Bash & Slash RPG beginning

Like so many other grognards, I make house rules for almost every game I play.  This has been applied to ludicrous levels with the solo-RPG "D100 Dungeon".  What I've been playing bears less and less resemblance to the rules as written these days, so I though I would write them down into my own rulebook.  Below are the first three pages, which is as far as I've gotten.  It will end up being much, much longer, as I have been picking up mechanisms and tables from all over.  (Check out "Welcome to the Deathtrap", "Bastionland",  "Goblin Punch", Knave, and Maze Rats for good examples.)

Anyway, here is what I have so far.  It's intended for solo-play dungeoneering, but could easily be expanded to general role play.  Please tell me what you think.

Bash & Slash
A role playing game system by me ( Alpha 0.1, MAR 2021)

Definitions

Skill Test (lower = better):  Roll a d20, and you succeed if the result is less than or equal to an Attribute plus an optional Boost.  A roll of 20 (19 or 20 for a disfavored Attribute) is a critical failure, and your character loses one point of Stamina.

Boost Test (lower = better):  Roll a d6, and you succeed if the result is less than or equal to the value of the Boost.  A roll of 6 always fails.

Opposed Test (high under):  A skill test against an active opponent.  Both sides roll a skill test, and the higher successful result wins.  In case of a tie, both sides succeed.

Effort (higher = better):  Roll one (or more) dice and take the result.  This is mostly used for damage rolls, but also for some tasks that will take extended effort to accomplish. 

Advantage (ADV):  Roll an extra die, and discard the worst result.  May be abbreviated as an “A” following a die roll type, as in “d6A”.

Disadvantage (DIS):  Roll an extra die, and discard the best result.  May be abbreviated as a “D” following a die roll type, as in “d20D”.

Advantage and Disadvantage cancel each other on a one-for-one basis.  Advantages and Disadvantages stack, to a limit of two.  Double advantage (2ADV) means roll two extra dice, and discard the worst two.  Double disadvantage (2DIS) means roll two extra dice, and discard the best two.  Examples:  d20A:  Roll two twenty-sided dice and keep the best.  d6DD:  Roll three six-sided dice and keep only the worst.  3d6A:  Roll four six-sided dice, discard the lowest, and add the higher three together.

Middling (MID):  Roll three dice and discard the highest and lowest.  May be abbreviated as an “M” following a die roll type, as in “d6M”.

d6:  A six-sided die.
d3:  A six sided die, with the result halved.  When halving a number, always round up.
d20:  A twenty-sided die.
d66:  Roll a d6 twice to select from 36 possible outcomes, labeled 11 through 66.
d100:  Roll a d20 twice, ignoring the tens digits, to select from 100 possible outcomes, labeled 00 through 99.  Or roll two different d10 dice.  Or a d20 and a d10.  Or an actual d100 die.
2d6:  Roll two six-sided dice and add the results together, to get a result between 2 and 12.

A Scene is a full encounter.  It includes local exploration, dealing with traps, fighting monsters, picking locks, gathering treasure, etc.  In general, one room in a dungeon is a single scene.

Character Creation

The five Attributes your character has are:

            Agility (AGL):  Melee combat, dodging, and acrobatics.
            Brawn (BRN):  Lifting, carrying, brawling, intimidating, and taking damage.
            Cunning (CNG):  Magic, shooting, healing, and crafting.
            Deviousness (DEV):  Manipulating, sneaking, and noticing.
            Endurance (END):  Stamina and enduring hardships.

Attributes can never rise above 20.  Attributes may be temporarily reduced.  If any attribute is reduced to zero, the character dies.  Whenever an attribute is reduced to 5 or less, test it with a d6.  If the test fails (the result is higher than the attribute), the character passes out for d6 hours, or until the attributed is healed to six or better, and that attribute is permanently reduced by one.  Pick two attributes to favor.  They have a value of 10.  Mark them with a “+”. Pick one attribute to disfavor.  It has a value of 8.  Mark it with a “-“.  The other two attributes have a value of 9.

Stamina:  How much physical effort your character can perform without becoming exhausted.  Your character’s base Stamina is equal to your Endurance plus Fortitude (a boost).  [For more epic adventuring, add half your Brawn.] 

Sweat:  Hard work (like melee combat) is exhausting.  Sweat is used in place of traditional “hit points” to avoid deadly damage, to power spells, and enable mighty feats of daring.  Sweat recovers quickly, returning to zero at the end of each scene.  When sweat equals Stamina, reduce your Stamina by one, and any additional sweat is applied randomly to your Attributes as damage. 

