Sunday 30 December 2012

Equipment, races, hero classes, and probabilties

+Josh Tapley added a comment on one of my earlier posts about adding racial modifiers to some of the heroes:

"Thanks for the response, and a great point. I've been thinking about minor pluses for most things.   Like -1 Melee / +1 Ranged for a halfling."

I hadn't thought about racial bonuses before, but it's obviously easily done in the style of the equipment cards that the heroes are given at the end of the Tomb of the Lost King adventure.

But before we get too deep into discussion, let me just lay out a few of the basic mechanics on which Hero Kids is built:

•   Ranged attack distance is longer than a hero/monster can move in one move action
•   Magic attack distance is equal to the distance that a hero/monster can move in one move action
•   Heroes (generally) attack with at least two dice, and can usually also increase this to three dice in specific circumstances
•   Enemies generally have only one or two dice for their armor defense

Back on my Heroes Against Darkness blog I ran the probabilities for the opposed dice pool mechanic on which Hero Kids is based.

Here are the results for the opposed checks, with ties resolved in favor of the attacker.   The bolded areas show the expected probabilities for heroes attacking monsters, while the italicized probabilities show what happens when the heroes get up to four six-sided dice for their attacks.

Attacker's pool
(down the left)
1d6 2d6 3d6 4d6
1d6 58% 42% 34% 30%
2d6 75% 61% 53% 48%
3d6 83% 72% 65% 60%
4d6 88% 79% 73% 69%
5d6 91% 84% 79% 75%
6d6 93% 87% 83% 80%

As you can see from the probabilities, Hero Kids is quite generous in that the kids' heroes are generally successful in their attacks ~60%-~80% of the time.   The 61% success probability represents a hero's normal attack (two dice) against a strong enemy (an enemy with two dice for armor).   At the other end of the scale, the 83% success probability represents a hero's strong attack (three dice) against a weak enemy (one with only one dice for armor).   So far none of the enemies in Hero Kids have three dice for armor, however the ghost at the end of Tomb of the Lost King can only be hit with a natural six.

Increasing the heroes' attacks to four dice increases these probabilities to 88% against weak enemies and 79% against strong enemies.

At this point you're probably asking; "What is the point of all of this discussion of probabilities and mechanics?"   My point is basically that offering a flat +1/-1 dice for a racial bonus is a significant increase in the already high likelihood of success for the heroes' attacks.

With this in mind, I would recommend against offering a flat +1/-1 bonus for racial modifiers as these skew the probabilities too far in favor of the players, and lead directly to the sort of min-maxing that they're too young to have to endure... :-)

Instead, I would recommend coming up with situational bonuses that reflect the race's strengths and weaknesses (or just their strengths) or intermittent bonuses that the players can activate sometimes.   Here are some ideas:

•   If you've been attacked by two enemies since your last turn, you can attack with 1 extra dice.
•   You can move up to 5 squares in your move action.
•   Once per adventure you can ignore 1 damage.
•   Once per encounter you can swap places with an adjacent enemy.
•   You are sneaky and gain 1 extra dice when hiding.

All of these examples offer situational benefits, rather than flat bonuses.   They reward players who are paying attention, and they prevent excessive power creep in the game.

"I also saw that you added some magical equipment in the modules, which is something that I was planning to do as well."

Persistent equipment was something that came up in the playtesting, but it wasn't until one of the later adventures that I managed to include it in a meaningful way.   As I've discussed above, I've avoided flat bonuses for the equipment and favored situational bonuses which help the players, such as in these examples:

•   Once per encounter you can reroll 1 dice of an attack or defense.
•   Once per adventure you can add 1 damage when you make a successful melee attack.
•   The first time in each encounter that this weapon hits with a melee attack it deals 1 extra damage.

Let me know if you've got any ideas for more equipment with cool abilities.

"Do you have any forums setup to talk/share custom character classes?"

While I don't have a forum set up, there is a thread for Hero Kids over on RPGnet:

[Hero Kids] A D&D-like fantasy RPG for 4 to 10 year olds

I think I've covered most of the mechanical distributions of dice using the guidelines for creating heroes with the four dice method (page 17 of the PDF rules).   However, there's plenty of room to explore in the Special Actions and Bonus Abilities, as well as the possibility of introducing heroes with less or more health to compensate for having more (or less) dice to distribute for their abilities.   For example, a hero might have only two health levels (Hurt and KO) but would have five dice to distribute for their abilities (remembering that the first dice in magic and ranged abilities costs two dice).

Feel free to discuss hero ideas over on RPGnet (make a new thread if you like), or even here on the blog.

Tuesday 25 December 2012

Printer friendly PDFs uploaded

Following a request from +Stephen Farquhar, I've updated all of the Hero Kids rules and adventures to include printer friendly versions along with the normal PDFs (which feature my patented parchment background).


