Call of Cthulhu RPG – Stress replacing Sanity

For some time, particularly when considering ongoing campaigns in Call of Cthuhu, I’ve been wondering about handling Sanity in a different way. I have a deck of Insanity cards that make a great alternative to how SAN works. (Unfortunately no longer available) These give players a choice of madness – such as Anger, Fear, Obsession, etc that builds as you gain more cards. While this can be used for campaigns, I feel they work best in one-off or short term games of traditional Mythos adventuring.

In a “normal” CoC game you can regain SAN for a successful adventure, but its generally a down-ward spiral into complete madness, assuming you actually live that long. In a game where there may be more unusual or occult connections, than actual mind-blowing Cthulhu Mythos, I want a structure that does something similar to SAN, but with perhaps more temporary symptoms/effects, so I’ve been internet surfing and reading.

Stress exists in the Alien RPG. Gaining stress dice gives you more dice to roll (greater chance of success) but rolling a 1 on a Stress die means you make a panic roll.

Uncounted Worlds (Vol 2, 2011) has an article on Stress replacing Sanity in BRP (Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing) and Call of Cthulhu; “a system where characters reach debilitating levels of psychological shock fairly quickly, but recover faster, and with fewer permanent scars.” It’s slightly complicated: Max Stress = POW+CON, a Stress roll is trying to get < 2 x Max Stress, and symptoms/penalties for being Shaken, Traumatised, or Fractured apply once your Stress is negative.

I’ve mostly run with these two ideas to come up with the following:

Base Stress = 100 – (5xPOW).

Adjustments: -10 if Age is ≤ 20, -5 if ≤ 25; -5 if INT or EDU > POW, -10 if both > POW; +10 if fought in WW1. Minimum of 30 for starting characters.

Any encounter that would cause stress to a character results in a Stress roll. Failure when d% roll is ≤ current Stress, which adds to current Stress in amounts similar to SAN loss in CoC rules, or a d4, d6, or d8 roll as determined by the Keeper. Gaining 5+ stress from one roll, rolling 00-09 (critical failure) or hitting 80, or 90 current Stress results in drawing either a Insanity card or a Stress card. Uneventful days or an undisturbed/comfortable nights sleep restores either POW or 2d6+4 Stress.

Stress cards have titles like: Adrenaline, Anger, Confused, Dazed, Distracted, Fascinated, Fear, Focused, Hysteria, Shaken, Stunned, Weakness. Most apply minor penalties to rolls, or restrict/dictate actions, etc, but some (Anger, Focused) give you a bonus. All have effects that occur for a number or turns/minutes.

At the end of an adventure, current Stress is reset to the base value. Insanity cards are returned. Successful completion may award a roll to decrease base Stress, and anyone who played more than one Insanity card adds +1d6 to their base Stress.

At this stage I’m not sure whether to use the Insanity cards for very disturbing stress events (or hitting 80 or 90), or allowing players the choice between cards. Insanity cards are mostly role-play hints with a possible Stress increase at the end of the adventure, while Stress cards are usually a temporary penalty. I’m also considering whether a player who had multiple Insanity cards records the base effect of one of those effects on their character sheet.

In other news, I received my Witcher: Old World board game last week, so I now have 19 new figures to paint! A future post should be on the game itself. My wife and I have played the basic game twice now, and are really enjoying it.

 

1920’s Call of Cthulhu – in the UK

While I wait for my Kickstarter “Witcher” board-game to arrive and give me some more figures to paint I’ve been distracted by a plan I had for a UK based Call of Cthulhu campaign.

The campaign is meant to be less SAN draining and more exploration and investigation. (Think “The X-Files” and “Warehouse 13” in 1920’s UK.) It’s based in the UK rather than America, because I know a lot more about British history and legends from decades of reading, and I’ve been there; I own physical maps, books, etc. My only time in the USA was 2 hours each in San Francisco and LA airport, changing planes. [If it came down to it, I’ve spend slightly more time in Mexico than I have in the UK, and that could be an interesting CoC setting too.] An Australia 1920’s campaign sounds a bit boring.

In addition to refining my notes on character creation for the campaign (like boosting HP’s for PC’s and defining how I will use sanity and SAN checks, etc) I’ve been researching for the intro adventure for the campaign. One great thing about games set in the real world, especially with the internet, is how easy it is to get hold of history, maps, statistics, and nearly anything else you might want to know to flesh out a your adventure and GM notes.

…why are “loose boxes” important?

