Another Reading Week bites the dust...
Feb. 26th, 2006 03:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexmegamiWell, I spent the week mostly sleeping and roleplaying. It's been a good week, although now I'm going to be scrambling to do all those things that I forgot to do, like readings and such. (Really there were only a couple of things, I think... *cough* Like a play...)
But hopefully I have managed to catch up on all that sleep I needed, and hopefully this means I won't be dragging myself to school in the mornings.
I'll just need to crack down on doing homework/essays.
I can do that. *firm nod*
In other news, Pat playtested a new way to run D&D so that it was darker/more horrific. It worked pretty well, though he needed to up the magic effect a bit more - I was casting Animal Friendship so often that I probably should have gotten points of Autumn, and I definitely think Cody needed to be picking up a lot more Autumn himself. Though he had enough Winter that it was already creepifying enough...
The Mage Storyteller's Handbook (yes, a White Wolf OWoD product) gives an idea for Resonance that doesn't just run Static, Dynamic, and Entropic 0-5. Instead, you have three axes:
Summer-Winter (life/death)
Day-Night (good/evil)
Spring-Autumn (creativity/banality (stasis); in D&D terms, chaotic/lawful)
These are marked from "0" (true neutral) to 10 in either direction.
We then applied this to D&D magic and actions.
...basically, everyone starts at "True Neutral". This means you have to toss out traditional D&D alignments, including ones for paladins and other restricted classes. Magic, especially, affects the direction you sway in: magic seems to have a bit of a life of its own. That said, "evil" magic doesn't always have to be "death", nor does "good" have to be "life"; an "evil life" might be zombie-summoning, and a "good death" might be the corpse preservation spell, or some things out of the "Repose" cleric spell list. And so on.
And, basically, as you get higher on these lines, you start to go a little crazy. Your resonance becomes noticeable. For example, by the end, Cody's character had 3 Winter (death) - he was wearing the skull of a beast we'd killed to sleep, and he had dreams about killing, and people were starting to become edgy around him. (I mentioned to Pat that with the frequency he was casting Charm Person, he probably should have had a bit more Autumn than he did, but it wasn't a big deal - we were just playtesting, after all.)
I dropped to 2 Winter at one point, but by the end had managed to pull myself to a total of 0 Summer-Winter, 0 Day-Night, 1 Spring. Pretty good for a Ranger/Rogue.
The other thing was the introduction of the critical injury table. Basically, if you took more damage in a round than your Constitution total, Pat rolled to see whether or not there was a crippling side-effect. (I was the only one it happened to, sadly, and I only got "requires a Heal check before it will begin healing." The other options were crippled (i.e. sprained), which I think gave temporary attribute loss; loss of limb, which gave permanent attribute loss; and... can't remember the last.
Anyway, it was pretty interesting.
But hopefully I have managed to catch up on all that sleep I needed, and hopefully this means I won't be dragging myself to school in the mornings.
I'll just need to crack down on doing homework/essays.
I can do that. *firm nod*
In other news, Pat playtested a new way to run D&D so that it was darker/more horrific. It worked pretty well, though he needed to up the magic effect a bit more - I was casting Animal Friendship so often that I probably should have gotten points of Autumn, and I definitely think Cody needed to be picking up a lot more Autumn himself. Though he had enough Winter that it was already creepifying enough...
The Mage Storyteller's Handbook (yes, a White Wolf OWoD product) gives an idea for Resonance that doesn't just run Static, Dynamic, and Entropic 0-5. Instead, you have three axes:
Summer-Winter (life/death)
Day-Night (good/evil)
Spring-Autumn (creativity/banality (stasis); in D&D terms, chaotic/lawful)
These are marked from "0" (true neutral) to 10 in either direction.
We then applied this to D&D magic and actions.
...basically, everyone starts at "True Neutral". This means you have to toss out traditional D&D alignments, including ones for paladins and other restricted classes. Magic, especially, affects the direction you sway in: magic seems to have a bit of a life of its own. That said, "evil" magic doesn't always have to be "death", nor does "good" have to be "life"; an "evil life" might be zombie-summoning, and a "good death" might be the corpse preservation spell, or some things out of the "Repose" cleric spell list. And so on.
And, basically, as you get higher on these lines, you start to go a little crazy. Your resonance becomes noticeable. For example, by the end, Cody's character had 3 Winter (death) - he was wearing the skull of a beast we'd killed to sleep, and he had dreams about killing, and people were starting to become edgy around him. (I mentioned to Pat that with the frequency he was casting Charm Person, he probably should have had a bit more Autumn than he did, but it wasn't a big deal - we were just playtesting, after all.)
I dropped to 2 Winter at one point, but by the end had managed to pull myself to a total of 0 Summer-Winter, 0 Day-Night, 1 Spring. Pretty good for a Ranger/Rogue.
The other thing was the introduction of the critical injury table. Basically, if you took more damage in a round than your Constitution total, Pat rolled to see whether or not there was a crippling side-effect. (I was the only one it happened to, sadly, and I only got "requires a Heal check before it will begin healing." The other options were crippled (i.e. sprained), which I think gave temporary attribute loss; loss of limb, which gave permanent attribute loss; and... can't remember the last.
Anyway, it was pretty interesting.
