Wild West and some observations

Jack Steel

Mongoose
I want to start a Thread where I want to write things I found strange/ didn’t found in the book. I will write some things, and if someone finds something, you can write it here. I made this because I think it's a great game and it deserves a special attention from us the players :p


I'm testing some rules of Wild West in my D&D campaign and I told to my friends the rule of adding the number with which you beat the enemy's Defence, and we came up with a question:
Is Power Attak useful? I mean, a player should choose it because of interpretation and it allows him to take Cleave; but if you think well: if you substract 1 from you attack bonus, it means that you will have 1 number less but you will add a +1 to the Damage, so in mathematical numbers you deal a theorical +0 of damage, more or less.

So what do you think? ( but think that I like this rule a lot and, IMO, it's great because it allows the experienced heroes defeat tough enemies with a simple weapon, and it's cool. They are simply better, you don't need a magic weapon or amazing damage rolls to break heads 8) )
Or am I thinking too much about this? (“hey you, it’s a game of guns, Power Attack is not such important!” )


Another one: in page 147-149, it's explained the uses of Luck. And there is a use that is not described: "Halve Damage from an attack". It's not explained and it doesn’t appear in the table of the costs (page 149).


When you confirm a critical, you multiply the Damage by a number (x2, x3 or x4 :twisted: ). Does it include also the succeeds of your roll? I ask you because a critical hit implies a high attack roll, so if you multiply everything it will provoke an instant death!!! :shock: (and I suppose it's the mission of Critical Hits in WW) At least I haven't seen Improved Critical in the Feats Sections :wink:


More questions, answers?

Thanks for reading.
 
1. Is Power Attack useful?
Yes. :)

It's true that taking a penalty to your attack roll to use Power Attack will decrease your Margin of Sucess should you hit. However, remember that the size of a wound is worked out by adding the margin of sucess to the damage, so (assuming you hit), you don't lose anything. For every -1 to hit, you get a +1 to damage.

Plus, you're doing more hit point damage, which will kill your opponent eventually regardless of wounds.

Power Attack also makes two-handed weapons even more desirable, and lets characters smash through immobile obstacles easily.

2. Eeep. We dropped that use of Luck. Just ignore that line.

3. No, you don't multiple the margin of sucess. Just work out the critical hit damage normally, then add the margin of sucess onto that damage to work out the wound type. (It's probably going to be Mortal anyway :)).
 
Mongoose Gar said:
(It's probably going to be Mortal anyway :)).


Yes, it's true. Many weapons (especially the Exotic ones) have a Critical of 18-20 or 19-20/x3. That's just amazing and dangerous. Well, that happens when bullets impact someone's head :!: I like it.


I see this game in the style of old films, (which I love) like High Noon or Fort Apache, Chisum or even Unforgiven (for example), everything is more or less quite, with good interactions between characters, who have hidden problems and sad/violent stories; and climatic scenes with dangerous and mortal firefights 8), not simple scenarios with many "average Joes" (I think this is the way americans call them, am I right?) like any high fantasy game (but some would be good too, he he...)


That's all :lol:
 
Another one:

1) In the table of longarms, every weapon has a reload time of 3 rounds. Is this correct? I ask this because it is the same reloading a Sharp (1 bullet) than a Winchester (15 bullets).


2) This is a question directed to the designers (or anyone who want to answer :) ): Why does the Strong Hero have the higher Attack Bonus? He/she is the only one who has it, and it's a high number for tis game, where each additional success means more damage.
 
I'll defer to Mongoose Rich and Old Bear, who are the gun frea-, er experts, on the reloading question. I'd leave at three rounds for consistency, though.

The short answer is that Strong Heroes get the full BAB progression because they get that in d20 modern which the book is based on, and while we'll make changes in the OGL series to fit the genre, we won't change stuff for no reason.

I was tempted to give the fast hero the full BAB progression, but Dexterity is already a very strong stat in the OGLWW system.
 
Okay, my first comment is that I noticed the "Backing" talent in the genuine dude tree resets the character's wealth back to "Wealthy." Can I assume that means the character's wealth is set to "Well Off"? Also, I noticed that Miner vocation is missing the Wealth rating.

I couldn't find guidelines for starting wealth for characters anywhere in the rules. (The general wealth rules are excellent, by the way.) Are any present?

If they're not, I'm wondering what others think may be the best way to calculate a character's starting wealth. I added up some supplies, including a sidearm, a long arm, some basic supplies, a light horse and a saddle, which came to about $130, so I'm using $130-150 as the outfitting price for a character.

So, that said, here are the options I've come up with so far. All of the values are based on the character's vocation-stated Wealth:

1. Give the character half the "maximum money" value to start.

2. Give the character the full "maximum money" value to start.

3. Allow the character 10 "Spending Money" rolls, representing about 6 months' savings.

4. Allow the character 20 "Spending Money" rolls, representing about a year's savings.

Using the Poor character as an example, option 1 provides the character $100, option 2 $200, option 3 about $70 (on average), and option 4 about $140 (on average).

