Stressed Spell Casting

I am working on houserules for my Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerors of Hyperborea campaign this morning. The main topic of the moment is variation from straight old school Vancian magic. Back in my 80s OD&D campaign I addressed making magic less predictable and a bit more epic, by including a D20 roll at every spell cast to get a spell off, with fumble and crit effects, spell level, caster level, and casting attribute bonuses involved, and allowed overcasting beyond spell slots at a penalty to the roll and taking HP damage based on the level of the spell and how the roll went. So casting was pretty reliable until spell slots were used up, then less so, and costing damage to self to overstrain. It worked pretty well, but was not really high on story flavor.

The primary concept is that magic is chimerical and capricious. A sorceror can manage the inherent riskiness of magic by preparation and not overtaxing himself. Vancian "finals cramming, with memory wipeout" style has always seemed odd to me, especially with multiple copies of the same spell being memorized into slots. So I will use each spell slot two ways. It is a spell that the sorceror has prepared enough that day to be as safe as possible and a packet in a sorcerous energy buffer to allow spells to be cast without undue strain. So a caster has two first and one second level slots can have two first and one second level spells prepared, and could cast either first level spell with each first level slot and either one or the prepared second level spell with the second level slot. That's all pretty straightforward and pretty similar to a 3rd Ed or 5th Ed sorcerer.

Various circumstances will add STRESS to a spell casting, and with Stress things are more likely to go wrong and in unpredictable ways. Stress will be a sort of currency, casting a spell with more Stress will likely make it go more spectacularly wrong. Casting with even one level of Stress should be dangerous. More should be really scary. Casting a spell over your level is a deeply desperate measure. This mechanic might replace various printed mechanics relating to armor, scrolls, interruption by damage, etc.

Stress causes I am considering using:

Cause of Stress	Amount of Stress
Not having the spell prepared	1 (2 if spell level > 3 )
Not having the spell slot for it	spell level/2
Cast a spell from your list and level range that you have seen but do not have in your book/preparable repertoire	2
Each armor step beyond sorcerer's Armor Allowed	1
Being struck for damage during the cast and not aborting	1
Casting anything besides touch attack/melee escape spells in melee contact	1
Cast a spell over your highest spell slot level	2 + 2/level over
Ritual casting - extended time and materials	-1
Using a scroll from outside of your school, for a spell shared by your school	1
Using a scroll from outside of your school, for a spell not shared by your school	2
Casting using a scroll beyond your level	1+

Each point of Stress will cause one roll on the table below. For each result, I plan to offer the choice of the rolled result and the next one farther down in the list. Followup rolls will be AFTER the choice. Each point after the first will modify all rolls by +5. Dungeon Crawl Classics has some nice tables in the right direction, so some of these results refer to those tables, which might take some results reinterpretation to fit in.

Roll	Effect
01-20	Escaped without harm
21-30	Spell fizzles
31-35	Add a level of Stress to all casting until well rested
36-40	Wipe out preparation of one spell (the attempted one first, if prepared).
41-45	Wipe out energy of one spell slot(the attempted one first, if slot was used, else highest available).
46-49	Knocked down
46-49	Destruction of minor or consumable magic item on caster (1st) or friend
52-55	Attract the unwanted attention of a nearby magically sensitive creature
56-58	knocked back 10 feet per level of spell
59-61	Destruction of an item in hand
62-64	Stunned for one round
65-67	DCC Generic Spell Misfire (5-6, pg 120)
68-70	Attract the unwanted attention of all nearby magically sensitive creatures
71-73	Save vs or Stunned for one turn
74-76	Experience point loss - 1D4 x 5% of highest level
77-79	DCC Minor Corruption (5-3, pg 116)
80-82	Take 1D6 psychic damage per level of spell
83-84	Attract the unwanted attention of a powerful but potentially remote magically sensitive being
85-86	Roll on the madness table, effect lasts 1D6 days
87-89	Take 1D6 damage to a random attribute
91-94	DCC Major Corruption (5-4, pg 118) if arcane or Deity Disapproval 5-7 if divine (chaotic or evil divine could be either)
95-97	Destruction of a significant magic item on caster or friend
98-100	The spell gains/replaces a Mercurial Magic effect (DCC 5-2, pg 111)
101-102	Gate in an inimical demon of level equal or up to 2 higher than caster, within 30' of the caster
103-105	Destruction of a most significant magic item on caster or friend within 30 feet
106-109	DCC Greater Corruption (5-5, pg 119) arcane; deity disapproval, worse of two rolls, if L/G/N divine; C/E divine could be either
110+	Attract the (potentially ongoing) attention of an inimical divine being. In this campaign that might mean Cthulhu awakens, and starts disturbing the caster's dreams, sending minions, and eventually showing up itself.

