So I’ve borrowed a copy of the Cityscape D&D book from one of the other guys in the group to look it over with an eye towards using it in developing the urban areas of my campaign world. I’ve got a few more books of this nature that I’ve been meaning to give a thorough reading so I can get some good ideas and plan out cities for my campaign settings. As I was looking through it I took some time to write down some notes on bits of the book that I found notable.

The book starts off with some basic notes on who it’s geared towards — Mostly it seems to be saying that it’s geared towards DMs but has the usual D&D book feats, spells, and Prestige Classes so that munchkins can grab something from it. The Amazon reviews I read on the book expressed a similar sort of disappointment that the book would split its attention in this way: What I really want is a guidebook for constructing unique but realistic cities and villages for a campaign setting, not a bunch of munchkin mechanics.

The first bit of the book is sample cities — Nothing spectacular, but with nice looking maps and some NPCs and descriptions of the city. Probably good for [plotwise] small cities which the PCs may pass through and only see one or two locations within.

After that the book moves on to city-based subjects that gave me a few ideas to think about: Sanitation conditions for various areas of a city, use of sewers, aqueducts, canals, wells, and so on. The book also got me thinking about news distribution channels, public transportation (if any), and law enforcement / laws. The next couple of sections brought up environmental hazards, and there were a few useful ones, such as acid rain/fog, and deadly molds. The book seems to posit the later ones as problems for the PCs in and of themselves, although personally I think getting killed by mold would be a bit anti-climactic. Still they’re the kinds of things that would bother people who live in a location and might need outside expertise to solve.

Some ridiculous rules:
-In areas lit by lanterns, the book recommends the possibility of lantern smoke as an environmental hazard. The lantern smoke gives something like a -2 penalty to rolls and requires a fortitude save against coughing. Pretty extreme for lantern smoke considering the number of magical/supernatural effects that only give you a -1 or -2 on rolls. (Though that does give me an idea about penalizing spot checks and so forth in a smoke-filled barroom or similar situations).
-The book gives the example of potholes as an environmental hazard. A pothole 2-3 feet in diameter is listed as having a DC10 check to spot and a DC15 Reflex save to avoid. So you’ve got roughly a 50-50 chance of seeing a 2-3 foot hole in the ground and a 75% chance to fall in. Falling in gives you -2 to your Dexterity and reduces your speed by 5ft. That is one deadly pothole.
-As usual, the D20 wealth stuff seems pretty ridiculous. Your average meal is running around a silver, yet an expensive bottle of Elven wine can cost as much as a low-moderate quality house. Maybe this is an appropriate distinction between wealth and poverty, but D&D really ought to run in a more moderate zone for average wealth levels of the PCs.

The book then goes through a list of potential “districts” that one can plop down in a city. This is one of the better sections of the book, as it gives types of districts and descriptions of each district type, as well as a plot hook that could be used if the PCs are just looking for something to do. The main problem I have with this section is that it gives no real guidance on how to create a city from these districts. The introductory part of this section says that a district comprises roughly 300-600 people and that a small city will have twenty districts, whereas a large city will have fourty and a metropolis will have eighty. Maybe it’s just me but I consider this approach a bit too freeform. What districts should pretty much every city have? What proportion of residential and commercial districts should there be? Even a little more in the way of guidelines here would have really improved my opinion of this section.

I have to say that probably my favorite “section” in the book are the little asides in the text boxes. These aren’t sections per-se but little half-page or so boxes that describe situations and give some pretty useful ideas or rules or descriptions to handle them. For example, page 42 has the “City Sights” interlude with 20 descriptions of things that would be happening in the city that you could use for spontaneous flavor. Page 44 has an interlude on how to make trips to the tavern interesting, going over things you can do in the tavern like drinking, armwrestling and other games, performing, and so on.

At this point we’re only 50 pages into the book. Unfortunately, the next 50 pages … I didn’t really find much that I liked there. It seems to be a big mishmash, with some canned text about various races and how they might fit into a city mixed in with new feats/spells. Around page 70 we get into some fairly generic descriptions of city governments and organizations intermixed with prestige classes. What’s pretty strange to me is that the chapter treats noble houses, guilds, and “organizations” as separate entities — there’s even a subsection specifically for churches even though there were already subsections for “religious guild” and “religious organization” previously. Either way, this chapter was a loss for me, the only useful bits being the sample NPCs provided to represent the organizations.

