Delaying Spell Selection

I was just about to write about a little house-rule I cooked up to help encourage more diversity in spell-casting (cf.this post), but it just occurred to me that there's a BtB way to do it.

The usual practice of spell casters is to prepare all their spells immediately after a rest period. So at the start of an adventuring day, the cleric tells the DM, 'OK, I'm going to pray for spells X, Y, and Z,' and so he's stuck with those spells until after another rest period when he can fill his spell slots differently if he so chooses.

But as far as I'm aware, there's no reason why spells have to be prepared at the beginning of the gaming session instead of during the gaming session. Why doesn't the cleric just leave a spell slot (or two, or however many he wants) open until a particular situation calls for a particular spell? So has a comrade just been poisoned by a giant spider? Give the cleric 10 minutes to pray and he'll be back with neutralize poison. Can't get that locked door open? Leave the magic-user alone with his spell book for a little while so he can prepare his knock spell.

Of course, taking 10 or 20 minutes of down-time so the spell casters can do their thing would invite wandering monster checks, but so be it. Better that than have to wait an entire day until they can swap out their spells. Also, for magic-users it would mean having to have their spell books with them, with all the risks that entails, but that's entirely up to the player to decide. I'm just saying that (again, as far as I'm aware, I may be wrong about this) there's no rule stating that all spells have to be prepared en masse at the start of the adventuring day. I don't see why they can't be prepared successively over the course of the day, thus allowing the spell caster more freedom to tailor his spell selection to what would be useful for the party.

Labyrinth Lord Referee Screen (Landscape Orientation)

Here are the panels of my Labyrinth Lord referee screen. I slide them into a Savage Worlds GM screen (they're pricey but awesome). Note that there are some house-rule modifications: I gave the heavy crossbow a longer range than the light crossbow and gave a 5 lb. carrying capacity to the small belt pouch. Everything else should be in accordance with the LL/AEC rules. You can download the pdf from the link in the sidebar.

The cleric is dead. Long live the magic-user.

My cleric, Anselm, bit the dust in last night's OD&D game (due to a rather foolish bit of bravado). In all of five minutes I had a new magic-user rolled up and ready to go.

Try doing that with Pathfinder.

"I'll take Purify Food and Drink"

If you ever hear a cleric say that, it's probably April 1st. Unfortunately, the way D&D is usually played,  both magic-users and clerics pretty much always prepare the same damn spells for an adventuring session. The reason is obvious: if you don't know exactly what you'll be facing, then it stands to reason that you'd select those spells that are most likely to be useful against the sorts of things that you usually end up facing: monsters. So clerics take healing spells, or maybe command (which is still risky because you probably won't speak the right language) and magic-users prepare sleep or magic missile.

In my current Barrowmaze campaign, I'm trying to encourage a little more variety by rolling randomly for the clerics' bonus spells (an idea I believe I got from the Akratic Wizardry blog), but it's a bit too heavy-handed in limiting the players' choices regarding a major aspect of their PCs capabilities.

It seems to me that the problem is just that: the players don't know what they'll be facing. By overcoming that lack of knowledge the spell casters would be in a better position to make more nuanced spell choices, and this can be done in (at least) two ways. The players themselves could attempt initial reconnaissance missions before making a head on assault on the dungeon. I understand that Rub Kuntz's Robilar character would first investigate a given level of Castle Greyhawk and get the lay of the dungeon before taking on whatever was there. So if the party scout comes back with info about a room full of snakes, then the cleric could prepare snake charm for the next day's attempt on that room.

Also, DMs could make info about the dungeon available through NPCs that have braved the dungeon themselves and, for the right price, are willing to share a few of the secrets they've discovered with the party. In fact, tracking these sorts of NPCs down might make for an interesting side-adventure. "There's a rumor in town about an old fighter living off in the hills who years ago lost his right arm and was driven to near madness by something he ran into in the dungeons below the ruined castle. If you can find him he may have something useful to say about what's in there." And such info may very well give the spell casters ideas as to what spells to prepare against these threats, that might prove even more useful than cure light wounds or magic missile.

4x6 Index Card Character Sheet

I'm coming to appreciate more and more the minimalist approach to D&D.

Prints out on a 4" x 6" index card.

PDF: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5QRyllOHhZmXzcxeFJkdFFLWTg/edit?usp=sharing

Turning Undead: 2d6 vs. 1d12

The d12 is a very under-represented die in D&D, so I'm always looking for more ways to incorporate it. One way that recently occurred to me was to use it for clerics' Turning Undead rolls, in place of the standard 2d6. Here's a comparison of the chances that a 3rd level cleric has of turning undead of various HD when using 2d6 or 1d12:





I'm pretty intrigued by the 1d12 spread. While the cleric is virtually guaranteed to turn 1HD undead when rolling 2d6, things are more iffy with a 1d12 roll. At the other end, the cleric stands a much better chance (in fact, his chances are doubled) against 5HD undead when rolling 1d12. So using 1d12 for Turning Undead has the effect of "flattening" the cleric's percentages, lowering his chances against lower HD undead and boosting them against higher HD undead. I may give this a try in my current Barrowmaze campaign and see how it works out in practice.

Labyrinth Lord Player's Guide

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm in the process of recreating a bunch of things that went down the memory hole when I lost a certain thumb drive. One of my bigger projects was the Labyrinth Lord Starter Set, consisting of a Player's Guide (containing all the info player's would need about their characters through 3rd level), a Referee's Guide (containing all the adventuring and combat rules, monster stats, and a quicky dungeon crawl that can be completed in a few hours) and a bunch of pre-gen characters.

I just (re-)finished the Player's Guide, which was a lot less work this time around since I discovered that you can cut and paste from pdfs. Here are a few sample pages: