HP in the Mutant Future

Hit Points in D&D are a nebulous concept, clearly not mapped directly to how much physical damage a character could withstand (or a mid to high level fighter could withstand more physical damage than most dinosaurs!). 

Gary Gygax has a great explanation of HP in the AD&D 1e DM's Guide (page 82).  An excerpt:

"It is quite unreasonable to assume that as a character gains levels of ability in his or her class that a corresponding gain in actual ability to sustain physical damage takes place... Why then the increase in hit points?  Because these reflect both the actual physical ability of the character to withstand damage - as indicated by constitution bonuses - and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations...  Each hit scored upon the character does only a small amount of actual physical harm - the sword thrust that would have run a 1st level fighter through the heart merely grazes the character due to the fighter's exceptional skill, luck, and sixth sense ability which caused movement to avoid the attack at just the right moment."

HP seem to be something entirely different in Mutant Future.  I say this for two reasons - one, at character generation they are directly tied to the physical makeup of a character as expressed by the Constitution score (starting HP are 1d6 or 1d8 per point of CON), and two, they do not increase as the character levels up (or increase very rarely and only when CON increases in the random leveling up process). 

I have been thinking about HP in Mutant Future ever since I commented on The Savage Afterworld's
Savage Managerie: Equort post that 3 HD seemed like too few for an incredibly strong, horse sized reptilian creature.  Sniderman (Savage Afterworld Blogmeister) pointed out that Mutant Future's Warhorse has 3 HD, which he used as a starting point for the Equort.  Opening up my copy of Labyrinth Lord, I realized that the statistics for all three horses in Mutant Future were lifted directly from Labyrinth Lord with no changes made.

This just seems wrong to me.  Lets compare Labyrinth Lord and Mutant Future for a second.  HP in Labyrinth Lord mean the same thing as they do in D&D.  The most that a character's physical makeup as expressed by attributes can effect HP in Labyrinth Lord is + or -3 HP a level.  Lets take two hypothetical 1st level fighters - one with a 3 CON and one with an 18, and assume that both have maximum HP.  Their HP would be 5 and 11, respectively.  The + or - 3 HP from CON illustrates the physical component of HP, and the rest has to be the skill of dodging (made more obvious when you realize that a fighter has more of these non-physically related HP than any other class, reflecting greater skills at dodging injury). 

Now lets look at two hypothetical Mutant Future characters, again with a 3 CON and an 18 CON and max HP, and we see a radical difference.  The 3 CON character has 18 HP and the 18 CON character has 108 HP!  There is no skill of avoiding injury component here, as there are no classes and the only way HP can increase is if your CON attribute actually is increased by leveling up.

All this leads me to the conclusion that HP in Mutant Future are actually a measure of how much physical damage and exertion a character can take.  The poor character reduced to 1 HP should be a bloody mess, possibly with broken bones, certainly barely able to move around.  The laser blast that does 45 damage should probably leave a hole in the mutant's body.  With no healing magic available, several characters have been temporarily retired in my Mutant Future game while they rest and heal up over the course of several weeks of game time. 

The most interesting ramification of this understanding of HP in the Mutant Future has been with mutant plant characters that posesses the Chameleon Metamorph mutation.  This enables them to change their form into that of any other plant, provided their total mass stays the same.  Bozko was the first character (and the only one still active) in my campaign with this mutation, and he has came up with many creative uses of it - we have collaboratively determined that he can use pieces of his own body as ranged ammunition if he sacrifices HP, so he could, for instance, turn a section of his body into a sharp wooden branch and break it off and hurl it at someone at a HP cost determined by Mutant Lord Me.  He has used this to great advantage, shaking off a few HP worth of dandelion seed tufts to form chaff to disrupt laser targeting, for instance. 

