Gamer ADD: Adventures in Middle-Earth 5e

I have long been tempted by the call of Adventures in Middle-Earth 5e. I have read good things, it uses D&D as a chassis, and I have been extremely curious as to how these guys mechanically expressed the breadth and depth of Tolkien's world. Unfortunately, I have never been a big fan of Tolkien's works. I slogged through the Lord of the Rings because I felt I needed to, but it took me years and several aborted attempts. Thus, the price tag was always too high for something that emulates books I was never in love with in the first place.

That all changed when Cubicle 7 offered up their Middle-Earth 5e library on Humble Bundle. I grabbed it and have been reading through the Players Guide. It is as good as advertised and I am very impressed. In order to explain why I love this so much (especially given my own dislike of Tolkien's books), I have to explain my relationship to baseball.

I do not like baseball. It is boring. The season is way too long and no one game seems to matter all that much, even in post season. I have tried to like it for both family and friends. Back in the day, I would try to watch Atlanta Braves games on TBS and Chicago Cubs games on WGN. I even went to a couple of live MLB games. I just couldn't bring myself to care.

Here's the thing though: I completely understand and appreciate why baseball fans love this game. I have always wished I could do the same because I love watching people who love baseball talk about baseball. Of all the 30 for 30 documentaries ESPN has produced over the years, my favorite is still the one about how the Boston Red Sox came back from three games down in the ALCS against the Yankees. It is one giant homage to Boston Red Sox fans and their love for their team. I love it because it is about everything I love about people who love baseball.

I have a similar relationship to Tolkien as I have to baseball. I don't like reading his books and I have no intention of reading them ever again, but I love to hear people talk about them and why they love them. This is why I actually slogged through the Lord of the Rings — I wanted to be part of that conversation. I wanted to love and talk about Tolkien that same way people who love the books do.

What I am trying to get at here is that what makes Adventures in Middle-Earth 5e so good isn't that it is Middle-Earth or Tolkien. What makes it great is that they get what people love about Tolkien: the themes, the ideas, the archetypes, the literary forms, the values, the world-view. Everything that I love hearing people who love Tolkien get excited about is in this game. It allows me to participate in that love in a way I could never have imagined myself doing.

Here is one of the highest praises I think I can give any game: I want to play this. Badly. Interestingly, I don't want to be the Loremaster/GM/DM/Referee whatever you want to call it like I do with most RPGs. I want to be a Player. I want to create a character and play.

To that end (and because I feel I have to whinge about something), I created this Character Sheet to replace the awful, boring, uninspired CS that comes with the game:

You can download it here.

One last thought. From a mechanical POV, I really appreciate what Adventures in Middle-Earth does with 5e. They push the concepts of Race, Class, and Background in the kind of experimental ways that I tried to with ba5ic. It has got me thinking of new ways to frame ba5ic — specifically in a Lovecraftian direction. Hopefully, these ideas will see the light of day prior to next New Years.

BTW I hope 2020 brings many blessings to us all.

The Bugbear

I have created a title for the purpose of publishing variant rules for ba5ic and 5e. I call it The Bugbear. The first two have gone live on DriveThru. You can check them out here.

Enjoy.

Ba5ic is Now Live

Ba5ic is now available as a POD on DriveThruRPG. The link is here. Enjoy.

Life is a bit crazy at the moment, but I plan to upload a .pdf of a Character Sheet as soon as I can. In the meantime, you can use this:

Towards a Supers RPG

One of the most challenging things about doing a superhero game within the mechanical structure of D&D is the radically different assumptions about combat. Where D&D grew out of a medieval war game where the consequence of combat is death, the superhero genre rarely deals out death, just incapacitation.

5e spells suggest a way to mechanically differentiate what Champions calls Killing Attacks from Normal Attacks. The 5e spell Sacred Flame auto-hits but allows the target a saving throw to avoid damage. Fire Bolt requires a to-hit roll that determines whether or not the target takes damage. Since the latter is the normal D&D mechanic for determining death of a target, that will model the Killing Attack, and the auto-hit/saving throw will emulate the normal superhero combat mechanic.

