Introducing Kaerlud, the D&D 4E police procedural

[Originally posted Sun, 25 Jul 2010]

Part one in an X part series. It would behoove you to know how 4E is played first, but I’m not going to stop you from reading anyway.

SO. Here I am, trying to cobble together a 4E setting. Why? Well, why the heck not? I like Dungeons and Dragons, I like 4E for all its flaws, and I think role playing games are awesome in general, but I hate dungeon crawls. Really, I just don’t like them, and if I’m playing D&D I want it to be a setting as devoid of dungeons as I can possibly make it. And to that end, I’m attempting to create a hack which will turn D&D into a cop show.

Why cops? Well, five reasons:

1. A fellow I know tangentially did the same general idea, and I thought it was brilliant at the time.
2. 4E hinges in a very real way in the physicality of locations, something which I think adapts well to the two non-fighting cop activities of “chasing perps” and “investigating scenes.”
3. As a GM, it’s easy to invoke Chandler’s Law: “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a [+1 Flameburst Crossbow] in his hand.”
4. As a player, the role-playing options are numerous and awesome.
5. Wooooo fantasy police woooo!

So, I think that should make the whys self-evident. The hows are still a struggle, but one which I’m going to go into more depth over the course of this X-part series. Today, part one, the general setting, I’m just going to bless you with the flavor text I’ve come up with for the setting (and, of course, give you the general idea of the concept). In future posts, I’m going to go into more detail on the handful of specific hacks I’d need to make the setting workable (and the few houserules I’d be using to make the game a tad more fun). So, the introduction to the setting:

Welcome to Kaerlud, the jewel of the kingdom, the greatest city in the world! Once, civilization was measured in points of light in the wilderness; nowadays, these points have grown larger and more all-encompassing. It’s a different sort of age… the dungeons have been explored, the dragons have been slain, and those determined to seek out adventure may find it’s not as easy to set out with a few allies and a ten-foot-pole and come home draped in magic detritus and dragging chests of platinum.

But all is not goodness and light and complacent mediocrity. A large enough village becomes home to crime, a complex enough town develops an underworld, and a powerful enough city begets conspiracy. And no city is larger, more complex, or more powerful than Kaerlud. And fighting to keep order: the City Watch. Drawn from all walks of life… powerful warriors, brilliant mages, unscrupulous thieves… some seek money, some thirst for power, and some only want to do their part for the city they call home. All they share is a badge, a code of conduct, and the knowledge that, if adventure can’t be found in points of light in the darkness, it might be found in the points of darkness in the light.

…slightly corny, perhaps. Slightly awesome, OH YES MY FRIENDS.

Kaerlud: Making dying count.

[Originally posted Mon, 26 Jul 2010]

Life is cheap in the current incarnation of Dungeons and Dragons. Seriously, resurrections cost 500 gold and you wind up sick for like a day after… this does not jibe with, say, a murder investigation. Because seriously, I’m cheap, but if scraping together a month’s salary to set aside in the event that I’m killed by accident or foul play is an option, then I’m going to do that. Obviously, not all of a police officer’s adventures are murders, and of those occasional humanoidicides it’s entirely reasonable that some involve petrification, others be over a month old, and still others have a missing body… but the fact remains that the existence of cheap and available resurrection would put a crimp on most traditional policing plots.

Tied to that: murder is trivial in Dungeons and Dragons. There is no pacifist run of D&D, really… especially 4E which is utterly combat focused. Oh, you can be a dedicated healer/buffer/debuffer… but you’re still existing in a combat-focused universe with a team which is killing dudes left and right. Of course, this is, after all, a universe where resurrection is cheap and ghosts exist, it’s not surprising that killing someone is generally ignored. For a murderer to be scary he needs to be either focused entirely on innocent bystanders or just committing outright genocide; or,if you want to go beyond the pale in terms of evilness, committing various forms of soul trapping, or straight-up torturing folks. Still, this leads to a team of PCs who would be considered serial killers by any earthly rubric, which is hardly the tone I want in Kaerlud.

Life is cheap. Which makes policing almost meaningless. How do we make life more valuable? How do we make murder an issue again?

Step one, get rid of resurrection. A few options: make it illegal (good for the criminals!) or expensive (good for the super rich!) or literally impossible (good for me, but disappointingly arbitrary and frustrating for those few instances where it would be really, really necessary). Or, we make it extremely difficult, through the “cell phone reception” analogy.

If you are using a cell phone, you will find that there are points where the reception is crystal clear and wonderful, and, radiating out from those points, areas where the reception is increasingly fuzzy. You can still hear, generally, but the words get dropped and your call may not go through at all.

