least some sense of self-preservation. So if you order it to do something clearly dangerous, it may... be reluctant. 

When the familiar drops to 0 hit points, it disappears, leaving behind no physical form. It reappears after you cast this spell again

• OK, I can live with his I guess, though unlike in the olden days, there's no real down-side to a magic-user losing a familiar, except that they've got to cast the spell again. Quelle horreur! I prefer the old way, in which the death of a familiar actually cost the magic-user a permanent loss of hit-points so that there's an incentive to keep it alive.

While your familiar is within 100 feet of you, you can communicate with it telepathically. Additionally, as an action, you can see through your familiar's eyes and hear what it hears until the start of your next turn, gaining the benefits of any special senses that the familiar has. During this time, you are deaf and blind with regard to your own senses.

• I'd add a feedback penalty here: if the familiar is attacked and damaged while you're linked with it in this way, you take the damage as well due to psychic shock. 

As an action, you can temporarily dismiss your familiar. It disappears into a pocket dimension where it awaits your summons. Alternatively, you can dismiss it forever. As an action while it is temporarily dismissed, you can cause it to reappear in any unoccupied space within 30 feet of you.

• HELL NO! If you don't want your familiar around, find somewhere to hide it. None of this blinking out conveniently bullshit. Also, this is just an excuse to give the thing a free short-range teleport ability.

You can't have more than one familiar at a time. If you cast this spell while you already have a familiar, you instead cause it to adopt a new form. Choose one of the forms from the above list. Your familiar transforms into the chosen creature.

•  I think not. Once you've summoned a familiar, it stays in the vessel you summoned it into until it's released either voluntarily or through the death of the vessel.

Finally, when you cast a spell with a range of touch, your familiar can deliver the spell as if it had cast the !spell. Your familiar must be within 100 feet of you, and Tit must use its reaction to deliver the spell when you cast it. If the spell requires an attack roll, you use your attack modifier for the roll.

•  Tchyeah, riiiiight...... by which I mean, of course, FUCK NO! This is a first level spell, for fuck's sake. This ability to redirect one's magic is way too powerful for a spell of that level.

There's so much wrongness here that I may as well just rewrite the whole bloody thing. I suspect that this won't be the only new spell definition I'll have problems with, but one step at a time.