"Sword of Daily Nastyness: Once per day, you can activate the sword before an attack. If you hit, you do 8 extra damage." (A minimalist Setup-Rider)
"Mancatcher of the Four Winds": +1 but +3 if the target have hostile combatants to their north, east, south and west."
"Shield of Arrow Attraction: All mundane, non-siege missiles fired at you or on a direct line that intersects you (and not sufficiently arched, impossible in dungeons with low ceilings) are attracted to the shield and harmlessly stuck there."
"Bow of Unstruck Accuracy: +2 bow. Loses its bonus if you are ever hit in combat. Bonus is reset when you wake up from 8 hours of sleep with the bow besides you." (or maybe reverse conditions to avoid 15 min adventuring day. Then again martials need to get more goodies from resting.)
"Mirror bow: If you are exactly in between two enemies, you can shoot both of them as one attack"
"Equilateral Bow: If you and two enemies form the corners of an equilateral triangle, you can shoot both of them as one attack."
"Piercing bow: If a shot hits and enemy, it continues through it in a straight line to hit the next enemy behind it and so on."
I think one problem with positional abilities like the Mancatcher above is that very much comes down to how the GM players the monsters. Do the orcs all charge? Or do they stay back and rely on their superior ranged attacks until the players close in? Do the orcs realize that the Fighter has the Mancatcher and then actively counterplay it? Detailed order of battles are needed or fights will be determined by GM fiat. I guess this is an issue in all combat but it seems to worsen with tactical play. But then again games like 4e exists and people play and enjoy it so it must be workable.
I'll still complain endlessly about the cursed problem I see in trying to get both tactical combat and a living world. If you give my PC a Tide-Turner, then every dungeon crawl will degenerate into "wait at the corner next to the Dangerous Dungeon Feature for a random encounter, then knock the monster into it". Not really "tactical" in the sense of 4e. Maybe I'm worrying too much and this isn't a problem in practice.
I think another useful route with less room for degeneracy is tactical monsters. Rubber Blobs are pushed 10 ft back whenever they are hit in melee. If you cast a spell on the Mirror Golem, it also affects the being closest to it. Many existing monsters have immunities and powerful abilities, but I think that weakness may give more room for interesting tactics. Now I realize that Goblin Punch kind of did this with the Monstrome: https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2024/12/mushroom-men-monstrome-v6.html
> the cursed problem I see in trying to get both tactical combat and a living world. If you give my PC a Tide-Turner, then every dungeon crawl will degenerate into "wait at the corner next to the Dangerous Dungeon Feature for a random encounter, then knock the monster into it"
I think my broad take is that spells already do the tactical combat thing (wall of fog exists, hold person exists, etc). We already have wands with daily rates or boots of speed and so forth. That degree of tactical combat doesn't seem to break the living world, so I'd hazard that trying to play around one of your daily charges of Tide Turner probably wouldn't either.
There's a chance that rather than creating more in-combat choice, you instead are just giving the players more tools to try to skew a fight before it starts, but in my experience, eventually you actually will just be in the normal combat procedure with bad guys to attack, and when that happens it's more interesting to have something like a Tide Turner than a +1 sword
You put my thought better then me. But yeah, I agree that eventually you just get 4 PCs vs 5 orcs in "normal" combat.
Sidenote, but how do you think about getting combats to end once they are no longer interesting? OSR Morale is useful but you'll get 3 orcs with "lucky" rolls who just keep fighting even if clearly outnumbered, and some unlucky rolls from the PCs can turn that into a slog. I think it should be mandatory with orders of battles that say that the orcs orderly fall back if outnumbered and outclassed, even if they succeed morale rolls (but then what's the point of morale rolls?). And you still have the mindless undead, slimes etc. to worry about. Some kind of snowballing magic weapon might not be "tactical" in the sense you talk about here, but might help end fights that are already over and make the game run more smoothly.
And then there's the swingyness of side-based initiative. It would be nice to help reduce that as well somehow.
> OSR Morale is useful but you'll get 3 orcs with "lucky" rolls who just keep fighting even if clearly outnumbered, and some unlucky rolls from the PCs can turn that into a slog.
Morale has been sort of weird at my table. BX morale you only check twice, and lots of the morale values hover around 7, so there a ~60% chance they pass the first morale check, and a ~36% chance they pass both (and fight to the death).