So it is with rituals in Kaerlud (and indeed, the world around it). There are areas where they work as per normal, but everywhere else they become… fuzzy. If the rituals create a stable, physical item or perform a specific, concrete action, very little is changed. If the effect is ongoing, then it’s going to sputter and drop… scrying is unreliable, and if you’ve cast a ritual which forces someone to tell the truth, you won’t be able to say for sure if it worked, only that it seemed to. These aren’t useless, but they are about as reliable as, say, long-distance surveillance and lie detectors. (Likewise wards can be trusted as professional alarm systems, and secret writing as a pretty good code, et cetera.)

The biggest problem is in binding something which should not be on this world. Things like permanent magic portals, summoned entities and, yes, the souls of the departed. It’s not that these things are impossible, it’s just that they appear and disappear, and (always a problem when dealing with the extraplanar) they may re-connect WRONG.

So, just like a poor cell connection might pick up your neighbor’s signal, a magic portal to the next city might sputter and reconnect to the Knife dimension. If you are lucky enough to raise the dead then good for you, he stays raised. That said, most of the time you’ll end up grabbing the entirely wrong soul, if you get something you could consider a mortal soul and not a demonic possession, if you manage to get a whole soul and not shear some poor bastard’s etheric essence in twain. Icky stuff. To that end, there’s a fairly universal cultural taboo against raising the dead which has nothing to do with honor and everything to do with practicality.

That said, there ARE a handful of points where the static isn’t so bad… for the time being, consider them the convergences of ley lines, and Kaerlud has more than most (which is to say, about five in the entire city). However, remember when I said we didn’t want our permanent magic portals to reconnect to the Knife dimension? Haha, yes. These convergences are both small and in use for portal purposes, which are essential in this modern economy. If you want to raise the dead, without the risk of Horrors Unknown, then you need to shut down one of these portals for most of a day.

Unsurprisingly, this is not an easy task to accomplish. It GETS accomplished in certain extremely important situations (like whenever the king is assassinated), and there are a few points floating around which are not publicly owned (though if the government knew about them, they would be), but death is 99% likely to be final. Because the math bears out: losing a day of trade is more damaging to the people and the city than losing nearly any individual. Imagine if a real-life murder investigation required shutting down, say, O’hare International Airport for a day. There would be PAPERWORK and people would be VERY UNHAPPY. Death is not absolutely final (how can it be, in a D&D universe?), but it is certainly serious.

(The obvious follow-up question: do spells and enchantments likewise sputter? My answer is yes, but in a way which is generally decorative. A fireball which flickers out of existence at the last second is called a miss, and there’s no real reason to have to deal with it on an especially direct level. Besides which, spells and enchantments are fast-acting and relatively simple, rituals are long and complex. Returning to the phone analogy: consider redundant monosyllables shouted over the static… even if it flickers, enough of it gets through that you can treat it as having been heard).

Kaerlud: Making killing count.

[Originally posted Fri, 30 Jul 2010]

In the previous post, we made life hard to get back. Now, let’s make sure lives are valuable. Why don’t people go around murdering orcs like good adventurers? And more to the point, what’s stopping our PC PCs from casual killing?

On the one hand, the answer is simple: we make it illegal. Someone who commits a murder, be they cop or not, will be hunted and arrested… justified “in the line of duty” sort of things can be explained away, but too much of that and you will go to jail, which is good a reason as any to roll up a new character. So, we just have to make sure all our characters use exclusively non-lethal damage WAIT A MINUTE! I forgot for a second that the way 4E handles non-lethal damage is amazingly facile.

No, really. A character is reduced to 0 HP, and whomever last hit them decides if that counted as lethal damage or not. What? What is this? I have punched you, and as you fall, I decide whether you land on death’s door or merely in the land of nod? This isn’t just a matter of “where’s my immersion?”, it’s an issue of making decisions matter… in policing, there should be a hard choice to make between doing the job the noble way and doing it the effective way. Light side and Dark side shouldn’t be a toggle, basically. Especially when (in vanilla D&D) there’s no reason to bother being non-lethal because it just means enemies will get up later, or (in Kaerlud) there’s no reason to bother using lethal damage because you always need to take prisoners. Of course, I’m not worried about regular D&D, so I’ll concentrate on my little universe.

To that end: Difficult Non-Lethal Damage.

When attacking, players must declare whether it is lethal or non-lethal (or, I suppose, it will be assumed to always be lethal unless otherwise specified). Attacking in this way incurs a -2 penalty to your attack rolls, because you’re avoiding their vitals, and you drop a die size with your attack, because you’re pulling your punches; 1d8 damage becomes 1d6, 2d12 becomes 2d10, 1d4 becomes 1d2, and set damage (such as the 2+INT of the new Magic Missile) is reduced by two (so it would not be just INT). Critical non-lethal hits do max damage, but with the reduced die… that said, additional damage retains its original die size. A weapon that adds 1d6 when it crits adds 1d6 even non-lethally, and hunter’s quarry or sneak attack damage are treated normally, only the attack itself drops.