Roll:                1          2-3       4          5          6
            Attribute:        AGL    BRN    CNG   DEV    END

Rest:  Your character can go Stamina hours without rest or food.  If you do not stop to eat and rest for an hour after that many hours, you are exhausted and gain one burden each additional hour you go without rest.  (Attempting to rest after fewer than half that many hours has no effect.)  When your character takes an hour to rest and eat, Sweat is reduced to zero and all Stamina is restored.  For each reduced Boost, roll a d6.  On a 4-6, you regain one point.  You may also make a healing test to recover one point to a single reduced Attribute.  Note that resting characters tend to attract wandering monsters.

Burden:  How wearying your character’s existence has become.  Carrying a heavy load, wearing armor, illness, adventuring too long without rest, or being cursed all add to your burden.  At the beginning of each scene, increase your sweat by your burden.

Carry Capacity (CC) in stones is Brawn plus Strong (a boost).  [For more epic adventuring, add half your Endurance.]  If you carry too much, your Burden increases and you may suffer disadvantage on all skill tests.  You cannot carry more than 10 stone more than your capacity.

Load:               ≤ CC               ≤ CC+3           ≤ CC+6           ≤ CC+8           ≤ CC+10
Burden:           0                      1                      3                      6 + DIS           10 + 2DIS

Boosts:  Your character can learn tricks to improve their performance at various tasks.  Boosts are associated with specific Attributes.  Boosts are used passively to increase an Attribute during skill tests.  Active use of a Boost reduces it by one point (after the use), but can accomplish much more, depending on the nature of the Boost.  Boosts with a value of 0 cannot be used actively.  Active uses only effect actions directly involving that boost, unless otherwise stated.

v  Agility

Ø  Fight:  Use when engaged in melee combat.  Active uses:

§  Reroll the skill test, keeping the better result

§  Add its value to a die roll you have succeeded at.  This can help you win an opposed test by having a higher final result than your opponent.

§  Add its value to melee damage you inflict.

Ø  Dodge:  Use when avoiding dangerous flying objects.  When fighting defensively, add Dodge to Fight, but you cannot deal damage to your opponent.  Also useful for avoiding certain traps.  Active uses:

§  Reroll the skill test, keeping the better result.

§  Add its value to a die roll you have succeeded at.  This can help you win an opposed test by having a higher final result than your opponent.

§  Subtract its value from non-magic damage you receive (to a minimum of 0).

Ø  Acrobatics:  Use creatively to climb, jump, swing, or generally move over, under, around, past, through, or away from obstacles and threats.  Active uses:

§  Reroll the skill test, keeping the better result.

§  Add its value to a die roll you have succeeded at.  This can help you win an opposed test by having a higher final result than your opponent.

§  Grant a swashbuckling Advantage to any Agility based test you have not yet rolled.

RPG modular rules cyclopedia

 Go here, read this.

Brian Rideout at "Welcome to the Deathtrap" has a lot to say about RPG rules, themes, and philosophy.  But in a really, really good way.

I've been working on my own RPG rules for a few months.  I keep changing my mind about how I want the fundamental system to work.  D20 based system like D&D?  D6 system?  Fudge dice?  All the dice, like Savage Worlds?  Dice pools, like RISUS?  A succeed/complication/fail system like Powered by the Apocalypse?  Traditional roll to hit, or automatic damage like Into the Odd?  I go/you go, or simultaneous action (Professor Dungeon Master)?  Fixed turn order, roll for turn order, or draw chits from a bag (Troika)?

D&D relies too much on armor, and ignores the defensive utility of having a weapon in your hand that you're really good with.  How do you fix this problem?  A "roll high under" system works (The White Hack), but is it what I want to do?  You can't easily define critical hits this way, except with math.  (A critical hit happens when you succeed by at least ten more than your opponent's defense?)

I like the concept of variable defense.  You roll a certain die (or dice) to determine your armor's ability to prevent damage every time you get hit.  It adds spice to the game, and increases the tension by allowing daggers to occasionally penetrate full plate armor or a dragon's hide.  But it also adds more rolls and more time to each round of combat, slowing down the game.

So much to ponder.  So many choices.  Writing is hard.  Organizing is hard.  Simplifying (but not too much) is very hard.

Anyways, here are my interesting but probably insignificant contributions to the topic.

Progressive Damage

Characters have few hit points, which are easily recovered outside an encounter. When hit points are exhausted in an encounter, the character takes ability/attribute damage. This may involve a saving throw to avoid being incapacitated or killed. The effects may depend upon which attribute/ability failed the save or reached zero.

Find it in: Into the Odd (Electric Bastionland, Mausritter, et al.)

