Monsters and Items

Monsters and items are small files. The difficulty is not writing them, it is placing them correctly against a combat system with no rolled damage.

The maths you are designing against

The standard delver has 12 hit points, defense 15, and deals 6 damage a hit. Damage is flat on both sides. So every monster reduces to two numbers a builder actually cares about:

• Swings to kill it: its maxHp divided by 6, rounded up
• Swings to kill the delver: 12 divided by its damage, rounded up

@Missing file has 8 hit points and deals 3: two swings to kill, four to be killed. Comfortable. @Missing file has 24 and deals 6: four swings to kill, two to be killed. Lethal without a fountain first.

defense sets how often those swings connect. The delver rolls 1d20 + MIGHT, so defense 11 is hit 65% of the time and defense 14 is hit 50%. Raising defense stretches a fight without making it deadlier; raising damage makes it deadlier without making it longer. They are different dials — reach for the right one.

Monster fields

Write behavior as instructions, not colour. "Does not pursue and does not initiate; stands motionless until something tries to pass it" changes how the fight plays. "Terrifying and relentless" does not.

Item fields

Four slots exist: weapon, armor, trinket, relic. An item declares one and fits nowhere else.

• damageBonus adds to every hit, from any slot.
• armorBonus adds to defense, from any slot.
• bonusStat plus bonusAmount raises one of the six while worn.
• rarity of cursed marks a trap. Nothing enforces it mechanically.
• value is what the item is worth in gold, and it is the only thing that makes gold mean anything.

Price everything, including the cursed things. value is read by any event that sells, so an unpriced item is either free or unbuyable depending on where it lands, and both look like bugs. Price a cursed item by what it appears to be worth, never by what it actually costs the wearer — @Missing file is worth 110 because a relic that adds four to defense is worth 110, and the two points of VIGOR it quietly takes are not discounted at the point of sale. That is the whole trick.

The bonuses sum across all four slots, so a relic can add damage and a weapon could in principle add defense. Use that for interesting kit rather than filling slots with the obvious thing.

Designing a cursed item

@Missing file is the pattern worth copying: damageBonus: 3, bonusStat: vigor, bonusAmount: -2. It puts more damage in a relic slot than most weapons put in a weapon slot, it costs four hit points, and the GM will not let it come off.

@Missing file is the same bargain rotated onto the other axis: armorBonus: 4, bonusStat: vigor, bonusAmount: -2. Fewer hit points, but far harder to take them off you. Building the second cursed item as a mirror of the first rather than a stronger version of it is deliberate — a player who has learned what the ring costs still has to think about the reliquary, because it is a different question, not a bigger one.

Three rules for these:

1. The upside must be genuinely good. A curse nobody would take is not a decision.
2. The cost must be visible in the numbers, not just narrated. Four hit points is real.
3. The description must not lie. It need not volunteer, but a player who reads carefully should be able to tell.

A note on stat bonuses

Write the item's bonus on the item. Never also adjust the character's stats to reflect a worn item — the effective stat is computed from base plus equipment, so writing it in makes the bonus land twice. Every computed field starts with _ and none of them are writable.