So, Bilzor the Magician, at first level, has cast his one prepared sleep spell for the day, and his party is being overrun by bandits. He tries to save the day by casting another sleep spell, but his only spell slot is drained. He rolls a 47 and has the choice of loss of a minor magic item or attracting the attention of a nearby magically sensitive creature. He picks the item, and since he has a Potion of healing and a level 1 spell scroll, the GM dices and the potion bottle shatters. Had he picked the attention, he gets a creepy being watched feeling, and the DM consults his notes and decides the Ixian witch a level deeper in the dungeon feels the emanations of the reckless spell, and gets a glimspe of Bilzor in her mind's eye, and a general sense of where he is, and might come hunting for him or is at least alerted, can make preparations, like dispatching a minion to spy, and is not surprised by the party for the next day.

Later in the fight, the party's fighter goes down, Bilzor is beset by a pair of bandits, casts a further sleep spell, and is struck by one of them before he gets it off. This time, he'll have 3 Stress, for overcasting beyond his slots, melee, and being injured while casting, and will be adding 10 to each of three rolls. With a 16 first roll that would have succeeded without backfire in the first instance, he now has a 26 result, and the sleep spell fizzles or he has additional Stress for any further casts until he can rest for the day. He chooses the Stress so his spell might go off. The second stress roll of 77 becomes 87 and he declines the permanence of DCC major corruption and takes a 3 point hit to his CHA after followup rolls, the DM decides these points will recover at one per week. The third roll of 52 becomes 62 and he is stunned for a round, declining the DCC misfire table. Bilzor might survive to recover that CHA if the spell puts all his enemies to sleep.

I'll probably tweak this some more, but it gets pretty close to what I want in letting low level casters not be one trick ponies, but with significant risks, and letting higher level casters get themselves into deep trouble when they attempt great feats of magic.

Putting on my DM Hat Again with Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea

The Plan

I got the second edition book for Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea a couple weeks ago via the Kickstarter. I've had the first edition boxed set for a few years, but never got around to actually running it. This time I intend to give it a whirl.

So, after reading a lot of it, and putting together a few starting characters that'll probably see service as pregens or NPCs, I decided this morning that the way to actually make myself focus is to put out the call. Here's my initial post on G+ and Facebook:

"So I'm thinking about setting up to try running AS&SH on Roll20. Potential interest? No time picked yet, but I'd aim to have a starter scenario ready in about a week and do the schedule matching dance along the way. In person is also possible if SF Bay Area people are interested."

Given the positive initial response, I got started today on a scenario. There's now enough that I could run it in a pinch, and time to polish it a bit. Now I have to fit it onto the campaign map and flesh it out some.

Sound fun? Leave a comment. Maybe start rolling up a character. The Rules PDF is on still on Black Friday to Cyber Monday sale at http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/221806/Astonishing-Swordsmen--Sorcerers-of-Hyperborea-Second-Edition?term=astonishing+sword&test_epoch=0

What is this Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerors of Hyberborea Game?

Imagine D&D was written without the influence of Tolkien, but heavily influenced by Weird Tales authors like Robert E. Howard and Howard Lovecraft. The setting is a pocket dimension overlaying the uttermost North, inhabited by groups descended from historical and not quite historical peoples of the Earth, Vikings who were swept off by a storm, Cthulhu cultists that crossed over in a ritual that went sideways, and the like. The rules have a lot of AD&D flavor, but PCs are assorted humans or nearly human, and not elves or dwarfs or halflings and the monsters have a similar filtering.

Getting Started

We'll go with method II for PC attributes.

Roll 3D6 for each attribute in order: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma

Then do it two more times and pick the set you like best out of the three sets.