1e morale is hellishly complicated
ACKs uses the reaction roll table (2-, 3-5, 6-8, 9-11, 12+) and monsters have a mod. You roll at 1/3rd losses and then every loss after that (so a lot more checks). This works better, but IMO still doesn't do what I wanted it to do. For sovereign, I dropped the rolls in favor of gm-fiat with guidelines https://sovereign-game.xyz/combat#morale. Individual break after losing half their HP (or rotate to the back line), the whole group breaks after losing 1/3rd of the starting strength if they think that's a viable option. I think this is a lot closer to how players behave and worked well for me.
One of the things we kept running into is that in the traditional morale systems is either the whole group breaks or the whole group doesn't, but that doesn't interface well with the combat system. If the whole group does a full retreat, they all just take free attacks, and then the players just move and attack them anyway (because they're not engaged and usually the players are at least as fast). If they fighting withdraw, the players are *definitely* faster, so they end up fighting to the death in either circumstance. My table *really* doesn't like leaving bad guys alive; they tend to go back to their faction and cause trouble, plus any opportunity to thin the ranks is welcome (especially since I'm so adamant about having explicit numbers of creatures in the faction rather than vaguely-handwaving).
----------
> how do you think about getting combats to end once they are no longer interesting?
I usually just scoop, or agree to roll a few more rounds of attacks to see if they get any more hits in. A lot of it is having fistfulls of dice to roll, and I use https://dice-grid.web.app/. "Let's call it 10 more attacks, 17 up to hit... that's 1 hit for... 6 damage before you finish them all off", but this only really starts happening at like, level 5 and up.
----------
> And then there's the swingyness of side-based initiative. It would be nice to help reduce that as well somehow.
Yeah - when we played acks it wanted individual initiative (including each enemy creature), which is too much to reroll every round manually. I eventually baked it in to my built-into-my-irl-table-vtt https://github.com/beaurancourt/local-tabletop-map, but before that I gave everyone two wooden disks, and one disk was painted green on one side and white on the other, while the other disk was red and white. If a PC rolled higher than me, they'd put green on top, otherwise red. Once they acted, they'd flip it to white. So, all of the greens would go, then me, then all the reds until everything was white and we'd start over. I think it would have been fine without that in a 4 person table, but my home game frequently has 8 players and tracking it mentally was too much.
For a simpler system like OSE, I think instead of rolling a d6 for both sides, you could just have all of the PCs roll whatever dice they want, and if they get a high number they go before the bad guys and if they get a low number they go after; that splits up some of the swing.
Great suggestions! I really liked the Sovereing morale rules. I agree that chasing is pretty broken since everyone usually have the same speed. At the same time, I'd like to capture the historical dynamic of the fight being mostly about morale and that the major causalities happens once each side break. Except the problem is that the PCs have infinite morale and will never break, players don't like losing and rather fight to the death in my experience.
> historical dynamic of the fight being mostly about morale
ah yeah, then imo there needs to be *a lot* more of a game around it if that's what you want to be focus of attention. ways to trigger morale checks instead of damage, ways to raise/lower morale, etc
right now we have complex health rules and simple morale rules, and you'd probably want them the other way around
Maybe not? The knight fighting at Agincourt probably gave way more thought to defeating enemies in combat that trying to lower their morale. Killing people is a great way to lower morale. Say 4 PCs encounter 5 orcs. The morale of both sides is mostly "set" before the fight. Both sides clash and try to kill each other. Once someone is badly hurt the morale of that side plummets and they flee. Could work with "standard" OSR combat rules if you inflate HPs (never thought I'd have that problem!) to not make the initiative swing too important, + make morale checks happen at first blood and make them very hard to pass + figure out decent chase rules (which we have to do anyway, chases suck).
Chase rules should probably include something like "If you throw away your weapons and shield, and leave the equipment behind (you probably aren't wearing a backpack during combat anyway), you can eventually outrun the armed guy chasing you". Maybe it's doable with standard movement rules. Bloodthirsty players will want to bring light skirmirshers (or cavalry!) to run down the orcs once they break.
I appreciate the idea, though don't personally love the daily limits for usage. The day is something that is not significant enough to my liking in order to hang things like this on it—spells have the same issue. A lot of people end up trying to solve this on the content side or by stressing a resource attrition that I don't feel is particularly well modeled or interesting (the latter more a personal appreciation than the former.)
That said, assuming one does not have a problem with daily limits: have you given any thought about how you would track usage? Clearly there are many ways, but I feel a lot of them may be cumbersome. What have you been using yourself?
> I appreciate the idea, though don't personally love the daily limits for usage.
I've written at length about the troubles of the 15 minute adventuring day. My at the table experience looks matches it; low level parties have one sleep spell per day and not a lot of healing, so it normally looks like being able to take ~2 fights per day (wipe the first one with sleep, fight on the way out, rest, repeat) which feels... stupid.
