Basics of the Demon Lord: Actions in Combat

Like many adventure RPGs, Shadow of the Demon Lord has special rules for tracking who does what when during combat. Specifically, it has what's called an "action economy," a predetermined set of options that constrain how much your character can do in one turn of combat. But SotDL introduces a very cool twist, fast and slow turns, which changes those options a bit. Let's dig in! To follow along at home, please open your textbooks to pages 46-50, the first part of the Combat section in Chapter 2.

You Can Go First or You Can Do More

At its heart, the fast/slow turn rule is about making a decision: do I want to go first, or do I want to wait until later but do more on my turn? The combat round is divided into two big chunks, fast turns and slow turns. Each of these chunks is divided into player turns and GM turns. So the round looks like this:

1. Player fast turns
2. GM fast turns (monsters and other enemies, etc.)
3. Player slow turns
4. GM slow turns
5. End of the Round

Each player chooses whether to act on a fast turn or a slow turn. You can't do both, and once you've acted, you can't act again until the next round. In other words, the players can always go first if they want to! So why would you take a slow turn? Because you can do more: any creature that acts on a fast turn can either use an action or move, but not both; a creature that waits until slow can both use an action and move.

Actions are for Big Things...

So what is an action? It's the big, main thing you do on your turn. Attacking (which includes both attacking with your weapon and casting an attack spell) and casting a utility spell (any spell that's not an attack) are the two most common actions, but there are plenty of others such as concentrating on a spell effect, helping an ally, hiding, and retreating from combat (see pages 48-49 of the core rules).

...and Moves are for Moving

I know. Obvious, right? Most of the time, moving just lets you move up to your Speed around the battlefield. If you're taking a slow turn, you can use your action at any point during the move, so for example if you have a move of 10 you could move 4 yards, cast a spell, then move another 6 yards. There are multiple special types of movement, though, such as swimming and riding (see pages 47-48 of the core rules).

Except When Actions are for Moving

There are a couple of actions that allow you to move! These are Retreat and Rush. Even though they involve movement, they still take an action to use. Retreat lets you move half your Speed without triggering free attacks (a type of triggered attack, see below, that lets an enemy try to hit you as you move away from them). If you're next to an enemy who's kicking your butt, this is a great option on a fast turn to get you safely away from it. You can also use it on a slow turn, though-- use your action to Retreat away from the enemy, then use your move to keep running! This would effectively let you move 1.5 times your speed in the turn, and the part of the movement caused by the Retreat action would be safe from free attacks.

Rush is the other action that lets you move. Specifically, you move up to twice your Speed. Like Retreat, you can use it on its own on a fast turn (when you really need to get somewhere quickly!) or combine it with your move on a slow turn. In the case of Rush, waiting until a slow turn would let you move up to three times your speed in total.

One More Thing About Fast/Slow

What we've seen in playtests is that combats often fall into a certain pattern. At the start of the fight, the combatants are far away from each other, so the first round is often spent closing that gap. That means that melee combatants will generally wait until slow turns, so they can get next to an enemy and attack during the first round. They may also wait for the foe to come to them. There is also an option to charge (see page 52 for that and many other attack options) which allows a creature to move and attack as one action, at the cost of banes to all their rolls for that round.

After the melee combatants have closed on each other, they often take fast turns for much of the remaining combat, using an action to make their attack as soon as possible. They've found their position and they're staying there! Spellcasters who have gotten into a safe position may also take mostly fast turns, as they can throw spells from that spot unless a clever enemy moves to threaten them.

You Also Get One Triggered Action Per Round

Last up in our list of important stuff you can do is the triggered action. You get one triggered action per round, and that's it! Otherwise, your triggered action can happen anywhere in the round, either your own turn or someone else's. Any talent, spell, or other power that uses a triggered action will tell you what the trigger is. It could be extremely specific, or as general as "on your turn." But no matter when it happens, you only get one per round. So if you use a triggered action on your own turn at the very top of the round-- for example, using the Priest's Prayer talent to give yourself a boon to your attack roll on a fast turn-- then even if an opportunity arises to use one later on someone else's turn, you're out of luck.