This has also led to the understanding that as he is damaged, he is literally losing pieces of himself to the point that if he was reduced to 1 HP, he would only be a tiny little blob of plant matter until he slowly regrew his body!  This works because we had already decided that a mutant plant with the Chameleon Metamorph ability did not have a central brain or nervous system, because the plant maintained consciousness even when in such radically different forms as a sheet of algae covering a pond or a tall pine tree.  Bozko's player ran with this idea and decided that each cell of his body had all of his knowledge and memories encoded into its genetic structure, so as long as any little piece of him survived he was still sentient and could eventually regrow himself.

As a Mutant Lord, deciding that HP = Physical Damage has made it very easy and exciting to narrate events in combat.  No longer do I have to restrain from describing horrendous wounds because HP are a representation of how skilled a character is at dodging; if someone takes a lot of damage, they are physically messed up.  End of story.  When Beyonce was reduced to 3 HP in a flame thrower attack, her body was horribly burned and her face became a mass of scar tissue.

2e Tuesday - Sleeths & Fleshins

That's right, Gamma World 2d edition... what 2e did you think I meant?  Every Tuesday I will pick one of my favorite monsters from the fully illustrated bestiary included in the 2d edition Gamma World Basic Rules Booklet and convert it to Mutant Future.  Today's monsters are...

Sleeths (Seer Lizards) & Fleshins (Flying Fish) 

Sleeths:

No. Enc: 1d10

Alignment:  Lawful

Movement: 120' (40')

Armor Class: 4

Hit Dice: 18

Attacks: 1 (weapon)

Damage:  By Weapon Type

Save:  L12

Morale: 5

Hoard Class: IX

These friendly, highly intelligent bipedal lizard men are a welcome sight to the Mutant Future traveler.  They live in peaceful, scholarly groups that typically befriend strangers and offer them whatever hospitality they can (although they will use their ability to foresee the future to avoid any potentially hostile wanderers).  They have the ability to possess one plant within 45 feet as per the Possession mutation, except there is no mental attack roll required and the ability can only be used once per day.  In addition to the listed mutations, each Sleeth will have one more beneficial Mental Mutation.

Mutations:  Precognition, Neural Telepathy, Body Adjustment, Special (plant control) + one beneficial mental mutation

Fleshins:

No. Enc: 1-2

Alignment:  Chaotic

Movement: 240' (80')

Armor Class: 7

Hit Dice: 6

Attacks: 1 (spines)

Damage:  Contact Poison, Poison Class 15 (Death/4d6 damage)

Save:  L4

Morale: 5

Hoard Class: None (there may be some random discarded treasure on the bottom of the body of water that the Fleshins hunt in, but Fleshins do not actually carry any treasure nor do they accumulate it in the crevices that they lay their eggs in.

Luckily for most mutant PCs, these six foot long flying fish are usually only found in large bodies of water.  They can glide for long distances with their wing-like fins, effectively staying airborne for as long as they want when they use thermals to regain elevation lost while gliding.  They are dangerous carnivores that rely on their deadly spines to bring down their prey.  They also possess the unique ability to assume the form of a Sleeth, and in this form they gain all of the Sleeth's mutations.  They possess only an animal intelligence, so anyone who has experience with the quick thinking, peace-loving Sleeth should be able to recognize that something is wrong when they encounter a Fleshin in its Sleeth form.

Mutations:  Sleeth Form: Precognition, Neural Telepathy, Body Adjustment, Special (plant control) + one beneficial mental mutation

Mice in Mech Suits

Here are the Mice in Mech Suits mech combat rules; this is a public beta playtest, if you download these and use them, please give me feeback!  These rules work much better for at least two on two combats, and I have ran them with up to 16 total combatants.  This is a stand alone game, and it pretty much ignores the mech pilots (who are mutated mice from the Mutant Future!).

One cool thing about these rules is that the Mechs are roughly human sized, so they could easily be used as robotic adversaries for Mutant Future or any other edition of D&D, really.  They are not so overpowered as to completely unbalance a normal game if they are introduced.  For Mutant Future, small mutant animals or mutants with the Density Alteration, Self mutation could easily pilot them.  The To Hit chart in the stand alone rules section is basically the to hit probabilities of a 5th level Mutant Future character, so you could adjust those numbers if you want the mech to be a more ferocious combatant.

