I decided to go forward with my combat card project. It's a lot of work upfront, but really pays off in-game and in making adventures.
I just decided to go through the ACKS random dungeon monster encounters and card them up.
Most monsters are pretty easy, except for the various Humanoids. For each humanoid entry, there's a Normal, Champion, Sub-Chief, Chief, Shaman, and Witchdoctor to do. You've got to look up a bunch of stuff and recalculate XP for all the non-normal types. But, since they're concentrated on the lower levels, I think I've gotten through most of them by now.
NPC parties are another nut to crack. One problem is spell repertoire, it's actually harder to set up than AD&D, since casters can cast any spell from their repertoire spontaneously. The other problem is Magic Items, each NPC has a 5% chance per category (potion, scroll, sword, etc) to have an item. If I'm just going to have 1 generic NPC per level, then we'd be running into the same magic items repeatedly, if I just say "roll when you use him" than the stats on the combat card my be wrong. I'm sure I'll come up with some solution.
That's another thing that I think ACKS could have done differently with their monster section: for each of the different leader types (at least for the humanoids), put the XP value for them underneath, as well as putting the base THAC0 for all the monsters. Would save a bit of flipping around in the books.
ReplyDeleteI guess that would make a good suggestion if they ever do a monster manual type product.
Yes, those were my thoughts exactly.
ReplyDeleteI think I have a good, complete format for the combat cards:
AC upper left in box
Damage/Attacks: upper right in box
Move: lower left in Box
Base Attack throw: lower right in box
Saving throw numbers: between Move and Attack
General Info (alignment, HD, XP, Morale) between AC and Damage
Special Stuff in the middle.
Leader types were a serious pain.
It turns out Clerics and Thieves are the worst NPC types to do, Fighters and Mages are easier. Clerics because of having 10-12 spells in repertoire per level (mages 1-5 or so). Thieves have the Thief skills.
The proficiencies slowed things down a little too for NPCs.