The Light Dawns

THIS!!!  Yes, a thousand times, this!

 

Back in the day, I referred to this as “neo-classicalgaming,” which is to say, the sorts of games that came out of various deep dives into older games to see what was actually going on under the hood, rather than what everyone assumed was happening.  (The ‘90s were a terrible time where dumb “conventional wisdom” ruled conversations about RPGs, but much of the thinking from those days still lingers, especially in professional spaces.)

 

Anyway, point is, if the core of gaming is making interesting decisions, rolling the dice isn’t playing the game; it’s putting the game on pause while a random element is introduced to force the players into potentially rethinking their approach and how they value their various resources.  So the more a game has rules about a thing, the less it’s potentially about that thing. 

 

This creates weird mechanics that kinda sidle-up to their topic.  On the one hand, if you want the players to be making decisions and talking around the table about a particular subject, you can’t gloss it over with a dice roll.  On the other hand, what rules you do have should encourage conversation about the topic.  Mothership wants you to spend time on being stealthy, so it has rules that make combat very dangerous, and creating spaces where you’re going to be chased by critters that want to engage you in combat.  So the game’s mechanics encourage stealthy activity and conversations because the alternatives (touching the dice) are much worse from a mechanical standpoint.

 

Granted, these games require a LOT of trust all around the table; lack of skill and lack of trust can ruin a game like this.  Luckily, it only requires a modicum of social skills to be able to put together a good group and engage in this sort of gaming.

Mad Mashup: Apsara

And back to my series of character classes for my mad mashup D&D game based on B/X but including rules from all over.  This time, a bit of Hindu myth that really, really harshes on what lots of folks consider a core element of the Old School vibe.

Apsara

Apsara are the handmaidens of the gods, divine nymphs who serve the powers of Order and Chaos equally.  Thus they must be Neutral in alignment.  They are also all female with skin in various shades of blue.  Each is an expert artist, and most favour dance, music, and the erotic arts.  

Requirements

• Apsara use d6 for their hit points.

• They cannot wear any armour or shields.  

• They can use any weapon.

• They can cast cleric spells, but only while at most Lightly Encumbered.

• They save and fight as Clerics.

• An Apsara must have a DEX and Charisma of at least 13.  If both are 16+, the Apsara gets a 10% bonus on all EXP earned.

Abilities

• Apsara can understand all spoken languages, and be understood when they speak.  They are, however, limited as normal in written languages.

• They are also immortal.  They do not age and they cannot die.  Only the most potent of foes or weapons can leave scars on the mind or psyche of an Apsara.  They can, however, be knocked unconscious, charmed, etc.  

• All who watch an Apsara dance for at least one Turn (10 minutes) cannot help but be affected by her grace.  When the dance ends, the audience must make a save vs. Spells or have their mood and emotions shifted according to the desires of the Apsara.  For every Turn past the first, the saving throws are lowered by -1 to a max of -4.  If they are being aided by a Bard or another Apsara, that penalty can go as low as -6.  

• Apsara can use all magical items designed for Clerics, as well as all magical musical instruments.

• 3rd Level: the Apsara can cast Charm once per day.

• 5th Level: Foes must successfully pass a save vs. Paralysis in order to target the Apsara with attacks or harmful magic.  This does not apply if the Apsara is inside a wider area-of-effect attack (like poison cloud or a fireball spell).  

• 6th Level: the Apsara can manifest a second pair of arms, allowing them to take a second action in a Round.

• 7th level: the Apsara can cast Confusion once per day.

• 9th level: the Apsara can cast Charm Monster once per day.

• 10th level: the Apsara can manifest a third pair of arms, allowing them to take up to three actions per Round.  

A fairly straight-forward support and social class.  Fun for people who really like to wield "soft power" and make others look cool.  

