Fixing Turn Undead

After Grapple, Turn Undead is probably the worst part of the 3.5e combat rules (and slightly ahead of all those combat maneuvers). It has several problems:

- It is an iconic, but little used, ability of one of the key classes in the game. This means that it comes up enough to be annoying, but not enough to warrant actually memorising the complex rules.

- It works slightly differently from anything else in the game.

- The mechanics require a table lookup. In fact, they are just about the only core rule that requires a table. This means that even if you did memorise the rule, you almost certainly still have to look it up every time.

The Way it Works

Turn Undead works like this: the Cleric can use the power a number of times per day equal to 3 plus his Cha mod (minimum 1). It is a standard action to turn undead (and lasts 10 rounds).

When the Cleric Turns Undead, he makes a turning check (d20 + Cha mod). He then looks his result up on a table to see the maximum "hit dice" affected.

He then rolls turning damage, which is 2d6 + Clr lv + Cha mod. This is the number of "hit dice" that are affected.

Then, you start counting creatures, starting with the closest (but ignoring any with total concealment, or if line of effect is blocked). You keep counting until you run out of turning damage, or there are no more undead within 60 ft. (If at any point the 'next nearest' undead has more "hit dice" than the remaining turn damage, those remaining dice are wasted; they aren't enough to affect the creature, and they don't carry over to a new creature.) Oh, one more thing - if two undead creatures are equally close to the Cleric, turn undead affects the weaker of the two first.

Normally, creatures affected flee from the character for 10 rounds. If unable to flee, they cower instead. You can act normally, but if you move within 10 feet of them, the turn effect ends.

However, if you have more than twice as many cleric levels as the creature has "hit dice", you destroy the creature instead.

All of these various elements - the uses per day, the turn check, and the turn damage - can be improved using appropriate feats.

One more thing: the reason I have put "hit dice" in quote marks above is that many undead creatures have Turn Resistance. This increases their effective hit dice vs Turn Undead. So, if a vampire has 9 hit dice but TR +4, it is considered to have 13 hit dice when the Cleric tries to turn it.

A Better Solution

The real solution to Turn Undead is actually to just make it a spell. Clerics already have a bunch of these, so adding one more shouldn't be a problem. Additionally, this eliminates the issue of why a Cleric of the god of hats gets the Turn Undead power the same as anyone else. Finally, it allows the complex rules to be shunted away into a spell description, which is really the most appropriate place anyway.

Unfortunately, that's not going to happen. In the first playtest packet, the designers for 5e actually did make Turn Undead a spell... and there was a rebellion. Apparently, people didn't like this change to this most 'iconic' of Cleric abilities. Odd.

(Besides, I'm actually talking in the context of 3.5e here. And moving it to a spell is somewhat problematic in that edition for a couple of reasons. Basically, it either means the Cleric gets more spells, boosting what is already the second most powerful class in the game, or it doesn't. Either way, Turn Undead is highly unlikely to be the spell selected, and so disappears from the game.)

Here's my alternate solution...

Clerics can Turn Undead once per encounter. It's a standard action, lasts 10 rounds, and affects undead within 60ft (ignoring those with total concealment, etc etc...). The closest undead are affected first. (The Extra Turning feats increases this to twice per encounter.)

The turning check is d20 + Clr level + Cha mod (basically, it works much like a skill, or indeed like the Druid's Wild Empathy ability). This check is made against 10 + hit dice + Turn Resistance. (A single roll is made, and applied to each target in turn...) (The Improve Turning feat gives a +1 bonus here.)

Turning damage starts at 1d6 at first level, and increases by 1d6 at every odd level (as for Rogue sneak attack). The Cleric's Cha mod applies.

When turning, the Cleric can choose whether to drive undead away or to destroy them. (He should decide before making the check.) If he elects to drive them away, the turning damage is the number of hit dice affected. Affected undead must move away from the Cleric so they're outside of the 60ft area, and cannot re-enter until the effect ends. (If they cannot move away, they cower as normal. Also as before, if the Cleric approaches within 10 ft, the effect ends.)

