Please critique my house rules and notes.

[cooper]

cut and paste the link below:

Cooper's d6 House Rules

I've included some house rules, but I've also included my interpretation of existing rules. Questions go!

[18 Spears]

I can't access it. Could you post the link again?

[cooper]

hopefully fixed.

The big changes are:

1) showing levels 1-8 while keeping the hero and the super-hero unchanged rules wise, as well as showing seer-wizard in context as well with no changes.

2) doing away with the fantastic combat table and incorporating it into the man to man table. Leaving mass combat and man to man as the only two "grains" of combat.

Everything else is BtB rules clarification as I read it. Including the surprise (to me at least) that lycanthropes are hero units that balance hero vs. antihero. Apparently modeled after Beorne from the Hobbit.

[kesher]

Cool! I'll try to take a look over the weekend.

If you're interested, too, the tag to paste in your link is simply, in brackets, url= (actual url) name you want for the link /url

Which produces Cooper's d6 House Rules

[aldarron]

Bravo Cooper, you are off to a great start and have turned CHAINMAIL into a workable RPG and Tabletop system. I've only spent about ten minutes reading thru and the only thing that I wondered about was Magic users never getting more than two "hits". In your D&D to CHAINMAIL posts - different I realize - I think you had them going up to 4 hits.

I think those of us who have read your posts or are familiar with CHAINMAIL can figure out most of the terms and what your intentions are, but what you need to do is add a lot of explanatory text, define terms and walk the players slowly through game examples. Mentioning LotR characters etc and posting some combat stats is fine but the reasoning can be hard to follow when the background gaming details/procedures are kept slim. My advice is to imagine you are explaining to a kid who never played before and add in some basic directions along those lines.

Anyway, thanks for posting this.

[cooper]

Thank's Kesher! I tried to to that before, but some how I got it wrong...

Aldarron, Yeah, I struggled with that and you're right in my other posts I did have them at 4 hits by wizard level. At first I did try to "D&D it up" (making wizard 11th level, seer 2nd level etc), but I found myself changing a lot of the rules for magic-users to the detriment of chainmail and I really wanted to maintain fidelity to the chainmail rules and only change things that were obvious and/or cosmetically different from what d&d became. (moving from seers with 2 spells and their 4 magical abilities to simply giving them 6 spells with the assumption that a "battle list" of common spells would take the place of all those special abilities--which honestly could just be spells with long durations anyway.)

It's still simultaneous hits from unheroic enemies so they're a bit sturdier than simply 2 men. But yeah...2 hits isn't a lot, especially by 8th level when paragon/super-heroes have 8 hits. I could go 6th level warlock 3 hits, 8th level wizard 4 hits which would keep a 2:1 ratio between magic-user and fighting-man hits and makes a wizard more than a match for any hero, which--when looking at the fantasy combat chart, would be appropriate (hero defeats wizard only on 11+ on a 2d6 but a wizard beats hero on 8+), But again, I wanted to stay as close to chainmail as possible and try not to repeat the mistakes of d&d where the wizard became all powerful and the super-hero became a super-zero in comparison. As is, Gandalf with a Glamdring would dispatch 2 goblins per round and roll 3d6 to hit in man to man melee in addition to ridiculous spells like fireball, death spell, summon elemental etc. Better to let the super-hero have not just twice the hits, but many times more than that to keep both in balance. But it is something to think about. A super-hero in magic armor is really quite unkillable by unheroic enemies, literally unkillable actually.

Giving more hits to magic-users also could make combination characters even more powerful or oddly useless, why be an elf 4/6 hero/warlock if a wizard fights as well as a hero any way?

To your second point. Yeah, my notes are only understandable by someone who is familiar with the basics already. Disjointed notes at the moment, but I figured some of you would enjoy reading them in this rough stage.

[aldarron]

Sept 17, 2010 23:24:57 GMT -6 cooper said:

Aldarron, Yeah, I struggled with that and you're right in my other posts I did have them at 4 hits by wizard level. At first I did try to "D&D it up" (making wizard 11th level, seer 2nd level etc), but I found myself changing a lot of the rules for magic-users to the detriment of chainmail and I really wanted to maintain fidelity to the chainmail rules and only change things that were obvious and/or cosmetically different from what d&d became. (moving from seers with 2 spells and their 4 magical abilities to simply giving them 6 spells with the assumption that a "battle list" of common spells would take the place of all those special abilities--which honestly could just be spells with long durations anyway.)

It's still simultaneous hits from unheroic enemies so they're a bit sturdier than simply 2 men. But yeah...2 hits isn't a lot, especially by 8th level when paragon/super-heroes have 8 hits. I could go 6th level warlock 3 hits, 8th level wizard 4 hits which would keep a 2:1 ratio between magic-user and fighting-man hits and makes a wizard more than a match for any hero, which--when looking at the fantasy combat chart, would be appropriate (hero defeats wizard only on 11+ on a 2d6 but a wizard beats hero on 8+), But again, I wanted to stay as close to chainmail as possible and try not to repeat the mistakes of d&d where the wizard became all powerful and the super-hero became a super-zero in comparison. As is, Gandalf with a Glamdring would dispatch 2 goblins per round and roll 3d6 to hit in man to man melee in addition to ridiculous spells like fireball, death spell, summon elemental etc. Better to let the super-hero have not just twice the hits, but many times more than that to keep both in balance. But it is something to think about. A super-hero in magic armor is really quite unkillable by unheroic enemies, literally unkillable actually.

