After making camp, Tyron went off to hunt,or perhaps off to pee, who knows. While about his business, he heard a sort of hissing sound, and saw a cluster of eight eyes regarding him from the wood.
A digression on systems
If you haven't played D&D in a while, things have changed. From my dim memories, I'd say it's gotten easier. Most "rollable" activities (combat, skill checks and saving throws as far as I can tell) are based on the roll of a d20. The scale you roll against, is open ended, and the roll can be heavily modified. A level 15 fighter might have a bonus of +12 or the like to his Fortitude save, but the poison of the queen of the spiders is so strong he needs to beat a 27 to survive. (Hence 15 or better on that 20-sider).
Generally your roll needs to be compared to something. For a skill check, the GM assigns a certain difficulty class (DC) to your attempt: using your Climb skill to scale a sheer icy cliff might have a DC 25 or so, so you'll need plenty of experience and bonuses.
Or, if a goblin is hidden and you're trying to detect it, you compare your Listen check to the goblin's Hide check.
One thing this makes much easier is combat. Armor class,for example, is simply a number, from 0 to whatever (as opposed to the old -10 to +10 I think I remember). To hit a foe, your adjusted combat roll needs to beat its AC. Simple. And as you go up in levels your combat bonus increases. Fighting classes increases their combat bonuses the quickest.
So this does away with those huge table that cross-reference your class and level with an opponent's AC.
As a result, it's been easy to have combats -- scribble a few numbers from the MM and you're ready to go. (Now, D&D 3 and 3.5 then throw in a host of additional combat complexities that put the old Steve Jackson Melee games to shame and make one think instead of Advanced Squad Leader. But you will not be surprised to hear that if you omit such considerations as flat-footed AC reduction, flanking moves, areas of threat and attacks of opportunity, the game still plays Just Fine).
Now, to those of you who've followed gaming, this news is probably 15 years old. To me, though, it is "new"! Delightful to be out of touch.
There followed a combat in which young Tyron handily defeated a large spider and reported the same to Fredegar.
"Spider? Where's the legs?"
"Legs?"
"Legs! That's dinner!"
Fredegar fried up the legs, and a fine meal was had. (I have to admit this is due to the influence of World of Warcraft, in which spiders are a prime food source and shed things like "white spider meat" and "crunchy spider leg." Hmm, sounds a bit like a punchily named Thai noodle dish, doesn't it? Crazy Spider Noodle.)
It soon developed that the woods were full of spiders. They set watches, and headed off early, hoping to reach the town of Holborne.
2 comments:
I didn't realize they'd done that with armor class. That is nifty.
Okay, as the resident never-completely-degeeked, here are some resources that may be of interest:
Hypertext d20 SRD You see, another thing that happened while we were away was they decided to "open source" much of the core D&D rules, so except for certain bits of information (like rules on character creation and levelling up), it can all be freely copied and even incorporated in commercially-published games. This website was done by a fan who formatted the offical SRD (System Reference Documunt) text to make it more web-friendly.
Way more SRD-type documents--because the decision to open up D&D meant that others could create SRDs of their own coherent sub-variants. (Not all on the page are D&D-based; some are the result of other companies following suit with the concept.) Of particular interest are the "Romantic Fantasy" version and the "Perfect 20" version, both of which basically cut down D&D 3.x into much simpler rules sets.
Also,
I'm a big fan of the Spider Roll at a couple local sushi houses. As far as I know, though, there is no actual spider, but the deep-fried softshell crab they use is very close.
Post a Comment