If the Cleric instead attempts to destroy the undead, the turning damage is measured in hit points. This applies to all affected undead. (The Greater Turning power of the Sun Domain would do double damage.)

(This, of course, then opens up some scope for additional Cleric turning abilities. Perhaps there could be a 'weaken undead' option, or an option to make them vulnerable to critical hits (good for Rogues!), or something...)

Anyway, as far as I can see, this has several improvements:

- It reuses the skill rules, which are already well-known.

- It eliminates the need for a table lookup.

- It improves with level more than is currently the case. This means that a Cleric has less incentive to adopt a Prestige Class, because he's then giving up more to do so. (At present, most Clerics will automatically seek a PrC that gives "+1 spellcasting level" at every level, and give up almost nothing for the priviledge.)

- I think it's simpler and easier to remember.

- It opens up another 'design space' for the designers to proceed to fill up, thus over-complicating the game. Actually, come to think of it, I'm not sure that's a benefit!

Any thoughts?

Eberron 4e

Over the last several days, I've been reading through the 4e "Eberron Player's Guide", which has been an interesting experience. I'm a big fan of the Eberron setting, but less so of some of the rules elements that it has introduced to the 3e ruleset. Further, I had seen comments to the effect that Eberron worked a lot better under the 4e rules.

My impressions of the 4e book have been mixed. I like that they've presented a lot of material in a fairly concise manner, including material that was first introduced in the supplements to the original campaign setting. I like that they've managed to insert the new 4e races (Dragonborn, Tieflings, Eladrin) into the world without it feeling artificial or that they've shoehorned them in. And I especially like that they resisted the temptation to either reboot the world (Dark Sun), advance the timeline (as they originally planned), or hit it with a major shake-up (Forgotten Realms). Of course, commercially this seems not to have worked out for them, but in terms of putting out a good product I would argue that it was the right way forward. (In fairness, their decision to reboot Dark Sun was also the right decision - different considerations gave rise to a different correct answer.)

However, the big problem with the book is that I fundamentally don't like 4e all that much, and this book does nothing to shake that. That's probably not all that surprising, but whenever it goes into the rules for the Artificer, or talks about the power structure, or... it just does nothing for me. It's quite certain that I won't be switching further campaigns to 4e in light of this book!

However, the assertion that Eberron works better under 4e than 3e... is wrong. Simple as that.

See, the biggest problem I've been facing with my Eberron campaign, which was a small issue at the start but is becoming increasingly difficult, is the length of combat. A low-level 3e combat can take 30 minutes or more, with a higher-level combat hitting an hour or more quite easily. And that despite the mastery that we have over the system.

In an environment like that, it can be quite difficult to engage in proper storytelling. With a single 3-hour session every 2 weeks, it really gets to be a bit of a slog very quickly. Every encounter has to count, and anything that's not combat needs to be very lean... and even then it's a struggle. Given that the campaign story is also quite complex, and the group spend significant amounts of time batting around ideas and putting things together, it becomesquite tricky. (And make no mistake - I want the group to spend time going through the issues. But that means that combat can be a problem.)

With 4e, combat takes longer. Even low-level combats seem to take about an hour to play through, while the only higher-level combat I ran (and the one that finally convinced me the game just wasn't for me) lasted 2.5 hours. Again, with a single 3-hour session every two weeks, I simply can't tell the stories I want under those parameters.

(The length of combat in 4e is a deliberate design choice, and I'm not actually saying it's a bad choice. Just that it doesn't work for me, for the reason above.)

If Eberron is supposed to be about fast-moving pulp action, then a system where every combat is an hour-long grind is really not the best fit. 4e really is no better a fit for this setting than 3e was.