The introductory adventure begins in “The George”, a hotel in Amesbury, very close to Stonehenge. In addition to pictures of the hotel, I was delighted to find census data for the hotel. I know everyone who worked for the hotel and all the guests who were there on the 2nd April 1911. I’ve had to delete some of the guests (there were 16 “boarders” during the census), and modify two or three to suit NPC’s I need for the adventure. Knowing their ages, occupations and place of birth has inspired me to invent backgrounds suitable to the area and reasons for why they might have been there. This all works into the mystery at the centre of my adventure. (It includes Stonehenge, a murder and a piece of jewellery… no more detail since 3 of my usual players read my blog.) I’ve aged the hotel proprietor, his wife and son by 11 years, to work with my starting time in May 1922.

While making notes on character creation, I realised there’s something I haven’t seen in the UK source-books that I have for Call of Cthulhu. For any game set in 1920’s UK, that is, straight after the Great War, nearly any male PC’s between the ages of say 21 and 45 would have been conscripted and served 2-4 years in the British military. There were exceptions. For example: being Irish, unfit (low CON or SIZE?), clergymen, teachers and certain industrial workers or some conscientious objectors. Admittedly, this could also be a factor to consider in terms of an American campaign, but with their much higher population I think you would have more characters that didn’t see service.

In game terms, most male characters should get a small increase in their rifle skill, but is probably balanced out by the fact that UK citizens were less likely to be skilled with firearms than their American equivalents. For my game I’ve decided that most players will need to decide if they served in the Army or Navy (or Air-force if they put skill points in Pilot) and if they have a high Credit Rating (or Lifestyle from Occupation) may have been an Officer or NCO. It certainly adds to a PC’s background.

Writing an adventure set in the real world? The computer is your friend! (Yes, I’ve also been wanting to run a Paranoia adventure.)

Painting Battletech (Part 4)

Here’s the last two of four Iron Wind Metals BattleTech mechs. I finished them just over a week ago, but I’d been waiting for some warmer weather to be able to spray varnish and let them dry.

The Dola (on the left) is quite large and was rather fiddly to assemble. A complete rethink of the basing helped made it stand up properly and I feel looks really good. The sword it holds has a fine joint between hand and blade, and bends too easily. It would be easy to break off if care isn’t taken with handling. The Gurhka was a bit easier, but I would have spent more care positioning the legs at the time of gluing if I’d realised that early that it could end up bot being entirely vertical in stance. By the time I was basing it, and realised, I wasn’t going to pull it apart and try again.

The DOL-1A1 is an Inner Sphere mech used as a skirmisher, primarily by House Liao’s Capellan Confederation. As such I’ve gone with a colour scheme used by the Capellan dragoons. It mounts a pair of medium lasers in addition to the sword.

The Gurkha, also an Inner Sphere mech, was developed by the Word of Blake. The GUR-2G is fast with good armour. It has a four-laser hand, sword and particle projector cannon. (I presume the PPC is the chest mount.)

I’m very glad to have these all done and even happier with the way they all look now. Here’s a shot with all four together:

That almost completely clears my painting tray. Of the six figures remaing, I only want to paint two of them – a Warhammer terminator and a possible Drizzt figure. (Warrior with two scimitars) Two more are old skeletons that need paint removed before I could start on them, and that’s part of the reason I’m not enthusiastic about them. Then I have a metal two-part black orc shaman, and a bones priest. I have a non-bones prepainted plastic of the priest already, and the shaman doesn’t really fit with my other orcs.

Shadowrun – Platypus has Fallen

I first played Shadowrun at a convention called Arcarnacon in the early 90’s. A group of us  tried a number of RPGs that we already played and some we hadn’t. Shadowrun with its mix of future and fantasy held my attention and I liked the mechanics of the game too. My group didn’t play it, but I collected an assortment of books through the 90’s. I later sold off many of them in order to buy miniatures, but re-invested in a few things pdf and paper in the last decade.

I’ve spent most of my free time over the last week reworking my basic structure of a one-session SR3 adventure I first made notes on 4 years ago. I’ve cleaned up and expanded the adventure and made a bunch of extra maps and visual aids. I’m now happy to declare it done.

The whole idea was based mostly on the movie “Olympus has Fallen”. The characters are all slightly improved versions of the sample characters from the SR3 rulebook, and named after the actors in the three movie series. Eg: Gerald Butler, Morgan Freeman, Aaron Eckhart, Angela Basset, etc. There are ten choices offering a wide spread of character options.