(This gets a little fuzzier when considering spells, especially arcane ones. Physical attacks translate easily, and divine or psionic energy being modulated makes a certain sort of sense, whereas declaring that you are firing a non-lethal fireball, which sets someone on non-lethal fire, is a little silly. That said, balance is important, and we can assume that the fire is, say, aimed at the legs. It’s still less silly than the present system.)

Now, here’s where things get a bit complicated, so bear with me. As you attack with lethal damage, you reduce a character’s hit points, from whatever their starting value down to zero. Well and good. As you attack with non-lethal damage, you increase the target’s pain points, from zero up until their hit point value. Pain points are like hit points in basically all respects… temporary hit points work as normal, healing spells and items and surges can apply to either decrease pain points or increase hit points (though not both with the same action, that’s going a bit far) and a character who has reached his bloodied value in pain points is considered bloodied for all intents and purposes. So why track these things differently?

Because, you aren’t fighting enemies until their hit points reach 0, you are fighting them until they have more pain points than hit points. You soften them up with some lethal blows, then raise their pain until they pass out. More specifically: if your attack causes their PP to rise above their HP, they are unconcious. If your attack causes their HP to drop below their PP, then they are dying… they get a save against death, and if they fail it, they are gone.

(I’d say that they should die instantly, but I want the PCs to have to suffer the similar dangers; I say one save instead of three because I still want fatal damage to be a big dang deal. ALSO, it means that having a “heal” skill is totally useful, ‘cause you may need to stabilize a villain in a HURRY.)

Of course, the penalties for having corpses on your hands will be left to the DM’s discretion, but they should, in general, be awful enough that you really, really don’t want to have to deal with it.

Kaerlud: Investigative minigames 1: the Chase

[Originally posted Sat, 31 Jul 2010]

Because this is D&D, there will be combat, and because we have made life valuable, it will be difficult and exciting. There will be people to fight, and, yes, there will be monsters as well (giving our investigators the option to not pull their punches at all, because there’s Beholders about, or something like that. BUT, on the City Watch, it’s not all combat… investigation is important as well. And interviews. And stakeouts. And chasing down a perp. How do we handle all of this business?

In this instance I’m looking to Bethesda (and many many other computer RPG designers, but I’m particularly thinking of Fallout 3) and the use of minigames. In a game which is primarily devoted to one thing (killin’ der monsters) there are two basic schools of thought with regards to doing something entirely unrelated (pickin’ der locks). This is utterly simplified, of course, but you’ll forgive me because I’m smart and handsome. One can either let the dice handle it entirely (I have 25 points in lockpick, which means I’ll have a 50% chance of picking the lock, 10% of breaking my lockpick, and 1% of critically failing and stabbing myself in the eye), or throw in a subgame which represents the activity, (which may lead to cognitive dissonance). Neither is inherently better than the other, however the latter is a bit more compelling to play, because it makes failure something you can sense your involvement in and appreciate happening, rather than being based on the utterly unfair machinations of Arengee, the God of Chance. That said, it does occasionally mean that a player talented at clicking rapidly or playing Mastermind can just not put any points into these skills; a designer’s “solving” this problem by requiring a minimum skill level in order to access these minigames is arbitrary and frustrating… why must I have Science 25 to hack Easy computers and science 50 to hack Medium ones? It’s the same game!

That said, for all my problems with Oblivion’s persuasion minigame (and I have many!), the need for the skill is worked organically in: the higher the skill, the more powerful the results; it nicely combines the dice and the the game, a synthesis in which failure is understandable and success requires… well, in this instance no more than the willingness to perform the game over and over and over until you get what you want or you level up to the top, but in theory it would require some measure of sacrifice.

So. What the hell does this have to do with fantasy policing? Glad you asked! While the luck of the die is required to do things, I do not want a single roll to be all that stands between knowing where to go next and having no idea, ever. Worse, I don’t want it to be all that stands between getting their man and not! Thus, I’m designing a few investigative minigames, which (theoretically) reward clever gamesmanship, whilst still demanding good dice.

Now, 4E has Skill Challenges, in which you must get x successes before y failures in order to accomplish a task. This is… well, honestly, this is pretty on point, in that it requires character skill and yet is drawn out enough that failure doesn’t generally seem like massive unfairness. It is a go-to minigame for many purposes… interrogating a perp before he breaks, for instance, or sneaking through a room without alerting a sleepy guard.

However, as implemented, Skill Challenges can be… stupid. Specifically, in instances where failing a few times should by no means cause you to bootch the entire affair. Also, it seems that they tend to follow the format:

“You can do this thing you want to… it’s a Skill Challenge and you need 3 successes before 2 failures.”

“Okay, I’m really good at Insight, can I use that?”