The next chapter is decently useful, going briefly over the types of events that might occur in the city and providing lots of sample NPCs for fights. I’m not so interested in “monsters” within cities, so that bit wasn’t useful to me.

All in all I was kind of underwhelmed with the book. Even though it comes in at about 150 pages it could have easily been boiled down to 50 or so. It’s pretty short on mechanics and the mechanics it does have are those that I specifically don’t want — I don’t care about having special doodad powers or statblocks for monsters, I want mechanics for generating cities, city components, special features, figuring out organizations and politics and all that. Naturally all of the things I want are treated in a paragraph of vague text. So I’m pretty glad I didn’t purchase the book, though some bits are nice enough that I may want to borrow the book again in the future.

Update: I uploaded an archive containing all of the art from the Cityscape book that I downloaded from Wizards’ website. Download here.

I finally broke down and bought my own copy of Iron Heroes and took another step towards actually starting up my campaign again in the foreseeable future. I’d been looking for it locally, but since it’s kind of a niche item, even for D&D books, I wasn’t really expecting to find it. Regardless, I asked one of the other guys to bring it in, the book got passed around a few times and most everyone seemed interested in running out of that book primarily.

Now, knowing the players I expect a tad bit of trouble when it actually comes time to play, with them wanting to play their typical (unusual) archetypes of say, Elven Samurai and Half-Everything/Half-Spellcaster/Half-Rogue. I’m hoping that, generally speaking, the background traits of Iron Heroes (basically allowing +2 to any attribute with a corresponding -2 elsewhere) will assuage any misgivings they have over playing an all-human group of characters.

My main concern is how much additional work picking up Iron Heroes will add to the NPC creation process — I suppose it’s not all that important since I can always use base D&D classes in lieu of Iron Heroes classes, but for major characters I will want to give them some of the nice features that Iron Heroes gives, like token pools and whatnot. Major bugs on my mind still? D&D’s skill system and the wacky-beyond-belief economy.

I wonder if Iron Heroes has alternate treasure rules, can’t recall…

I’ve been musing about starting up my campaign again lately using the Iron Heroes ruleset — Iron Heroes solves the major issue I had last time I was running the campaign, namely, Magic. I’m not a big fan of high-magic D&D at all, but the core D&D rules don’t allow you to run anything else. Magic, of course, is intertwined with all kinds of other bad ideas, like Alignment, and it all becomes so complicated that it’s not even worth dealing with, in my opinion.

Iron Heroes, of course, is a system and pseudosetting where all of the characters are expected to function fully without the aid of hundreds of magical doodads or spellcasters constantly slinging about reality-altering effects.

Of course, since nothing I do is ever “easy” I’ve taken from thinking about Magic as a problem issue to thinking about Skills and player control over narrative. I really like the idea of The Pool to give players a sort of arbitrary resource that they can hedge to shape and change the game. I’ve been thinking about how to incorporate this sort of mechanic into D20 without completely throwing off my players. The natural inclination here is to give the players a certain number of D20 rolls per game session — But that wouldn’t really work, at least not with combat in the mix.

So lets throw out combat. Players can make all the attack rolls and whatnot that they desire — Lets face it, this is the core of D&D, so I don’t want to mess too much with that. However, things like my favorite least-favorite skill in D&D “Use Rope” or skills whose only use is out of combat (e.g. Diplomacy) could be done away with entirely and replaced with a Pool-like mechanic using D20 rolls instead of D6 rolls.

I got around to looking over at Mike Mearls’ LiveJournal and what do I see? An idea on how to really trim down D&D’s skills.

Ditch all skills that can be used untrained.

Everything that doesn’t match a remaining skill is now an attribute check. Cut every class’s skill ranks in half. When you buy a skill, you buy the right to make checks using its relevant attribute. Don’t keep track of ranks. You get access to a new skill at levels 5, 10, 15, and 20.