The setting (as the name suggests) is the Canberra, Australia, based in and around our Parliament House. The President of Australia is hosting the Deputy PM of New Zealand. Injecting a little humour, all the politicians involved are Australian & NZ celebrities. So the players could be trying to rescue Hugh Jackman, Kylie Minogue, Russel Crowe, Peter Jackson, Neil Finn, or Paul Hogan.

I may be an Aussie, but the closest I’ve gotten to the real Parliament House was driving past it with my parents when I was a kid. (The War Memorial held a much greater attraction!) I do enjoy researching stuff though, and there’s an incredible amount of material (especially maps) that you can find on the internet nowadays. I’ve looked at lots of photo’s too, so I had a good idea of what the main chambers within the building actually look like, in order to come up with authentic and accurate handouts and game aids.

When I put together the PC’s it was always in mind that they could be used for other SR one-off games. This week I had a basic idea for a Tasmania based adventure. (My SR timeline says Tassie was abandoned 30 years ago except for 2 small research stations.) I really need to get back to finishing my Star Gate and Battlestar Galactica one-offs before I chase this idea any further though.

I’m haven’t seen some of my gaming group face to face for what could be a year, but its a good time to see if we can get back together. A one-off game could be a better option than straight back into our long FalsKrag D&D game. This is one possibility, though one of my players has already voted for “A three hour cruise” – a Cthulhu Future one-off based on Gilligan’s Island. We’ll see what happens…

Stargate SG-1 RPG. The Saga of Wyvern & Aetherworks

This post is roughly four months later than I’d intended it to be. In August last year I posted about a new Stargate RPG having completed it’s Kickstarter and being close to publishing the rulebook. PDF copies were available then, and actual books did start getting out to backers out Sept-Nov 2021, primarily in parts of the USA. Covid and the MGM – Amazon purchase caused a number of delays, especially with printing and shipping overseas. Overall, the project has gone really well, and I’ve seen worse delays in other Kickstarters, even some pre-Covid that never had that excuse.

Initially I’d hoped to have my book October – November, but like lots of other things around the world there were more delays. This was complicated by what sounds like Wyvern now needing approval from (MGM /) Amazon to do anything, including giving updates on what was happening.

Books actually arrived in Australia early Jan 2022, and I was thrilled when mine turned up later in the month. I’d heard Aetherworks (Sydney based) had a bad reputation as a KS distributor, but they got me the book fast and it was really well packed. Not so happy when I started flicking through it to find two sections of duplicated pages and other pages missing because of the repeats. This messed up a whole chapter on the worlds of Stargate and the Goa’uld. It’s taken four months for me to get a replacement. Aetherworks has their own website for selling stuff, and a single contact form – no address, no phone numbers, no assistance! I got a automatic response to creating a ticket that insisted “A support representative will be reviewing your request and will send you a personal response”.

That personal response took three & a half months! I’d updated the ticket twice with “what’s happening?”, and sent multiple emails to support. The response was “we’re sorry”, “we’ve made changes to customer support”, “it shouldn’t happen again”. No, it shouldn’t have happened AT ALL. They were selling copies online, so it wasn’t like they didn’t have spares.

I don’t fault Wyvern – they were great. They didn’t respond to every query (having multiple contact points is probably not so helpful), but I could email them (and had a Discord chat) and got responses that were friendly and helpful. I’m convinced they were doing what they could from the other side of the world to assist and push AW to act.

If there’s a good side to this all… it’s that I now have two books. The “bad” one has  complete player & main rules sections, so that can be the book everyone passes around, and I have a full copy just for me as GM. My group learnt a long while ago that two copies of the main rules of any RPG are a requirement with 6+ people. I got a set of equipment cards which look great too, though a lighter background would have been better.

The book is great… 368 pages, well-bound, nice artwork (nearly all original), glossy pages, well set out and easy to read. Print could have been a little smaller and reduced the page count! It sounds like Wyvern really wants to do more with this while they have the license. A ‘companion’ soft-cover with more character options, feats & equipment would really help the case game. Lots of people want expansions that cover Atlantis, Universe and SG-1 seasons 7-10. I’d certainly buy another book.

I’ve nearly finished writing two one-session adventures using this – one for Stargate itself, and another based on Battlestar Galactica. I still need to make some maps. (You could do a Star Trek game easily with this too.)

I’m sorry for those who are still waiting their order/KS to arrive. Brexit seems to have completely screwed delivery from Europe to the UK (changes in taxes, freight, etc) and some other countries also still have problems. My enthusiasm for the game has gone up and down a lot over the past year, but I’m still glad I supported this.

