The Complete Works Of Zorin Greystar

Part 3

That’s The One With Terry Silver

Man, He Went From Ridiculously Over-the-Top to Scarily Sociopathic In Cobra Kai, Didn’t He?

Wait, This Isn’t Another Cobra Kai Piece! What Am I Doing Again?

I shall begin with a digression. I’ve got like four different editing tools for WordPress, and they all suck different kinds of ass. This one, for example, lets me pick from Google Fonts, and displays them in preview, but NOT in the editor! Another one renders them in the editor, but not on the page! And I really like ‘drop caps’ to open a major section, but the ‘classic’ editors don’t support them, and the ones that do are fuckin’ Gutenberg, which after, what, five years?, is still utterly terrible in every way. I know enough CSS to do some Cool Shit, but what I don’t know is where I’m supposed to stick it… er… enter it… in a convenient way, and if I go down the rabbit hole of finding out, I won’t write this article, disappointing 1d10-1 readers!

Eh? This article? It’s a continuation of my walkthrough of the 1984 unofficial D&D supplement, the Complete Works of Zorin Greystar, Book One (of One). The first part is here, the second part is here, and the third part is what you’re reading right now.

The Greystar Experience

To finish up from last time, there are some rules for “zeroeth level” characters. This has always been a semi-popular sub-genre of D&D rules, which I am heavily divided over. (As opposed to, as Mrs. Slocombe might say, ‘I am unanimous in this!’) Why am I a horse divided against itself, unable to st… hm? It’s house? I think ‘horse’ makes more sense, actually. Either way, my division is thus:

On one hand, it’s good to get more of a sense of your character’s transition into independence, neither fully a student or apprentice, but not yet fully ready to be an adventurer.

On the other hand, first level characters were already pretty weak and likely to die, reducing their abilities even more meant the threats had to be beyond (or is that beneath?) trivial.

Dungeon Crawl Classics has a good system called ‘the funnel’, where you play four 0-level nobodies without a class to speak of, and if one of them survives, you get to make them a first level whatever-they-might-be-good at. And I understand D&D 5e sort-of does this, by making the XP to reach third level very low and holding off on some key character choices until then, so levels 1 and 2 are ‘training’ levels. 

In Zorin’s rules, 0th level fighters attack as, well, 0th level, casters have only a 50% chance to cast, thieves are at -10%, and so on. At least hit points and saves are not reduced. (It seems all 0-level classes attack as 0-level, so fighters really get the shaft. If I were using these rules, I’d have non-fighters attack as 0-level but with a -1 modifier to both attack and damage.)

Next, there are some rules to give thieves XP for using their thief abilities, and casters for casting, both in a ‘non-repetitive’ and/or ‘dangerous situation – no points for a thief constantly picking the same lock while safely resting at home, or a wizard casting ‘light’ every 10 minutes to annoy the sleeping dwarf. (Though upon reflection, I think that’s a “dangerous situation”.)

Lastly, we have, of course, another formula, to wit:

Let: A = Ability value
∆L = Level of individual enemy minus character level
X = Additional experience awarded
X = A2(∆L – 10)

Before we move on to combat, let’s look at some cool art!

I love it when I see an artist (possibly) paying homage to a classic, iconic image. There isn’t enough Wolverton-inspired art in RPGs, and he was to illustration what Lovecraft or Smith were to writing – a master of truly alien concepts, of things never seen or imagined before. (And taking inspiration from prior art, especially iconic pieces, is not plagiarism or ‘stealing’. All creation builds on prior creation. It’s only ‘stealing’ when it’s not an original work paying homage to an existing one, but a literal copy with minor editing (if that), or the output of an AI.) Honestly, being able to know which art is worth re-creating in your own image is a big part of being a good artist. Or writer, he says, thinking of his occasional ERB and Lovecraft pastiches.

Combat

This chapter is written from the point-of-view of “Lord Toran”, who opens with a complaint that under inferior rules systems, a wizard can cast a bunch of spells while a fighter can only swing his sword once, and that’s… just not how it worked. At all. The ‘segment’ casting system, which almost no one used as written, allowed only one spell per round, not ‘as many spells as you can fit into the segments’. Indeed, since you could not move and cast, a spell user would very often take two rounds to get into position to cast – during which time, of course, the tactical situation may have drastically changed.

Ask me how I know.

