Sample potions

The feasibility of the sub-system for Alchemy I proposed for the alchemy month hinges on the presence of multiple formulas for the same potion. Only by finding two or more formulas that creates similar effects will players have a chance to understand the principles of correspondence and substitution. The presence of multiple formulas also reinforces the notion that formulas are more like recipes for cooking than chemical notation; or that they consist of equal measures fluff and crunch.

To better show what I mean, I've made a small pdf containing three variations on a potion of restoration, and three variations on a potion of healing. While they are designed with this system in mind, you can also use them as stand-alone handouts if you just want to award your players with a tangible representation of their scroll or similar.

Rules for Alchemy

Apparently, there is an alchemy month going on. That's neat, since I've been thinking a lot about alchemy now that my campaign is on pause. Here are my rules. They are not at all playtested, but at least in theory I'm really happy with them.

The basic idea is that alchemy should be about formulas, trial and error. The system therefore makes a strong distinction between simple player-facing rules which are basically "say a prayer, and follow the formula" and more involved referee-facing rules which governs how formulas should be designed. For most players, alchemy is consequently about finding a formula and questing to retrieve the ingredients. For those who want, however, alchemy instead is about trying to understand what makes the potion effective, and/or trying to improve it.

Hopefully, you can find some ideas worth stealing. An example formula can be found here; and there is plenty of inspiration for more over at Slugs and Silver.

A system for Alchemy

PLAYER-FACING RULES

Alchemy is a craft based on a secret system of mystical correspondence. To create an alchemical potion, your character needs
- A formula
- The required ingredients
- Paraphernalia and tools

Any character possessing these things can be an alchemist. To become a master requires understanding the correspondences that govern all of creation - a task that may easily consume a lifetime.

Preparing a potion

Before preparing a potion, alchemists commonly fast, say a prayer or invocation that will compensate for their impending blasphemy. Failure to take proper precautions results in minor corruption (-1 Spirit).

After these precautions, just follow the formula.

Determining the Effect of a Potion

The potion's effect is determined by three things
- The formula
- The alchemist's INT
- How closely the formula was followed

When the potion is used, or otherwise tested, roll d20 and add INT of the character preparing the potion to determine its quality.
Formula was followed exactly
- the potion always has effect
- failed INT-roll means side effect: minor corruption (-1 Spirit)
- natural 1 means side effect: major corruption (-1d4 Spirit)
- natural 20 means potion not depleted; it was so effective it can be used again

Minor deviation from the formula- the potion only has effect on successful INT-roll

Major deviation means the potion never has effect.

Creating new formulas

If a process involving minor deviations is successful, it can be codified into a new formula. Once codified, it is no longer considered a minor deviation for rules purposes. To codify the process, the player simply writes it down.

Prepared potions

A prepared alchemical potion should be noted as
"Potion of healing (minor, +3)"
indicating the formula used, how closely the formula was followed, and the INT of the alchemist.


 REFEREE FACING RULES BELOW

REFEREE FACING RULES

For referees only, below image.

The Formulas

There are three basic types of alchemical formula:
- Pure
- Diluted
- True
When designing formulas, you start with the Pure.

The Alchemical Principles

To design the formula, you first decide what class of potion it will result in.

There are four alchemical Principles, or classes of potions, corresponding to a colour each. All potions use a base that is determined by their principle. They are
- White (purify, heal): White wine, distilled alcohol, fermented milk, or other white/clear liquid intoxicant
- Yellow (enhance): Ale, Mead, or other yellow/golden liquid intoxicant
- Red (alter): Red wine, or other red liquid intoxicant
- Black (?): Ichor

A healing potion will thus be white, a potion of giant strength yellow, and a potion of growth red. The black are there as a possibility; not currently part of my campaign.

The Pure formula

The Pure formula consists of 5 components
1 base- An intoxicating liquid of a colour determined by the Principle of the potion.

3 ingredients
- A natural ingredient (something from nature)
- An unnatural ingredient (something made)
- A preternatural ingredient (something with magical or mystical properties)

1 reagent- Salt or potash gives a normal potion
- Sulphur gives a weak potion (+3 to INT roll)
- Mercury gives a strong potion (-3 to INT roll)

Diluted formulas

Over time, many formulas become diluted when passed from Alchemist to Alchemist, or developed from flawed understanding of the pure process. A diluted formula has the same effect as a Pure formula, but contains more than the 5 required ingredients. These additional ingredients may give side effects, but are commonly just cosmetic. For example: an alchemist may decide to add honey to a potion where honey is not required, just because they prefer the taste or to see if a rival alchemist is stealing their formula (and thus also including the unnecessary honey).

Using a diluted formula means characters have to collect more ingredients, but otherwise carries no penalties.

True formulas

Through clever substitution (see below), it may theoretically be possible to create a formula with less than 5 components. The hypothetical formula using the least number of components to create an effect are known among alchemists as True formulas.

