Four Ideas

It's easy to miss cool stuff in the blogosphere if you get tied up with work or life so I thought I'd share four ideas I saw in the past few months that I thought were simple to execute and really interesting: 

• Starting off, on 1d30, a way to make damage less abstract by keeping the traditional cure spells but retooling them a bit.  I'm pretty satisfied with damage at the abstraction that its at in my game, but if I wanted more concussions, broken bones and seeping wounds this is probably the way I'd go.

• Over on Stuffed Crocodile, a chart to tell you where the heck all these undead are coming from.  Skeletons and zombies have pretty much been standard bugaboos for me.  I think it would be really interesting to have some of them be adventure hooks or to leave little traces of their former humanity on them (jewelry, tattoos, scars).

• A look at abstracted missile weapons at Untimately.  I've seen a similar idea years ago where a blogger proposed saving to see if you had certain resources left.  That was a little too abstract for my taste.  What I personally settled on was giving players 5 poker chips, each represents enough missiles to get through one combat.  What really caught my eye in this post was the idea of allowing players to get a bonus if they give up more missiles.  I think I will implement this immediately.  I love a mechanic that will let a player feel more effective (I'll take +3 to hit) but has to make a choice (but I'll be out of ammo). 

• The ever-interesting Nine and Thirty Kingdoms offers up some alternate magic systems involving getting tired or old.  Awesome.  They match up with archetypes like in Sinbad movies and they are simple.  Anyone who is bugged by the logic of Vancian casting should at least look at the spells causing exhaustion option.