Now its back to trying to finish painting this final Battletech mini!

Revising AD&D – Finished! (Part 3)

My revision (home-brew) of AD&D is complete. I have four documents that cover changes to Ability Scores, Class & Race, Saving Throws and General Rules.

My aim was to keep as much as possible from AD&D, but include things I liked from AD&D 2. The 2nd edition dropped a race, and bunch of classes (mostly those from Unearthed Arcana and Dragon magazine). They added: Wizard Specialisation, some spells got better, initiative and surprise being a d10 was a better design, etc. (These are my opinions, you may not agree.)

TSR later went nuts adding race and class “kits” to add variety. I used a few kits in my game, and a future project may be looking at those and making a revised subset of kits that I’m happy with. My players and I weren’t keen on any kit (or anything else) that meant you earned less XP, so some of the better ideas would need rewriting to work around that in some other way.

I’ve learnt a lot about 2nd edition that I’d originally missed. When I first bought the 2nd edition Players Handbook (and DMG, revised 1995), I would have mostly read the race and class stuff, then skimmed over combat, etc. Only now, decades later, have I found rules and detail that I wasn’t aware of then. Most changes were minor, but there were some bigger ones and I’d missed some of both.

I also realised that as much as I loved Unearthed Arcana (1985), I’d missed stuff there too! My main AD&D campaign included a Cavalier and a Barbarian. The Thief-Acrobat sounded interesting, but it seemed like you lost a lot of the good stuff about a thief and were replacing it with different jumping abilities. As part of this, and also separately writing a one-off AD&D adventure that utilised the characters from the AD&D cartoon, I realised that I’d misread some parts (about what Thief abilities didn’t progress) and overlooked other detail. The tumbling abilities given are quite powerful – bonus to-hit, chance to completely evade attacks, reduce falling damage. The end effect is somewhat like a Thief-Monk.

I’ve really enjoyed going through all of this. I’ve revisited D&D history, and had a more patient & thorough read of large chunks of many rule books. I’ll be using this to rework some PC’s in a one-off game, but apart from that, I might not use it again. I don’t care… the process was both satisfying and a lot of fun!

The pdf files are up on my Resources page. Download if you are interested. I’m happy to get comments or suggestions!

Painting Battletech (Part 3)

Two of the four BattleTech mech’s are completed. I’ve been doing a little bit each evening during the week and thoroughly enjoyed painting these.

On the left is the Roadrunner RD-1R (also called an Emerald Harrier) and the right the Lament LMT-2R.

For those who may be interested:

The Roadrunner is a Clan Jade Falcon mech, 15 tons from the Late Succession War (2901-3019, and used up to 3058). It’s a fast, lightly armoured mech with two medium lasers.

The Lament is a heavy Inner Sphere mech, 65 ton created for the armed forces of the Republic of the Sphere about 3127. (Dark Age 3131-3150) Mostly used by regiments of Stone’s Brigade. This heavily armoured mech has a heavy particle projection cannon on each arm, and three medium lasers on the upper torso.

Painting Schemes:

I couldn’t find specific colours for the Jade Falcon Clan (and didn’t look too hard) but did find many other JF mech’s painted in dark green with yellow panels… worked for me!

The Lament is painted in Stone’s Brigade spec’s, specifically following that of the 52nd Shadow Division. I’m not a Battletech nut, so I’ve ignored the “fact” that this divisiion was mostly active about 50 years earlier. I like the colours! The figure had a distinct hole/dimple in the lower right leg. I tried filling this, but wasn’t entirely successful and decided to do it up as battle damage.

EDIT: Got my colour scheme and mechs confused. Shadow Division is actually ‘Word of Blake’ which should be the Gurkha. Stone’s Brigade has a bunch of designs (not red) that were possibly beyond my skill, but I still like the red and black I used.

Here’s an outside image taken which brings up the colours differently for some comparison.

If I had decals or much better freehand, it would be nice to add insignia on some of the panels, but I don’t… so this is it. Two done, two to go!

PS: Hope you like them my friend Asmodeus!

Revising AD&D – Part 2

My revision (home-brew) of AD&D has been slowly progressing in between gaming (PC and tabletop), reading and life in general. I’d thought I’d post an update because there’s been a bit of interest in my first post, and it encourages me to continue.