Then you can trade points by paying down two in one attribute to bump another up one.  The range is bounded 3-18, no boosting to 19, and no percentiles on 18 for fighters.

The ranges on the attributes for bonuses and penalties is 3, 4-6, 7-8, 9-12, 13-14, 15-16, 17, 18. The bonuses are flatter than late editions of D&D, with an 18 giving +2 to melee attacks and +3 to damage, for instance.

Hit Dice for classes are pretty much what you would expect, D10s for Fighters, D4s for Magicians, D6s for Thieves, D8s for Clerics. Subclasses of each of the main four may redefine that up or down.

House Rule: Take the best of three rolls at first level, and best of two rolls at each level thereafter. 

There is a standard starting gear pack for each class and subclass. We'll go with those, or you can swap to similarly valued weapons and other gear that makes sense for your character.

This is a game with class and subclass specific EXPs for levelling, like older flavors of D&D. The level table goes up to level 12, it is unlikely the campaign will last to get close to that cap.

The classes very briefly summarized, with required stats, prime reqs, and notes,just enough to give flavor and see that you qualify (Prime requisites for EXP are in ALL CAPS):

Fighter, STR 9

Magician, INT 9

Cleric, WIS 9

Thief,  DEX 9, Rolls thief abilities on a D12, so abilities are expressed in chances in 12 of success

Subclasses have two Prime Requisites and both have to be 16+ for the bonus.

Subclasses of Fighter, all have more special rules, but base fighter gets the most weapon specialization bonuses, and extra attacks against weak mooks:

Barbarian STR 13, DEX 13, Con 13, D12 HD, a lot of wilderness and adventure related skills and abilities, No Rage. Great saves, Think Conan.

Berserker STR 15, CON 15, D12 Hd, Strong, multifaceted Rage 1/day/4 levels, dangerous to friends if still raging when enemies die, a few skills, Great saves

Cataphract STR 9, Dex 9, Wis 9, CHA 9, Mounted combat specialists, honorable heavy knights with high damage couched lance close order charge. Kinda meh dismounted for a dungeon crawl, or in the mountains, or in the swamps...

Huntsman STR 9, Dex 9, WIS 9, Cha 12, Wilderness and prey&pet animal related skills, max of Med armor

Paladin STR 9, Dex 9, Wis 9, CHA 15 Classic LG Paladin with spells at higher levels 7+

Ranger STR 9, Dex 9, Int 9, WIS 9 a lot of ranger type skills and has druid and mage type spells at upper levels 7+, sort of an X Files focus, with Lovecraftian special enemies instead of the usual ones

Warlock STR 12, INT 12 (some Wis 12), D8 HD fighter-mage hybrid, spells from 1st, any mage specialty, L or M armor

Subclasses of Magician

Cryomancer INT 9, WIS 9- cold focused, it is the demi-arctic

Pyromancer INT 9, WIS 9 - fire focus is popular when its cold 

Necromancer INT 9 WIS 9, has turn/command undead ability from 3rd level

Illusionist DEX 9, INT 9

Witch INT 9, Wis 9, CHA 12 - Spell list and witch trope skills, starting with potion brewing

Subclasses of Cleric

Druid WIS 9, CHA 12, shapechange starts at 5th

Monk Str 9, DEX 9, WIS 9, classic martial arts monk with some thief skills

Priest WIS 9, CHA 9, D4 HD more spells, less fight, no armor, few favored weapons, deity related bonuses, usually specific extra spells

Runegraver STR 9, WIS 12 Nordic flavor, Fighter-like combat ability, limited spell list, no turning, berserker minions at high level instead of the usual mix 

Shaman INT 9, WIS 12 D6 HD, shamanistic cleric/druid  plus mage/necro hybrid

Subclasses of Thief

Assassin Str 9, DEX 9, INT 9

Bard Str 9, DEX 9, Int 9, Wis 9, CHA 15 D8 HD  A few Thief skills, mez, Druid + Illusionist spells

Legerdemainist DEX 12, INT 12, Wis 12 if mage subclass requires it, Mage hybrid, pick specilization

Purloiner DEX 12, WIS 12 cleric hybrid

Scout DEX 9, INT 9, less theft, more woodsy or dungeon crawling skill focus

Races

Amazon Women warriors are legendary; their men, not so much.