Games like 13th age, Draw Steel, etc have per-encounter resources (as well as per-arc abilities) but it feels like doing mental gymnastics to try to explain why they can only be activated once/fight. Once per 10 minutes feels like it accomplishes the same thing, but still becomes implausible/gamey.
That said, it's important to me to design with interoperability with general OSR content in mind; and that includes other adventures and systems, so I think the cleanest place to do that is magic items; you can take them with you into other modules (unlike monsters). Within the constraints of interoperability, I think 1/day stuff is fine because that's already how these systems are built.
----------
> have you given any thought about how you would track usage?
I have extensive custom digital character management that solves the problem for me, but back when I played with pen-and-paper, I prefered to track this kind of stuff on playing cards (you can buy decks of blank cards that game designers use to make board games). You start with a "hand" of all the stuff you can still do (limited use items, 1/day items, each prepped spell), and then you discard stuff you use. When you rest, you refill your hand
> That said, it's important to me to design with interoperability with general OSR content in mind
Makes sense. I think given your constraints this is as good as it'll get!
That said, classes do get special abilities (multiple attacks, rebuking the undead, detecting treasure traps—you know, the classics) so you could potentially hang specific things onto them. I foresee two issues with this recommendation:
1. Special abilities usually don't have usage limitations attached to them.
2. It requires you to modify existing classes or add new ones (which doesn't seem to gel with your constraints.)
So, once again: this is as good as it'll get.
> I have extensive custom digital character management that solves the problem for me…
That looks really nice. My players are pretty adamant about doing pen and paper, but would also be totally keen to add things like cards to the mix.
PS: Is leaving comments on some of your previous articles an ok thing to do? I was reading your previous work and had some thoughts, but I'm unsure whether that amounts to necroing old content.
> Is leaving comments on some of your previous articles an ok thing to do? I was reading your previous work and had some thoughts, but I'm unsure whether that amounts to necroing old content
Great list!
"Sword of Daily Nastyness: Once per day, you can activate the sword before an attack. If you hit, you do 8 extra damage." (A minimalist Setup-Rider)
"Mancatcher of the Four Winds": +1 but +3 if the target have hostile combatants to their north, east, south and west."
"Shield of Arrow Attraction: All mundane, non-siege missiles fired at you or on a direct line that intersects you (and not sufficiently arched, impossible in dungeons with low ceilings) are attracted to the shield and harmlessly stuck there."
"Bow of Unstruck Accuracy: +2 bow. Loses its bonus if you are ever hit in combat. Bonus is reset when you wake up from 8 hours of sleep with the bow besides you." (or maybe reverse conditions to avoid 15 min adventuring day. Then again martials need to get more goodies from resting.)
"Mirror bow: If you are exactly in between two enemies, you can shoot both of them as one attack"
"Equilateral Bow: If you and two enemies form the corners of an equilateral triangle, you can shoot both of them as one attack."
"Piercing bow: If a shot hits and enemy, it continues through it in a straight line to hit the next enemy behind it and so on."
I think one problem with positional abilities like the Mancatcher above is that very much comes down to how the GM players the monsters. Do the orcs all charge? Or do they stay back and rely on their superior ranged attacks until the players close in? Do the orcs realize that the Fighter has the Mancatcher and then actively counterplay it? Detailed order of battles are needed or fights will be determined by GM fiat. I guess this is an issue in all combat but it seems to worsen with tactical play. But then again games like 4e exists and people play and enjoy it so it must be workable.
I'll still complain endlessly about the cursed problem I see in trying to get both tactical combat and a living world. If you give my PC a Tide-Turner, then every dungeon crawl will degenerate into "wait at the corner next to the Dangerous Dungeon Feature for a random encounter, then knock the monster into it". Not really "tactical" in the sense of 4e. Maybe I'm worrying too much and this isn't a problem in practice.
I think another useful route with less room for degeneracy is tactical monsters. Rubber Blobs are pushed 10 ft back whenever they are hit in melee. If you cast a spell on the Mirror Golem, it also affects the being closest to it. Many existing monsters have immunities and powerful abilities, but I think that weakness may give more room for interesting tactics. Now I realize that Goblin Punch kind of did this with the Monstrome: https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2024/12/mushroom-men-monstrome-v6.html
Good items!