If you've already downloaded your PDFs, you can download them again from DriveThruRPG and you'll get the new Printer Friendly PDFs alongside the normal versions.

Monday 17 December 2012

Answering some Hero Kids questions

Over at Google+ (where I lair) Stephen Farquhar posted a fairly long write-up and a few questions about Hero Kids.   I answered them there, but I think it's worth reposting here for the non-Plusers.

Stephen's original post (my responses follow):



Hero Kids.   TLDR: It was good.

This is a first on many fronts:
First time I have GM'd in 25 years.   First time I have RPG'd in 25 years.   First time my kids have ever played pencil-and-dice RPG.

Players: 10 yo Girl played a Rogue.   6yo boy played a Knight.   Mum played healer so the kids could take the battle focus.

Comments: We played the very simple and enjoyable first scenario Basement O' Rats and it was a great introductory setting for both me and them to get into the swing of things.   The professionalism of the presentation of the scenarios was a major contributor: good maps, good environment descriptions targetted for the kids amusement (they didn't believe me that the text actually read "and the whole place smells like a giant rat’s toilet." and I had to show them.)

Minor balance issues:
The Knight seemed both underpowered and indestructible with 3 dice of armour - looking to test this in a more advanced scenario.
The Healer, with 2 dice of Searing Light, killed almost every rat she attacked, which is a bit of downer for the kids who only had 1 dice of attack.   We made the Healer (Mum) always attack last, and always healed instead of attacking, if that was an option.

PROs: All good, however I reduced the number of rats.   Being the first game, the gameplay was a little slow and we ended up taking almost 2 hrs.

CONs: These aren't really cons, more just things I had to deal with:
- Should I reroll initiative at the commencement of each turn? This was relevant because it could seem that the wording of some abilities make them conditional on whether or not the player had been attacked this turn or not.   e.g.   The Knight's Strikeback Special attack which reads: If an enemy has attacked you since your last turn, you can attack that enemy with 1 extra dice.   If heroes gained first initiative at the start of a battle, and that initiative is maintained through every turn of the battle, then it might seem that this attack can never be used.   The difference though is interpretation of "since your last turn" as opposed to "since the last turn." We played the rule to be the former rather than the latter.

- Should I roll for player attack/move order during the turn, or should I let the players decide, or should all attack be considered simultaneous? This question arose when considering the Warrior Bonus ability Teamwork: Gain 1 extra dice to attacks against targets than an ally attacked since your last turn.

How did I deal with these: Hey, we're playing with kids! We winged it and just used abilities when it seemed appropriate and I frequently manoeuvred bad rats into convenient positions for the hero's to inflict maximum fun damage.

Recommendations:
1.   Create some example clarifications on how to treat scenarios above.
2.   Clarify the Ability Test (p.15) - it's not clear on initial reading that a number has to be rolled higher than one of the difficulty numbers (4,5, or 6), or if it's meant to be equal-to or higher, or just higher.
3.   Create scenario PDFs, especially maps and character sheets, that don't have background shading.   Printing all that yellow background was murder on my ink cartridges.

Conclusions: We can't wait to play the next scenario!




Thanks for the long post with great feedback.   I've tried to answer your questions and observations below.

"The Knight seemed both underpowered and indestructible with 3 dice of armour - looking to test this in a more advanced scenario."
For those reading at home, all of the characters have (basically) four dice shared amongst their melee, ranged, magic, and armor characteristics.   When creating characters (as opposed to using the pre-gens), the first dice in ranged and magic costs two dice, but all of the rest cost one.   So the Knight has only one dice for melee attacks, but three dice for armor, which means that he trades off attack power for excellent defenses.   The opposite of the Knight is the Brute, who has three dice for melee attacks but only one dice for armor.
The Knight is a character that requires some attention to play.   He can gain an extra melee dice when using Strikeback Attack to hit an enemy that has attacked him.   His combination of three armor dice and his Defender ability (the Knight can choose to take damage dealt to an adjacent ally) means that he is usually able to choose when he takes damage.   So, yes he is nigh-invulnerable but not usually very powerful when attacking unless retaliating against an enemy attack.

"The Healer, with 2 dice of Searing Light, killed almost every rat she attacked, which is a bit of downer for the kids who only had 1 dice of attack.   We made the Healer (Mum) always attack last, and always healed instead of attacking, if that was an option."
I think the choice of both the Rogue and the Knight for the kids is tricky, because they both only have one dice for attacks.   However, as explained above, both of these characters have ways of gaining an extra dice to attacks.   In the case of the Rogue, they can gain an extra dice to both melee and ranged attacks by attacking an enemy that has been attacked by an ally.
The healer is a good support character, but they can end up spending every turn healing their allies.

