D&D Wights

[WhiteLily]

The D&D Cyclopedia described Wights:
"A wight is an undead spirit living in the body of a dead human or demihuman. A wight looks much as its body appeared in life. but bone-white and thin. with hollow. lifeless eyes. Its burial garments will be tattered and filthy."

D&D had this tendency to just take the stock creature and give it a power boost to sub in for higher level modules, and Wights just seem like zombies for the level 3-4 crowd.

In increasing their abilities, D&D allowed them to drain levels from adventurers and required a silvered or magic weapon to even hit them.

Growing up, my DM felt that level drain was just unfair. So I never really experienced much in the way of wights and wraiths. I'm not looking at running the I6 Ravenloft for my Dungeon Fantasy group and wondering what to do with these guys.

I'm really not a fan of special weapons needed to hit monsters. In Pathfinder, I remember melee builds at higher levels carrying at least 4 different weapons: this one for undead, this one for constructs, this one for evil outsiders, and this one for everything else.

I gotta say, I'm not a fan of carting around a bunch of weapons. If we're going to have fighters with Bags of Holding carrying around an arsenal of different fantasy weapons, we should just go ahead and give them power armor. Besides, nothing in the description really suggests to me how the Wight is able to withstand a cleave from a Barbarians sword and take no damage at all. So I'm thinking of simply ditching the special weapon to hit requirement.

As for level drain, I'm thinking of substituting Fright checks. The original Wight ONLY did level drain with no damage. I'm trying to figure out how best to flavor the mechanics of this bad guy. So what if a hit from a Wight did some psychic assault that inflicted 1d fatigue points and triggered a Fright Check at -4? That might trigger some mental disadvantages that chew up character points and what not; lost CPs are the best translation of negative levels.

[DouglasCole]

For more alternate takes:

The Vaettr (wight) in Hall of Judgment (p. 96) can inflict a Health Drain, treated as an innate version of the Frailty spell. They can also create vaettrhrogn (wight spawn). They're smart (vaettr, not vaettrhrogn) and use tactics to good effect.

The ghoul from that book has a version of the paralyzing touch.

The reiði (wraith) is a nasty undead from Forest's End who has the unfortunate ability to raise draugr...one of the nastier undead from the DFRPG monsters book.

[Anthony]

Well, I don't recall wights being super important to I6, so it probably doesn't really matter how you convert them, but I'd be tempted to implement energy drain as fatigue damage, possibly with something that makes its recovery slow.

[WhiteLily]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

The reiði (wraith) is a nasty undead from Forest's End who has the unfortunate ability to raise draugr...one of the nastier undead from the DFRPG monsters book.

Thank you. I'll take a look at Hall of Judgement.

I don't see an entry for Wraith in the DFRPG Monsters book.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by WhiteLily

Thank you. I'll take a look at Hall of Judgement.

I don't see an entry for Wraith in the DFRPG Monsters book.

Sorry, yeah - the *draug* are the nasty monsters from the book; the reiði can raise them. So you start with one hard challenge and then the reiði can create an even worse one from a convenient corpse.

[Imbicatus]

If you want to have the level drain intact, you can have a cursing touch, that applies the effects of a curse spell on hit. This gives a -1 to -3 penalty to all attacks, similar to the penalty from negative levels in the the other game. It has the benefit of being able to be cleared by a critical hit in addition to the normal magical methods of removing a curse.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by WhiteLily

Besides, nothing in the description really suggests to me how the Wight is able to withstand a cleave from a Barbarians sword and take no damage at all. So I'm thinking of simply ditching the special weapon to hit requirement.

I suspect the idea is that damaging the corpse does nothing to the spirit possessing it. With the abstract nature of d20 HP, the easiest way to handle that is just to have only things that harm the spirit do anything. With GURPS - and thus DFRPG - you can have better resolution, allowing for total destruction of limbs (or even just lopping an arm off, requiring the wight to either take time to pick it up and reattach it or fight without it), the corpse being clumsier due to excessive damage, or even rendering the corpse unusable, forcing the spirit to find another one to inhabit. This makes a silvered/magicked weapon better for fighting wights, but not strictly necessary. Instead giving the wight DR, IT:DR, and/or Regeneration that only apply against mundane wounds can have a similar effect.

Or just ignore that bit, and which can also work.

[LokRobster]

To transfer over the “feel” of the absolute suck-fest that is a level drain, just have a GURPS Wight do 25 character points of damage per touch, to be removed from skills, attributes, advantages or added disadvantages. Keep the silvered weapon restriction.

It should match up in tone to the original!

(i.e. no GM that wanted his players to have fun would ever actually inflict one on his gaming group)

Seriously, though, your idea of fatigue damage and a Fright Check are probably the way to get a monster that would be scary to face but not utterly game-experience destroying.

[Gumby Bush]

Originally Posted by LokRobster

To transfer over the “feel” of the absolute suck-fest that is a level drain, just have a GURPS Wight do 25 character points of damage per touch, to be removed from skills, attributes, advantages or added disadvantages. Keep the silvered weapon restriction.

It should match up in tone to the original!

So, building this with GURPS:

As a base, that's something like: Affliction (Variable Enhancement, +25% enhancement, limited to disads/removed skills/etc. (-20%) +200%; Extended Duration, really and truly Permanent, +300%; Melee Attack, C, -30%; Contact Agent -30%) [54/level]

Add enhancements like Malediction, remove Contact Agent, or reduce the permanency so that it can be undone with Remove Curse, and you'll have a similar ability with different harm factor.

Something like this, for instance, might not be terrible:

"Level" Drain [52]:

With a touch you can reduce the capacity of another being. Roll Brawling or DX to hit, and roll Will versus your opponent's HT. If you win, you remove 25 points in the way of removing abilities or skills, adding disadvantages, or reducing attributes. As a special effect, these reductions are chosen by the GM rather than yourself, but you do not need to carefully select abilities to remove which you know your adversary actually has.

Statistics: Affliction 1 (Variable Enhancement, +25% enhancement, limited to disads/removed skills/etc. (-20%) +200%; Extended Duration, dispelled by Remove Curse, +150%; Melee Attack, C, -30%; Malediction 1 +100%) [52]

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by LokRobster

To transfer over the “feel” of the absolute suck-fest that is a level drain, just have a GURPS Wight do 25 character points of damage per touch, to be removed from skills, attributes, advantages or added disadvantages. Keep the silvered weapon restriction.

It should match up in tone to the original!

(i.e. no GM that wanted his players to have fun would ever actually inflict one on his gaming group)

I think this depends on your approach to "fun."

On one hand, you can say that there should never be any chance of something irreversibly bad happening to a character: no death, no permanent crippling, no "level drain" effects. And then characters can charge into battle and mow down their foes, not worrying about the odds. Your players will have no reason for them to exercise caution or restraint, since the game payoff structure doesn't provide such a reason.

On the other hand, you can have situations that are real threats to the characters. And then the characters will try to plan carefully so the odds are in their favor, and to avoid random fights that serve no purpose. And if they do have to fight or take risks, the players will be in real suspense. For some people, and I includ myself, that can be fun.

And if the characters do suffer bad consequences? Well, I've long treasured a scene in my GURPS Martial Arts campaign of some time back, when one of the player characters went Big Damn Heroes on a huge, strong street criminal armed with a large club, and the dice went against him: "Bad Leg and Addicted to laudanum? Sweet!"

Not everybody has the same preferences.