Friday, January 24, 2020

Best of the Web - Hiring, Campaign Turns, Dynamic Combat, Undead Turning Humans

Hall of the Mountain King has a wonderful post that is a mock advertisement. It is called The Temple of Elemental Evil Wants You!. The concept is simply brilliant and I'm amazed I haven't seen something similar before.

Martin O of Goodberry Monthly has a post called Wizard City Hex Crawl in which he does just that. I'm not really sold on urban hex crawls (6 mile hex subdivided into 1 mile hexes) as I believe an urban area should be far denser than that but it has me thinking of doing something similar by the neighborhood would work nicely. I'm also a big fan of his throw-away line about Campaign turns "What is a Campaign Turn? After every Adventure, that’s a Campaign Turn." with some interesting things that startup while the adventurers are gone and thus give the settlement a lot of character. The idea is very similar to the What is happening in the Quant Village, in the Rebellious Village, happening in the Holy Village posts I did nearly a year ago. I might have to reconsider and revisit the idea at some point.

Norbert at Darkworm Colt has a post called Static vs dynamic: how old is your game? that has my head buzzing. Basically he's saying that in the very, very old days they used a system of attack/counter-attack instead of initiative. Basically according to Norbert:
  • roll dice against each other (maybe you get to add a bonus because of some advantage), higher roll hits, a tie means both side hit simultaneously
  • repeat
I really like this and I'll have to run my brain around the issue awhile. It really has the potential to make combat nasty, brutish, and short and make being outnumbered particularly nasty.

Micheal “Chgowiz” Shorten at ChicagoWiz's games has an interesting post called Undead Turning the Living that I think would go very nicely if treated like the Dynamic combat mentioned above. Cleric attempts to turn the undead and they both give it a shot at the same time to see if the Undead flees or if the Cleric and party lose their nerve and try to get out of there. I like that characters don't generally roll morale in normal situations but this does make for a nice way to introduce fear on occasion. Of course it would have to apply to Demons and other otherworldly nasties to be consistent.

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