I'm inclined to go with option 4, but that means average wealth characters would have about $690 to spend, and Well-Off characters would have close to $1,400 on average.

I'm going to do a little more research into this, going vocation-by-vocation to see the effects of my options on each one, but I was looking for a little input from the designers and other players.

Thanks for any help you all can provide. :)

Davy
 
Miners start out Poor.

Yeah, Backing restores the character's wealth to Well Off. Oops.

Starting equipment's an interesting one. My general attitude in design was to let the players pick whatever basic equipment they imagined their character having - a rifle, sidearm or two, and a few basic bits and pieces. Quick, simple but it does rely on the players not saying 'I imagine my character having a cannon and a private train.' :)

I really like the 'year's worth of wealth rolls' idea. Hmm. I'll add the question to my errata list, but I might borrow that solution if you don't mind. :)
 
Thanks for the quick response, Gar. :) Feel free to lift as you see fit. :D

I suspected miners weren't all that wealthy, but I didn't want to make an incorrect assumption. ;)

I'll still look at the vocations, to see how starting wealth will affect them, and I'll post my findings.
 
Doh! That was me, just above. :p Oops. :)

One other thought that just crossed my mind, that if you do include using either 6-months' or 1-year's worth of weatlh rolls, you may also want to state that the player can just take the average for his wealth level (for those that don't want to roll 36 or 72d20 :) ).
 
Okay, I went through and looked at the various professions and came to the conclusion that 20 wealth rolls would be the best way to simulate the character's starting assets.

Now, three professions have variable starting wealth: Dude, Cowboy, Lawman.

For the Dude profession, I decided on a d20 roll for GMs who don't wish to assign the character's wealth themselves. The resulting wealth would be:

Poor (1-5), Average (6-10), Well-Off (11-15), Rich (16-18), Very Rich (19-20)

This doesn't put Rick or Very Rich results ridiculously out of reach, but also keeps them in a single quartile.

For the Cowboy profession, I did a little research before working out the mechanics. Cattle drives generally lasted three months from Texas to KC/Topeka. From that information, I figured that there'd be a buffer on each side (gathering and cutting the herd, controlling the herd before they're turned over to the buyer, etc.) and chose a month in front and back. Also, when on the trail, cowboys were paid between $40-100 a month (depending on their position), which technically puts them in the Average category, but I decided to stick with Well-Off, as presented in the rulebook.

So, from that information, I went with the cowboy being Well-Off from May-September, and either Struggling (1-4) or Penniless (5-6) from October-April (d6).

The lawman profession is pretty easy, since the type of town determines which wealth range the character will have. For safer towns, I used a 1-3 (on a d6) means the lawman is Poor, and 4-6 for Average. For the tougher towns, 1-4 is Well-Off and 5-6 is Rich. Again, this is only if the GM doesn't want to assign the character's wealth.

Comments, questions?
 
Mongoose Gar said:
I'll defer to Mongoose Rich and Old Bear, who are the gun frea-, er experts, on the reloading question. I'd leave at three rounds for consistency, though.

Even for the cap and ball weapons?
 
I must be missing it somewhere, but on the Longarms table, several carbines have the number of shots listed as 1*, but I cannot find reference to what the * represents.

Could someone point me to the appropriate page?

Regards,
Larry
 
I wonder if the * next to the Springfield is a mistake?
I notice that all the other asterisks are beside older, muzzle-loading weapons, though the significance remains unclear. Certainly, there's nothing in the individual weapon's write-ups that explains its presence.
A puzzler and no mistake.
 
Daddy Dragon said:
I must be missing it somewhere, but on the Longarms table, several carbines have the number of shots listed as 1*, but I cannot find reference to what the * represents.

I assumed it was there to indicate that the weapon had special rules - either a slow reload time (muskets and so on) or could be fired from horseback with a reduced penalty (a feature of carbines).
 
I agree with you, Grimalkin, the asterisk obviously denotes a qualifying piece of text elsewhere, but where?
Still with guns - am I the only one who finds the fanning rules to be ridiculously clunky?
By my reckoning a character with high dex and a good attack bonus can loose off five successful shots in a round, thereby provoking 25 dice rolls before another player gets a look in - zoinks!
 
I'm interested in trying this and looking at it, being a long time fan of old classic Westerns from John Wayne to Clint Eastwood style movies.

How well does it play d20 style? Does it fit the era/moods/themes of good ole classics like Outlaw Josey Wales, Hang 'Em High, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly etc...?

Anyone here playing it much?
 
Unfortunately, I haven't had the chance to run anything with it; I'm still working on converting my Boot Hill characters in my Silversmith, AZ campaign over to d20.
 
Davy Jones said:
Unfortunately, I haven't had the chance to run anything with it; I'm still working on converting my Boot Hill characters in my Silversmith, AZ campaign over to d20.

I'm working on getting a party together to start a Wild West game on the same message board I run my Conan game on currently.

Anyone interested, check out this thread.. "When the west was wild.."

http://online-roleplaying.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3875
 
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