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Green Ronin has released their Dragon Age pen and paper RPG, and one thing that has been pointed out is that there are some elements from the CRPG missing. As I was preparing for my first session of the game, I asked a rogue player what he wanted. “Darts with tranquilizer poison” and that when I realize…”This game needs some poison rules”. And here they are.

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Whenever I read through the rules for most role-playing games, I find it interesting when some mention “combat is just a kind of opposed roll, but it usually takes a number of rolls to determine the outcome”. The reason is simple – combat is usually the main conflict of most games, the point in time when your builds, equipment, strategy and cunning all come into play. (Strangely, though, it’s hard to find formal rules for skill checks which could doom a character if he fails just one roll, like falling down into a bottomless pit). Yet I have GMed games which combat take an hour to go through, and I have known D&D combats which went for 2 to 3 hours. Is there a faster way to resolve combat while keeping it fun, and allow players to employ tactics?

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So finally, after a long hiatus, I have return to complete this house rule for Dragon Warriors. Elementalists in Dragon Warriors are able to specialise in one primary element and pick two other elements to complement his repertoire. The previous article has looked at variant Earth spells for the Fire Elementalist and today it’s time for Air!

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In Fate 3.0, characters tend to be on the level of heroes – they start with 5 boxes of wounds, and get 1 more for each level of Toughness they get. This may make them nigh undefeatable. The following set of rules is actually inspired by Unknown Armies‘ combat rules and changes combat by introducing less wound boxes, higher damage from combat and use of armour.

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One of the features of Dragon Warriors is that of the armour bypass roll. Each armour has an Armour Factor and a weapon has a Bypass Roll. Whenever a weapon strikes, you roll the Bypass Roll and try to score higher than the Armour Factor to score a hit. Simple though this design is, it leaves out one thing – being hit by something as thick as a battle-axe, even though it does not draw blood, it ought to have some effects.

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So we added a new Ranged Attack stat for Dragon Warriors – but it stills need some fleshing up so that it is coherent with the rules. So this article will see how attributes influence the stat and add in some archery styles for the Barbarian (which comes right out from our own world!)
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Dragon Warriors comes before the multitude of computer roleplaying games where in the latter (such as Diablo II and various MMOs), a bow wielding character can effectively fire off shots even in tight combat situation (say in a room about 20m by 20m). The rules in Dragon Warriors for archery is quite vague on whether you can pull off ranged attacks in close combat situation.

The idea here is to introduce another statistic to govern the use of ranged attacks, such as bows, crossbows and throwing daggers, as the discipline that goes behind them is different from hand to hand combat.
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IMHO, combat in Fate 3.0 (or Spirit of the Century) should orient around the use of Aspects; discovering them, placing them and using them to the maximum instead of hoping for the +4 rolls to get you a whooping hit. However, placing Aspects in Spirit of the Century is a risky move – why blow a chance on the dice when you can just hit the guy instead and do damage? And why set yourself up for a groaner when you tag an aspect, you may get a -4 which make the whole process wasted time?

This article discusses ways in which aspects can be easily placed in Fate 3.0 during a conflict, making them the central theme of combat and fierce debates instead of high skills and good dice rolls.
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The new edition of Dragon Warriors give a powerful “blast” ability to all elemenatlists – for every 1 MP spent, they got to do a blast which does 2d6 points of damage. Checking the stats of an average PCs as given in the book, a 12th rank Knight has 24 Hit Points. A 3-MP blast from an elementalist does 6d6 points of damage. Clearly the damage is off the charts!
What this article proposes is a re-balancing of the raw elemental blast power for the Elementalist. Read more…