The most common triggered action is probably the free attack. If an enemy is within your reach (a number of yards equal to your size number, so for most player characters reach is 1 yard) and they willingly move away from (that is, they're not pushed around by some outside force) and you're wielding a melee weapon (sword, axe, dagger, that sort of thing) you can use your triggered action to attack them with it. This rule exists to help front-line fighters lock down their foes and keep squishy casters safe in the back, but the key thing here is that it uses your triggered action-- so if you've already used yours for the round, enemies standing next to you can feel free to move with impunity until the next round.

What About Minor Activities?

Whew, almost done! There's one more type of thing you can do in combat, and it's so small it's not even called an action. Minor activities are things like opening and closing doors, drawing a weapon, and picking something up off the floor. The rule is that you can do one minor activity on a fast turn or two on a slow turn (another advantage for slow turns, if you really need to sheathe your current weapon and draw a new one, for example) but it's really up to your GM how much you can get done. For example, as a GM I would probably rule that a warrior could kick open a door and draw her sword while moving into the room beyond, all on a fast turn, because that's awesome and it feels realistic to me. But I probably wouldn't let her make an attack, sheathe her sword, and shut the door all on her next fast turn.

Basics of the Demon Lord: Health and Damage

Shadow of the Demon Lord handles damage and health a little bit differently from many other adventure RPGs. It's a system that is actually quite elegant and rewarding, but it requires you to shift your thinking just a bit to get in the groove. Here's how it works. If you want to follow along at home, we're talking about rules that appear on pages 34 (Health) and 39-40 (Damage) of the Shadow of the Demon Lord core book.

Damage Goes Up, Health Stays the Same

Your Health score is (generally) static. It represents the total amount of damage you can take before you drop (that is, become Incapacitated; see page 40). Rather than losing Health as you take damage, you have a separate damage score that increases. I'll say it again because it's key to how the whole thing works: as you get hit by monsters, traps, spells, and anything else that causes your character pain, your damage increases. Your Health doesn't change. (This is where the system differs from what we're used to, namely losing Hit Points as we subtract damage.) So if I have 13 Health and I take 5 damage, I still have 13 Health. I just also have 5 damage!

Damage Never Exceeds Health

So far, so good. The next key thing to remember is that when your damage equals your Health, you become Incapacitated. (We'll discuss the death and dying rules in a later entry in Basics of the Demon Lord.) Your damage can never exceed your Health. So to go back to our earlier example, if my character with 13 Health and 5 damage takes 10 more damage (from an ogre's club, say) he now has 13 damage. He can't go above 13 because his damage cannot go above his Health, so those last two points of damage are just lost as overkill. He's gonna drop either way-- the key thing to focus on here is that there's no tracking of "negative Health" or anything like that. You're either awake and alive, or you're Incapacitated and (temporarily, one hopes!) out of the fight. If you reduce your damage by any means (a spell from the Life tradition or a healer's kit, for example) you are no longer Incapacitated! In other words, you only ever need to heal away 1 point of damage to wake up. This is why healer's kits are so useful!

Okay, Health Can Change Sometimes

You may be starting to see why this method is so elegant. Removing things like "negative Hit Points" means the game plays faster at the table. Another rule we don't need is something like "temporary Hit Points." If we want a character to be able to withstand more damage, we just increase her Health score. For example, the spell "Call of the Wild" increases a target's Health by 10 for 1 minute (among other things). That means that for the next minute, that character can take 10 more damage without dropping. Conversely, the Circlet of Eyes relic bestows a 1d6 penalty to Health while worn, making its wearer a bit easier to take out. In other words, temporary changes to your ability to take damage don't require a bunch of extra rules. Instead, they just alter your Health score; you can keep taking damage as usual until you're Incapacitated.

