Hirelings: morale issues

Some of the most memorable moments in my current Glint RPG campaign have come from hirelings failing morale checks. The morale system transforms hirelings from robots into living beings, who have to be looked after and occasionally bargained with when they decide they've had enough.

In other OSR systems, PCs' charisma stats affect their employees' morale scores. However, Glint has no charisma score. So what do we do instead?

In Glint, morale is driven by PCs' words and actions, not their charisma

Hireling morale normally starts at 7 and can never exceed 11. The following factors can affect it:

• Pay: Every doubling of the hireling’s pay increases morale by 1. A missed payment drops morale by 1 per day until the shortfall is made good.

• Loot share: A half share of loot will increase morale by 1. A full share will increase morale by 2.

• Treatment: Consistently better than usual treatment or a single moment of exceptional care (e.g. a PC risking their own life for the hireling) can increase morale by 1. A pattern of poor or callous treatment can reduce morale by 1, even if it never reaches the level of requiring a morale check.

• Experience: Every time a hireling gains a level with the party, their morale increases by 1.

• Rousing speeches: If a PC gives a particularly inspirational speech before a battle or another moment of peril, the GM should feel free to give the hireling a temporary +1 morale bonus. The speech must be given in full by a player, not just described.

• Bold or cowardly action: A particularly brave action from a PC in combat can inspire the party’s hirelings, giving them a +1 morale bonus for the rest of the battle. On the other hand, commanding hirelings to remain in battle while the PCs flee will reduce their morale by 3 and force an immediate morale check.

Simplifying Large Battles: a Dice Pool approach

The problem I'm trying to solve

Large battles, involving 15+ combatants, are exciting on the page or screen. But running them at the tabletop takes a long time and involves a painful level of bookkeeping, even in OSR games.

Tracking individual attack bonuses, AC, HP levels, special abilities, status effects and, in some systems, initiative order is a lot of work. It's particularly annoying when the battle involves monsters / NPCs on both sides, with or without the PCs joining in.

Sure, you can always handwave the ebb and flow of a large battle. But I couldn't help feeling that there must be some way of resolving it in a simple, fast and fun way that doesn't entirely sacrifice the detail of what's happening round by round.

So I've invented a dice pool system to speed it up. My design goals for this were:

• Fast and simple - ideally zero prep
• Fun
  
• Tracks round by round attrition to each side
• Allows tactical / positional factors to be reflected
• Allows a mixture of creatures on each side of the battle
  
• Allows PCs to take part using the regular combat rules of the game

I haven't found any other systems which tick all these boxes for me. Having said that, it feels like my solution is so obvious and intuitive that someone must have come up with it before. Please let me know who!

The Glint RPG mass combat system

Each side gets one die for each of its members. The size of the dice are determined with the following rule:

• d4:    The weakest creature in the battle, with X HD (e.g. 2HD)
• d6:    1.5X HD creature (e.g. 3HD)
• d8:    2X HD creature (e.g. 4HD)
• d10:  2.5X HD creature (e.g. 5HD)
• d12:  3X HD creature (e.g. 6HD)
• d20:  5X HD creature (e.g. 10HD)

If you have a wider range of creature strengths in the game than that, you might want to start with a d4 representing two or more of the weakest creatures or by giving the strongest creatures more than one die (see the Potential Issues section below for discussion of that).

For really large battles, each die could represent 5, 10 or 100 creatures.

Once you've created the dice pools for each side, roll them. Then do the following:

1. If one side outnumbers the other side by Y dice, put that side's Y dice with the lowest results to the side.
2. Now that each side has the same number of dice, create a series of 1v1 dice contests, facing off one side's lowest result with the other side's highest result and proceeding like that down the line.
3. Take the Y excess dice and add them, one by one, to their team's side of the dice contests. The highest excess die joins its side's strongest die, the next highest joins the next strongest, etc. If you reach the end of the line and have dice left over, start again by adding the highest remaining excess die to its side's strongest die, and so on. Continue like that until you've allocated all the dice.
4. Now compare each team's total score in each contest. If one side beats the other by at least 3 points, all the losing dice/creatures die and are removed from their dice pools.

And that's a round of combat. Repeat, removing dead creatures from the dice pools until the battle is over.