Nonetheless, the ‘problem’ will be ‘fixed’ here!

Fighters use ‘intervals’, which are equal to two 6-second segments. There are, thus, 5 intervals in a round, and 3 hogsheads to the barrel. And in case there was any doubt, a wizard can cast 2 1-segment spells in a single interval! This is apparently the way Zorin played, so, it’s not surprising they think wizards were over-powered! (They certainly could be, but not until very high levels — and even then, they could manage only one spell per round unless there were special case rules involved.)

Next follows a complex example of counting off segments and intervals, and then we get into a very interesting mechanic: You roll 2d20 to hit! One is the normal attack die, the other is the ‘luck’ die. If this is a 20, and the attack hits, it’s a critical hit; if it’s a 1, and the attack misses, it’s a fumble. I’m not sure how this actually changes the odds from ‘fumble on 1, crit on 20′ on a normal single die roll. It’s still a 5% chance, either way. Mathematics not Zathras’ skill — am I missing something? Ah, Zorin goes on to explain this: If you normally only hit on, say, a 19 or better, half your hits (using a single die) will be criticals, while if you would hit on a 10 or better, only 10% of your hits will be critical, so, this way, as a percentage of hits, you get criticals more often the better your odds of hitting in the first place. I dunno. It still seems to me it’s the same odds but with extra steps¹.

Fortunately, there’s a convenient chart explaining the order of combat:

(Oh, the other use of the Luck die is for what a later generation of non-tabletop gamers would call a ‘proc‘ – a special ability that only occurs some of the time, such as a sword that does an additional 1d6 fire damage 15% of the time it hits. )

Next there is a hit location chart, whose use is strictly voluntary – Toran explains that most hits should just subtract from your hit point pool, but if you want to aim for a specific location, you can. (Exceptional hits will also include locations, it seems.) In another attempt to justify the Luck Die, if you aim for a location (which will have a penalty) and hit, on a roll of 19 on the luck die, you get a 50% damage bonus. Again, this is oddly reminiscent of an MMO mechanic decades in the future — Final Fantasy 14’s “Direct Hit” mechanic, which is a chance to do 25% more damage, vs. the “Critical Hit” mechanic, which gives a bonus ranging from 40% to 64%. This idea of a step between ‘normal hit’ and ‘critical hit’ seems to appear and disappear over the years in TTRPG gaming. Hell, I’m playing with it in one of my many unfinished designs.

Let’s move on to…

Fumbles

And what better way to begin that with this?

%B = ([(S – W)² + S – W]/4) – P, rounding down

This formula gives the chance of your weapon breaking.  Glad we’ve got that sorted out. But if you don’t want to do the math, there’s a chart and… hoo, boy. Sorry, Zorin. You really needed someone to help with layout. 

Following this is a new saving throw system, that, skimming, adjusts the save based on the relative level of the caster and the target — a mechanic it would take until D&D 3.0 to implement, yet one that is eminently logical and should have been there from the get-go. However, there will be math. A lot of math.

Therein lies one of the main issue with not just Zorin, but countless similar supplements of the era: Their issues w/the default rules were valid. They brought up things such as weapons and armor being damaged, and spells scaling properly, and the effects of stress/fatigue on concentration, and so on, which were logical to consider in play. But all of these things add numerous calculations to each step, and bolting them on to simpler systems produces an asymmetric, wobbly stack of contradictory mechanics. If you want those kinds of details, you need them built into the system, even as options, from the baseline, such as GURPS and Hero do.

I don’t know if “asymmetric complexity” is a term anyone else uses, but to me, it’s part of the essence of Old School Non-Revisionism. Areas of particular interest to a designer, esp. one they had personal familiarity with, could get paragraphs, or even pages, of detailed rules, while other topics, as likely, or even more likely, to occur in play were handwaved with a single roll or “DM’s discretion”.

And my wife’s probably done with church now, so we end here.

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1: Pathfinder 2 uses ‘A natural 20 is a crit, but so is any hit succeeding by 10 or more’, and this results in meeting the same goal: A high level character will have a lot of critical successes in spells and skills against lower-level opponents. This has the effect of scaling combat and magic while keeping the number range tight, though still far greater than 5e’s very tiny range. Still, non-sarcastic props to Zorin for recognizing the problem and making a stab at solving it. Game design is an iterative process, played out over decades.