Of course, that said, there is a system that really should be a much better fit. One that was designed specifically for pulp action/adventure. A game that is fast! furious! fun!

Yes, the better system for playing in Eberron is actually something like "Savage Worlds". I'm not sure that's too much of a surprise, really.

The iPad

For a long time, I have resisted the use of electronic devices at the game table. Both because I live my professional life surrounded by electronics and so don't really want them encroaching on my hobbies as well, and also because I like books - that is, real honest-to-goodness books with real pages. Therefore, beyond a bit of background music (and the occasional 'crawl' for Star Wars), I've avoided using such things.

In particular, I've consider the laptop to be a big no-no at the table. Indeed, one of very few things I've found objectionable in our current group occurred in one of Brindy's early 4e games, where not only the DM made use of a laptop, but so did at least two of the five players.

Now, I should hasten to note that I had absolutely no issue with the DM using a laptop. That's really not much different from him using a DM's screen, and while I prefer not to do so, that's very much a personal choice and not one I would seek to impose on others - it's not even something I necessarily recommend to others.

But the players using laptops was problematic, because it significantly changed the dynamic around the table. Suddenly, instead of a congenial free-for-all, most of the players were hunched behind their individual walls, suspiciously peering at one another. It was surprising how much difference it made, and not for the better.

As it happened, the "three laptops" thing happened exactly once. That being the case, I'm rather glad I didn't make an issue of it. However...

Over the last couple of years of "The Eberron Code", I've noted that at least one player (possibly two, or even three) have been making extensive use of either an iPhone or, less often, an iPad at the game. This has typically been to look up spell descriptions, and sometimes rules material, from the SRD (an online reference of the core of the game).

And the key thing to note about this is that it has not had the same effect on the dynamic around the table. Because these devices take up less space than a full-blown laptop and, crucially, because they lie flat while not in use, they have served solely as a convenient way to access lots of data quite quickly. They don't raise physical walls between the players, and so they don't raise metaphorical walls either.

And they have proven to be very convenient. At the moment, it is still marginally quicker for me to look up spells in the PHB than others using the iPhone, but it's a very close-run thing. And it's dependent both on my knowing the layout of the books very well, and also on us using relatively few books. If we were playing an "anything goes" campaign (and if the SRD were complete), then it would be a completely different matter, with technology winning handsomely. There are upwards of 50 3.5e books and they tend to be poorly organised and indexed (if they're indexed at all). I simply couldn't hope to find things faster by hand.

But I've mentioned one of the key elements there: the SRD has to be complete, and it just isn't. This is mostly because it was never actually intended as a reference for gamers while running the game; the purpose of the SRD was actually for third-party publishers doing their own supplements for the game. That being the case, most of the 3.5e material (including all of the setting-specific material) hasn't been opened. Most of it has never been legally available online, and those parts that were were made available as PDFs of the books themselves. (And, of course, the illegal versions exist as PDFs of the books.) There is no complete database containing everything in an indexed and easily searchable manner - and if there were, WotC would promptly stomp on it.

When it comes to viewing PDFs, especially PDFs of gamebooks, the iPad is pretty much an ideal size. The iPhone screen is really too small, and even an ebook reader like the Kindle has a smaller screen than suits the larger format of RPG books. Even so, PDFs don't really help you much over the physical versions - you still have to track down the right book, quite often they can't be searched, and they tend to be graphics-heavy. Basically, what the iPad gets you is a reduction in back strain (which isn't to be sniffed at, but we can do better).

Nonetheless, I'm convinced that the iPhone and, especially, the iPad are game-changers for the RPG industry. And, ironically, although it appears that their DDI initiative failed rather badly, I think WotC actually hit on the right structure. (Sadly, they hit on it five years too early, before the technology to make it really work was widespread.)

Basically, what I think is wanted is a game with relatively few, and relatively simple, core rules. Around these, you then build huge amounts of 'bits' - powers, spells, magic items, monsters, etc... And you want to structure each individual bit so that it can be displayed comfortably on an iPhone screen.