Neo-classical Gaming Revisited

It’s been a while since I’ve discussed neo-classical gaming.  The basic idea is made up of two components:

1. -        The core activity of playing games is making decisions, primarily about how you’re going to use your limited resources to achieve victory (however that’s defined).
2. -       Thus, when you’re rolling dice, you’re not playing the game; you’ve paused the game while you wait for random chance to tell you what the new situation is going to be.

So while lots of RPG design theory says, “If your game is about exploration and danger, you should have an Exploration and Danger stat,” neo-classical gaming is more about building mechanics around exploration and danger so the players are making decisions that lead to exploration and danger.  (To see a good modern example of a neo-classical game built around exploration, check out Numenera.) 

 

What’s brought this to mind recently is discussion around WotC new upcoming book, Strixhaven.  The book is odd, to say the least.  Strixhaven is a wizard’s school, and the adventures revolve around the PCs being students.  There are no villains, but your characters might find an NPC classmate is a “frenemie.” 

 

It’s a far cry from crossing wits with Count Strahd or banishing kaiju-sized demon-princes back to the Abyss.  Even Hogwarts had its Voldemort.  Still, I think the idea is that you’ll drop Strixhaven into existing campaign worlds that already have their own epic villains.  The ad copy certainly implies that one suggested use of Strixhaven is as a level 1-to-10 prequel to a full-blown campaign. 

 

But what would a darker, more adventurous version of Strixhaven look like?  I ran a campaign using 2e D&D where all magic-users got their powers from pacts with demons and devils, and the school where these pacts were made was a recurring element.  Starting from that, what would a neo-classical game about such a place look like?

 

The classic tropes of the pact-with-a-devil genre, from Dr. Faustus to Elric of Melniboné, include the tug of temptation to give more and more to the devil and the dangers associated with that.  Slippery slopes and dangerous assumptions abound, as well as pitcher-plant style traps that are pleasing to fall into but difficult to escape from.  (Now that I think on it, these stories have a lot in common with the American gangster genre.)

 

So what springs to mind is something akin to Numenera’s mechanics, which use a death-spiral to push the characters to use their Cyphers.  But instead of Cyphers, the students of the Shadow University would instead be tempted by sweet-but-poisoned deals. 

 

Our stats are going to be the sort that define college students: Athleticism (to cover everything from physical combat to how much you can drink without passing out), Wits (native intelligence, book-learning, and cleverness), Intuition (seeing beyond the surface of things and ferreting out lies and half-truths), and Charisma (charm and deception).  There will also be a class-ranking number which measures both your academic standing versus your classmates and social position in campus culture. 

 

The bulk of the game would be opportunities to raise your Ranking or threats to it.  If it ever falls too low, you’ll likely end up being sacrificed by one of your classmates to a devil.

The Eyes of Satan are Upon You...

 

The stats are represented with a die; d6 is average, d8 is noteworthy while d12 is exceptional.  (We’re skipping the d10 here.)  There’s one lower, the d4, which represents an impaired stat.  When you try to use one of your stats to overcome a challenge, you roll you die and try to beat a target number:

 

2+ : a routine challenge; you’ll succeed unless luck, exhaustion, or some other outside influence trips you up.

 

4+ : an educational challenge; this one might stretch you a bit.  It’s akin to a pop-quiz in a class or a game versus an equally-skilled opponent.

 

6+ : a daunting challenge; for most, it’s possible to succeed, but only with a lot of hard work and maybe a little luck.  This is the final exam from that prof who brags about how many students fail his class every year. 

 

8+ : crushing!  Native talent is unlikely to be enough, and you’ll have to exert yourself to even have a chance at success.

 

10+ : harrowing!  Only the most gifted or foolish will tackle this challenge with out prep and support. 

 

The higher the challenge, the better the chance that success will move your Ranking. 

 

If you roll and fail, your character can exert themselves to put in extra effort.  This causes your stat to reduce to the next smaller die, but you get to add the max roll possible on that smaller die to what you rolled.  So if your character’s Athleticism is d6, and you roll a 5, your character can exert themselves, lowering their Athleticism to a d4, but also automatically adding +4 to the 5 for a final score of 9. 