Boosts

Characters have Boosts which passively grant bonuses to certain actions. Actively using the boost creates a much greater effect, but reduces the boost by one level. This reduction may be automatic, or determined by a die roll. Boost levels recover with time, after resting or between play sessions.

Find it in: House rule, inspired by depletion rolls and Luck Scores.

That's all, folks!

 

Ch ch ch ch Changes

 Everything changes today.  No matter what happens at noon.

Biden has already promised to grant amnesty to every last illegal alien here in the country.  That's around 40,000,000 new Democrat voters, for those not keeping count.

Biden has already promised to make "assault rifles" and "high capacity magazines" illegal.

Watching the East German news

Everything on the news is fake.  Every channel, all the time.  At 12:01PM next Wednesday, if Biden is sworn in as the President, then the Democrat dream of communist totalitarian rule will have finally arrived here in the USA.

Long ago and far away, I used to watch the East German news for fun sometimes.  It was always entertaining, often hilarious, and quite enlightening.  You may not find out what the truth is, but you can always tell what they don't want you to know.  For our version of communists, the following three rules are always in force:

SJW's always lie.
SJW's always project.
SJW's always double down.

Sarah Hoyt has an article about how to read the tea leaves.  Check her blog out.

Read Peter's astute take on it at his place.

What Tom said

 Tom Kratman sends:

Widest possible sharing authorized and encouraged; share via copy and paste. Be sure to include my name, so the left can understand I am not afraid of them and perfectly willing, on my own ticket, to fight:

So why, after all this, do so many of us still believe the election was stolen?

In the first place, there are two things we mean by “the election was stolen.” They’re mutually reinforcing, yes, but they’re not the same. The first of these is via the influence of media and social media. It was not illegal for them to have been Biden’s campaign, but they were Biden’s campaign. What that means, in practice, is that they used their privileges under the first amendment to violate the intent of the first amendment. I say “privileges,” by the way, rather than “rights” because by their conduct they have undermined the first amendment to the point we can calmly consider killing it, as regards the media, as so many lefties want it to be killed for the common citizenry. It no longer serves its purpose.

The second factor is our belief that actual spurious ballots were introduced into the system by both mailing in and other means. And the numbers were not even that large; Trump “lost” by about twelve thousand in Georgia, eighty thousand in Pennsylvania, and under twenty-one thousand in Wisconsin. Let’s not pretend that those were particularly difficult numbers to have illegally come up with.
But there’s not a shred of evidence…the courts…

Look, friends, we live in the age of MiniTru and Comrade Ogilvy. We have precisely zero sources of reliable direct information. Don’t believe me?

Answer these questions:

1. What was on Hunter Biden’s laptop?
2. What party and philosophy ruled the states that drove United States’ Covid stats into the stratosphere?
3. Who took the blame?
4. How much evidence did there turn out to be of Russian interference with the 2016 election?
   And, conversely:
5. How many Arab states has Israel recently signed peace treaties with?
6. Who got NAFTA replaced with a treaty that more carefully guards US workers’ interests?
7. Who hasn’t gotten us into any new wars?
8. Under which presidency did the United States regain energy independence, so we DON’T get into any new wars?
9. Why are illegal immigrants largely going or staying home?
10. And how much do we hear about this: USPS worker charged with dumping ballots, as mail carriers perform extra trips before Election Day | Fox News

And, if you don’t know the answers to these, ask yourself why you don’t?

Moreover, why did Facebook and other social media suppress any notion of election fraud? One doesn’t need to suppress a lie; “a lie will not stand.” There’s only benefit in suppressing “inconvenient truths” (to steal another fraudulent Democrat meme).

Of course, when you control the media, a lie most certainly WILL stand…if it’s your lie.

Instead, we are thrown back on secondary increments of data, because the left isn’t clever enough – well, not YET, anyway – to have doctored those. (“Call for Comrade Ogilvy from Democratic Party Headquarters! Comrade Ogilvy please pick up the red phone in the lobby…”)

Among the secondary sources of information are:

The railroading of secession through various Democrat-run southern states by careful selection of those who would be allowed into the secession conventions.
Tammany Hall.
“Vote often and early for James Michael Curley.”
The Battle of Athens and the E. H. Crump (Democratic Party) political machine.
Cook Country, which is to say, Chicago, 1960.
Princess Nudelman, the dead goldfish (yes, I know the fish didn’t cast a vote. What’s important is that someone TRIED).
Look at the heritage.org election fraud map.

In short, election fraud is so completely a part of the Democratic Party and the left, more generally, and has been for so long, that it would only be remarkable if there were a close election where there wasn’t any. We expect it. If we can’t easily see it, we expect it to be only because it’s a little better hidden than usual.