What you then do is publish a single, deluxe "Starter Set", containing the core rulebook of the game plus the usual starter components - pregen characters, dice, adventures, etc. You probably want to sell the core rulebook separately (though I would recommend this be the same core rulebook).

However, your main vector for releasing the game would be online, via a subscription-based service. Here, users who are logged in gain access to an ever-expanding database of all the accumulated 'bits' - all the monsters, spells, etc.

(For the holdouts, you would also want to publish the material in physical form, at least at first. However, I would advise turning the historical release schedule on it's head - do the electronic release first, perform whatever playtesting is required, patch using errata, and then reprint the material in hardcopy form. And, because you expect print runs to be quite small, sell it at a premium as well.)

Oh, and of course, everything that can be released in ebook format should be released in ebook format. Which, quite possibly, means changing the size of RPG books down to something more suitable for use on the Kindle.

(Of course, once you've got people using iPhones and iPads as a matter of course, there's much more you can do than simply offering a Compendium of the 'bits'. That's where you get things like online character sheets and/or character management apps. But then, that's not terribly new - I think the site that did this already was/is called iplay4e or somesuch. Amusingly, the use of such apps would make 3e a vastly better game.)

It will be interesting to see if, and how, the Disney/Lucasfilm thing affects the FFG license for the Star Wars RPG. However, as things stood previously, FFG did not have the ability to publish PDFs of their games, nor to do any sort of supporting software. The way things are now, I suspect that kills their game dead.

The Best Scene in the Prequels?

Although it is by far my least favourite of the three prequels, and largely without redeeming features, "Attack of the Clones" does include what is probably my favourite single scene in the trilogy. I refer specifically to the scene between the captured Obi-Wan and Count Dracula, wherein the latter attempts to persuade the former to join him.

In addition to being one of the few pieces of actual good acting and dialogue in the trilogy (with other examples being Qui-Gon and Shmi Skywalker in TPM, and Anakin and Palpatine at the opera in RotS), during the course of this scene Dooku actually lays out pretty much the entirety of the villains' evil master-plan for Obi-Wan. He even goes so far as to tell Obi-Wan that there is a Sith Lord in control of the Republic, and gives him the name (Sidious). That's about as close as you can get as to put up a big sign saying "Palpatine is a Sith Lord!!!".

Of course, he does this safe in the knowledge that he won't be believed. Almost everything he says is true, and yet it serves to throw the Jedi even further off the path than they otherwise would be. (Of course, I have major issues with the Jedi being incredibly stupid in the prequels, but that's another rant. One mostly unrelated to the scene in question.) In effect, he lies to him using the truth.

Now, there's a reason that this is here, rather than on my other blog, and it is this: betrayal has been quite high in my thoughts of late. Partly, this is because of an article over on the Wizards of the Coast website a couple of weeks ago. (Incidentally, that's part of a very good series, and one I highly recommend. I don't agree with everything the author says, but there's a lot of good stuff there.) And partly it's because of a long-expected betrayal in my ongoing campaign.

In my opinion, for a betrayal to be effective, and especially for it to be effective without totally outraging the players, it has to achieve two things: firstly, it has to be in some sense unexpected; secondly, when looked at in retrospect, it's important that it was obvious that it was coming. After all, if the guy you didn't trust anyway betrays you, well, that's just obvious. Of course he was going to betray you; it was just a matter of when (and how)! Conversely, if the guy who has been your staunch friend and ally throughout suddenly turns his coat, players might rightly call foul.

That is, of course, a very fine line to walk.

The thing is, the DM holds all the cards. And, in fact, the DM can create new cards at will - if you need to pull 5 aces out of a pack, you can do so. So 'beating' the players really isn't a challenge. All I need to do is have a great wyrm dragon appear and use its dragon breath for 300 damage (DC 50 Ref for half). And with a mystery, it's the same - it would be very easy to think through the scenario like a master villain, look at the PC capabilities, and progressively close off all the clues.