This allows for an interesting mechanical smorgasbord in terms of attack and defense. Each attack power gets to specify which attribute is used for a saving throw:

• Strength
• Dexterity
• Constitution
• Intelligence
• Wisdom
• Charisma

It also gets to designated what type of damage it does:

• Acid
• Bludgeoning
• Cold
• Fire
• Force
• Lightning
• Necrotic
• Piercing
• Poison
• Psychic
• Radiant
• Slashing
• Thunder

Defense would include Resistance to the various types of damage, Damage Reduction for various types of damage, and the good ‘ol Armor Class.

This leaves a huge (maybe even too big?) amount of space for players to come up with all kinds of weird ways to explain why a Lightning attack targets Charisma.

Alternatively, the type of damage could pre-determine what kind of saving throw is required:

Strength: Cold, Fire
Dexterity: Bludgeoning, Piercing, Slashing
Constitution: Acid, Poison
Intelligence: Lightning, Thunder
Wisdom: Force, Psychic
Charisma: Necrotic, Radiant

Note how the latter limits choices on how special effects function and how arguments can be made why one type of damage also belongs with another type of saving throw...which is why I hesitate even though it would make things "easier" mechanically.

The Gray Mouser and Ba5ic

If I were to pick a fantasy author whose work I love and have read avidly but had the least impact on the way I play D&D, that author would be Fritz Leiber. When I first discovered Appendix N in the 1e DMG, the first books I went out and got were Leiber’s stories about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. After reading them, I stopped looking to Appendix N for inspiration because Leiber demonstrated to me the serious limitations of D&D and I didn’t want to be further disappointed by anything else on that list.

I don’t know anybody that doesn’t have that literary hero that they want to emulate in D&D. For a lot of guys I grew up playing D&D with, that character was Drzzt Do’Urden. (Not so coincidentally, he is also the reason I don’t like using drow in any campaign I run). For me, that character has long been Leiber’s Gray Mouser. Unlike all the Drzzt fans, however, there was no easy way for me to play the Gray Mouser in D&D.

Sure, I could play an elven Magic-user Thief, or dual-class with a human or multi-class in some of the newer versions of the game…but none of those options would be the Gray Mouser from 1st level. Given the fact that most long-running campaigns I have ever taken part in end around 5-7th level, the effort to go dual- or multi-class never really appealed.

Thus, I had avoided all things Leiber in my D&Ding because it reminds me of what I can’t do. That is, until now.

In my opinion, the most important mechanical innovation that 5e has brought to the table is the Background. Not only does it offer up some interesting backstory to a character, but it expresses this story with some mechanics — a couple of proficiencies and a kind of perk that come with the territory. When I first read through the SRD to see how I would use it, my first impulse was to declare the that Rogue class is no longer mechanically necessary. All of the things a thief/rogue brings to the table can be handled through the Background mechanic.

In other words, I can finally play the Gray Mouser from 1st level on. Human Wizard/Sorcerer/Warlock with a Criminal Background. Done. Finally.

The Background Mechanic doesn’t stop there, though. As I was editing down the 5e SRD to make Ba5ic, I came to realize that 5e doesn’t really understand what it has in the Background mechanic. I can completely understand why — the game is tied to classes that have existed since the 70s and it can’t really jettison those traditions. In redacting the SRD, however, I kept finding myself asking the question: What if we did?

This is why Ba5ic only has three classes: the Adept, Expert and Warrior. These are simply generic mechanical chassis upon which to place Backgrounds that result in truly literary characters: Sorcerers that can’t cast magic, for example.

In other words, the Background mechanic is a means of making D&D into a set of mechanics that can be used to create a plethora of concepts. The reason I could never play Gray Mouser was that D&D has always been about concepts that have mechanics to justify them. While that works and has done so for decades and (hopefully) decades more, I have always chaffed at the limitations that such frameworks operate under. While the concept might be really cool, I have usually found myself wanting a different concept that the mechanics can’t always handle.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that my go-to Supers RPG is Champions. Regardless of how many excellent Super RPGs have come out over the years (and there are many — V&V will always have a place in my heart), Champions just does it better. The reason is simple: it is a game of mechanics that invites you to dream up concepts to place upon those mechanics. Thus, instead of a Firebolt (which uses the same basic mechanic as a bunch of other offensive spells in D&D), Champions has Energy Blast, which is explicitly those mechanics, without the flavor text of “You hurl a mote of fire at a creature or object within range.” I am free to think of those mechanics as anything from a Fireboat to a flying rocket-propelled fist.

