Sunday, February 14, 2010

Pelor, Lord of Time. Wait, wasn't that Cronus's title too?

Pelor is everyone's favorite deity, at least among humans. He's good, and he helps farmers and works with the sun, and great stuff like that. Just now, however, I came across a detail in the description of Pelor that I never noticed before. Apparently he also runs time. That strikes me as an opportunity to run a grittier DnD game, even within the Super-Heroic-Heroes-of-Good default setting.

The party, who are probably either unaligned or some sort of servant of Pelor (Paladin or Cleric), are contacted by the god and asked to do some more-unaligned-than-good deeds to keep the space-time continuum from coming apart (probably in more fantasy-ish terms, but you know what I mean). Maybe some normally good force, such as other Pelor-ites, is accidentally doing something damaging and won't see reason about stopping. Maybe one of the other gods is being a little more malicious than usual. Maybe the Far Realm is breaking through into reality, and driving people insane (and spawning Daemons and corrupting Space Marines? Wait, no, that's a different setting :P).

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Active Defense!

I was reading through the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 PHB the other day, and I noticed something that is oddly missing from 4th edition: active defenses.

So I decided to make some up. I decided that there should be a dodge for rogue-ish sort of characters, and block for fighter types.

Dodge is based on Acrobatics, and is more or less just a straight check with that skill with a DC based on the roll result that caused the hit. For instance, a character gets hit by a monster who rolled an 18 on the d20 and had a +6 bonus. His dodge check has to pass a DC of 24. If he succeeds, he shifts one space (getting out of the way) and avoids all effects of the attack. If he fails, he may still shift one space, but he still takes the damage and effects, in addition to being knocked prone.

Block is similar. It requires a shield, but the DC is figured the same way. On a success, the character is unaffected by the attack. On a failure, he is pushed back one space (this is forced movement) and still takes all the effects.

I've been trying to think up a way to do parrying, but my ideas are all mechanically similar to either dodge or block. Any ideas? (I'm pretending here that anyone actually reads this blog. Heh.)