Substitution

Alchemy works through correspondence. Thus, all components can be substituted with another component of sufficent similarity. For example, red wine may be substituted as a base by blood and white wine, and a hippogrif egg might perhaps be substituted by the egg of an eagle raised among horses. Substitutions like these are considered a minor deviation.

If a substitution is successful (meaning: the character succeeds with the INT roll to determine the potion's effect), the character can codify the process as a new formula. In game, this is done by a player writing down the process. Through iterative attempts of substitution and codified processes, a clever alchemist might eventually arrive at a formula that is very different from the original.

Class abilities

My campaign doesn't use classes in the traditional sense. However, I want to allow for (semi)-magical abilities without giving everyone access to them. Therefore, all starting characters get a class ability: a fraction of what a class might normally entail. To determine the class ability, roll 2 six-sided die and choose one for column and one for row. More powerful, or more interesting, class abilities are placed on doubles to make up for the lack of choice.

So if you roll 1, 3 you can choose between the passive abilities "favoured" or "true aim". If you roll 1, 1, you have no choice but is instead awarded with the more active ability "impress".

Most of the content is reworked from Skerples - especially his Iron Gates setting.

The class matrix is here

Weapon list (and less interesting choices)

The other day, we playtested the rules in a real adventure for the first time. For the most part, everything worked as anticipated. But one thing that didn't work was the weapons list. I had thought that the incentives and disincentives were fairly balanced. But in play, I found my players overestimating the incentives and underestimating the disincentives when shopping for equipment. As a result, I had one player-character who was comically over-encumbered from the start, while another had opted for a weapon he had almost no chance of hitting with.

I don't know if this is a general thing, but at least for my group it seems to be: they constantly overestimate their luck. This presents a problem since it can result in decidedly un-fun situations. So I repeatedly have to build in fail-safes that - if everyone was rational - should not be needed.

Anyone analyzing games will tell you that you create interesting choices through incomparables. Gather two forest-tokens, or move your troops? Discard all cards, or play one? But this works poorly when you have players like mine, who have a very fickle interest in rationality and could just as well compulsively chop down trees every round out of some vague animosity towards dryads.

So I revised the weapons list and some of the rules, and I think it came out less interesting but a whole lot better. Here's the list.

(It used to be that higher damage was balanced against lower chances of hitting for weapons where you didn't meet the requirements. After the playtest I decided to instead lower the damage. This, I hope, will make oversized weapons lose their appeal).

House Rules

It's been a while since I posted and I'm struggling with the last pieces of the next adventure. But today is supposedly the last day of the Google+ OSR group, and I felt I wanted to post something to commemorate this occasion. During my time at G+, this group has filled my feed with a constant stream of inspiration and creativity, and led me to discover a wealth of outstanding blogs and creators that I might otherwise have missed.

So, in lieu of a proper post with actual content, I offer my house rules.

The starting idea behind these rules was to provide a sense of weight. This is the reason for using damage reduction instead of AC, and for the size die and ability requirements for equipment. But this reasoning also resulted in two rules that might perhaps be of some interest to others: fatigue, and pressing.

Fatigue basically provides an extended range for critical failures. To not make the book-keeping too burdensome, normal equipment and normal actions do not result in fatigue. Opportunity attacks, wielding heavy weapons - and in my game wearing heavy armor - do. In my game, it's treated as a "mild" critical miss: you become easier to hit and attacks deal more damage to you until your next turn.

Pressing, in turn, is a way of gambling a success on getting another success. After an attack hits, the player can opt to attack again instead of rolling damage. If the second attack is also successful, they score two hits. If not, they lose the first. However, for each time the attack is pressed, fatigue goes up by one. I stole this rule from detect magic where it is more unforgiving, but I scaled it back since I want to keep HP roughly in the same spectrum as ability scores (max 20). If you use standard HP progression, the original rule is probably better.

The Case for Squares

One of the issues with hexagons is that they tend to be the wrong size. Now, of course you can choose to have smaller or larger hexagons, but the thing is that no matter which size you ultimately settle on it's not optimal for all purposes. Part of this is that the natural unit of a map is distance, while the natural unit of travel is time and the unit of exploration is line-of-sight. Thus, plain-hexes could reasonably be much larger than jungle-hexes.

Another part is encounter density. To more accurately represent your setting, the solution is to zoom in. But once you do that you get a crazy number of hexes to fill which a) renders you a massive amount of work; b) tempts you to cheat the players of their agency by having totally random contents (like MYZ); and/or c) creates a strange pace when players by chance repeatedly choose the unpopulated hexes.

A basic cause for these problems, I would argue, is that space gamified through hexagons conflates unit of movement (ie. "move one hex") with points of interest (ie. "in this hex, there is..."). Or in other words, hexes scale poorly. There are solutions for dividing a hex into smaller sub-hexes, but they aren't very practical.

