{.right} Halberds and Helmets Podcast I’m on fire! This one is about the six attributes and how I tried to rename them and how that didn’t work. Oh well.
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2011-04-06 Yoga is the new Wisdom
Hello, this is Alex speaking and this is the Halberts and Helmets podcast.
Second episode, I am so excited. I am much more excited than I thought I’d be.
So thanks, Judd, for making me do this. He inspired me. I recently remembered that way back, way back when podcasts were new, I think I started with The Sons of Kryos and Judd Karlman was there. And now he made his own podcast, Daydreaming with Dragons, and I loved it. He’s just talking to us, using his phone a thing and the anchor app and just talking to us. I love it.
So what are we going to talk about today here on this podcast?
So I’m going to turn to page two of the Halberts and Helmets player handbook, I guess. It’s all about character creation and it starts with the famous six abilities.
I know it’s lame. Everyone has them if you’re descended from Dungeon and Dragons and if you’re not, then it’s – it’s weird. We have strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. And I have often thought about replacing those. I mean, in a way, it’s nice when you think about it in terms of options, like if you’re strong, you can be a good melee fighter. If you have high dexterity, you can be a good ranged fighter. If you have high constitution, you can tank, you can take a lot of damage. And then what? High intelligence gives you what? In the old, in the very old, in the original D&D rules, having high primary abilities would just give you extra XP. So you would … you would just gain levels faster and that’s why it would be better. But it didn’t actually give you a bonus. And I don’t like having lots of bonuses because when we played Dungeon and Dragons 3E, the adding up of all these bonuses and the spells that increased your ability scores and gave you more bonuses or diminished your bonuses… ah, it just, it was a lot of simple math and it didn’t really change all that much.
And furthermore, I don’t have any rules for talking. We just talk at the table. We negotiate. You and me, we just talk. Can you convince your, try and convince me. Is your idea going to work and entertain us with your descriptions? And if we all laugh and … then that’s it. It’s gonna work. And if we all make dubious faces and think, nah, that’s – that’s probably bullshit, then, then it’s not gonna work.
So what do you use intelligence and wisdom for? I don’t know. You don’t really, you don’t really need it. But I remember as kids, we just looked over to our neighbor’s character sheet and we said, we just said it out loud. Hey, I’m more intelligent than you. Yeah, but I have more wisdom. My charisma is better. And it was a – it’s a childish thing. But, but it was fun. I loved it.
And so we’re just gonna use those old six ability scores just because they’ve always been in use. So intelligence gives you nothing other than more languages. And I’m in the camp of the just-in-time languages. That means we don’t actually determine the languages that you know at character creation time. We just note down how many languages you could know. Then, if during the game you meet some orcs and you would really love to speak orcish, have a look. If you still have a language slot available, then you probably spoke orcish all along and just didn’t tell anybody. And, and I’ve never seen a drawback to that. So intelligence for language slots, and you just determine them later. It’s no problem.
And what about wisdom? Wisdom gives you a bonus on saving throws against magic. Ah, I think we often forget about this. I don’t know. I do remember reading one of those old blogs, I don’t know, 10 years ago, maybe Planet Algol. Man, that was such a great blog. Fantastic. It was, I don’t know, it was Carcosa and Fear and Loathing in LA and Westerns all jammed together into one hell of a package. And it was the only blog, I think, where I actually read those session reports and I loved it. So Planet Algol had a blog post, if I remember correctly, where it said we should just rename wisdom to yoga. And man, that’s just such a great idea. You think about yoga, and then maybe you can think about the Mahabharata or some fantastic imagery of the gods riding through the heavens.
There’s this absolutely fantastic manga, which I read when I was younger, called Orion, by Masamune Shirow. And that’s just so over the top. But it has all those religious themes, but with an easy touch. So there’s scrolls, and there’s demons, and all the rest of it. And suddenly, it just makes sense.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there, if there’d be some yoga ability, and it just, I don’t know, it just involves wisdom, but in a spiritual, in a magical way. You know, just like the wisdom of growing old and knowing when to stop talking. I tried it.
Actually, I also tried renaming intelligence to education. I was reading some Traveler, and they use education. I thought, that’s cool. And it sort of worked when I translated my character sheets to German, and we just used Bildung. Bildung is education. But I never managed to change the minds of my English players. It’s always been intelligence and wisdom, and never education and yoga. And following the rules I’ve set myself, if you don’t use these words at the table, then I’m just not gonna write them in the book. Sorry.
That leaves us with Charisma. The famous dump stat, I guess. Well, not in our game, because I just allow henchmen. And henchmen are just first level characters. I have a huge stack of generated characters that I just print out. I have a character generator online. I just print out 10 or 20 of them. And that’s it. So if you say, hey, we need to, we need to find some, some henchmen, I say, sure, are you gonna pay 10 gold for the town crier? Yeah, they are. Okay, good. We’ll scratch off those 10 gold. Roll 1d6. And that’s how many people show up. And then just pull out a handful of character sheets from, from the stack and say, these are the guys that show up. And then they can look at the character sheet and just pick and choose. And I’m trying hard to not print any new ones until all of them have been taken. So if they don’t like Chantal the fighter, then sure, she remains in the stack. And next time she’s going to be there again. And one day they’ll take her. Then, when all the NPCs are gone from the stack, I’ll print some new ones. So it’s easy to get retainers and, and having good charisma allows you to get more retainers.
You get four retainers if you just have average charisma. And then the bonus is up to plus or minus three. So everyone gets at least one retainer and the best have seven of them. That also means that since I often have a table of five or six players, and each of them brings along one, two, three, up to five retainers, that’s a lot of characters.
Two days ago, we were exploring the sewers beneath Portra and we had 19 characters at the table. Five players, 19 characters. So I guess charisma is somewhat important. It’s not all that important because we hardly ever max it out and nobody’s really sad when they just get one or two retainers. But the number of retainers is somewhat important and the reaction rolls are quite important.
I like to roll for reactions from NPCs. My players like to talk to them because if you talk to people and to monsters, then you’re not fighting, fighting is dangerous. So they prefer talking, which is good. It’s more entertaining for me. And then I call for a reaction roll if they’re not totally convincing. And then the players who were talking to me at the table get to roll and they look at their character sheet. And then it turns out if you’re not a very charismatic character who’s been doing all the talking, then the opposition is going to have a bad reaction, probably.
Does that mean you’re punished for having a bad charisma? I guess somehow some of my players also show a certain amount of glee by just talking to everybody, even though they know that their charisma score is bad and that their reactions are going to be sub-average.
And I think time’s running out. I’ll save the rest for next time. Cheers!
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