In my campaign, the players have finally convinced King Arthur and the Mice of the Round Table to help in their cause, so a contingent of these mechs will join them if requested to sortie against the Knights of Genetic Purity or Julius Corple and his henchmen.  This definitely gives the party some sorely needed muscle, because up till now, they have been running around like chickens with their heads cut off!

Updated the Guns Post

I just added the alien gun wielded by the Dog Boys to the guns post.  Of course, at this point the players have already exhausted the alien worm ammo and the alien web ammo, but they still have homing darts, flamethrower fuel and the regular energy blasts to work with.

Oh, and I just realized I forgot to do a 2e Tuesday post this week.  Oh well.  Catch ya next week, Gamma World Critters!

Look out Mutant Past!

Tonight's Mutant Future session, something a long time coming finally happened; a character with the Plane Shift mutation finally used it!  The text of this mutation states that "This mutation grants the power to visit realities in other dimensions... The mutant can only choose to open doors to worlds he has visited before. Otherwise, the doorway leads to a random world of the ML’s choice and design."  I have had a fun plan ready for this since the very beginning of the campaign, because one of the starting characters had the mutation.  Of course, he was only able to attend a few sessions and never ended up using the ability.  But with the deadly sessions of the last few weeks, we had several new characters and two of them have this ability!

My plan was that the first time someone used the Plane Shift ability, it would open a gateway to an alternate past in the same physical location on earth that the portal was opened.  The gate would lead to today's date in the present (the real present, Monday, January 11th 2010).  I figured that the only time the group would want to hop through a portal to a random destination was when they were running from something truly horrid and had no other chance to survive; I envisioned a group of wounded mutants suddenly appearing on Eugene's streets, and thought it would make a fun diversion for the week they were stranded in the Mutant Past before the ability could be used again.

As often happens in RPGs, the way things went down was far from how I had planned it.  After a lengthy meeting with the Mice of the Round Table, where King Arthur and his knights promised to assist in a campaign against Julius Corple and the Knights of Genetic Purity and Merlin told the interested members of the party that he would get a list of materials needed for the robot manufacturing plant to create powered armor for the characters, the party decided that the most pressing threat was Julius Corple.  This decision was aided by two things; the mice had just been invaded by Corple's dog boys and terminator bots, and Dataan's player was not in attendance (he has a serious grudge against the Knights of Genetic Purity and probably would have lobbied hard to make them the top priority).

The group piled into the jeep (all except Natas and his melted face, who rode on the back of Samantha, or "Stang" as she is nicknamed, a 22' long giant mutant wasp who is new to the party) and rolled over to the military complex.  They investigated the building where the formerly aggressive war chimps appeared to be holed up, and discovered that most of their number had succumbed to the FDF7 virus.  The mutated survivors were tending to the diseased and dying, and were patrolling the perimeter of the building as if they expected an imminent attack.  Blue, another new party member, has a special sense that allows him to smell emotional states by the pheromones that are emitted by a body in different mood which he used to detect that they were afraid of something.  He is also a precog, and used this ability to imagine himself hopping (he is a mutant kangaroo) into the building unarmed and attempting to parlay with them.  When he foresaw that they would not react violently, he did this in real time and discovered that their will had been largely broken by the devestating virus and a mysterious creature that had emerged from the military complex and had been slaughtering them one by one.  Now that the rest of the survivors and diseased members of the war chimps had clustered in this one building, the creature had been unable to pick off any more of them, but they were too terrified to leave.  Blue also learned that several of the first war chimps to survive the virus and gain mutations had cracked under the strain of the transformation and had fled off into the swamp never to be seen again.