What am I actually doing? I loved AD&D, and “Unearthed Arcana” is one of my favourite books. Second edition sorted out spells quite nicely (and added specialist Magic-Users) to my delight, but dumped almost all the early class additions from Dragon Magazine and UA. My group was already using some of the extra classes and we simply kept using them. My “revision” is primarily aimed at keeping all the race and class detail from 1st edition, but also drawing on some of the rules from 2nd edition to complement or simplify the stuff that complicated by the writing style of the first PH and DMG. I’m also drawing on my knowledge of later versions that helped balance out some of the stuff that hindered the early versions or that people simply ignored or reworked themselves.

I started by listing all the important info from the AD&D Players Handbook, Unearthed Arcana, and some notes from the DMG and Tome of Magic. Then I went through the second edition rulebooks for the same detail, and worked out what I felt was best, and made notes of any related gaming rules that I wanted to keep or change. I’m now at the point of compiling all my notes into proper tables and forms to put into booklet form.

Races: Dwarves (Hill, Mountain), Elves (High, Grey, Wood), Gnomes (Deep, Forest, Rock), Halflings (Hairfeet, Stout, Tallfellow), Half-Elves, Half-Orcs (which were dropped from 2nd), and Humans. In all cases I’ve kept the basics of the race abilities from 1st, with % rolls rather than x in 6 (or 8, 12, etc) and stat bonuses more based on 2nd edition. Humans get some enhancements to make them more playable.

Classes: Cleric, Druid, Fighter (Archer, Barbarian, Cavalier, Paladin, Ranger), Magic-User, Monk, Thief, Acrobat, Bard. (Archer & Monk are from Dragon, Bard based on both Dragon & 2nd Ed.) I’ve greatly simplified the Ability Score requirements, and many of the XP tables are from 2nd Edn. Class abilities are also % based, with any class that has a thief (or acrobat) ability getting bonuses and/or penalties (from race, dexterity, armor) in the same way a thief does. I’m thinking of using 2nd edition’s level caps. I’ve got a basic weapon proficiency system for the cleric that is based on their deities favoured weapon instead of the blunt weapons only of AD&D. Magic Users allow Specialist, Elemental and Wild Mages (AD&D Tome of Magic, 2nd Edn PH and PO: Spells & Magic.) My rangers will start with 2d8 HD, and gain both limited Clerical and MU spells.

Ability Scores: Since 9-12 is average (mean) of the 3d6 stat roll, my aim was to have penalties for <8, and bonuses for 13+. (AD&D didn’t give a bonus until a stat was 15+) In most cases I’ve compressed the 3-8 results and stretched out the bonuses given at higher stat’s. I’ve made small changes to the INT and WIS tables, with a max spell level castable for both clerics and MUs, and removed maximum spells learnt for MUs.

Surprise and Initiative use a d10 (2nd), searching (secret doors, etc) uses a custom % roll. Spells are likely based out of the 2nd edition PH, using schools and domains.

I’m working through each class now listing the XP tables, abilities, restrictions and so on. It’s still a work in progress but getting closer to something playable.

Tabletop Games for the “holidays”.

Not much painting over the last few weeks. Lots of writing, reading and playing board games!

My work has only been closed on public holidays, but that’s still given me two long weekends with chances to catch up with friends and do stuff at home. My wife and I spent one week playing Kingdom Builder (2011+), and another playing Alhambra (2003+). Both of these are great games where its hard to be sure of who’s winning till the end, and every game plays very differently. Sadly to say, when it’s just the two of us, she wins about 3 of 4 games! When we have played these with 3+ players, wins are more evenly distributed.

For the New Years weekend I dug up some of my older board games: RISK Lord of the Rings (2003, Trilogy addition), The Lonely Mountain (1984) and Talisman (1985, 2nd Edn). I think she’s played Talisman with a larger group of us once before, but not the others.

We set up RISK yesterday and ran one long game. Long, because I’d completely forgotten all the rules and so both of us were learning. Turns mostly became a case of each of us assembling one or two concentrations of forces and claimed a lot of territory, then losing parts of it when the other player did the same thing. Our biggest mistake was not defending some areas enough and over-extending our forces in attacks. My wife got a slight advantage in territories (individual areas) early on, and then regions (a group of territories) which gave her more reinforcements. I realised about halfway through that I wasn’t likely to fight my way back.

This shows the board after seven turns at the main turning point. My wife (Yellow) has reinforced her troops and is about to sweep straight down through Rhovian (yellow area on right) and take 1/2 of Mordor. With only minor reinforcements for me (and lots for her) from here on, the game only lasted about four more turns.