An attribute check is d20 + the relevant ability score (not the modifier; the entire score).

DCs range from 10 to 30 for most tasks, with 5 point increments. The (DC – the ability score + 1) times 5 is the chance of success. Some checks are opposed, just as per the rules now.

Everything else is up to the DM.

My thinking behind this is that a skill system is only as interesting as the players and DM want to make it. Adding more rules to the D&D skill system, such as for stunts, doesn’t make it more interesting. It just bloats the system. These rules allow a DM and players to find their own level of importance for skills.

These rules don’t tell you what you can do with them. They just provide a framework for doing stuff.

Probably will still need to devise my own system, but it’s a good starting point, I think.

I haven’t written about D&D in awhile — Our group went on hiatus for November when we realized that everyone was pretty much busy as far as scheduling goes. Ostensibly, we’re going to start things up again this month, but who knows how well that will really turn out. A few people did show up yesterday, and we had a bit of a talk about our games, but not enough to play.

One of the members of our group, the one who hosts all the time, is notoriously fickle. And, as I figured and feared, a month of not playing has given him some disruptive ideas. In particular, he wants to start his own, new group, kicking out some of our regular members for no particular reason that I can see. He’s also indicated that he no longer wants to play either of the campaigns we were playing (Spycraft and Warhammer-Fantasy-inspired D&D).

The latter I wasn’t terribly surprised about. For the past, say, four or five months he’s been talking about rewriting the rules to the Dragon Star campaign setting. Dragon Star is a third party campaign setting which, as you might expect, is kind of a mixture of fantasy and science fiction. It was published for D&D 3.0, but apparently there’s some minor rules glitches between 3.0 and 3.5 and D20 Modern that require fixing. Since he’s been spending all of this time and effort to modify the rules, he now wants to run a campaign in Dragon Star. I saw this coming a mile away and I tried to defuse the situation before it came to this point, but it seems like I was unsuccessful.

You see, the problem is I can’t say anything interesting about Dragon Star. The idea of playing a game in Dragon Star hasn’t been sold to me. Take all of the horrible triteness of high-magic D&D, throw it into space and introduce high-technology from D20 Modern and D20 Future. This is not appealing to me. Tell me what type of story you want to tell in this campaign. Tell me why it’s cool to have magic & technology, and why this isn’t game breaking. Tell me why it’s cool to have 50 different player races other than the fact that I can choose the most optimized race to make my character game-breakingly powerful.

What sort of stories should you tell in Dragon Star? Tell me that. Is it supposed to be like Star Wars, with the players taking on the roles of rebels against the Dragon Empire? Are we supposed to be agents of the Dragon Empire working to suppress a rebellion from the Drow/Humans/Whatever? Are we supposed to be military officers who fight off the “Aberration Threat” of the Illithids and other Underdark creatures? Are we part of a minor house or planet in the Empire that’s reaching to increase its status? Each of these has a different theme, but I’ll be darned to say what sort of theme a campaign in Dragon Star would have. Don’t tell me that it’ll have all of these elements — The fact that we’ve got magic and technology and a million races and a million planets means that we’re already covering way too much for a compelling narrative. Pare it down and make me care.

If we’re going to play rebels against an Evil Empire, why not play Star Wars? If we’re going to play as future cops, why not play Star Trek? If we’re going to play horror, why not play Call of Cthulu? Any one of these systems appeals to me more than Dragon Star. I know them, I’ve played in them, watched TV shows or movies about them, read about them. It takes something special to get me to want to prefer something new and unknown over these — So what’s special about Dragon Star?

It seems like the idea here is basically to combine the extreme brokenness of high level magic with the extreme brokenness of high technology. We’ve run similar high-technology games in the past, and it’s simply too damn problematic to have a character with a belt of Cryogenic grenades of 8d6 cold damage, etc, at level 1. Magic is more balanced in play, but when you get into enchanting technological items or using magic (such as haste) to allow you to use more technological items, you’ve got serious problems on your hands. I know right off the bat that this is going to degenerate into Monty Haul extremely fast… Maybe I can still put a stop to the madness before it begins.