One Interesting Corner Case

If you're like me, you heard that Health can change and immediately started wondering what happens when those effects wear off. Well, you should be careful when your Health is temporarily higher! Let's say you normally have 20 Health, but your friend casts "Call of the Wild" on you. You now have 30 Health for the next minute. You charge into combat and take 25 damage. No problem! But before you can heal any of that damage, "Call of the Wild" wears off. What happens to you? Well, you've suddenly got 25 damage and only 20 Health. Your damage can never exceed your Health (see above), so that extra 5 damage is lost. That's cold comfort for you, though, because now you have 20 damage and 20 Health-- yup, you're Incapacitated! In simpler terms, if your Health decreases to equal to or below your damage for any reason (maybe you had 20 health and 19 damage, then put on a Circlet of Eyes), your damage resets to equal your Health and you're Incapacitated.

Hopefully that elucidates and elaborates the Health and damage rules in the core book. Look out for future installments of Basics of the Demon Lord to get more insight into how your favorite rules work!

Random Encounter Chart Generator, v. 1

There was a bit of talk on the Shadow of the Demon Lord G+ group about creating random encounter tables by group "tier" (starting, novice, expert, master) as a way of defining zones of safety for your players. As in: sure, you can go to the Nightmarish Hellscape of the Weird at level 0, but the first time the GM rolls on the encounter table you're gonna get eaten by an encounter aimed at master groups.

I was going to write up some generic encounter charts based on the Encounter Difficulty table on page 180 of Shadow of the Demon Lord. I wanted a reliable way to make sure the average encounter on any table I created would be exactly where I wanted it, so I started messing around with how the math would work out if I wanted, say, an average encounter Difficulty of 15, a minimum Difficulty of 3, and a maximum Difficulty of 30. (In other words, a chart that more or less covered the range of Difficulty appropriate for starting characters, assuming I don't want a Hard encounter in my random table.) And then I started to do it again for novice characters. And then I remembered I'm a software developer. So I wrote an ugly little program to automatically create encounter tables!

So the program generates 2d6 tables, meaning you get a weighted table that (in this case) tends towards the average Difficulty. Basically, you give it a minimum, maximum, and average difficulty. It uses the minimum difficulty as a roll of 2, the maximum as a roll of 12, and the average as a roll of 7. (These are the two least likely, and the most likely, rolls of 2d6.) It fills in the other values with Difficulties that approach the min and max as they get farther from the center, and then tweaks them so that the total weighted average of the entire table is exactly the average you entered originally. Finally it generates a table for you. The left-hand column is your roll on 2d6. The center column is the total Difficulty of that entire entry. The right-hand column is the average Difficulty one monster should be, assuming the encounter is made up of 1d6 monsters of the same Difficulty. (Which not all encounters will be, but it's a useful tool for simple encounter tables.)

Here it is!

The little program is in a JSBin, so you can easily see the source code. Like I said, it's ugly. I banged it out over a lunch break and didn't refactor at all, so don't judge me professionally from this! But you're welcome to copy the code, play around with it, and find my mistakes. (Just don't change it within the original Bin, so other people will find it as I originally wrote it.) And hopefully, make some random encounter tables!

Eventually I want to expand this. First up would probably be rounding to integers, and maybe rounding the average monster Difficulty to the numbers in the core rules. (There's no monster of Difficulty 4.09622...) Then maybe some suggested ways to break up the total Difficulty of the encounter. We'll see.

Inception

A long-time blog reader, I've been impressed with the public development methods of writers like Chris Kutalik (Hill Cantons) and Trey Causey (From the Sorcerer's Skull). Thus this blog: a useful place to catalog my own notes on the city of Lorden, the drop-in adventure setting I'm developing for Shadow of the Demon Lord, and perhaps to get feedback from the public as well. Enjoy!