> the cursed problem I see in trying to get both tactical combat and a living world. If you give my PC a Tide-Turner, then every dungeon crawl will degenerate into "wait at the corner next to the Dangerous Dungeon Feature for a random encounter, then knock the monster into it"
I think my broad take is that spells already do the tactical combat thing (wall of fog exists, hold person exists, etc). We already have wands with daily rates or boots of speed and so forth. That degree of tactical combat doesn't seem to break the living world, so I'd hazard that trying to play around one of your daily charges of Tide Turner probably wouldn't either.
There's a chance that rather than creating more in-combat choice, you instead are just giving the players more tools to try to skew a fight before it starts, but in my experience, eventually you actually will just be in the normal combat procedure with bad guys to attack, and when that happens it's more interesting to have something like a Tide Turner than a +1 sword
You put my thought better then me. But yeah, I agree that eventually you just get 4 PCs vs 5 orcs in "normal" combat.
Sidenote, but how do you think about getting combats to end once they are no longer interesting? OSR Morale is useful but you'll get 3 orcs with "lucky" rolls who just keep fighting even if clearly outnumbered, and some unlucky rolls from the PCs can turn that into a slog. I think it should be mandatory with orders of battles that say that the orcs orderly fall back if outnumbered and outclassed, even if they succeed morale rolls (but then what's the point of morale rolls?). And you still have the mindless undead, slimes etc. to worry about. Some kind of snowballing magic weapon might not be "tactical" in the sense you talk about here, but might help end fights that are already over and make the game run more smoothly.
And then there's the swingyness of side-based initiative. It would be nice to help reduce that as well somehow.
> OSR Morale is useful but you'll get 3 orcs with "lucky" rolls who just keep fighting even if clearly outnumbered, and some unlucky rolls from the PCs can turn that into a slog.
Morale has been sort of weird at my table. BX morale you only check twice, and lots of the morale values hover around 7, so there a ~60% chance they pass the first morale check, and a ~36% chance they pass both (and fight to the death).
1e morale is hellishly complicated
ACKs uses the reaction roll table (2-, 3-5, 6-8, 9-11, 12+) and monsters have a mod. You roll at 1/3rd losses and then every loss after that (so a lot more checks). This works better, but IMO still doesn't do what I wanted it to do. For sovereign, I dropped the rolls in favor of gm-fiat with guidelines https://sovereign-game.xyz/combat#morale. Individual break after losing half their HP (or rotate to the back line), the whole group breaks after losing 1/3rd of the starting strength if they think that's a viable option. I think this is a lot closer to how players behave and worked well for me.
One of the things we kept running into is that in the traditional morale systems is either the whole group breaks or the whole group doesn't, but that doesn't interface well with the combat system. If the whole group does a full retreat, they all just take free attacks, and then the players just move and attack them anyway (because they're not engaged and usually the players are at least as fast). If they fighting withdraw, the players are *definitely* faster, so they end up fighting to the death in either circumstance. My table *really* doesn't like leaving bad guys alive; they tend to go back to their faction and cause trouble, plus any opportunity to thin the ranks is welcome (especially since I'm so adamant about having explicit numbers of creatures in the faction rather than vaguely-handwaving).
----------
> how do you think about getting combats to end once they are no longer interesting?
I usually just scoop, or agree to roll a few more rounds of attacks to see if they get any more hits in. A lot of it is having fistfulls of dice to roll, and I use https://dice-grid.web.app/. "Let's call it 10 more attacks, 17 up to hit... that's 1 hit for... 6 damage before you finish them all off", but this only really starts happening at like, level 5 and up.
----------
> And then there's the swingyness of side-based initiative. It would be nice to help reduce that as well somehow.
Yeah - when we played acks it wanted individual initiative (including each enemy creature), which is too much to reroll every round manually. I eventually baked it in to my built-into-my-irl-table-vtt https://github.com/beaurancourt/local-tabletop-map, but before that I gave everyone two wooden disks, and one disk was painted green on one side and white on the other, while the other disk was red and white. If a PC rolled higher than me, they'd put green on top, otherwise red. Once they acted, they'd flip it to white. So, all of the greens would go, then me, then all the reds until everything was white and we'd start over. I think it would have been fine without that in a 4 person table, but my home game frequently has 8 players and tracking it mentally was too much.
For a simpler system like OSE, I think instead of rolling a d6 for both sides, you could just have all of the PCs roll whatever dice they want, and if they get a high number they go before the bad guys and if they get a low number they go after; that splits up some of the swing.
Great suggestions! I really liked the Sovereing morale rules. I agree that chasing is pretty broken since everyone usually have the same speed. At the same time, I'd like to capture the historical dynamic of the fight being mostly about morale and that the major causalities happens once each side break. Except the problem is that the PCs have infinite morale and will never break, players don't like losing and rather fight to the death in my experience.
