bodhranist's page

Clearly, this isn't for those who like the 'take 10' rule the way it is. However, some people don't like that rule, many of them for one of two reasons:

Some don't like the way things basically flip from '50% failure chance', which might not seem like especially competent, to 'almost guaranteed success', with the gain of a single point of skill bonus. Others are just disappointed because, while they'd like to succeed more regularly than rolling a d20 on something they're good at, they really like rolling dice and don't get to roll them when taking 10 (I haven't seen this on the boards, but I've heard it from at least three players in various games).

A fix I've used, fairly successfully, has been to say that, in circumstances where you could normally take 10, you instead roll 3d6.

Where you'd just barely succeed at taking 10, or have a 55% chance of succeeding if you roll a d20, you have about a 61% chance of success with "take 3d6". Another point of bonus raises that to 74%, a third more brings it to 84%, a fourth to 91%, and a fifth to 95%.

Anyone else used something like this? In any case, hope it's fun for somebody.

Around the summer of 2011, my wife and I really wanted to play through a classic dungeon adventure. We'd played plenty of D&D 3.5 (mostly home-brewed adventures), two Star Wars campaigns set about halfway between the KOTOR games and the prequel movies (using the BESM system), some Shadowrun, some Deadlands, and it was time for some hack and slashing.

However, since we didn't have to script the games any more, it seemed like we would have a lot more prep time available, and we went a little crazy and decided to handpaint the battle mats for the entire adventure, starting with the moathouse, and continuing on fast enough to keep up with the pace of the adventure.

Finally, two years later we've finished. 27 maps, weighing over 15 pounds in total (paint's heavy!), covering 200 square feet. And just in time, as we're going to be studying abroad for at least a year and need to get rid of pretty much everything we own. Hopefully, linking to them on ebay doesn't violate the messageboard terms of use. I don't intend to infringe or be a jerk. We've also got a fairly-well-updated webpage from the game with summaries of all the sessions and some character details.

We used most of the monsters as-is with their pathfinder stats, rebuilding some with templates or whatever to scale them for the party's level, and built the NPCs as close as we could to the ones in the book and still be decently challenging. When we finished, the party was five 8th level characters, one PC death, and with two players having dropped out and two new ones dropped in to fill the gap. Most of the PCs had the wealth of 13th level characters, and there were almost a dozen NPCs, mostly staying at our camp to guard the huge pile of loot.

We're hoping to sell them, partly because we spent a lot of money on paint, brushes, and masking tape while making them, but partly because we think using them was great fun and wanted to spread it around. It was what we'd wanted to be able to do when we were teenagers but didn't have the ability to manage. If anyone knows somewhere besides here that would be good to publicize them, let me know.