Greetings everyone!
This month, I thought I would address a few of the common questions I’ve gotten over the summer since the game was announced. So, today we’ll discuss how “sandboxy” the game is and what house rules the game has outside of the SRD content.
A Sandbox to Play In
While the game is not nearly as sandboxy as games like Skyrim, the completed campaign will include a number of towns, from a capital city to tiny villages. All but the smallest villages will serve as little quest hubs, having something for the player to do that will let them spend an evening in one place, solving people’s problems for them.
The intention is for the main campaign not to provide all the XP to get to a level high enough to handle its content. In other words, visiting these towns or discovering dungeons by exploring the wilderness will be necessary to gain the gear and levels to tackle the full campaign.
House Rules – the Spice of Life
In most tabletop groups, there are at least a few house rules that deviate from the rules as written. This is true for Revenge of the Firstborn as well; however, there are only a few of them as I’m marketing the game as an extremely accurate implementation of the SRD rules.
Each of these rules can be turned on or off on the fly as you’re playing the game.
Generating Character Stats
We’ll start with one rule that I’m not sure counts as a house rule, but it’s something that I’ve gotten questions about a few times, so I’m going to talk about it here. The rule in question is how character stats are generated.
The game supports 3 different methods for determining character stats. They are 28-point buy, roll 3d6 and distribute as desired and roll 4d6 and drop the lowest number, assigning the results as desired.
The Estoc
The next ‘house rule’ isn’t really a rule, but one of the few things that additional content outside of the SRD. Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t really have much in the way of two-handed piercing weapons, so I’ve added estocs to the game. I’ve also thought they are cool weapons, so they’re included to fill the niche of two-handed piercing weapons. It has similar stats to the greatsword.
The next optional rule is having death occur at negative constitution score rather than a flat -10 hitpoints. This means your burly fighter types can hang on a little longer before they bleed out.
The other common house rule that is implemented is the ability to have weapon finesse affect not just to hit bonus, but damage as well. Of course, this cuts both ways; It’s a boon for the party, but makes opposing finesse fighters more dangerous as well.
Damage-Specific Armor Class
The last rule is one that is not as common in pen and paper because it makes combat more complicated. Fortunately, we can have the computer take care of those details for us. This rule was an optional rule included in the Player’s Handbook in AD&D 2e and in original D&D was very involved. I’m speaking, of course, of damage-specific armor class.
In original D&D, armor class was specific to each weapon and armor combination. I’ve never played this version, but it sounds very involved to keep track of all this data for each combatant!
The implementation in Revenge of the Firstborn is inspired by the optional rule in 2nd edition where each armor provided slightly different protection against each of the three damage types: bludgeoning, piercing and slashing.
This means that full plate is better at protecting against piercing and slashing attacks than it is against bludgeoning attacks. Similarly, chain mail is more effective against slashing weapons than it is against piercing weapons.
And that’s it! Like I said at the outset, I’m limiteing the house rules to try to keep the game as faithful to the SRD rules as I can. The game may evolve beyond that given feedback from you and others once the game goes live.
As a reminder, there is an FAQ you can review at
https://steamcommunity.com/app/3429270/discussions/0/591767370341560232/.
Happy autumn to all. Keep your eyes peeled for more news about the impending demo release!