This series of posts began in August with a post entitled “Starships in Crowfield.” Despite the title, that post was really about beasts of burden.
With your feedback the idea grew and mutated until it became ships floating on a lava sea. This post is about some rules to create such ships, and to conduct ship-to-ship combat. The rules here are modified from rules I wrote a few years ago to develop starships.
We’ve come full circle. We now have “starships” in Crowfield.
So I’m still thinking about the Lava Sea and Teesha wood. I have not fallen out of love with the idea. If anything, I’m getting more excited. Here are my thoughts this week.
There are two changes from last week’s thoughts.
James read last week’s post and offered a thought:
What about magic carpets for high [social] class, and wooden barges for low class/poor people? The barges are always falling apart.
I replied with some comment that I’d never heard of flying wood before, but as soon as I said it I realized that it wasn’t true. In 1988, Frank Chadwick wrote Space: 1889. That game features “liftwood.” Liftwood is an anti-gravity wood used to make steampunk spaceships in the year 1889.
This got me thinking…
A few weeks ago I posted some ideas about beasts of burden in the Firelands. I received some feedback, and I thought I would address it.
In my vagabond way I happened to stumble across BareBones Fantasy (BBF for short). Whereas Crowfield started an attempt of a fantasy campaign that mirrored the play experience of Traveller, BBF is attempt to convert the old Star Frontiers rules to fantasy. I should probably do a review of it at some point.
Like Star Frontiers, BBF’s core mechanic is the percentile roll. As I said before, I hate percentile rolls. Hate them. I feel that most percentile rolls can be converted to d20 rolls, making everything simpler and faster. Because BBF has a semi-permissive license, I decided to spend some time to convert the game to use the d20 instead.
One neat thing that BBF does is say that any roll of doubles is a crit. If the roll would have been a success, then it’s a critical success; a failed roll would be a critical failure. For example, if Jalice’s lock-picking chance is 68% then a roll of 66 (or 55, 44, 33, etc.) would be a critical success while a roll of 77, 88, or 99 would be a critical failure. While this makes crits a little too frequent for my liking, I like how the scale slides based on the character’s skill as well as the intuitive “doubles = crit.”
It’s impossible to translate that to a d20. Rolling a single die rules out doubles. Ways of adjusting what numbers are crits based on skill level while keeping the crits to 10% (or less) of the rolls also proved impossible.
That led me to think about other ways to do it. The idea I finally came up with was a paradigm shift: Why do crits have to be random? Let the player decided when they’d want a crit!
The system would work like this. Whenever the player wants/needs a crit they simply declare “I’m taking a crit.” He has to declare this before the dice are rolled.
If the roll is a success, then it becomes a critical success and the player has to forfeit one experience point.
If the roll is a failure, it becomes a critical failure (i.e. a fumble), but the player gets an experience point as a consolation prize.
I toyed around with that idea for a few days, but I think I decided that I don’t like it. From a gamist perspective it sounds ok, but I think the joy of a crit is the way they pop up unexpectedly. When you invoke one yourself, I think that the thrill of the spontaneity will be lost.
Am I right?
Remember that hex in the Dreadwood where the party shrinks down to a fraction of their size? This is like that, but with two differences:
It’s in the Firelands.
It messes with time instead of space.
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| Sundial photo by liz west / CC BY |
I'm torn on whether or not to include non-human races in Crowfield in general. I'm doubly torn on orcs.