Saturday, February 22, 2014

Dead of Night: Our AGE House Rules

The Dead of Night setting is running the Adventure Game Engine with some hacking on my part.

Don't get me wrong, I love the system and think it works great, but for this group at this time, these changes work.  Many of the changes came into use because this is a fill-in game for

For one thing, even thought Characters are 6th level, none of them use a Specialization and simply took a talent at 6th Level.

Next, I wanted to slowly teach the group the rules and them were intimidated by the Stunt Charts.   So we're using a rule that if doubles or triples are rolled, another d6 is simply rolled and added to the existing total, however if its equal to the doubles or triples, you keep rolling as long as you get that number.  The Players are liking it and I use the same rule for my NPCs.

Third, I've abandoned Mana and Spells, and just give them abilities with room for interpretation.  Examples, includes Shapeshifting, Telepathy, Telekinesis, Waterbending, and Teleportation.  Essentially, I usually charge the player a minimum of two Talents for each ability, work out their base damage (generally, I require them to take the Mage class and build their basic offensive abilities off of Arcane Lance) and then during play, they can simply trying to do cool stuff and I assign a Target Number (one of the reasons I love the AGE system).

I've also added Bonus Dice.  Depending on circumstances, a Player may earn between 1 and 3 Bonus Dice that can used later on rolls.  This represents clues or facts they've picked up, but I don't specifically define and they have a say in how they use the information by ]helping them solve problems with the Bonus Dice.  Once a Bonus die is spent, they lose it and they can even spend it after rolling the dice for a task, but before I tell them if they succeed or fail.

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