Atlantis sank under the waves and Atlanteans are now amphibious and look it

Common (after a few generations of intermixing, unclear ancestry of multiple lineages)

Esquimaux

Hyperboreans are the tall, thin, pale, longlived indigenes, who consider all the Earth exile descendents beneath them, as snooty as other games' high elves without the pointy ears and infravision.

Ixians - Scythian, Egyptian, Persian heritage, Priests, Witches, Necromancers run society, the Stygians of this world

Kelts -still led by druids with Celtic-style society

Kimmerians, Caucusus Cimmerian derived, but with Conan Cimmerian flavor, hate Ixians, some steppe nomads, some are catacomb dwellers

Kimmeri-Kelts - barbaric hybrid race

Picts 

Halfblood Picts - Bloodthirsty savages, threatening civilization, orc-like niche

Vikings

Other Races - small numbers from nearly any earthly place and time, either recent arrivals or their ancestors stayed isolated

So roll up a character's attributes and choose a class it suits if you are interested in joining in.

Elm One Day In

I've been interested in the Elm programming language for several months, reading and poking around some at code examples but with too many hobbies competing, only finally started really writing some yesterday.

I usually do a gaming related project to learn a new programming language or framework on my own time, because that is where I have software itches to scratch. This time I started with the simple die roll example and my first step was learning how to take a program where the model is a single Integer that gets updated to a record with two attributes, one the value rolled on the die and the other the size of die to roll. Finding and wrapping my head around the pattern to write to an attribute of a model was my first hurdle.

That set me up for a first serious project. I have been playing a lot of D&D 5e lately and my character sheet has gotten pretty messy. I've been procrastinating on the rewrite, so making a character sheet application that avoids getting messy and can export nice copies is a natural fit.  Also at work, we are thinking about rewriting the proposal submission application, which is a form of similar complexity to a D&D character sheet, with a complex nested data structure and a lot of options. I'd like to be able to say with confidence that we can handle it in Elm and be better off for having used it.

So, I hid away the die roller part of the UI with a style of display:none, but kept it around as the core of an in situ dice rolling part,  and started into the character sheet.

Design spec: This will be a web based single page application, well loosely SPA since a full character sheet for a spellcaster can run to four or five paper pages, and I'll probably be hiding portions away with paging or tabs of some sort. It will be a full character sheet that can handle multiclassing at least up to three classes. It might not go beyond the Player's Handbook in terms of what it supports with known classes and such, but I might allow for typing in some other options. The displayed form on the web should be usable in game from tablet or laptop, maybe phone but its an awfully big form to navigate on a phone. It will have localstorage persistence for offline use and probably use Dropbox or Google Drive as the personal server storage for accessing the same sheet from multiple devices, but I'm not planning to provide a server that users would depend on with all the authentication, uptime, and cost/monetization issues that entails. In that regard, it will autosave the sheet to at least localstorage as changes are made, with syncing to update remote storage whenever access is good. There will be some sort of list selector to choose the character to to load into the sheet, and something to delete unwanted characters. After a CSS design pass, it should print out a pleasant sheet to use. There will be nested structured data for things like weapons blocks and spell lists, but a lot of things that are simple lists like mundane possessions and encounters to remember will just be free text in text areas. It might be worthwhile to support markdown in text areas.

I spent most of my Sunday coding on it, and by the end had about 500 lines of good code that displayed and recorded edits to the model for pretty much all the top level fields. I intentionally put off the nested structures, knowing they would be more complex, and did zero to minimal CSS styling, leaving that for after things basically work.

I downloaded Atom for the editor and a few Elm related packages for it. It mostly worked for me but I was seeing errors from the package that was trying to auto run elm-format for me and did not go down the rabbit hole of working that out. Instead I manually ran elm-format once at command line later in the day, and mostly just tried to code close to what it would output, which slowed me a little bit. Should probably have run it more often. I had the project sitting in my Dropbox for easy access from other machines, so I did not initialize it as a git repo, but will probably do that in my next big session on it.