Used in the right way, Backgrounds could very well be a means by which to strip D&D of its concepts and leave only mechanics and an invitation to go wild with our imagination.

While I think Ba5ic falls short in this lofty vision, I think it is a step in that direction. I feel justified in saying this because my oldest decided to start her first D&D campaign as a DM with her friends. Knowing that she probably couldn’t get away with not doing 5e, she asked if she could borrow both my Essentials Rulebook and my (now rough draft) copy of Ba5ic. She pitched both to her friends and they chose Ba5ic because they felt they could have (and I quote) “weirder” characters.

Ba5ic should be generally available in printed format soon.

Ba5ic Update

Ba5ic is going to be available as a POD through DriveThruRPG . . . after I fix some formatting problems that reared their ugly head once I got a printed copy in hand. Not something terribly surprising, actually. I worked in graphic design and typesetting for many years prior to my current vocation and I can tell you from personal experience that seeing something on a computer screen is different from seeing it in print and even that is different from seeing it in book form.

I gotta say, though, that I am really happy with the overall look and feel of the thing. I’ll soon be done with the formatting issues (and double checking that their aren’t any hidden typos or errata that I’ve missed along the way). Once I get another printed book from DriveThruRPG and I am happy with the fixes in formatting, I’ll make it available for everyone.

Thanks to everyone who gave a kind word about this. I appreciate it.

In the meantime, I am also working on adapting and updating The Caves of Cormakir as well as making a new urban hex crawl adventure for use with ba5ic. I am also going to re-release The Caves in its LL version with some much needed updates, something I should have done a long time ago.

Hopefully all the above will happen sooner rather than later.

I am posting this to help keep myself honest...

ba5ic: Corrected & Edited Draft

Thanks to everyone who commented and helped when I posted my (very) rough draft. I have gone through and re-read the entire book. I found a bunch of stuff referencing things not included in the rules, a number of missing items and the expected plethora of spelling errors. For ease of use, I have also rotated the monster section in the .pdf so that it is much easier to read and use. I also added a Character Sheet.

As I stated in my last post, this is the first project I have done that I really want POD. Any useful tips for those with experience?

Cover art by James Shields

You can find the latest draft here.

ba5ic: A Rough Draft of a 5e Continual Light

As I noted in my last post, I am itching to sink my teeth into the D&D Essentials Kit in order to glean a simpler, cleaner version of 5e. Truth be told, this not a new desire. As can be seen here and here, I started a similar effort over a year ago.

I actually have a flawed version of these ideas that is about 64 pages long that I dubbed ba5ic; however, I was never really satisfied with it. More importantly, I found that I really didn’t want to play it. So, despite sending it off to a couple people to get their opinion, I never went back to fix the many problems that it had.

That is, until now. I realized that I could plug in the three “Sidekick” classes from the Essentials Kit into what I already put together last year. In process, not only could I trim some of the fat, but I would have to trim a lot of the fat by virtue of the simplicity of the three classes.

I now have a rough draft that sits at 43 pages. This includes 2 splash pages, a one-page Sample Wilderness and a one-page Sample Dungeon.

Cover Art by James Shields

Truth be told, I think more fat could be trimmed if I knew the system better. I just haven’t played enough 5e to be able to capably simplify some of its subsystems.

That being said, this is something I would love to see get a POD treatment. To that end, I would ask your help. Read it. Spot the multiple typos that I know exist. Spot places that fat can be easily trimmed, and suggest ways to trim even more fat. One obvious place is the equipment list. What stays, what goes? Necessarily, I kept the list of magic items short. Good list? Bad list? What shouldn’t be there and what is missing?

You can download the rough draft here.

Thanks and enjoy.