But there's no challenge in that. It's far more satisfying watching the PCs (and the players) work through the struggles and then 'win'. Ultimately, you want the PCs to succeed most of the time. And one of the most enjoyable parts of the Eberron Code campaign has been watching the players gradually unravelling the mysteries, so that they now know most of what's going on.

(Indeed, an old DM of mine used to assert that for a mystery game the DM should only write half the plot. For the rest, he should wait until the players start batting around ideas, and whatever they come up with should be the ultimate answer. I don't agree with that approach - it certainly gives the players the joy of being 'right', but one of the great joys of the current campaign has been seeing them get it 'right' (mostly) without help. They've seen the clues, they've gradually put them together. Basically, they're involved in the game. Good times.)

The last session went so quickly that the players didn't really have time to think about what's been happening recently. And that was intentional - significant chunks of the session were specifically intended as a distraction to keep the players focused on what's happening over here while other things happen over there. But it will be interesting to see how the next session goes...

Everyone Else (and also, Why Prestige Classes Don't Make Sense)

When designing a roleplaying game, it's quite important to consider the calibration of the game. Otherwise, you get results like characters routinely solving problems well beyond the bounds of known science, or great heroes being slain by a lucky strike from some random punk, or (worse) both at the same time.

Of course, neither of these is actually inherently bad. If your heroes are the Avengers, and your character is Tony Stark, it is entirely sensible that he's constantly pushing back the frontiers of science. Conversely, if you're playing a gritty war drama (or Warhammer), it's entirely consistent that life should be cheap - being that "great hero" is simply a matter of having the luck not to have died so far. But the key thing is to calibrate the game so that when these things happen, it is because they are meant to happen.

In D&D 3e, the original designers did a decent job of calibrating the game... but not actually in the way that they envisaged. See, they seem to have taken the view that the early levels were some sort of apprenticeship, that the mid levels represent the point where the character is a known hero (the equivalent of a skilled tradesman, perhaps), and that even at the high levels characters were fundamentally human in scope - they didn't become truly superhuman until epic levels.

The reality is quite different. In 3e, even 1st level characters are strictly superhuman in some regards, and they pretty quickly accelerate out of sight. By the time they're mid-level, they're quite clearly superhuman, to the point where pretending otherwise really gets quite silly. High levels are yet another step above, and epic... well, by the time you get to epic levels the maths of the game has broken down to a point where it's barely worth considering.

Basically, low-level (1-5) play has the heroes as "The Three Musketeers" - the characters are clearly a cut above the man on the street, but not spectacularly so. They can still be challenged by mundane threats, they can't (quite) laugh at a crossbow pointed at them.

Mid-level (6-12ish) play casts the characters as the Knights of the Round Table, Han Solo, Batman, Aragorn, or many similar characters. These characters are legends, and are clearly superhuman... but still recognisable. These are the guys who see a band of orcs rushing towards them and proceed to draw their swords and get stuck in. But to really challenge them, they really need larger-than-life foes. Batman can take on any number of thugs, but he is challenged by the Joker. Aragorn, as mentioned, takes on a legion or Uruk-hai singlehandedly, but struggles with an armoured troll. Han Solo, of course, meets his match in Boba Fett ("Return of the Jedi" notwithstanding!). And so on.

High level play, then, is "Clash of the Titans", "300", or the Iliad. The characters are the most epic of the epic - they're Leonidas, Achillies, and the like. Chances are, they're directly descended from the gods themselves, and indeed they may well fight against the gods and at least hold their own.

Which brings us to NPC classes.