“Yes. Success. Now what?”

“I use insight again.”

“Success. Now what?”

“I use insight again.”

“Congrats, you did the thing.”

“Good. Can we fight now?”

In short, metagamey, not role-playery. A problem, yes, but utterly, utterly fixable. Hell, I’m not even close to the first person to yammer about this, so I’ll be brief (too late!): create a few specific alternatives built on the Skill Challenge skeleton, reward player creativity in the challenge, and punish metagaming. Remember, the GM’s Best Friend… if someone tries a neat and unexpected but feasible angle, they get a secret +2 to their roll. If they fall back on their best skill more than, say, twice in a row, when there are logical other options, they get successive secret -2s.

Oh, and declaring “I use athletics” or such automatically fails. “Okay,” the GM would say, “You use athletics, but despite jumping rope vigorously for a few moments, you are no closer to the top of the cliff.”

Anyway, Minigame one: replace the abstract values of success and failure in a Skill Challenge with abstract values of physical distance, and we have a Chase Challenge. That’s right, we chasin’ the perp. What’s great about this is you have a battle grid right in front of you, making for easy display of the arbitrary physical distance. Set the villain on one square, and the PCs a short-ish distance away… call it three squares, give or take.

Each “step” of the way, a PC can either do something which gets them one notch closer to the perp, or one notch further, something which we can easily represent on the battle grid by moving one square closer or further away. Every step of the way is a scenelet… in some cases the obvious response will be physical (the perp has leapt across rooftops), some will be mental (the perp has vanished entirely) and some will be social (the perp has run into a big crowd). The PCs get a description of the scenelet; they’re in hot pursuit, so everyone gets to take one action to respond… maybe it’s the same as the other guy used, maybe not. This may well split the party… that’s okay. Passing the scenelet moves you a step further, failing it outright moves you a step back, but you might stay in place for a moment… asking for more information, for instance, is a perception check, which MIGHT tell you something useful (for instance, will reveal a ladder just around the corner, which will make their next step count for triple. Something like that).

Because it will take more failures to end a chase, there’s one big angry change I’m adding: the DCs of the challenges will increase as the PCs get more tired. After every two steps, the difficulty of any activity increases by one. We can’t keep chasing forever, you see.

(That said, if you have a utility spell or other power which you can substitute for a skill, then you totally can. Teleporting two squares won’t move you up two spots on the chase chart, but it will count as a success against anything which could be overcome in such a manner, and moves you a square forward no questions asked.)

Anyway, a modified Skill Challenge is the first of the essential minigames. More to come.

Kaerlud: Investigative minigames 2: the Evidence

Sometimes, investigating police officers aren’t interacting with perps. Sometimes, they’re collecting clues. Scene of the crime or interacting with the body, they need to do a little forensics. Time, then, for a Evidence Challenge.

Investigation, like chasing down a perp, is basically a Skill Challenge, in that the player suggests what they’re doing, and the GM decides what skill that relates to, and then a die is rolled. The difference being that the limiting factor isn’t the number of failures, and successes aren’t necessarily useful; one can peer as hard as one wishes at the bed fibers, but if there’s nothing there, one won’t find anything. Likewise, there may be fibers of some sort, but finding them and understanding their significance are entirely different checks (though the latter can be greatly aided by returning to the station and spending a lot of time).

The limiting factors here are patience and time… the patience of the players to keep looking, and the amount of time things take. Each action a player takes is assumed to take some amount of time; assume any act of perception takes ten minutes or so of solid looking, and using religion or arcana checks on convenient papers takes about the same amount of time because of reading and thinking, and using nature on the footprints by the door or something like that likewise involves close study. Fifteen minutes, out of, what, four hours to look over the scene? Less? Almost none if it’s public. If you’re willing to take more time you can look carefully, which reduces the DC by 2 or so per ten minutes of looking. If you’re looking at specific areas, DCs are reduced, if you’re scanning the room as a whole, DCs are high. Every crime scene has lots of evidence, but not a lot of useful evidence, in general.

Collecting evidence has three benefits to it:

• Successfully analyzed evidence is a story hook, which will push you in an interesting direction (“this sort of mud is only found on Filigree Street” and such). -Evidence can be used in interrogations… mentioning a bit of relevant evidence in an intimidation or diplomacy check is an easy +2 for you. -Evidence must be presented in court, before the magistrate. If you don’t have enough (for a fairly broad definition of enough… it’s a bit Phoenix Wright in the cavalier attitude regarding fairness in the courtroom) the case gets thrown out, the perp goes free, and you look like a fool.

Once again, the battle grid can be used as a convenient marker… you are here, your time will be up here, what are your plans for the intervening steps? Look at a thing, move up a square. Look at a thing especially well, move up two, et cetera. Players need not use it all, but if it runs out, they will have to answer to their superior.