 

If your stat is down to d4 already, your character is too spent in that area to exert themselves effectively. 

 

Replenishing your stats involves wallowing in vice.  Wrath might involve smashing something expensive or useful, Pride might require you to abuse a hireling or sacrifice a relationship, etc. 

 

And thus our death-spiral trap makes you exert your character’s stats to keep from falling in the Rankings, and then engage in self-destructive behavior to replenish those exerted stats. 

 

Or you can make a pact and sell your soul for power. 

 

And just to twist the knife, the longer you can go without making a deal, the better a deal you can make.  It’s push-your-luck all across the board.

 

Then we just sprinkle the calendar with all those school-fun events, from freshman initiation streaking to midterms to dances.  And all will be twisted to either challenge the PCs or give them chances to indulge their vices. 

2010 Resolutions Review

Time to see how I did.

Hold Fast on Gaming
Um, I kinda succeeded, but only in spite of myself.
The Seventh Sea game ended prematurely, but I did keep poking my nose into new games, most lately Scott’s Huge Ruined Pile game. (Un?)fortunately, I haven’t really had time to play in that game, or many others. Luckily, Scott’s running a pretty open, sandboxy game, so my presence isn’t missed. But I can’t call this a success. Apparently, I can’t quit whenever I want. ;p

Get Fit for GenCon
Much better success on this front. In spite of running around with people 17+ years younger than me most of the time, I had no problems keeping up. I didn’t turn myself into a muscled Adonis, but that wasn’t the goal. The goal was not to collapse in exhaustion after climbing a few flights of stairs or bust the buttons off my jeans. A modest amount of weight was lost, and while Indianapolis was uncomfortably humid, I had no trouble keeping up with people, eating what I wanted to eat, or anything like that. More work is needed (Christmas saw some unfortunate but not unexpected weight gain), but even during a recent visit to Manhattan I was able to hold my own against folks in their 20s.

Give This Blog Some Love
New art? Check! Thanks to the talented Ravenconspiracy for my awesome banner.

Wider range of topics? Check!

Get listed on the RPG Bloggers Network? Check!

Looks like I done good here, and I think I can make things better in 2012. But that’s a topic for another post…

Supporting, Not Replacing

Over at the RPG site, Ryan Dancey has started a discussion on how adding social mechanics from Dogs in the Vineyard may be a way to improve gameplay in traditional Dungeons & Dragons. Yeah, I know, I know... And the thread starts off as a hideous mess, just as you'd expect. However, John Morrow has some very interesting things to say. I suspect he and I share very similar attitudes about gaming. Things get a lot better around this post.

This gets to the heart of what I have been talking about with neoclassical gaming. Ryan Dancey, having found some neat social mechanics in Dogs in the Vineyard, has suggested that such rules might make D&D more fun for people who would prefer tabletop RPGs to computer games. Mr. Morrow complains, and I think quite rightly, that this "gamest" approach hurts more than it helps. We see this a lot in games. Substituting dice rolls and resource management for the activity itself, in this case, social interaction, which is very easy to do at the table, undercuts what we really want to have happen.

I'm assuming here that Mr. Dancey is interested in games where the characters interact with each other, are parts of their social environments, and are motivated by the peoples and situations that exist inside the game. Festooning these things with mechanics undercuts that. The players never really care about the in-game reality, because they're too busy dealing with mechanical bits that have been bolted on top of them.