See, in addition to the regular PC classes, 3e also introduced 5 classes for NPCs: the Commoner, the Adept, the Aristocrat, the Expert, and the Warrior (later joined by the Magewright in Eberron). The notion here was that if the DM ever needed stats for one of the great unwashed, he could quickly roll those up. And, I think, the notion was that the King would be a high-level aristocrat, perhaps even as high as 20th level. After all, in 3e, NPC wealth was tied to their level, and kings are of course fabulously wealthy.

The problem with that is that 20th level characters, of any class, are clearly superhuman. If the king is 20th level, even a 20th level NPC, then suddenly there's little reason for the PCs to be called on to adventure - if a threat to the kingdom is truly that bad then the 20th level monarch would need to just go and deal with it.

(And, incidentally, 3e did indeed assume that such high-level NPCs did exist, and were even quite common. There are demographic tables in the DMG for designing cities, and very large settlements could indeed throw up multiple 20th level NPCs.)

Fortunately, there's a fairly simple (two-part) fix for this oddity:

Firstly, of course, the DM shouldn't feel the need to stat up every single NPC. The effort involved in absurd anyway, so not really worth bothering with. This should only be done if it's necessary or beneficial to the game. (Which is just good sense anyway. Those NPC classes can, at times, be very useful, but they're like flavourings used in cooking - best used sparingly.)

Secondly, the DM should simple recalibrate. With a very small number of exceptions, no NPC should be assigned anything above 5th level in even an NPC class (and PC classes should be even rarer). The overwhelming majority of people should be 1st level. (Those low, but above 1st, levels aren't terribly hard to justify. It's not hard to envisage Cleig Lars as being a 3rd or 5th level farmer, what with his living in proximity to Sand People. It's not hard to see a master smith, having spent decades at the forge, as having several levels in Expert.)

And there can be exceptions, of course. It's not unreasonable to have a high-level Expert hidden away somewhere in your campaign - just make him appropriately rare, well-known, and potentially legendary in his own right. Basically, he's Hatori Hanzo.

(Incidentally, if the king and all his retinue are 5th level or lower and the PCs are 10th level or higher, one might well ask "what stops the PCs from just killing the king and taking over the kingdom?" And the answer is: nothing. There is absolutely no reason that the PCs shouldn't do that, if that is truly what they want. Of course, they might then find the demands of running a kingdom get in the way of their ongoing adventures, or they might find that doing so throws up a whole load of new challenges/adventures for them. But that's not really a terribly bad thing, is it?)

--

There is an unfortunate corollary to this fix, and it highlights the second part of my title: Prestige Classes don't make sense.

See, as written, Prestige Classes were intended as a world-building tool - they're organisations for elite characters to join after they have completed their apprenticeships.

However, if mid-level characters are already clearly superhuman, they must necessarily be very rare or your setting is quickly cease to be recognisable. But if such characters are rare, then organisations that you can't join until you've reached that point become even rarer.

Now, that doesn't mean they shouldn't exist - as I indicated above, the Knights of the Round Table make for a decent model for mid-level characters, while Leonidas' 300 represent a possible high-level group. But it does mean that the setting can't really accomodate more than maybe half a dozen such organisations (in total), and that such organisations would have to be necessarily broad - with so few mid-level characters who could join, the few organisations would need to be willing to accept almost any character of the requisite level.

3.5e has several hundred Prestige Classes, and it is generally expected that a PC should be able to adopt pretty much any PrC that he wants, provided he meets the entry requirements. Indeed, a single PC could adopt multiple prestige classes over the course of the campaign, if that is what he desires.

As I said, that doesn't make sense. Either the DM needs to build his world with hundreds of mid-level organisations all in place (and vying for a ridiculously small talent pool), or he needs to leave large swathes of his campaign undefined so that he can drop in whatever organisations he requires. Which defeats the purpose of these classes as world-building tools.

Oops.