Blue offered the party's assistance in killing the creature, recognizing that the war chimps could make valuable allies.  He picked their brains for as much information regarding the killer creature as they could give him, then got their permission to invite the rest of the party in.  The war chimps parted with some weaponry to assist the party (good thing to, because the group was out of grenades!  Lard Jeebus knows they love blowing stuff up, so I am sure the ten grenades and the couple of missile launchers that they got will get put to good use) and then sent them on their way with sincere wishes of good luck in their endeavor.  The war chimps had revealed that the creature had an iron will and had proven almost impossible to effect with mental mutations.  It moved with incredible speed and could leap a hundred feet in a single bound.  One of its arms ended in a deadly metal claw, and a tentacle-tongue emerged from this and entered the wound made by the claw to suck out the insides of its victim.  Its other arm was a long tentacle that it used to grapple its opponents.  An energy cannon mounted on its tentacle arm and poisoned quills that covered its head rounded out its formidable arsenal.

The creature only emerged from the complex at night, so the party hoped that by searching for it in the complex during daylight hours they might catch it napping.  Stang shuttled everyone up to the roof, and just as they were discussing strategy and how to best go about finding the beast, it burst through the roof and hurtled itself at Stang (who has the Prey Scent mutation which draws predators to her like sharks to blood in the water).  The following fight was brutal, and several party members (including Stang) were reduced to single digit HP in the first couple of rounds.  Only some lucky shots with the guns looted from the Dog Boys using the alien web ammunition kept it from completely annihilating the entire group.

This is what they were up against:  The 16' tall Xiticix Killer from the Rifts Lone Star World Book.

A few rounds in to the combat, the monstrosity had shredded the rest of the party's alien web ammo like so many spiderwebs and was about to commence with the devouring of the party from the inside out with its claw and tentacle-tongue.  Desperate, one member of the group emerged from behind the air vent where he had been hiding and knelt directly behind the killer, enlarging himself so that he came up to its knees.  Rok used his Plane Shift ability to open a gate directly behind the kneeling party member, and the rest of the group rushed the creature and pushed it over the kneeling party member and into the gate.  As it tumbled in, I told the party that they could see through the gate to what appeared to be the same location, but the rooftop was not in the middle of a swamp, instead being surrounded by dry ground, paved roads, cars driving and generally not a ruined post-apocalyptic landscape.  The beast attempted to drag Rok through the portal with it, but he managed to shut the portal on it, severing its tentacle and trapping the beast in an alternate reality.

Everyone realized that they had just unleashed a terrible killer into the present/Mutant Past.  A debate ensued as to whether or not the portal led to the actual past of the timeline that they presently inhabited, or if it led to an alternate past.  Some party members felt like they might have unwittingly caused the apocalypse that led to the Mutant Future and the world they knew today!  Blue used his precog ability to imagine Du Pont (the other mutant with the Plane Shift ability) opening up a portal to the same place (I ruled that now that Rok and Du Pont had seen through the portal, they could reliably open up a portal to that particular reality if they so desired) and himself looking through it.  He saw a scene of devastation, cars wrecked on the road and people fleeing as the creature slaughtered everyone within reach.

2e Tuesday - Kai Lins

That's right, Gamma World 2d edition... what 2e did you think I meant?  Every Tuesday I will pick one of my favorite monsters from the fully illustrated bestiary included in the 2d edition Gamma World Basic Rules Booklet and convert it to Mutant Future.  Today's monster is...

Kai Lins (Lizard Bushes)

No. Enc: 1d4

Alignment:  Neutral

Movement: 120' (40')

Armor Class: 5

Hit Dice: 9

Attacks: 1 (gamma eyes, 30' range)

Damage:  3d6 (radiation damage)

Save:  L5

Morale: 5

Hoard Class: none

This mobile plant is often confused with a large reptile, because it is covered in green scaly bark and runs around on two stalks that end in thorny pads.  It trails a bundle of roots that look like a tail when it is running, and uses these roots to feed by wrapping them around its victim and absorbing nutrients.  Kai Lins prefer to eat carrion because it is easier for their plant digestive juices to break down tissue that is already decomposing, but if there is no ready source of carrion they can hunt live prey effectively with their deadly mutations.  Interestingly, Kai Lins emit a pheromone that seems to attract dangerous predators, so often the main danger associated with a Kai Lin sighting is whatever mutant beast is currently tracking it!