John Morrow makes this very point when he says:

[T]he players are no longer making decisions based on what's happening in the setting but wing up looking for ways to wedge things like background mentions or relationship connections into the situation just to get modifiers. This is also one of the reasons why John Kim's Dogs in the Vineyard strategy page explicitly mentions that very broad traits are frowned upon. The same problem crops up in Spirit of the Century and any game where invoking some aspect of a character or their background makes it more likely for a character to succeed. Games that give bonuses for clever descriptions can also get goofy when the players start playing to the GM rather than the situation their characters are in. Yes, it gets the characters to bring those things into play, but there is a point where it doesn't help the quality of game and even a point where it turns the game into a farce…

So is there some way for us to have our cake and eat it too? Can we encourage the sort of activities we want without burying them in mechanics?

I think we can. I think that old-school D&D shows us how. D&D is a game about exploration that has almost no rules about exploring. It discusses the problems of exploring, and gives us tools for tackling logistical issues associated with exploring, and creates rewards of various sorts for exploring, but does these things in a very tangential way. Your character never earns experience points from exploring itself. Instead, you gain experience through moving treasure from dangerous, unexplored territories back to home base. Monsters, traps, and the usual issues of exploration (such as provisions, light, and getting lost) all must be overcome to achieve the goal of rescuing treasure from the wilderness.

Mr. Dancey seems to want a game that is more about relationships and the social landscape. I've discussed this before. The neoclassical approach (and, interestingly, the approach of the guy who actually wrote Dogs in the Vineyard) seeks to encourage the desired gameplay obliquely. The final result would most likely be a game that looks very traditional to most gamers. However, it would have certain tweaks that encourage players to forge alliances and call on their friends for help. If we were just going to house-rule D&D, these might look like additional ways to take advantage of hirelings and henchmen, or at least, the rules dealing with them, rules that grant bonuses in combat for having friends fight with you (either by their diversity, or by their quantity), and for using social resources to solve traditional dungeon challenges. Let's take a look at two examples of what these might look like.

I frequently encourage my players to search for information about a dungeon before they attempt to enter it. Usually, this begins with visiting the local tavern and buying drinks for the old-timers with stories of days-gone-by, and ends with the PCs visiting the local sage in order to verify and flush out what they've learned. It would be easy enough to include local groups like adventurers guilds or wizards guilds, knightly orders, secret organizations like the Harpers of the Forgotten Realms, and the like. Any of these groups might have more information about the places the players wish to explore, as well as specialized tools for tackling the dangers they might have to face. In order to acquire some of the information or supplies, players may need to be on good terms with these groups or even members. However, not all of these groups will be friendly with each other, and membership in one group might earn the enmity of the others.

This sort of thing doesn't even actually require rules per se. It's simply a new way for the players to interact with their local environment. It's simple enough for the DM to implement, requiring only a list of such groups, what sort of information they may have, and how they feel about each other. I use things like this in my game successfully all the time.

Here's another example: a while back, Zak was pondering how to add something like feats to old-school D&D. The solution he came up with was rather intriguing; instead of presenting his players with a dizzying list of feats and their various pathways, he simply associated feats with different social groups, and, when the players reached an appropriate level, they were given the opportunity to learn the feet associated with whichever locale the PCs happened to be in at that time.

It would be simple enough to expand this and other aspects of the game. Maybe certain equipment can only be purchased from certain areas. Lembas bread, for instance, makes it easy to provision a large expedition, but only certain elven bakers can make it. Perhaps certain spells are only known to a particular sorority of sorceresses who carefully guard such secrets. Now where the PCs go to find adventure doesn’t just change the window-dressing (jungle vs. forest vs. plains), but actually affects what sort of rewards they can expect to earn or how their characters develop. Traveling to the Ashen Wastes in order to learn how to fight with a spiked buckler or the dreaded Disintegration spell are exactly the sorts of things we’d expect from a character like Elric or Cugel.

None of these rules violate Mr. Morrow's desire to avoid replacing actual social interaction with resource management or dice rolling. They also encourage exactly the sort of entanglement with the social landscape that I think Mr. Dancey is looking for. Where they do fall down, however, is in dictating what that social landscape looks like to a certain extent. Old-school D&D is incredibly flexible and can be used to model any sort of civilization from Bronze Age city-states to Renaissance-style empires linked by magically powered dirigibles. As the rules currently stand, including the sorts of additions I’m discussing is something the DM will have to tackle when creating the setting. For me, this sort of stuff is part of the fun of world building, but it's a rare to find it in most rulebooks, especially those that purport to be fairly generic.