Worked example

Ten Gnolls (2HD) are fighting three Tigers (6HD). Let's assign d6s to the Gnolls and d20s to the Tigers.

Rolling each pool, we get:

• Tigers (d20):     14, 13, 7
• Gnolls (d6):       6, 6, 6, 5, 5, 4, 3, 1, 1, 1

The Gnolls outnumber the Tigers by seven, so we put aside their lowest seven dice and then pair the remaining three Gnoll dice with the three Tiger dice, with each team's largest result facing the other team's smallest:

• 14 (Tiger) vs 5 (Gnolls)
• 13 (Tiger) vs 6 (Gnolls)
• 7 (Tiger) vs 6 (Gnolls)

Now we assign the excess Gnoll dice which we put aside earlier to the contests we've just created. We put the highest remaining Gnoll die with the highest Gnoll die from the last step, and so on. When we've assigned one excess die to each contest, we repeat this step. This leaves us with the following match-ups:

• 14 (Tiger) vs 5 + 4 + 1 = 10 (Gnolls)
• 13 (Tiger) vs 6 + 5 + 1  = 12 (Gnolls)
•  7 (Tiger) vs 6 + 5 + 3 + 1 = 15 (Gnolls)

In the first contest, the Tiger won by 4. That's one above our kill threshold, so that Tiger's three Gnoll opponents die.

In the second contest, the Tiger won by 1. That isn't enough to kill a Gnoll.

In the third contest, the Gnolls won by 8. A Tiger dies!

After that round, we're down to two Tigers and 7 Gnolls. A new round starts so we roll these reduced dice pools again:

• Tigers:      19, 9
• Gnolls:      6, 4, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1

Now we put the five excess Gnoll rolls aside, like before, to create new match-ups:

• 19 (Tiger) vs 4 (Gnolls)
• 9 (Tiger) vs 6 (Gnolls)

Then, we assign the excess Gnoll dice as before:

• 19 (Tiger) vs 4 + 2 + 1 = 7 (Gnolls)
• 9 (Tiger) vs 6 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 12 (Gnolls)

So the first Tiger kills the three Gnolls it was facing, while the other Tiger dies. There is now one Tiger left, facing 4 Gnolls. It's not looking good for the Tiger!

With only one creature left on one side, the process for the final round is simplified. We just compare the other team's total roll to the last Tiger's. This gives us: 

• 16 (Tiger) vs 4 + 3 + 3 + 3 = 13 (Gnolls)

The tiger kills the last four Gnolls and wins the battle!

I appreciate that this looks a little complex on the screen. I promise that it's vastly simpler when you're just rolling and pairing up dice. You don't have to write anything down at all.

Reflecting tactical or other advantages

If one side has a significant defensive advantage (e.g. is holding a strong position or has unusually good armour), you can increase the 3 point threshold the other team needs to get a kill. This can be useful for modelling situations like the storming of a castle wall.

If one side has a significant offensive advantage (e.g. powerful magic weapons or spells), you can reduce the 3 point threshold it needs to get a kill.

If one side is armed with ranged weapons and the other has to cross open ground to meet them, give the ranged side one or more rounds of combat in which only they can inflict kills before the groups meet.

How do we work the PCs into these battles?

It's actually quite easy. Simply decide how many creatures are going to be directly engaged with the PCs. Then remove those creatures' dice from their side's dice pool and run the PCs' part of the battle like any other fight. Each round, if the GM feels it's appropriate, more creatures can leave their side's dice pool to engage with the PCs.

If the PCs use AoE attacks which take out more creatures than they're directly engaged with, just remove more dice from the pool. If they do something which gives their wider team an advantage (or the enemies a disadvantage), play with the kill thresholds as described above.

My simple Glint RPG Horde rules can also be used to good effect in this system. I'll write about them separately.

Playtests

So far, I've only tested this with my wife rather than in an actual game. But we were both struck by how smooth and fun the system was, and by the cool stories it tells as the creatures fall during the battle. You can see small creatures ganging up to bring down larger ones, and larger creatures killing multiple little ones with a single blow. It's pretty cool.

Battles with around 20 creatures generally seemed to take around 4 rounds to resolve, which I think works pretty well with the usual length of OSR fights. If it's a bit too fast (or slow) for you, the kill threshold can be tweaked up or down from 3.