> historical dynamic of the fight being mostly about morale
ah yeah, then imo there needs to be *a lot* more of a game around it if that's what you want to be focus of attention. ways to trigger morale checks instead of damage, ways to raise/lower morale, etc
right now we have complex health rules and simple morale rules, and you'd probably want them the other way around
Maybe not? The knight fighting at Agincourt probably gave way more thought to defeating enemies in combat that trying to lower their morale. Killing people is a great way to lower morale. Say 4 PCs encounter 5 orcs. The morale of both sides is mostly "set" before the fight. Both sides clash and try to kill each other. Once someone is badly hurt the morale of that side plummets and they flee. Could work with "standard" OSR combat rules if you inflate HPs (never thought I'd have that problem!) to not make the initiative swing too important, + make morale checks happen at first blood and make them very hard to pass + figure out decent chase rules (which we have to do anyway, chases suck).
Chase rules should probably include something like "If you throw away your weapons and shield, and leave the equipment behind (you probably aren't wearing a backpack during combat anyway), you can eventually outrun the armed guy chasing you". Maybe it's doable with standard movement rules. Bloodthirsty players will want to bring light skirmirshers (or cavalry!) to run down the orcs once they break.
I appreciate the idea, though don't personally love the daily limits for usage. The day is something that is not significant enough to my liking in order to hang things like this on it—spells have the same issue. A lot of people end up trying to solve this on the content side or by stressing a resource attrition that I don't feel is particularly well modeled or interesting (the latter more a personal appreciation than the former.)
That said, assuming one does not have a problem with daily limits: have you given any thought about how you would track usage? Clearly there are many ways, but I feel a lot of them may be cumbersome. What have you been using yourself?
Howdy Federico!
> I appreciate the idea, though don't personally love the daily limits for usage.
I've written at length about the troubles of the 15 minute adventuring day. My at the table experience looks matches it; low level parties have one sleep spell per day and not a lot of healing, so it normally looks like being able to take ~2 fights per day (wipe the first one with sleep, fight on the way out, rest, repeat) which feels... stupid.
Games like 13th age, Draw Steel, etc have per-encounter resources (as well as per-arc abilities) but it feels like doing mental gymnastics to try to explain why they can only be activated once/fight. Once per 10 minutes feels like it accomplishes the same thing, but still becomes implausible/gamey.
That said, it's important to me to design with interoperability with general OSR content in mind; and that includes other adventures and systems, so I think the cleanest place to do that is magic items; you can take them with you into other modules (unlike monsters). Within the constraints of interoperability, I think 1/day stuff is fine because that's already how these systems are built.
----------
> have you given any thought about how you would track usage?
https://ibb.co/RtdW3wQ
I have extensive custom digital character management that solves the problem for me, but back when I played with pen-and-paper, I prefered to track this kind of stuff on playing cards (you can buy decks of blank cards that game designers use to make board games). You start with a "hand" of all the stuff you can still do (limited use items, 1/day items, each prepped spell), and then you discard stuff you use. When you rest, you refill your hand
> That said, it's important to me to design with interoperability with general OSR content in mind
Makes sense. I think given your constraints this is as good as it'll get!
That said, classes do get special abilities (multiple attacks, rebuking the undead, detecting treasure traps—you know, the classics) so you could potentially hang specific things onto them. I foresee two issues with this recommendation:
1. Special abilities usually don't have usage limitations attached to them.
2. It requires you to modify existing classes or add new ones (which doesn't seem to gel with your constraints.)
So, once again: this is as good as it'll get.
> I have extensive custom digital character management that solves the problem for me…
That looks really nice. My players are pretty adamant about doing pen and paper, but would also be totally keen to add things like cards to the mix.
PS: Is leaving comments on some of your previous articles an ok thing to do? I was reading your previous work and had some thoughts, but I'm unsure whether that amounts to necroing old content.
> Is leaving comments on some of your previous articles an ok thing to do? I was reading your previous work and had some thoughts, but I'm unsure whether that amounts to necroing old content
yeah, more than welcome!
Those three zones items all jump out at me as my favorites.
I remember that 4e had some very cool magical banners for buffing allies, but the brambles banner takes it into a very cool direction.
I can see that one getting a lot of use.
Hello Beau, very inspiring items!
Happy to share a list I made some time ago!
May the fun be always at your table!
https://viviiix.substack.com/p/where-to-run-a-kup-game-10-artifacts
Can you post some of the highlights from that list that you think fits the theme that I'm talking about?