Hexcrawl [Part 3: Skills]

So I've been thinking about how I want to do skills. I decided to keep a fairly simple system, with a low scalability factor (that is to say; there is no huge difference between a low-level and a high-level character).

I decided I wanted to have a few major skill groups, each further divided by skills. Each level, the characters get a certain number of points to spend within one or more groups, up to a level cap of 1 point per skill every 3 levels (or something). This means that the difference between a 1st level character and a 30th level character is a +10 skill bonus. The higher level character is at a very large advantage, but even then, it's not a given he'll succeed and the other fail. This seems about right to me. Playtesting will bear it out.

The proposed skills groups are:

Movement, which includes every skill necessary to move around. 4th Ed. only has a few of those skills, and I'll probably return to a more 3.x division of skills: Tumble, Climb, Jump, Balance and Swim. Probably no more than those, though.
Active skills are those that require the player to do something. Picking pockets, handling animals, brewing beer are all active skills. This is a large category, and will probably be left largely up to the player to fill.
Social skills are those that play out the relative inlfuence of two people on each other. Intimidate, Lie (better than bluff), Negotiate (better than diplomacy), Haggle, Sense motive and their ilk. Again fairly specific, each describing a way to deal with people.
Knowledge skills are supposed to represent character knowledge of the world around him. This will probably take the form of History, Etiquette, Culture (by civilisation), Language* and some form of Monster knowlegde.
Magic I'm still not decided about. If I do decided to have magic in the form of skills, they'll just be another category, which only wizards have easy access to.

I'm not sure if I really need Active or Social skills, fearing it'll lead to pidgeon-holing the character's roleplaying. However, I want the charming rogue to have a more than equal chance to fast-talk the barkeeper into giving him free beer, for example. However, I want the dull-witted figther to have a small chance of doing the same, too. For now, they're both in the game.
About absent skills: There's no Gather Information, nor is there some kind of Spot or Perception. Gather information, I never liked,as it can both cut an adventure short or bring it to a stop, when a high or low roll upsets the GM's planned rate of information release.
Any form of perception is absent too, this to make players think independently and to find clues on their own. Some form of passive perception might survive, to see wheter or not enemies succeed in sneaking up on the characters. This is, however, unlikely.




*I've always been unsatisfied by the way D&D treats languages. The only languages apart from common are the species languages, which is unrealistic. Thus I will use a different system. Each culture will have its own language, with common being a sort of trade tongue, or pidgin. A language will have fewer possible ranks than a normal skill, but won't be bound by the level-cap. Similarly, I'll introduce different formalised systems of non-verbal communication (I wanted to say writing systems, but that would left out things like sign language, which also is part of it). The two systems will be separately from each other (that is to say, just because you can speak a language doesn't mean you'll be able to read it).

Spoken languages
0 ranks: Speaker isn't able to form a simple sentence.
1 rank: Speaker can form simple sentences, but can't explain complicated ideas. Many mistakes in grammar and pronounciation.
2 ranks: Speaker can speak well, although with an accent and still the occasional mistake. Complicated ideas are not immediately clear, however; some "dumbing-down" is necessary for that.
3 ranks: Speaker can almost pass for a native speaker. Even complicated ideas are no problem, although an accent remains.
4 ranks: Speaker is completely fluent.
5 ranks: Speaker has an usually high graps of the language, can speak very eloquently. This is the level for those who live by the language (orators, politicians, poets).

Formalised signs
0 ranks: Reader isn't able to interpret signs, and maybe doesn't even know they are supposed to convey a message.
1 rank: Reader can recognise origin of signs and can glean some superficial information from it.
2 ranks: Reader can get gist from message but missing details.
3 ranks: Reader can read the language without problem, to the details.

Hexcrawl [Part 2: System]

I'm planning to cobble a system together for my hexcrawl campaign, since there's no single gaming system that does everything I want it to, so I'll be looking at the different parts that my gaming system needs and what I'll do to fulfill that need.

Combat: I'll use 4th Ed. for this. I like the combat system, which is more than I can say for 3.x, and the ease of building encounters will mean I can focus more on other things.

Magic: Magic is an integral part of fantasy roleplaying. I've been a great fan of Vancian spellcasting in my rpg's. The resource management imposed by it means very few wizards would use their spells outside of direct adventuring, which always seemed a waste to me. After all, if you have the power over reality, would you use it to do nothing but sow death and destruction on your enemies to exclusion of everything else? I know I wouldn't.
Which magic system I'll use in place I don't know yet. I like the Ars Magica system, which is flexible enough for my liking. However, there's nothing to prevent a wizard from using, for example, Perdo Corpus to kill his foes in combat. I could rewrite all the wizard powers so they're the equivalent of the Ars Magica action/substance combinations, with a minimum skill requirement, but that's more work than I really like, even taken into account that no single wizard would have access to every possible combination.
For now, I'll keep my eyes open, in the hopes that something turns up. If not, I'll grit my teeth and use Ars Magica.

Skills: I'll be doing away with skill challenges. Never liked them much. I might not use the normal D&D skill system at all. I might invent my own system. For some reason, this is the part of any gaming system that I have the least difficulty tampering with. More on this in a later post. Suffice to say that'll it have to be simple, so as to fit in with both the combat rules and the magic rules.

Mass combat: I'm not sure I'm going to be needing these rules, but I'd like to have them handy. The most elegant ones I've seen so far are in the Lord of the Rings RPG by Decipher. They're simple and general, leaving place for individual combat where dramatically appropriate, so I see no problem stealing them.

Apart from these elements, I need only random tables for all the following:
Terrain (probably, depending on which of two different starting points I use)
Weather
Encounters (different ones by climate, terrain and civilisation level)
Events (in case my players decide to become rules)

Next time, I'll elaborate on how I'll implement skills.

Hexcrawl [Part 1: Introduction]

This is something I've been thinking about for the last few weeks, and actually one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place.

My goal with the hexcrawl is to run a random sandbox campaign. I want a larger theme of exploration, too. This is as much a desire to come as close as possible to a campaign with an Old School flavour as possible, without actually going back to the old editions of D&D.

Why not? Because of a few things. First, I don't own OD&D, in any form, and I'm not going to be able to easily get it; I can't buy it online (being broke, and hating to buy things online), and there's no FLGS that stocks a decent selection of rpgs.
Second, my players (and I!) like the new D&D. We like having choices beyond picking a class in shaping our characters, apart from the superficial things like equipment. Stricktly necessary? Not at all, but I prefer it, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

Next part: system