Mutations:  Prey Scent, Energy-Retaining Cell Structure, Optic Emissions (Gamma Eyes) 

Hooray for mutant plant-lizards that attract deadly carnivores, shock you when you touch them and shoot radiation from their "eyes"!  Gotta love Gamma World!

Mice in Mech Suits group playtest

I just ran my Mutant Future group through a pretty epic playtest of the mech combat rules I have been working on.  Running 8 people through a large scale combat with three waves of attackers coming at them took longer than I had anticipated.  The one-on-one playtests that I ran the night before with my girlfriend where we each controlled two mechs and duked it out had been pretty fast and furious, but with such a large group I ditched the individual initiatives rolled every round in favor of just going round the circle, with all the players going then all the monsters under my control going.  This took one of the more interesting elements of my rules out of play; each mech has at least a 30 HP force field that refreshes at the start of its turn in combat, so when you roll initiative each round there is the possibility of the enemy getting to hit you to end a round, then you losing initiative and the enemy going again before your shields could refresh.  It also made movement less important, because you add your current movement to your initiative roll in my rules.  In my effort to save time with a larger group by ditching individual initiative each round I think I actually made the combat last longer!

Everyone still had a good time and the battle was a success; the mice turned back the invasion of the Dog Boys and other allies of Julius Corple (Terminator Bots, a War Gorilla, some alien tongue beasts, some alien "dogs" and a terrifying blob of alien acid).  We used my new Heroscape tiles and while I was getting some last minute prep work done I had my girlfriend and one of the other players set up the gameboard with instructions to include lots of elevation change, water and swamp tiles.  This is what they ended up with:

The terrain and cover ended up being very important - the trees and some serpent heroscape minis were mutant plants that attacked anyone coming into an adjacent square, which was used to great advantage by the players.  The long range weapons wielded by the Terminator Bots and the Dog Boys more or less pinned down a lot of the players behind cover, but two threw caution to the wind and ran up to engage some alien dogs in melee only to get their arms and legs blasted off in short order.  The combat hung in the balance when the third wave of attackers showed up - the War Gorilla charged into the middle of the battlefield, ready to wreak havoc, when James' mech grabbed it and threw it between two trees which subsequently hit it for a ton of damage, and then the next round Brent scored a critical hit with his mech's massive sword and nearly finished it off.  My big bad 300 HP monster ended up dying without getting to attack a single time because of some extremely lucky rolls on the part of the party, and the tide of battle turned from that moment on.  The alien acid blob did manage to cause some consternation as it melted both legs and one arm off of Danny's mech in one round, and exploded in a huge shower of acid that took out one of Brent's legs when it was finally destroyed a few rounds later.  While none of the party died, there were a lot of missing limbs (a function of the hit chart that is a part of my mech rules) and it definitely was not an easy combat.

Here I am, eyeballing line of sight for a Dog Boy sniper as it perched up on a tower picking off PCs:

Carter chose the Hulk to represent his knightly Mech, and promptly got pinned down in enemy territory and lost a leg and his sword arm - here he is charging across the bridge on his way to danger:

My girlfriend chose a winged Valkyrie to represent Maid Marion, her bandit mech:

She also gussied up the character sheets that I threw together for everyone before the combat started:

Mechs in high heels!  Why didn't I think of that?  She is wielding a vicious hairbrush in one hand and appears to have some terrifying ribbons and a daisy of doom!

The rules worked very well, and I will be posting the beta playtest version that we used tonight up on this blog in the next few days so that I can hopefully get some more feedback on it.  Right now it is a complete stand alone game with mech creation rules, a combat system and some pretty detailed tactical mini rules in 9 pages.