Save vs. Awesome

[aspiringlich]

This is a blog post I wrote last night; just thought I'd share it here since my blog is tucked away in blogger ghetto and doesn't get much traffic. Basically it's my attempt to counter the "let's give the fighter some extra cool things to do so he can be cooler" approach.

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I have a new-found fondness for the fighter. I've begun to see him as the bedrock of D&D, and possibly the coolest class out there, precisely because his class is so open-ended. The possibilities as to how to play a fighter are almost endless, while the cleric and magic-user, on account of their built-in class abilities, have to be played within pretty definite boundaries.

Unfortunately, it's this very open-endedness that's proved to be the fighter's downfall. The fact that the class doesn't have any specified abilities, beyond combat (which every other class can do, just not quite as well), is what's led to the introduction of "feats" in later editions, because the only way to make the fighter special is to give him special things to do. In reality, all that has served to do is restrict what the fighter can do: now he's the class that does feats X, Y and Z (just like the cleric is the class that heals and turns undead and the magic-user is the class that casts powerful spells). Get rid of feats and the fighter is once again, not the class that can't do anything special, but the class that can do anything special (of a non-magical nature) because he's no longer limited to what's there on his list of allowable bits of coolness.

All that's needed is some way to adjudicate his success at executing this or that bit of derring-do that his player wants him to attempt, and we don't need to invent some new-fangled dice mechanic to add to the house rules. There's one already there: the saving throw. I pointed out in my last post that the save vs. breath attacks is the one that the fighter is consistently best at relative to any other class, so I think it can be used as a way of determining the success of fighter-specific attempts at awesomeness. So, I hereby dub it the "saving throw vs. awesome."

Want to throw your sword at your fleeing enemy? Roll to hit and ...

save vs. awesome

Want to fire two arrows at once like Robin Hood? Roll to hit and ...

save vs. awesome

Want to cleave the two mooks blocking your way with one fell swoop? Roll to hit and ...

save vs. awesome

You get the idea. Of course, there has to be some trade-off to keep players from trying to save vs. awesome on every attack. So, take that last bit about cleaving. Fail your save vs. awesome and you end up swinging wildly, throwing yourself off balance and taking a -2 penalty to your AC next round.

The nice thing about this method is that it scales with level advancement. Every three levels your saving throw vs. awesome improves, so by the time you reach name level something that would be difficult for a mere 1st level Veteran to pull off (roll 15 or better) becomes almost second nature for a 10th level Lord (roll 7 or better).

So let's have no more of this "old school fighters are so boring" b.s. Just use your imagination, roll to hit, and ...

save vs. awesome

[Blood axe]

Very cool idea. DCC RPG has a rule like that Mighty deeds of Arms. Fighters & Dwarves can do it.

[kingius]

I really liked the multiple attacks of fighters in the original Bards Tale game. Your fighters reached about 5th level and got their second attack. By about 9th they got their third attack! By the final stages of the game my fighters were hitting _five times per round_ and inflicting so much damage that they were like awesome whirlwinds of death. It was a different game though and Labyrinth Lord doesn't bring in multiple attacks until much, much later, but I do wonder if I should implement the same thing sometimes.

[ArcherSix]

"Save vs. Awesome" sounds AWESOME!

I think I'll implement this into my game.

You say your blog is in the Blog Ghetto? Give us a link, I'd like to check it out.

[aspiringlich]

http://aspiringlich.blogspot.com/

[ArcherSix]

thanks...cool blog!

[aspiringlich]

Thanks

[kingius]

Added to my Feedly reader.

[JVWest]

I read this from the G+ group. I liked it a lot!

Someone else mentioned DCC's Mighty Deeds of Arms, which I LOVE. I've been trying to come up with something like this to incorporate into my LL game. I have one player who really appreciates this kind of narrative flair and it is in my blood to include this kind of stuff.

What I currently do is really loose and on-the-fly. If the player describes an action in sufficnently cool detail I'll grant a +1 or +2 or, if the action is ridiculous but cool, I'll apply a -1 or more to the hit roll. Then I just let the d20 speak. This is, of course, VERY similar to the DC check in 3+ editions. But hey, that's a great little mechanic and it does the trick.