The Democratic Party is and always has been a party of corruption, heavy on power, short of or bereft of principle. The only difference between it and any given sub-Saharan African kleptocracy is in the shade of skin.

But what about the courts?

No, wait; you didn’t know that the legal profession is up there – or down there – with college sociology departments for its tendency to lean left? You didn’t know that coming up with direct evidence is often quite difficult? Investigations take years to uncover single instances of discrete bank fraud; we’re expected to find evidence of massive voter fraud quickly? See below.

Then, too, one might well wonder just which John Roberts it was that visited Epstein’s pedophile island. Epstein didn’t waste his efforts on nobodies, you know; oh, no, he turned over the use of his harem of barely post-pubescent teens to the already powerful and the up and – you should pardon the expression – comers.

I don’t know that it was him. I will not insist it was him. I want to see an honest investigation into whether or not it was him.

Of course, to be more fair than he probably deserves, Roberts probably does think he’s heading off a civil war. He’s wrong, of course, as Roger Taney was before him; he is bringing the war closer and ensuring it will be worse.

Difficult to come up with evidence? Enter the mail-in ballot, a positive Godsend for would be election fraudsters. Just think about what’s required to prove effective fraud on that scale. It’s not the mere one hundred and thirteen thousand vote that allegedly swung things in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.

We’re not talking here about railroading Jefferson Washington Lincoln III, the small-time dope dealer and occasional fence. Oh, no; this is a much more – an infinitely more – difficult problem.

For one thing, the investigators would have to scrub the voting rolls themselves. Then they’d also have to scrub the obituary columns and social security death register for the last century or so…or three. Add in the birth and naturalization records. They’d have to match not just the one hundred and thirteen thousand votes in question, but every mail in ballot AND every other ballot too. (No, the mere likelihood of most of the fraud coming via mail does not rule out more traditional methods.) And they’d have to do all this in a country that has an automatic revulsion against keeping and consolidating those very kinds of records, and often where the government in charge of the states in question will interpose every possible obstacle. And all of that with MiniTru ensuring that no adverse information ever sees the light of day.

Has anyone put that kind of effort into the investigation? No, they have not. Hence, with the best will in the world, the courts had not enough to work with. Hence, none of the investigations can be said to be valid. No, none of them. Neither can any of the court decisions, even where legally sound – and they were not all legally sound; Roberts, you swine, I’m looking at you – are dispositive, either.
So forget it; the information coming from the media is doctored and dishonest, with anything contrary studiously suppressed. The investigations were trash. The court’s refusal to hear cases prejudiced where not just outright unconstitutional.

Now some ignorant toad is going to scream, “Conspiracy loons! Conspiracy theory!”

Not on your life. People are not competent to conspire at this level, while Biden, cowering in his basement, certainly wasn’t. No, no; this is not a conspiracy but a consensus or, rather, several of them. A consensus exists when similar people, with similar values, backgrounds, and educations, see similar issues and problems, similarly, and come up with similar programs and solutions. A consensus doesn’t rule out conspiracy (“Adam, should we introduce spurious bit of bullshit X as people’s exhibit A, for the impeachment trial?”) but doesn’t depend on it either. It was sufficient in this case for enough middle and lower party workers and sundry activists, plus the media and the vile and filthy denationalized rich to a) believe that the only legitimate directions for the United States to go were further left, more globalist, less nationalist, more feminist, less nativist, etc., b) to recognize the promise of mail-in ballots, c) to deny for themselves that any principle is more important that continuing to move in those directions, and d) a resolve to do it, each in his or her or s/h/its individual capacity. No, Facebook did not conspire with Twitter; there was no need. No, X judge didn’t conspire with the Democratic Party; there was no need. No, Buffet and Bezos and Billzebub Gates didn’t conspire with Soros; there was no need. There was no need because they share a consensus.

And, so, no; we do not have any faith in the election results. Nor will we have, especially since we are quite certain that election fraud is now the way of the future. Soon to be President Harris (does anyone, anyone at all, have any illusions about that? Did anyone, ever? I have no more doubt of it than I have that she gives the best blowjob in the world, if the payoff is right) will never be considered legitimate. And she, and we, can expect everything from civil disobedience to nullification to riot to resistance in arms until the war commences. (Bet you didn’t know that the South was not the only region the states of which engaged in nullification.)

What they really think of us

This man, Rick Klein, is the leader of ABC News' political division.

This is what he thinks about you.  About all of us.

To the Left, we patriots, the American people, are a problem that needs to be solved, an infestation that needs to be cleansed.

In the future, remember that.  Keep the commandments of war to heart.

Win or perish.
Do unto others, first.
Any weapon, tactic, or strategy my enemy uses is meet and fit for me to use against him.