On the basis of this, I want to suggest another way: to treat the game-map as if it was a normal map. I have yet to playtest this, so there might be some hidden flaw, but since rules are often more complicated than relying on prior knowledge I think it might carry some merit.

The idea is this
Instead of superimposing hexagons on your map, you place a square grid.
This square grid does not primarily represent spaces in a game sense (as in: move your pawn two spaces) but a coordinate system.
Make the scale so that 1 square is 1 (metric) mile square in reality, but 1 cm2 on the map.
Set base movement to 3 miles in light terrain.
Use a ruler.

This has the following consequences
For MOVEMENT. The party can move 3 squares horizontally or vertically, OR that they can move 3 cm in any direction they want. So a novice group would probably stick to the orthogonal, whereas a more experienced group would say "we travel NNE for eight miles, then turn sharp E for another seven to stay clear of the Dragon valley"

for SCALE. You could zoom in and out as you like. Each square can be divided into 10x10 new squares (each 1 km) or 100X100 (each 100 m), and each 100 squares in turn form a macro square (10 x 10 miles) and so on. And as long as you keep this basic structure, your coordinates will work. As an example, East 20,0 through East 20,9 would be the ten horizontal locations nested within square East 20. And East 20 through 29 would in turn be part of the macro-hex East 2X.

for ENCOUNTERS. Since the location of anything on the map can be stated as precise as your ruler allows, you could vary the encounter area for each encounter. A hidden cache is perhaps only found is the party moves into the exact dot representing it on the map, whereas a city is encountered in the square and a prowling beast in encountered within a four mile radius of its lair.

for LEGIBILITY. Normal coordinates are much easier to track than hex-coordinates. There's no need for numbers in every square - making every fifth gridline thicker and having numbers every tenth would suffice. This allows much more room for at-a-glance information on the referee's map.

Obviously, there are strong reasons for sticking with hexagons. They look good. They rest on a strong tradition, and form the basis for many procedures. They have an esoteric quality that sets game-specific knowledge apart from normal knowledge. Etc. On the other hand, I think that there's a solid case for squares.

The merit of cascading dice

Cascading dice, popularized by The Black Hack as usage dice, is an excellent mechanic. You roll a die, and on 1 or 2 the die size decreases. When the die is reduced below 1d4, the resource you're using is depleted. It's an elegant rule, its fun, and it produces a nice acceleration of degradation near the end. However, the rule is also often described as making book-keeping easier or simplifying things. For example, one reviewer writes

"Every item that has a limited number of uses has a usage die. So, instead of counting every arrow you have, you simply say your arrows have a usage die of d10. Whenever you use the item, you roll the usage die. If you roll a 1 or 2, you step the usage die down. So, if I rolled a 1 on my d10 after firing my bow, I now have d8 arrows. Once you get to d4 and roll a 1 or 2, you are out of whatever the item was. No more marking off each little arrow, torch, etc."

What I want to highlight here is that this statement is perfectly valid in an RPG context, yet it is fundamentally weird. If a person who had no prior experience from any game sat down at your table and you said "your bow has ten arrows", they would immediately understand the bookkeeping involved. Shoot one, deduct one. This simplified approach, on the other hand, requires a paragraph to explain.

The disconnect between perceived simplicity and reality becomes even more marked with rations, which haves you roll your die as often as you would otherwise mark one ration used. In other words: usage dice are a simple system for bookkeeping, but primarily in comparison to a hypothesized much more complex system. Any gamer can come up with tremendously complex systems at the blink of an eye. And that is often our point of comparison. But the reality is that any rule, no matter how simple, is often more burdensome than having no rule at all, because through our successful existence as humans we are already stuffed full of systems and procedures for doing any number of things.

So my contention is this:
Even a very simple rule is often more complex than relying on already existing knowledge. Instead, enjoyable rules often serve to gamify aspects that would otherwise seem uninteresting or unappealing. And one of the major ways of doing this is shifting from managing resources to managing risk.

This is why cascading dice works: not because they make book-keeping simpler but that they gamify an aspect that many gamers find all-too mundane, by transforming it into a risk. But beyond that, I would also argue that this is why low-lever combat is very different than high-level ditto, and why many vastly prefer the former. It is also the reason why wandering monster checks are fairly universally applied, whereas counting rations are less so, and why burn-time of torches become a more urgent matter when you throw away all but one to haul as much loot as you can out of the dungeon. For a large subset of gamers, adjusting to uncertainty and gambling on your odds are much more exciting than logistics.

Because of this, i think that the notion of wilderness travel as a game of resource management is very accurate, but also part of why it has found less traction than dungeon explorations and other forms of adventures.

Basically, I think that any system of wilderness exploration should consider which parts to be left alone (without rules), which parts to keep, and which parts to further gamify by shifting focus from resources to risks.