Welcome to Blackmoor

I haven’t done this blogging thing in a few years and starting a new campaign seems like as good a time as any to get back into sharing my DMing and game design experiences with the internet masses. My hope is that you, readers, discover something of value in each article I publish.

Why Blackmoor?

I once had the pleasure of meeting Dave Arneson. In fact, I was expecting to have him as a game design teacher, but he retired from teaching that class just before I took it. RPGs and tabletop gaming were the first places I really got to play with and fall in love with game design, and my signed copy of Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor is probably my favorite RPG book that I own. Naturally, I have been itching to run a campaign set in Blackmoor for years.

Only a few months ago, my players TPKed as dimwit players tend to do (sorry guys, you mad a BAD call there) while saving a city from a planar invasion. Once the dust cleared, I could tell the group was looking for something a bit different from my normal fare of over-complicated plots and hard-mode combat encounters, without losing the sense of a living world.

I was already thinking of ways to run a fun sandbox-style campaign, and when looking through my materials for ideas I realized that Blackmoor gave me a pre-hexed map with a highly populated (in terms of adventure content) world. I pitched the campaign to my players (along with a couple others) and it was readily apparent that Blackmoor was the choice, except that we would be playing it using the 5th edition rules for Dungeons and Dragons rather than the 3rd, which is what the book was written for. Luckily, that gives me plenty of content to talk about in the future (Prestige Classes for 5th ed. ? HELL YES!).

Alternative Rules

I want to talk about what rules I use and what I use them for, including a rather controversial ability score system. In order to get the feel of the campaign right, I had to implement some rules and other bits of content to really make the world feel like one where adventurers are at the heart of society. Every notable individual has a history of an adventuring life in Blackmoor, even the more politically-inclined. I want to bring that forward with a sense that everyone who matters is or was an adventurer and that heroes are made, rather than born.

Called Shots and Dismemberment

I will start with called shots and dismemberment. Credit given where due, I actually picked up these rules from TheAngryGM’s article, however, unlike the monsters he creates in the article, I want the players thinking this way consistently, so as part of my player handout I included the following text to inform them I would be using monsters with dismemberment rules.

Some creatures have pesky limbs. Wise adventurers know how to target an enemy’s vital spots. When making an attack against a creature without disadvantage, you can choose to make the attack with disadvantage and target a specific body part or limb. On a hit, the creature takes damage as normal, and the limb takes the same amount of damage. Once a limb has taken sufficient damage, it is rendered useless to the creature, and the creature loses all abilities related to that limb (for example, destroying a creature’s wings would remove its flight speed).

he amount of damage a limb can take is generally proportional to its necessity for survival in combat. For example most humanoids are as good as dead if they lose an arm or leg or head, so individual parts will have the same HP as the creature itself, but a giant octopus is totally cool with losing several tentacles (especially since it can regrow them later) so they will have a much smaller percentage of its total HP – One tentacle? Good to go!.

When attacking a limb, the creature will not take more damage than the limb’s remaining hit points from that attack. For example, if you are attacking a limb that has 3hp left and you crit it for 20 damage, the creature will still only lose 3 hit points from its primary hit point pool, and the limb will be destroyed.

One of the primary reasons for this is that it allows me more flexibility when designing and throwing critters at the players, because the ability to disable powerful abilities and other effects can actually alter the difficulty of certain creatures.

Delayed Speed-Factor Initiative

Our initiative system is based on Speed-Factor Initiative from the Dungeon Master’s Guide, but with a twist. We used Speed-Factor for a while, and found that while it gave players the opportunity to make a foe’s declared action useless, much more often the players were getting screwed out of turns and it just wasn’t fun, but we liked the effect of the turn order being unpredictable from round to round, and I loved the mechanic/flavor mix that came from the size and action modifier added to initiative, and so the following entry in the player handout was born.

At the beginning of each round all characters roll initiative and act in order of highest to lowest roll. A character’s actions apply a modifier to their following initiative roll, according to the charts below, applying a modifier for size as well as the slowest (lowest-modifier) action taken.

Normal Weapon	+0	Dodge, Dash, Disengage, or Hide		+5	Tiny or Smaller	+5
Heavy Weapon	-2	Cast a Cantrip		+0	Small	+2
Light Weapon	+2	Cast level X spell		-X	Large	-2
Loading Weapon	-5	Not Listed	GM Call		Huge or Bigger	-5

Having used this in a session already, it plays for us as the best of both worlds. Rather than winding up an action and having it effectively fizzle, players can take whatever action they need, but then have to deal with the recovery time of their actions. The primary difference between the two systems ultimately comes down to actions having the sense of needing a start-up time before they fire, or a cooldown time after being used.

Honor and Reputation

I added two ability scores (well technically more than two since a Honor score is specific to a faction) for this campaign. Every character begins the game with a reputation of 4, and those whose backgrounds make them part of a faction start with an Honor score of 10 for that faction.

Reputation is how well people know about the character, their deeds, and their achievements. Reputation cannot be improved through ability score improvements or other similar things. Successfully completing adventures, challenges and other notable achievements can increase a character’s reputation while failures may reduce it. In-game, it determined what information or missions NPCs are willing to trust the players with, making it a sort of gating mechanic that allows the players a sense of progression as they receive progressively more important tasks. Reputation is also used in various interactions and contests when the character’s reliability or integrity are the determining factor in success.

Honor(Faction) is an ability score that determines how effective a character is at interacting with a specific group. A faction could be a noble house, an artisan guild, an adventuring company, a thieves guild, a military group, a tribe or some other organization that holds influence in the affairs of Blackmoor. Having an honor score for a faction marks a character as a member of that faction, and entitles the character to privileges of that faction based on their current honor score. Honor also represents the esteem with which the character is held by that faction. Completing tasks and acting in the interest of the organization improves honor and acting against it reduces honor. In addition, a character who has an honor score adds his honor score modifier for that faction (same as any other ability score) to most rolls when interacting or dealing with that faction.