 It was a very productive flow, using elm-reactor as the dev server and the Chrome browser to see the results. I already love the Elm compiler, which made it very easy to clean up simple mistakes. The debugger was fun to play with, but not too necessary for the simple, repetitive sort of coding I was doing. The workflow for adding a plain text field was very straightforward. Add a line for then new attribute to the model with name and type. Add the new attribute to the initialization record to match the model, with the default value. Add an update message for it to the messages list. Define the function that responds to the message according to one of two patterns, one where it is just text, another where the value needs to be an integer. Add the field and any framing HTML like a list item or label to the view, with the onInput attribute of the field calling the updater message function. Save and go look at the web page to see if it worked or there are compiler errors to fix.  Adding a batch of them at once was easy, the compiler is good at pointing out missing ones in some section, mismatch typos, and similar problems, so I could move along quickly.  Using an editor with syntax color and bracket/parentheses matching support has the usual benefits. Besides something like fifty basic input fields, I did the first dependent attribute calculations to show the die roll modifiers based on the primary attributes

At that point I had two possible places to go - work out the beginnings of persistence to localstorage or start to tackle the deeper data structures beyond placement of H2 headers in the character sheet to show where they would go.

I went with trying to tackle one of the simpler data structures, the saving throws section where it should have checkbox like controls to mark the two that get the proficiency bonus and fields to enter the value. I also started with intent to have a bonus section for special bonuses to saves like from magic items or feats, and to list the source of bonus, but did not expose that part of each saving throw model right away.

This is where I hit the wall. In Elm you can reach down multiple levels by dot notation in getters but not in setters.  So I couldn't say what I initially tried, { model | saves.strength.proficient = not model.saves.strength.proficient } as the update response to clicking the checkbox for the strength saving throw proficiency. Stared at that awhile and started googling for what to do about it.

From what I see, you end up writing a custom setter function that reaches down and updates the innermost record you are updating an attribute on, and the one that encloses that, etc, all the way out. These can be kind of long, so you probably want to tuck them in a module devoted to a related collection of them There is a Focus module from Evan that can simplify this process some, with caveats about performance. There is a blog post about it by Wouter In t Velt that explains how to make some helper functions to shorten it.

But all options are enough of a pain that I didn't move on from there last night, and am considering flattening out the saving throws data structure and possibly doing the calculable dependent values based on character class selection, character level (and thus proficency bonus), and primary attribute modifier, and only making editable fields for special bonuses. The downside is less flexibility for additional character classess. I'll also start looking deeper into the ToDoMVC example to see how to update nested elements that are members of variable length lists like spells and weapon stat blocks.

The take home as a beginner one day into programming in Elm is that Elm is very pleasant and productive to work in if you understand the basics, with a stumbling block once you have to work with nested data models. I expect that is just the first place where I'll be paying back for the benefits of immutability and functional programming. So far though, it feels like a good trade. I want to get back in there and work on the next part.

LiveCode and Rogue Stars

For the last couple of weeks I have been preparing (or procrastinating around preparing) for the Rogue Stars event I will run Friday at DunDraCon. One of my main tasks has been to prepare character sheets for two dozen characters. I've been going back and forth about how to do it, all the time wishing I still had HyperCard on a machine that would run it, since it was perfect for that kind of quick layout of fields for a deck of cards database. I considered making a little Rails project but was not in the mood to wrestle CSS to lay it out, etc. So yesterday, I did some searching around the web to see if there was a good current HyperCard replacement for hobby projects. And I found it.

LiveCode is a language and concept descendent of HyperCard. It lets you throw together a UI as quickly as possible by drag and drop, wire up components with a mix of property panel choices and light scripting.  It started as MetaCard, and was Runtime Revolution for awhile. I used Runtime Revolution pretty extensively back at Stanford in the oughts, and found it quite serviceable for scientific projects. When I first hit their site the day before I saw the $1K a year license and said "Nope" regarding getting back in for a hobby project. Then yesterday I saw they have a GPL open source version. Bingo! Download, learn some of the changes in how it works, and I now have an utterly rudimentary character sheets app that does exactly and only what I need to print out a stack of characters for Friday, and about half of the characters entered. It might even be worth spiffing it up a bit and giving it away. I used to make a lot of gaming software in HyperCard, since it was so easy and fun to do.

Here's what it looks like so far (extra points if you spot the data entry error in the screenshot):

That blank space at top right will get a picture of the figure if I have time to take and insert the pics.