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Cairn-ish Content: Odd Math, Part 3

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 More questions need to be answered: How much does always attacking first do for you? How do Detachment rules affect matchups? (I'm saving the question about multiple attackers, since that will require me to do a little more programming before I'm ready, whereas these other questions can be answered pretty quickly with the tools I already have working.) DEX saves This one is quick: how much of an advantage does it give you if you can guarantee you'll go first? At the weak end of the spectrum, it's a 20% bump against an even match, and the benefit falls off to 10% at the opposite end of the spectrum. Armored opponents reduce the impact of going first, and the stronger you are to begin with, the less the DEX save matters. Both of those make sense: the longer a combat lasts, the less going first actually matters. I wanted to check the flip side too, though. If you're guaranteed to go second, how bad is that? There's some nice parity here. The result is almost the i...
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Cairn-ish Content: Odd Math, Part 2

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I'm back! My last entry on this subject was such a tease, and going the route of writing code to simulate combat odds was quite a rabbit-hole. (It's just the sort of thing that I can lose myself for hours on). In any case, the big revelation came from some helpful advice on Reddit (shoutout to u/south2012!) to use a Monte-Carlo method with simulated combats instead of a a pure-deterministic approach. That unlocked the ability to run simulations with completely arbitrary stats, and never run into the really thorny programming cases. Today, there are two questions I want to dive deeper on: If I can mechanically improve a character in just 1 way, what should I prefer? How much does impairing enemies and enhancing attacks shift the odds? Mechanical Improvements Now, Cairn isn't really about  mechanical advancement. Even so, Cairn has numbers, and they matter. Players will want to equip themselves to increase their odds of survival! The question though is what gets you the mos...
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Dungeon Room Index: Galleries

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"Galleries" are rooms intended for the display of objects. That may include true "art galleries" (displaying paintings, tapestries, etc.), statuaries (displaying statues ), or museums (displaying artifacts, bones, etc) Here are the rooms: On Display At it's most basic, a gallery exists because some creature wanted to show something off, or preserve something for a general audience; a gallery implies an at least moderately intelligent and social entity. Galleries are great rooms for showing off some flavor and lore ! Don't miss out on a fun opportunity to tease other parts of your world. (I for one take great pleasure in coming up with something fantastical to slap up on those walls.) If your galleries incorporate physical objects, then they're also a great place for handing out fun magical artifacts and the like! (I love to hide a genuinely useful or interesting artifacts in the midst of a bunch of junk and knick-knacks.) As you mig...
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Cairn-ish Content: Odd Math

I like Cairn . Into the Odd and it's children have been a breath of fresh air to me. I also like combat. The default assumption in Cairn about combat is generally "avoid it". Even so, as it's bound to come up sometimes, I would like to build up good intuitions for how the math shakes out. (For reasons I'll elaborate on later. But forget that for now, on to the goods.) Basics Let's start with a simple table of average dice output for each damage die: d4 d6 d8 d10 d12 Average 2.5 3.5 4.5 5.5 6.5 This is a well understood result: the average roll is about half the dice total (slightly better because numbers ) and when you increase the dice total by 2, you increase the average roll by 1. Nice! Armor The oft-cited conclusion based on the above result, however, is that in terms of averages, each point of Armor a defender adds is like red...
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Dungeon Room Index: Food Rooms

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So, "Food Rooms" is a pretty lame shorthand, but truthfully I can't think of a better one (without sounding pretentious, at least), so here we are. Kitchens, larders, breweries, and so on. "Rooms where food is created, prepared, consumed * , or stored". This entry is a bit shorter. Here are the rooms:
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Thank You! (10k)

I woke up today to find that this blog has now generated over 10,000 views, and within the last few days, my first entry in the Dungeon Room Index has gone over 1000 on it's own. I have no idea if that's "a lot" in the grand scheme of things--I couldn't begin to guess how many views the great blogs of the OSR rake in--but it's certainly more than I had imagined! So thank you for tuning in. I'm glad that it's providing value to someone. Have a great day!
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Dungeon Room Index: Prisons

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Sorry for the long gap; sometimes life has gotta life! Today's subject is Prisons (and company). Jail cells, oubliettes, torture chambers, execution chambers. That sort of thing.  Here are the rooms: "True" Dungeons Considering that the origin of the word "dungeon" comes from a kind of castle prison, it's only appropriate that at some point I should cover this milieu. Prisons are an interesting subject. Given how much of fantasy adventure gaming has grown beyond simple dungeon crawling--especially toward somewhat generic hero-adventure stories--I think they bring to fore a grimy underbelly of assumed medieval-esque fantasy. For that reason, some might avoid such a dungeon (ironically!). I can understand that. Even so, a prison is a deeply evocative kind of space! Using one provokes some questions: What was the purpose of imprisoning people here? Merely to protect victims? To actively punish? To reform? Are/were the prisoners criminal...
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