Insanity Rules for SWL & My Mash-Up

I am in the midst of typesetting my 4-page SF+SWL Mash-Up and realized that I have no real intention for this game to go beyond 3rd level because I don’t have Erik Tenkar’s luxury of saying, “For advancement beyond 3rd level, please refer to the Sword & Wizardry: Complete rules.”

This got me thinking about how to make it possible to have a long-running campaign with SWL without going on to S&W:Complete and by extension how to do the same with my SF+SWL mash-up. In reviewing my monster list, I was reminded of how much influence H.P. Lovecraft has on the way I build RPG worlds, regardless of which system or genre. This, in turn, got me thinking about the insanity rules of Call of Cthulhu and I think I have a fun little means of extending the life of a rules-light RPG campaign that only goes to third level.

I’m Too Old for This Crap!

Delving into the Mythic Underground, going to the edge of the Outer Darkness and fighting the strange monsters that spew forth from these places can and does do damage to anyone’s sanity. Therefore, after each successful adventure, players are required to make a “Sanity Check” for their character:

Roll a d20 and add the character’s level and the number of successive adventures the player has used the character in the current campaign. If the total is ≥ 20, then the character has seen too much and needs to take a break from active adventuring. Roll a d4 (or other die type agreed upon by the player and referee). The result is the number of sessions that character has to sit out before being mentally stable enough to return. The player then creates a new character to use in the next session.

The long-term result is that each player will have a cache of characters that they can play with. Depending on which character is recuperating and what the player feels like, they have the freedom to come to the table with different characters. In turn, this gives the Referee the freedom to plan a longer term campaign that doesn’t have an automatic cut-off date when characters get to 3rd level. Indeed, it can add a bit of spiciness to the table, especially for Referees and Players who don’t mind using a random table of insanities to add to their character’s growing number of quirks.

Meditating on Grappling (5e + B/X)

Over at B/X Blackrazor, JB ran an adventure for his kids and shared a little house rule he uses with multiple attacks:

My (simple) house rule gives creatures with multiple attacks one attack roll per round versus a maximum number of opponents equal to its multiple attacks...so the [carrion] crawler (for example) would be able to attack up to eight opponents, but regardless it would make only one attack per character per round. This is something I've been doing for a while now, and I find it works well in practice

This got me thinking about how I might express this idea in context of the Advantage/Disadvantage system from 5e (because I really want to see how many applications this mechanic can have). My starting point is an old-standby in the OSR and was even codified in S&W Complete:

Just as shields improve armor class by 1, fighting two-handed grants a +1 to damage rolls . . . and fighting with a weapon in each hand gives a +1 to hit. (Note that fighting with two weapons does not actually give two separate attacks; it just increases the likelihood of landing a successful blow.)

So, multiple attacks don’t result in extra die-rolls, but rather in a bonus to-hit. Why not give advantage instead? Thus, the carrion crawler in JB’s example would get one attack, but would roll two dice and use the higher of the two.

Since we are already going down this rabbit hole, shield-fighting should do the opposite. Rather than affecting AC, having a shield puts attackers at a disadvantage, meaning that they would roll two dice and take the lower of the two results. This advantage would be cancelled out by either multiple attacks or flanking.

Two-handed weapons, therefore, should have advantage on damage rolls.

This all leads to grappling, the bane of every D&D combat ruleset. The reason for this is rather simple: combat in D&D is very abstract, which is why multiple attacks can equal a bonus to-hit (two-weapon wielding in S&W) or an advantage as in my musings above. Grappling, by its very nature is . . . not. Thus, once anyone tries to go down the road of specificity and handle grappling it gets messy.

The above concepts for using advantage/disadvantage suggest a nice and simple abstraction for grappling:

Anyone can grapple. A successful attack roll indicates that grappling is taking place and both the attacker and target are now at a disadvantage. Thus, anyone attacking those currently grappling gets to roll two dice and chose the higher of the two and those grappling must now roll two dice and take the lower of the two if they wish to make an attack. This can only work on creatures that are larger than the attacker at the Referee’s discretion.

This rule could also work for shield bashing, possibly even cancelling out the disadvantage the attacker gets for grappling because of the shield (though they would lose the defensive capabilities of the shield).

I am currently play testing these ideas with a summer-time  campaign with my kids. The first time it came into play was an encounter with a ghoul. Having shields made the encounter survivable and hammered the point that attacking with advantage and a paralyzing touch is just as nasty as three attacks per round with a paralyzing touch.