My preferred way of dealing with this is dead simple: I just don't use Prestige Classes. Problem solved. However, if you do want to use them, my suggestion is simply to divorce them from the "in-setting organisation" part of the equation, and make a Prestige Class just another class that a PC who qualifies can take. Meanwhile, simply add whatever organisations you want to your game, but don't tie membership of these to being even mid-level (in most cases). So even a 1st (ish) level character gets to join "The King's Musketeers", without the need of a Prestige Class to model that affiliation.

About Dice

Ah dice. Bane of my existence, but the game wouldn't work without them. Indeed, they're one of few truly irreplaceable bits of gaming kit - using cards as an alternative just doesn't have the same style, even electronic rollers fall short, and diceless roleplaying is obviously wrong and unacceptable to all right-thinking people (joke).

(Incidentally, this week has also seen a very odd metaphysical event. Two dice fell off the table during the game and have simply disappeared. They aren't hiding in my living room, because there just isn't anywhere I haven't checked, but nobody picked them up. They seem to have simply ascended to a higher state of existence.)

But I'm in a bit of a ranty mood, so here are two oddly-specific nitpicks...

Firstly, why doesn't everyone use colour-coded dice? And, for that matter, why do dice manufacturers persist in producing matching sets of dice, when the converse is much easier to use?

It really shouldn't bother me as much as it actually does. I know that. But it does, so here goes.

In theory, picking out the right die should be easy. They're different shapes and different sizes, after all. Want a d8? Pick the one with eight sides! It couldn't be simpler, surely?

And yet, in practice it's just not that simple. Simply put, the shapes aren't as immediately distinguishable as might be hoped. And, in particular, the d8 and the d10 are really quite easy to confuse. (Oddly, many people also seem to have problems with d12s and d20s, which are more distinct.) Almost every session, someone seems to either roll the wrong die or, more commonly, spend time searching out the right die amongst a pile of similarly-shaped lumps of plastic.

There's an easy fix, of course, as I've already said: colour-coded dice. If all your d8s are blue and all your d10s are green, you're not going to mix those up easily (unless you're colour-blind, of course!).

(That said, there's another useful scheme that can be applied using colours. If your character has two attacks, you could instead have two different-colour d20s each matched with a d8 of the same colour. Then, declare the order in which the pairs are to be counted ("the reds are my first attack; the blacks are my second attack"). And then, when your turn comes, you can just roll all four dice together. Use each d20 with the appropriate modifier to see if that attack hit, and if it did you already have the damage rolled. Instead of having to make four individual rolls, you're down to one... a saving of several seconds.)

The second rant is also connected to dice colours: what's with the hard to read dice?

The classic form of this is the green speckled dice with red numbers. Due to the nature of the human eye, this particular combination is oddly difficult to pick out. However, the combination I've been seeing most often (with apologies to one of my players) is a dark blue die with black numbering.

It's rather bizarre. After every roll, the player has to bend forward and squint at the die to make out the numbers, which is both time consuming and error prone.

(I could understand it if this was all an attempt to cheat, by producing numbers that just weren't there. But I'm very confident that that's not the case here. I guess it's just a matter of the player being particularly attached to his 'lucky' die. I suppose that's fair enough.)

On a slightly different topic...

I have a bag of dice that I use for D&D. This contains the following dice:

• 9 d20s. This is a set that has evolved due to some horrific rolling in the past. The bag originally included 3 that had a split red/black colouration. However, because those dice hate me, I added my previous 'good' dice, which were two blue and one white d20. And because those dice hate me, I added the venerable d20s I got with my Basic and Expert Sets - one red, one blue, and one black.
• 2 d12s, purple.
• 4 d10s. These are in two pairs, one green and one black, with each pair consisting of a normal d10 and a 'tens' d10. This allows me to generate one or two percentile results very quickly, or roll up to 4d10 at a time.
• 5 d8s, yellow.
• 10 d6s. These are of mixed colours, but are all 'pipped' rather than numbered. Turns out that the 'pip' style of die actually predates our numbers, and I do like to be old-school. I don't have any 10 dice of the same colour here, but fortunately the d6 never gets mistaken for anything else.
• 5 d4s. These are all in the 'modern' style, with the numbers are to top of the caltrop rather than the bottom, because they're easier to read like that. Again, I wasn't able to get matching colours here, but the d4 never gets mistaken for anything else (except PAIN).

