Continuing with the prompts from d4 Caltrops’s d100 Table of Topics to Blog About, today I’m going to start going through some of the rules-oriented ones as they pertain to my Iron Fist of the Hobgoblin King setting. In our Sunday morning Ptolus game, we play things pretty much straight as written. At the moment, I’m considering building Iron Fist as a Shadowdark hack, so the following are modifications to Shadowdark’s core rules.

18 – Do you use “Critical Hits” or “Fumbles” in your games? What have they added? I don’t care for fumbles, it’s enough of a downbeat to automatically miss. Although now that I think about it, it might be nice (“nice”) to allow an enemy that you’re engaged with in melee to make a counterattack at disadvantage when you roll a 1 on a melee attack roll. The disadvantage is there to keep it from being completely punishing, but I like the narrative element that it lends to the attack roll.

I’m tempted to use exploding damage dice for weapons in Iron Fist. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, that means that when you roll the maximum possible value on a damage die, you roll again and add that to the total. This applies to all subsequent rolls as well. You should be able to kill someone with a well-placed dagger between the ribs regardless of what level they are, and daggers are particularly nasty as their d4 damage die gives them a higher potential for exploding damage.

This seems like it could spiral out of control quickly, but really, the average result for a d4 only increases from 2.5 to something like 3.3. For heavier weapons, the effect is lessened, as a d8 goes from 4.5 to 5.1. Despite this, I think exploding damage dice are effective at adding a perception of risk, lethality, and drama.

How would this work with the standard critical “roll the damage dice twice?” Well, you’d have a lot of dice in play that could potentially explode! As for spells, they’re powerful enough already, and you can easily imagine how the damage from a 4d6 fireball could get out of control.

All of this will have to get sorted out in playtesting. I’m thinking of running sessions of Iron Fist at whatever cons I go to over the next year or two. That should keep a fire lit under me to keep up with development.