Both of these scores are used to give the players a tangible sense of progression as their sphere of personal influence spreads around. Honor, especially, also creates interesting opportunities for role-playing (the “making choices” kind, not just using funny voices and saying ‘thou’ every 3 words) when a character is associated with multiple factions and has to choose between conflicting objectives, or choose between loyalty and selfishness, or any other conflict that arises from being part of an organization with an agenda. In addition, it is a tangible progression reinforcing the idea that heroes worked their way to leadership positions.

Honours: Everyone Loves Achievements

In any RPG, there are things that the GM wants to encourage. The best way to get players to do what you want is to attach a reward for doing it. Honours acts as a very clear message to the players about what they should be up to, as well as serving them a promise of what sort of adventures and play styles will be available to them during the game. In the players’ handout, I told them this:

In Blackmoor, would-be heroes and champions are not uncommon, but what separates the Uther Andahars from wannabe knights and the Skelfer Ards from common hedge wizards? That would be their Honours, the power their have gained as tales of their achievements spread. Different groups and different people may react different to various honours.

I have a spreadsheet of all the different honours that can be earned in the campaign, ranging from “deliver 100 killing blows” to “Capture and deliver a wanted criminal alive” all the way to “Become King of Blackmoor”. There are too many to be worth listing here, but what is worth noting is how I use these to draw the players to engage with the world. It should be clear from just those examples that I want the players to be warriors who work their way up to becoming figures of great influence. Completing an Honour awards XP and sometimes reputation, with the XP based on the level they could could be expected to achieve it.

The other thing I am encouraging with this is friendly competition within the party. The kind of competition you see when Gimli barks “That still only counts as one!”. Each member of the party is out to prove themselves, and they challenge each other to step up to being worthy of traveling with the best. A necessary side-effect of that is that XP is awarded separately, and certain accomplishments give one player a little more than the rest. For example, a killing blow awards an xp bonus of 10% to the felling player (a monster worth 100xp defeated by 4 players would then award 27 to the player that killed it and 20 to the other players), or a social encounter solved by a rousing speech might award bonus xp to the speaker. Even with the bonus from Honours, these bonuses are small enough that players should only ever be separated by no more than a few encounters worth of xp, so while no one will be truly behind, the desire to get to the next level first is still a driving force.

Ability Scores: The one where I am kicked off the internet

I had my players use a rather unorthodox, and apparently controversial ability score assignment system. The system is as follows:

1. Choose a race
2. Choose a class
3. Roll ability scores
   1. Roll 4d6 and drop the lowest number. The result is your strength score.
   2. Repeat for that roll for each ability score.
   3. After all ability score have been determined, you may re-roll ONE ability score, but must use the second result.
   4. Racial/Class choices (Such as human’s variable ability score increase) can be chosen after the rolls are resolved
4. Choose Race/Class options as normal (including optional racial ability scores)
5. Choose background options as normal

There are several reasons I used this system, and it is not without risks or flaws, but I make no apologies for it. I also know it is a controversial issue. One of my players took to the internet seeking advice on how to work with unorthodox warlock stats (19 Dex,  13 Cha, and 6 Int after racial modifiers). That player was mostly met by rage at the system that led to those stats, including comments that I should not be allowed to GM, so I want to address what is actually going on here. In the future I will do an article comparing the various methods for determining ability scores, but for now we are just looking at what this system makes available, and why I am okay with the drawbacks.

First, I wanted characters that played to type. I wanted wood elves to be archers and scouts; I wanted dwarves to fighters; I wanted dragonborn to be paladins; etc. I also didn’t want characters being the cookie-cutter min-maxed race/class they always are. Instead I wanted characters who begin from their standard racial upbringing but then grow organically from there.

This system is perfect for creating that. Characters of certain races will still be generally better at what their race is good at, but they will likely have another strength (or occasionally weakness) they can utilize or have to compensate for. In addition, it encourages players to pick starting race/class pairs that math-up well to maximize the value of their initial rolls. I also wanted players making characters based on who they wanted to be in the world (what does a ranger represent vs a fighter vs a wizard? What does an elf represent vs human vs dwarf?). This leads to characters that are almost certainly competent at what they were most likely brought up to do, while remaining likely to surprise the player with some affinity they had not expected.

The two primary concerns I hear about the actual system are power disparity and “what if you get a 6-int wizard”. Both of these issues come down to the fear of being forced to play a useless character.

For my campaign, these are non-issues, as I have a very thorough understanding of the system and would not allow a player to do as such. In general, most characters will actually wind up with overall better scores than they would with standard array/point buy (which serves my purpose because I want the players on the more powerful side). Statistically, most characters will have AT LEAST one score at 15 or better (the best you can get with point-buy), and with the allowed reroll, a character is about 18 times more likely to get a 17 before modifiers than to get a 7. The chances of the 6-int wizard are more than low enough that it is not worth worrying about in the general sense, and should it come up, there are a number of spells that are not concerned with a low save or attack bonus, at least until they find that Headband of Intellect, which then becomes a character-defining item rather it’s normal role of being a mundane  +1 or maybe +2 casting bonus.

And because it’s worth saying, in the case that astronomically bad luck led to a character that was wholly unplayable, I would work with the player to resolve it as a case-by-case issue.

Conclusion

Phew. That ended up being longer than I had intended. Those are the unique rules I am using for this campaign, and I expect to talk more about the campaign as it progresses. We have already had our first session and it seems to be going fantastically. Feel free to discuss anything I talked about in the comments section, and thanks for reading!

 

 

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