"All good, however I reduced the number of rats.   Being the first game, the gameplay was a little slow and we ended up taking almost 2 hrs."
If the game is going slow, reducing the number of enemies is always a good idea.   Once you've got three or four players the adventures can get long.

"Should I reroll initiative at the commencement of each turn? This was relevant because it could seem that the wording of some abilities make them conditional on whether or not the player had been attacked this turn or not."
Nope, once you've established the initiative you should just keep running around the table in the same order.   Sometimes you'll run into situations where players will want to hold their actions to do something after another character, but you can wing that.

"The Knight's Strikeback Special Attack which reads: If an enemy has attacked you since your last turn, you can attack that enemy with 1 extra dice.   If heroes gained first initiative at the start of a battle, and that initiative is maintained through every turn of the battle, then it might seem that this attack can never be used.   The difference though is interpretation of "since your last turn" as opposed to "since the last turn." We played the rule to be the former rather than the latter."
Yes, you interpreted this correctly.   The key phrase here is 'since _your_ last turn.   So if that character has been attacked since they last had a turn, they can attack with an extra dice.   Obviously this can't be activated if the Knight has initiative and is acting before the enemies, but that's a small price to pay! :-)

"Should I roll for player attack/move order during the turn, or should I let the players decide, or should all attack be considered simultaneous? This question arose when considering the Warrior Bonus ability Teamwork: Gain 1 extra dice to attacks against targets than an ally attacked since your last turn."
As I mentioned above, I only do initiative once, and then let it stand through the whole combat.   Basically, I use initiative to determine whether I go first or the players.   Once that's established, I go around the table clockwise for each round, starting with whoever has initiative.   I don't do individual initiative for the players or the monsters, only group initiative.
However, as you mention there are instances when players want their characters to act out of initiative order to gain some advantage.   When that happens I just temporarily switch them in the order to let them achieve their tactical goal.   This can happen when a character like the Rogue gains an advantage attacking an enemy _after_ another character has attacked it, but neither of them have attacked that enemy yet and the initiative or table order would normally have the Rogue attacking before the other character (thus not getting the bonus dice).
Don't forget, you don't have to play to this level of tactics.   Simply choose the Warrior, Warlock, or Hunter and the combat tactics are greatly simplified while offering relatively powerful attacks.

"Clarify the Ability Test (p.15) - it's not clear on initial reading that a number has to be rolled higher than one of the difficulty numbers (4,5, or 6), or if it's meant to be equal-to or higher, or just higher."
My fault.   This should specify that the ability tests are be *equal to or higher*, like attacks (otherwise you could never beat a difficulty of 6).

"Create scenario PDFs, especially maps and character sheets, that don't have background shading.   Printing all that yellow background was murder on my ink cartridges."
Sorry about that.   I'll see what I can do in the future for 'printable' versions of the PDFs.

Sunday 16 December 2012

New adventure - The Lost Village

A new Hero Kids adventure is now available:

On the eve of another harsh winter, the kids are sent on a journey to the village of Willowsdell to to determine why their autumn produce wagons have not arrived in Rivenshore.   Can the kids make it to the distant outpost and discover what has happened to the lost village?
•  Adventure with 9 encounters and 5 new encounter maps
•  Includes a 8 new monsters to add you your kids' adventures, including a full sets of brigands and lizardkin


Here's the link to DriveThruRPG:

Hero Kids - Adventure - The Lost Village

I wanted to get this adventure out for Teach Your Kids to Game Week, but it turned out it was bigger than I planned, and took longer to get done.   The previous adventures have been about 20 pages long, but this one's a whopping 32 pages!   The Lost Village has more emphasis on exploration and role-playing while still offering plenty of opportunities to beat up some nasties!

By the way, I'm not sure if I ever mentioned this, but most of the encounter maps in Hero Kids are modular, so you can mix and match them to create your own adventures.

Friday 14 December 2012

Hero Kids 50% off for 24 hours!

I've teamed up with Zachary at TheRPGSite to offer a Christmas discount on Hero Kids.

For the next 24 hours the voucher link at TheRPGSite gets you the Hero Kids - Ultimate PDF Bundle for 50% off, bringing it down to just $5.99 (in your American dollars)!

Bargain get:

TheRPGSite Advent Discount Thread

Here's the direct link to the discount:

50% off Hero Kids at DriveThruRPG

Don't forget, the Hero Kids - Ultimate PDF Bundle comes with a 50% discount on the print version of the Hero Kids - Fantasy RPG, so there's no better time to buy Hero Kids for yourself or your kids!

Wednesday 5 December 2012

Hero Kids hero cards in German

With great gratitude to for the translations, the hero cards for Hero Kids are now available in German (and FREE) on DriveThruRPG!

Hero Kids hero cards in German at DriveThruRPG


If anyone else on these here internets has another language they can supply translations for, then drop me an email and I'll work up another set of hero cards.