Some Rambling

Played another game in Strigastadt on Friday that went pretty well, but a couple issues were highlighted:
1) My rules for First Aid are a bit broken
2) Treasure was... insufficient for the terrible risks involved

As a quick recap, I have First Aid working as a standard LotFP d6 skill (based off Logan Knight's Surgery rule), where failure means inflicting a point of damage and success healing equal to the number rolled, and you can only heal folks at or below 1 hp.

Thought it was pretty handy, but one of the players only sunk a single point into the skill... which, with the healer's bag, meant a 50/50 chance of helping or harming. I like the idea of being able to do damage on a failure, but as the rules stand it's not super helpful where you need it most: when characters are a point or two away from bleeding out. You shouldn't have to dump all your points into a skill before it becomes usable!

So, as a minor change: only failure rolls of 6 harm the patient... That should make it so even relatively unskilled folks have a decent enough chance of helping. I think the old way would work better for a game that's less brutal than Strigastadt, but using a standard LL dungeon stocking with LotFP means that my players don't need any extra help in killing off their characters!

The "HP goes down to negative 1/2 HD, you have a couple rounds before passing out" ended up being a bit fiddly too, and without GM fiat characters didn't have any way of taking more lasting injuries. Both these problems will be solved by using Goblin Punch's fantastic death and dismemberment table. It is elegant and works, I only wished I had discovered it earlier!

Treasure amounts took a bit to fix. My generator placed hoards according to suggested Labyrinth Lord stocking values for unguarded hoards. I figured I could extrapolate and just have those hoards appear wherever monsters lair and having it be close enough, but that ended up being VERY wrong... The average value for an unguarded hoard is something like 165 gp, whereas for a bandit hoard... average of 11,700 and an upper limit of 131,480 gp. Sweet baby Jesus! I mean, I know bandits are on the wealthy side, and lairs don't always have cash, but that's massive!

Anyhow, the generator now uses monster hoard types in generating their hoards so it's much more usable. I now know why progression seemed slow... I liked having their characters be short on cash though (I find it helps with the mindset of grubby gritty dungeon-crawling), so I'm going to reduce the monster treasure hoards to 1/2, give double XP for finding cash, and use carousing / squandering rules for getting more XP.

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