It would be simple enough to create some Reintsian random tables to distribute this sort of thing among groups created via other random tables, but again, the more we do this, the more we dictate to the DM what the setting is like. Whether that is a bug or a feature depends entirely on the preferences of the group. Unfortunately for Mr. Dancey, attempts to do similar things with prestige classes in 3e fell flat: people just assumed that every prestige class ought to be available in every world, in spite of direct statements to the contrary. Then again, the players who embraced this sort of universality tended to be exactly the sorts that Mr. Dancey says we 40 lost to computer games. Perhaps those of us who are left can be expected to be slightly more careful readers?

Death is Boring

New Fish in an Old School asks, “To Kill or Not toKill?” and comes down on the traditional (and, I think, fairly common) compromise of not to kill much, with an emphasis on letting the dice fall where they will. (Frankly, I think that’s the actual Old School preference. Yes, the dungeon is designed to be deadly, but it’s also beatable. That’s often what Old Schoolers mean when they talk about putting “game” before “role playing.”)

That’s an attitude I have a lot of sympathy with, and it’s been my default mode for decades. Lately, however, I’ve been drifting away from it. You can see that in my Table of Death & Dismemberment; sure, there are broken bones and lopped-off limbs, but the most likely results are knock-outs.

Why is that? It’s not because death is inconvenient. I do not base my campaigns around any one character (PC or NPC), so simply killing or dying won’t derail things. Likewise, with the opportunity to hire henchmen, it’s fairly easy for the PCs to fill out the ranks of the party if there are holes in their team.

No, the real problem with death is that it’s, well, boring. You roll up a new character, the other players weave in a bit of grief and angst into their play, and you move on. And that just feels rather “meh” to me.

(Let me make an important distinction here, however; while death itself may be boring, the threat of death is not. Though this can highlight the problem even more, as the death of a character can feel horribly anticlimactic, after the threat of it has been ramping up.)

So, what other than death? Maiming, broken bones, and unconsciousness. If only one or two PCs are incapacitated this way, now the others need to figure out what to do with them. They certainly don’t want to abandon their comrades to capture or being eaten. Now the tension of the fight rises. The players of downed characters are still riveted to the game. Will the others be able to drag them away to safety? How much will those still standing risk to safeguard the fallen? This is a lot more thrilling than rolling up a new character.

This means, of course, that I have to be a bit more on top of things ahead of time. What does it mean when the bugbears capture the party? Do they have a history of ransoming captives? Do they keep slaves? Or do they have a relationship with some other race, deeper in the dungeon? Will the PCs be kept in cells until they are to be eaten or sacrificed to their dark god? And if that’s the case, what are the cells like? How or when are the PCs fed? How long will they be kept before they are sacrificed? What are the opportunities for escape?

It also means TPKs are far more likely. Defeat to unintelligent monsters probably means some, if not all, of the party gets eaten. (And though they were intelligent, that always makes me think of Bilbo and the dwarves, strung up by the spiders, kept poisoned and weak until it was time to feast.) Who gets eaten first? What happens to those “saved” for later?

Luckily, I love answering those questions, and usually I find examples in real-world animal behavior or the fantastic cultures I’ve created for my game. And heck, if I do get a TPK, the way my campaigns are usually put together, that means an adventure in the realms of the Afterlife.

Art by Charles-Gustave Housez and Edmund Blair Leighton.

Sandbox-finder?

