The Resistance Table

In Call of Cthulhu, there was a mechanic called the Resistance Roll, to be used when two characteristics were pitted against each other. It could represent shoving someone out of the way, STR vs SIZ, or an Investigator dying from poison, CON vs POT (the potency of the poison). A simple but clunky formula gave you the chance of success given the characteristics, but there was also a table that had the math already done for you for characteristics from 1 to 31 against characteristics also 1 through 31. The seventh edition of CoC did away with this mechanic, as did Delta Green, which replaced it with the opposed roll. So why do we care about this defunct mechanic? Lots of folks like to use CoC content in their DG games (including old DG content published for CoC) and the Resistance Roll is a tricky mechanic to convert. This post seeks to compare it to DG's opposed rolls and offer some conversion advice.

ANGUISHEDWIRES session one

Two years ago, I played in a dungeon crawl. It was pretty fun, despite us basically dying horribly every session. I asked my friend mellonbread for the dungeon's music tracks, printed off the floor maps, and hopped into the discord call. Our three musketeers were:

Márta Benedek, a devout Muslim from the ever-swelling ranks of the Benedek family (a female dominated clan who turns its daughters loose on the world as adventurers).

Octavia, an educated woman, both an alchemist and an arcanist.

K'rizzt Tri'Orgen, a "connoisseur" of dark elf culture so obsessed that he'd dyed and painted his skin to look just like them.

Guest Post: Making Special Operators Special

The Problem
For right or wrong the special operator profession in the Agent's Handbook has got rather a bad reputation. Put simply, when players show up with an operator there is a fear that they are nothing more than a disruptive murder machine. In my experience this fear is far from ungrounded and sadly quite a few special operators really are just one trick ponies. My suspicion is that much of this comes from the players' lack of knowledge about special operations and a misguided belief that they aren't allowed to make their characters anything more than gunmen while staying realistic.

The Solution
While often relegated to the role of action heroes or the cavalry that rushes in to save the main characters, America's special operations community do a lot more than just shoot people. In fact, after twenty years of unprecedented expansion, the range of missions that fall under 'special operations' is truly massive, as are the capabilities of the units tasked with them. This post will offer a few examples of how the reality of special operators can make your characters and your game more interesting.

A History of SWORDS (and how to fix them)

Chainmail, OD&D, and Magic Swords

One of the classic tropes of D&D, for good or ill, is the magic sword. A sword that is just magically better at doing its job of hurting and killing people. Maybe it has a few other properties like glowing blue in the presence of orcs or evaluating the "alignment" of the person holding it. But at the most basic level, it's a +1 sword. When you make an attack roll, you add an extra +1 to the D20 on top of whatever you would add from your class or ability scores, and you add an extra +1 to your damage roll. However, in OD&D, the latter was not the case and magic weapons only improved your chance to hit.

Unsurprisingly, this is not incredibly impactful. You're increasing your chance to hit by 5% and your damage by about 20%. However, players mostly care about their hit-chance as that's what they get immediate feedback on. Additionally, the damage boost is not as impressive as it might seem once you realize its goal, reducing the enemy's HP to zero. Against an enemy with 1 hit-die (HP rolled randomly), the chance for a single sword-stroke to slay them only increases by ~10% when you add +1 to your damage roll. This conflicts with the supposed idea of magic swords as presented by both Chainmail and OD&D. Each one was supposed to be a rare thing with its own personality and name. That's a level of importance that doesn't seem fitting of such a slight increase in fighting ability. However, this makes more sense when you realize that OD&D was initially supposed to use Chainmail's combat resolution system.

Guest Post - The Green Mafia

In just about every power structure one of the surest ways to get ahead is to have friends who are already ahead. An Ivy League education isn’t just valuable for its curriculum after all, it allows for networking with people who will almost certainly end up in positions of power. Similar patterns can be seen within specific organizations. In the British Army, The Rifles were represented among the highest ranked generals almost nine times as much as they were in the wider army, leading to their nickname — The Black Mafia. In the Russian Army a similar phenomenon, this time with the VDV, is commonly referred to as the Air Assault Mafia.

These are more often than not simply cases where implicit bias and favoritism enables a concentration of power, but Delta Green — both the Program and Outlaws — is a conspiracy made up of long term careerists and deeply driven to accrue power. So, why not a Green Mafia? 

Guest Post - Playing the Man Behind the Man

Spying, operating, burgling or any other ‘kinetic activity’ is usually thought of by players and the general public in a vacuum. Nine times out of ten when Bond or Bourne are doing their action movie thing they are doing it on their own. This makes for great cinema, but poor gameplay in a TTRPG. Luckily, the real world is not so unilateral, analysts put together targeting packages on just about every objective that a ‘doer’ will try to achieve before they ever get into action and this can offer a Delta Green party some ideas on how to include the whole party.

This post uses the example of espionage to detail one way of how to include support characters in a social scene, but the same principle could be applied to just about anything. an analyst who has looked over a cult compound and determined the best approach could give a special operator a bonus to stealth during the raid, just as a psychiatrist might give a case officer a bonus in a social scene. This is not a be all, end all solution to making support characters on par with action men but simply aims to give them another tool.

The Glaakeen, an Old Threat for Delta Green

untitled 'doodle' by Asta Daily

In the Handler's Guide, in Glaaki's part of the Great Old Ones chapter, we learn about the Glaakeen (or Servants of Glaaki as they're called in CoC). Most of them hang around Glaaki and presumably do his bidding, but they also show up in Glaaki cults, most famously under the leadership of the Fate's Belial/Robert Hubert in Holy War in Eyes Only. In fan content, they're well suited for the dual role of 'muscle' and 'ascended elders,' a bit like how Deep Ones act in some Cthulhu cults. We're given 'stats' for them in one of Glaaki's abilities in the Handler's Guide, but it is incomplete if you want to actually use them.

Simplifying B/X's Saving Throw Matrices

I like the old saving throws. To no one's surprise, my favorite incarnation of them lies within the pages of Moldvay's B/X. However, they're not perfect. They rely on a series of tables that aren't the easiest to reference quickly. It's not uncommon for one's eyes to slip and read off the wrong number. This is more of an issue for the Dungeon Master than the player, but it's not the primary problem: the saving throw progressions aren't smooth.

"But Top Hat," I hear you say, "why does that even matter?" I will admit, it's a bit of an obsessive mathematical yearning but it's in contrast to almost all of the rest of the game's mechanics. HP progression is smooth, each level, you get more HP. Spells and spell slots are smooth, barring a few levels where you get multiple at once, you get a new spell slot each level. THAC0...okay THAC0 isn't quite as smooth but it's still smoother than saving throws. Thief skills go up by 1% or 5% each level. A cleric gets incrementally better at turning each level. In contrast to that, saving throws do nothing for three (or five if you're unlucky enough to be a Magic-User) and then improve by several points all at once. And the rate of advancement doesn't even hold constant. It's a mess!