The reason for the particular numbers is as follows. There are three d20s because I roll more attacks than anything else, and it's good to have spares in case one gets dropped. (Of course, I now have three sets of three.) There are two d12s and sets of d% because these get rolled reasonably infrequently. The remaining sets are sized based on the maximum damage of particular effects - magic missile can do up to 5d4, fireball up to 10d6, and I forget what does 5d8.

Of course, these numbers are only really suited for use in 3e. Both newer and older editions, and other d20 games, use slightly different balances of dice... and yet I use the same bag for them all. I don't like to be totally consistent.

Review of a Game That Never Happened - Ghosts of Churchill

I've only ever done a tiny amount of superheroes roleplaying. Which is a little odd - on the face of it, something like the Avengers or the X-Men seems ideal for an RPG, what with the team dynamic. (It doesn't, however, make sense for these to exist concurrently in the same universe... but that's not an RPG issue.) However, the key issue with superhero seems to be one of scope. Because the range of powers that are possible is massive (indeed, limitless), the game must necessarily be very wide-ranging, which almost inherently means it's for campaign-play only... and very few people seem to like superheroes that much!

Anyway, about 18 months ago, I had this idea for a game, which became "The Ghosts of Churchill". The concept was that the game would take place in an alternate timeline in which the Nazis had won the Second not-quite-World War.

In the parallel timeline, rather than give his "fight them on the beaches" speech, Churchill had suffered a fatal heart attack. His successor had proceeded to sue for peace, with the net result that Germany had occupied the UK more or less without a fight. The US never entered the war, choosing instead to remain isolated. (I never did decide what happened on the Russian front.) What resistance to Nazi occupation was conducted by various cells of superheroes, covertly aided with funding and materiel from the US.

The adventure was to take place in an alternate 1960's, then, when that resistance had gradually been whittled down to a single superhero team, the Ghosts of Churchill. And, at the outset of the adventure they were making their way to the London docks to meet an agent from the US who was bringing some secret weapon to "change all our fates". The party were fated to arrive at the docks just in time to see their ally being arrested and driven away, and the chase was on!

Anyway, the game never happened.

The intention was that the PCs (being superheroes and all) would rescue their ally. His invention, it would turn out, was a device capable of opening a window 20 years into the past, allowing our heroes to step through and take action. Specifically, it would be revealed that Churchill had in fact been poisoned by his cabinet, out of fear that his speech would lead the UK to annihilation (better, they thought, that it be occupied and subjugated).

So, the PCs would have their opportunity to go through, prevent the assassination, and so 'fix' the timeline.

But...

Of course, that's all too simple. The key conceit of the game was that over the course of the session the various PCs would each learn their fate in the alternate reality - and that that fate wouldn't be pretty. One simply wouldn't exist, another (who prided himself on his morality) would be a monster without other monsters to fight, a third (who prided himself on his celebrity) would be a nobody, and so on...

And so comes the fundamental question: do you change the past, knowing that it will destroy you, or do you stick with things as-is and continue the good fight against impossible odds?

Of course, it might well not have worked. But I figured it would be interesting to at least try.

(Alas, the game just didn't attract sufficient interest. And it seems that the concept just didn't grab the attention - there's a little interest in superhero roleplay around these parts, but really not much... and not enough. So I'm cancelling this game rather than rescheduling (which is why I'm posting here!). This also means I'm removing "Mutants & Masterminds" from my list of games to run, as if there's no great interest in a one-shot then I can't see there being interest in a full campaign. Which is fine - I have three (maybe four) other games that I am keep to run in campaign mode, and that I'm confident of getting players for, and that really should be enough.)