We swapped sides for another game today, and had a very similar game. I only held her off in Eastern Gondor for an extra turn before being wiped out.

This is quite fun, with the LotR cards adding movie stuff into the game to give bonus reinforcements, or affect battles, and scoring. I’m hoping for a three player game next weekend, which should be very different. Tonight we play Talisman.

There are 400+ figures for the game, which is far too many to paint. They are also smaller than my usual 25-30mm figures, and not so detailed. I did decide to paint the shield tokens – each represents a leader. (Gives bonus to a dice roll.) Elven shields for the good armies, and orc shields for the evil armies. All were single colour plastic tokens, that will stand out a lot more on the board now that they are painted. It was easy to miss the detail on the front (particularly on the elf shields) when they were plain colours.

A new project – Revising AD&D

I really don’t need to start a new project… I’m part-way through writing three different one-off adventures, would like to get a few more miniatures painted before the end of the year, and have a back-log of TV series and movies to watch.

Why AD&D? Why now, after two decades of playing 3rd, 3.5 and PF?

Over the last year or two I’ve read a lot of blog & forum posts about playing AD&D and how people still play or used to play the game. What rules they followed, what they ignored, how they interpreted some stuff that wasn’t straight forward, and what they changed… The original AD&D Players Handbook and DMG were really badly written, and/or edited. You needed both books to understand how spells and combat worked. You had to look all over the books to check how different parts of races, classes, combat, encounters, etc all worked. You really had to read a lot to get a thorough knowledge of the game, which still left you with questions. Looking for detail on how something worked meant you found a rule for something else you hadn’t seen before. You got used to doing certain things without realising the rule was something slightly different than what you thought it was, played using weapon speeds, or encumbrance, and then gave up when it all got complex, and so on.  Stuff on player races in the Monster Manual was different from the Race info in the PH. Gygax himself was answering questions, giving explanations and errata for the rest of his life!

Just recently I’ve been reading “How to read the AD&D Rulesbooks” series by ‘Cave of the Dice Chucker. His look at how to play the game comes down to some simply ideas:

1 – If it’s not clear in a table, or concise paragraph of text – ignore it.

2 – If it defies common sense – use common sense.

3 – If its too complex, impractical, or irrelevant – ignore it.

There’s lots of stuff in AD&D that everyone complained about – demi-human level limits, unbalanced classes, weak humans, different rules for the same types of abilities… It WAS a mess – but we all enjoyed it anyway. I played and ran AD&D all through High School and University, and beyond. (About two decades… yes, I’m that old!) We took a break from AD&D (1st and 2nd) and played some other games. I finished putting together a whole bunch of tables of ability scores, races, experience, saving throws, non-weapon proficiencies, weapons, armour and general equipment… and then 3rd edition came out, and I started up a new campaign using that. We really haven’t gone back.

Over the last 1-2 years of Covid, I’ve worked on a heap of one-off adventures using many different game systems, I’ve done an adventure using AD&D (based on the AD&D cartoon), and written part of another based on 2nd edition. I really liked going back through the books. It got me to finally revise the saving throw table that I’d been planning to do forever.

My most recent reading has found me remembering all the little tweaks that I’ve considered over the years… adjustments to the ability score tables, simplifying class Stat requirements, converting all the different race and class abilities to a standard form, etc.

Consider surprise… it’s a basic, very simple rule, isn’t it: PC’s are surprised, and surprise opponents 2 in 6.

Then you recall that Elves & Halflings can potentially surprise opponents 4 in 6. A Ranger surprises 3 in 6, and is only surprised on a 1. A Monk is only surprised 32% of the time at 2nd level, and 2% less each level afterwards. Gray Dwarfs surprise others 3 in 6, and are only surprised 1 in 10. Deep gnome PCs surprise others 9 in 10, and are only surprised 1 in 12 chance. We won’t look at the monsters!

I want to start expanding my AD&D booklet, revising Ability Scores, Races, and Classes and abilities. Then likely look at surprise, initiative, and weapon & non-weapon proficiency. I want to include some of the things that 2nd edition introduced, use 2nd edition spell descriptions, etc. I want to rewrite Dual-class for Humans, and give Humans something to raise them up compared to demi-humans and all their racial abilities. This will be fun, as well as exploring a game that I’ve forgotten a lot of.

Will my RPG group play it with my rules… who knows! I’m doing it for me, because it’s caught my interest again.