Giving more hits to magic-users also could make combination characters even more powerful or oddly useless, why be an elf 4/6 hero/warlock if a wizard fights as well as a hero any way?

Ah that's an interesting problem to work on. I think keeping it to two hits could be the right way to go for faithfulness to CHAINMAIL as you explain it, but I can also see a good case for topping out at four. Hmmm.
In D@D I kept the 2:1 ratio Warrior to Wizard and Priests in terms of attack strength (modeled on the OD&D cleric FC) and Hit points - via Arnesons notes - are always less. But the big difference in this case is that warriors recieve combat related bonuses to saving throws making it extremely difficult to hurt a superhero for lesser foes. Well, food for thought anyway.

[jacar]

Hi Cooper,

As promised, some critique.

1) Unit size: I think it is enough to say that cavalry units are, on the average half the size of infantry units...or perhaps as much as 2/3 the size. It accounts for man and beast. the relative power of the units are accounted for on the melee tables.

2) I wouldn't get too bent up about scale and such. Even if you have a 25 to 1 scale, heroes can be assumed to have the great man and his following. So the hero would be like any other scaled figure. Trolls are what you think they should be. I'd make them maybe worth 5 actual trolls and be done with it.

What is your goal of the game? Are you just trying to make a fantasy battle game or do you want to use this with 0DnD?

I like the rational for using the spell casting table. I omitted it and just have a rule that spells go off at the end of the turn if the caster is not hit.

John

[cooper]

Thanks for reading it John.

1) I would agree that if 1 unit of foot is 20 men then 1 unit of horse is roughly between 5-10 men, if you are looking at the rules in the meta sense of what "1 unit" is. Obviously, as played 1 unit of heavy horse is 20 men, ergo the funky ratio of x3-x4 damage. Perren and Gygax--it appears, didn't want to deal with multiple ratios on the field of battle for good reason (specifically taking wounds), so instead of having horse troops be 1:10 (or 1:8 or 1:5 whatever) they just left them at 1:20 but doubled/trippled/quadrupled their damages. With things like ogres and trolls he made 20 ogres 6 heavy foot, where 20 men is 1 heavy foot (for example).

2) I messed up a bit. I factored everything as if it were the default, "1:25" ratio. But chainmail is default 1:20! woops! In which case 1 unit of ogres is actually 3 ogres, and a full 1:20 contingent is between 18-20 ogres (fighting as 6 heavy foot).

Where I really disagree with you (and many other apparently. T. Foster and I just had a go around on the K&K forums unfortunately where I got a bit heated) is mixing scales for heroes on the battlefield. I really don't believe this should be done and absolutely impacts the ability of players to use 0d&d with chainmail if done so and wouldn't have jived with the war gamers in the 1970's who were fighting large scale battles and weren't interested in individuals until after they started playing with the man-to-man rules.

For example: A group of four heroes on horses couldn't really be considered 16 heavy horse, in which case they would be able to kill 1,280 light foot men per minute! It would make things like the battle of the 5 armies impossible to play using chainmail and no self respecting wargamer would have played such a game. Indeed, it would be ironic considering the fantasy supplement was designed specifically to recreate battles from the hobbit and LotR. Look at the competition between Gimli and Legolas in Helms deep. Gimli killed 42 orcs and Logolas loses the competition with 41. Having heroes as individuals on a 1:20 scale just doesn't work. Also, such an interpretation, as I said, means people don't think chainmail would work with d&d and it absolutely should, and does.

A hero is literally listed as, "a well known knight, or a leader of an army contingent." Gygax (pg. 30) in it's description. A hero is the fantasy equal of an army commander (pg. 21) and nothing more. A hero is not hundreds or even a thousand of men by himself. Both provide +1 to the dice rolls thrown by the units being so led and a hero forces morale rolls by enemy troops (inspired by gandalf's charge with the Rider's from Westfold vs. the Dunlendings in the "Battle of Helm's Deep/Horburg or perhaps Beorn from the hobbit fighting the goblin kings bodyguards), I'm not sure if the last part only applies to man-to-man combat or mass combat as well.


Thanks for taking the time to read it. Unlike what Trent Foster said, my mind is in no ways closed on interpretation of any rule and look forward to defending my position rigorously while keeping an open mind to anyone who wants to play along.

3) My goal? Mostly teaching myself how to play the game and kind of posting my discovery in real time on D&D boards and also to see what gygax and arneson did, which was to look at chainmail and the man to man rules and the fantasy man to man rules and combine them into dungeons and dragons.

Things like "magic missile" which came from the fantasy section on "enchanted arrows" which automatically hit in normal man to man combat! Or how having a "magic weapon" allow you to fight on the fantasy combat table even if you weren't a hero became the rule that some monsters require magic weapons to hit in dungeons and dragons.

fun trivia like that which casts the rules we all take for granted in a new light and provide understanding all these many years and editions later.

[jacar]

On scale. Pretty much only the DM looks at scale. Everybody else plays the game and usually do not give a hoot about scale. Whatever you decide the scale is pretty much will work even if you just eyeball it. Scale adds almost nothing to any game be it a wargame or a role playing game. Nobody ever lost because the scale was 1/25 and it should have been 1/20! :-)

My point? Scale adds little or nothing other than a bit of frame of reference and the occasional ratio of monsters to men. I wouldn't waste too much time on it.

[tombowings]

Cooper, were you panning on adding clerics and thieves? If not, you may want to take out the reference to thieves in the sectioned title "Heroic Tier".