“Winners don’t do Drugs”
Some FBI Director possibly? (lol) Maybe it’s just in the type of media I consume, but use of drugs in combat is a pretty common trope in fiction, which isn’t terribly shocking given it’s a fairly common thing in our history. Sure, fighting stoned out of your mind isn’t a great tactical choice, but the right dosage or mixture can make someone a great deal more effective given the right nudge.
I haven’t posted in a while, and that’s due to the fact I’m working on two big faction articles simultaneously, while also messing around with reverse engineering a magick system and a couple other things. But sitting in the backlog was this mechanic, so I thought it should be presented in the meanwhile.
First and foremost, this procedure is not a replacement for roleplay (duh), but to be specific, I don’t care for mechanics that trivialize social interactions or make it a “button to speak good.
“There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles."
Paul Atreides Much like Firearms, psionics in D&D have this stigma around them, a very vocal group of people who think they don’t belong. My typical retort to those people is to tell them to browse Appendix N of any old D&D edition, and you’ll find psionics was quite a big part of the pulp fantasy that would inspire D&D.
Of all the classes, Thief receives probably the brunt of criticism regarding D&D’s early class design. I’ve even met some OD&D grognards who view the class as borderline heretical and excise the class entirely from their games, viewing it as a “forced niche.”
The point of this article is not to debate the merits of the thief class, which I believe it has - even if not mechanically, certainly archetypically - but that is a bit beyond the scope of this article.
Token Magic The name is a bit of a work in progress, as is the concept, but its place in a mechanical and cosmological context is pretty solid at this point. One of the design goals of this “magic system,” if you could call it that, was to backport some of the more classic OSR spells into my game system, Be Not Afraid.
Because the setting takes place in a modern-day world imposed upon by the supernatural and occult—and because traditional D&D magic doesn’t really fit into any modern practice or real belief structure, nor does it even much resemble its Vancian roots—I designed this system to lend the spells a degree of plausibility.