Potential issues with the system

You need quite a lot of dice. But most RPG tables have a lot of dice.

It doesn't work very well on VTTs, so the GM would probably still have to use physical dice. Having said that, it should in theory be possible to build a simple app for this.

Sometimes, combatants' HD values won't fall perfectly into the d4-d20 system. But in practice, I think almost any combination can be made to work by slightly fudging the numbers. Extremely strong individuals can be modelled with multiple dice, but you do then have to roll them separately to keep track of them. You can either use them as a block or assign them separately to individual dice contests, increasing that creature's killing power but allowing it to lose individual dice over time.

There's a slight issue whereby the strongest creatures / dice are the last to receive extra opponents when outnumbered, which means they don't tend to kill multiple targets per round. I'm still thinking about that one.

The biggest omission from the system so far is probably guidance on how and when to use Morale Checks in large battles. I think the answer is probably to give every creature/dice unit on one side a Morale Check when half their team's dice are gone, and potentially also when any champion / leader dice die (e.g. the d20 in the middle of all the d6s and d8s). But I need to play around with that a bit more.

Please give this a try!

I'd love people to try this out - either in a real game or just with a handful of dice on their own - and let me know how they get on. And please let me know if the rules aren't clear. Thanks!

Introduction and design principles

I've started this blog to share my progress in designing the forthcoming Glint RPG. (Subtitle: Mighty Feats & Meaty Fights"). It's a working title - let me know what you think!

The game is part of the Old School Revival / Renaissance - i.e. it's inspired by early fantasy RPGs played in the late 70s and early 80s. For an introduction to OSR principles, I recommend the famous Principia Apocrypha by Ben Milton, Steven Lumpkin, and David Perry.

There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of OSR games already. My design was sparked by the same feeling which no doubt drove all the others: a sense that nothing out there quite matched what I was looking for. Inevitably, I've leant heavily on the work of other designers. But I hope I've innovated enough to make this a worthwhile exercise.

My current main design principles are, in no particular order:

1. Compatibility. It should be possible to play the game with materials (particularly adventures) from other major OSR systems and the original games. Where conversion is required from other systems, it should be fast and simple. Ideally, conversion should be easily done on the fly at the gaming table.

2. Asymmetry. Systems don't have to be applicable to both the PCs and monsters / NPCs. Some systems can be fun when limited to PCs but either too punishing or too slow and complex to be universal. Systems used for monsters / NPCs should be as simple as possible to reduce the mental load on the GM.

3. Mighty feats and meaty fights! Combat should be cinematic and fast. PCs (particularly fighters) should have ways of ending a fight quickly and bloodily, right from the start. Positioning should matter, even in Theatre of the Mind combat. The game should encourage and reward feats of bravery and creativity: swing on that chandelier; climb that dragon and stab it in the head! And let's see if we can do away with overly boardgamey turn-taking in combat and get simultaneous movement flowing instead.

4. Weapon differentiation. Weapons should *feel* different from each other. A two-handed sword shouldn't just have a slightly larger damage die, it should cut terrifying swathes through the battlefield. But you probably shouldn't stand right next to the person swinging it. Similarly, a dagger should feel different from a spear.

5. Simpler pre-game admin. Lightning fast character generation. Quantum gear: it isn't fun when your clever solution to a puzzle fails because you didn't write "twine" on your character sheet two sessions ago. Non-Vancian magic. Some aspects of character generation to emerge through play.

6. A simple, almost unified, task resolution system. No skill lists. Not a unified d20 system for reasons I'll get into in a separate post.

7. No "builds". Every character of a particular class will be quite similar when they start out. Character progression will be partially randomised.

8. More flexible magic. Fewer spells, with more flexible effects to spark creativity. Spell dice inspired by GLOG, which compensate for low rolls instead of punishing them as some roll-to-cast systems do. Levelless spells which function sensibly whether they're cast with one spell die or scaled up to ten.

9. Encourage smaller parties. Large groups of retainers slow the game down a bit. Smaller, stealthier parties will attract less attention and be more likely to surprise enemies rather than being surprised themselves. Lethality will be dialled down a little for low-level PCs to compensate for having fewer retainers.