There are so many good blogs out there! I might almost say too many; I'm having a devil of a time keeping up with all the good stuff going right now. Case in point: nearly a month ago, Navdi posted about his desire to use Pathfinder materials to run a more sandboxy, Old School game. I just discovered this last night. It struck a chord with me because 3e in all its incarnations leaves me cold, but I love Paizo's design style, artwork, and just the look-and-feel they give their stuff. So, how to infuse a more Old School feel into a game that is based on Paizo's rules and Pathfinder adventures?

I offered some suggestions in his comments, and this is expanding on what I wrote there. Generally, what the players want from 3e and its ilk is a sense of story and verisimilitude to their adventures; they don't want to just whack random monsters for random amounts of treasure. What DMs pining for a more Old School game often want is a more open-ended story and a more proactive approach from players towards tackling challenges; they don't want the players twiddling their fingers while they wait for the DM to deliver the adventure on a silver platter. With a creative and flexible DM, those goals are absolutely compatible. (Where you'll run into trouble is the conflict between the players' desire for mechanical customization of their characters and the DM's desire for simplicity. If you find a good way to harmonize those discordant themes, please let me know.)

I don't know any of Paizo's adventure paths well enough to say, but the ones I have read at least make nods towards player choice (and their latest, Kingmaker, promises to do more than that), and as Navdi points out in the comments of his blog, Paizo does a great job of establishing settings that are larger than the mere adventure path and its dungeons. With all that in mind, here are my suggestions to Old School-ify your existing collection of Pathfinder adventure paths:

1) start the players off with a clear, obvious, but open-ended problem. My favorite is a shipwreck (players need to gather supplies and find their way to civilization), but you can also use a natural disaster or alone in the wake of a military defeat for their side.

This works great because the players are presented with concrete, obvious problems to solve, but while there's no dungeon in sight, they're immediately put into the proper, creative, open-ended problem-solving mode that is the backbone of Old School play.

2) Once they've reached civilization, shift the focus to an urban environment. Everyone knows that Old School play and city adventures are incompatible, right? (We just won't mention Aerie of the Slave Lords and Vault of the Drow. Or the Random Harlot table. ;) ) Give them something concrete to do as soon as they get into the city, or better yet, have it be something they need to do that they discovered while solving the issues of the start of the campaign. During the course of this first urban adventure, start planting the seeds of conflict that will inspire the players to make choices: let them hear rumors, find treasure maps, or make enemies that will guide them to your adventure locations. Let them choose sides in local conflicts, and make those choices matter. Most importantly of all, make it clear to them as early as is reasonably possible that their choices have a direct and powerful impact on the setting. If they're not utterly bizarre, they'll love it. And again, that puts them in the proper headspace for Old School play.

3) Use more than one Pathfinder series. Since you're giving the players choices about what challenges to tackle, you'll likely need more adventures than one Pathfinder series can provide. So feel free to seed your CotCT adventures with some cherrypicked from Rise of the Runelords or Legacy of Fire. If they don't know much about the OSR, you might be able to squeeze in a Raggi adventure or something from Fight On!

4) By the time the PCs reach 4th or so level, most of the work should be done; they'll be interacting with the world as a place, rather than looking for the markers pointing them towards the next adventure. Don't be surprised if it takes that long, however. Even when the players are all on-board for that sort of thing, it can take some time before they know enough about the setting and the NPCs to really start being proactive and taking their destinies in their own hands.

Fabulous Wealth

This grew out of a number of conversations (some online) about the massive amounts of wealth old school characters (who earn most of their EXP through treasure) tend to acquire. Carousing rules work great, but if you don't want to use those for some reason, the PCs are going to end up with giant piles of treasure. Here's what I've done in the past to allow the players to fritter that great wealth away:

Potions and Magic - I've usually had a very small local market (usually one hedgewitch or the like) selling potions and a few magic spells. The potions are usually utilitarian things, like healing potions and waterbreathing potions, and sell for 100s of gp per use. Even first-level spells should probably sell for no less than 500 gp. Nothing above 2nd level is available, and little of that.

I also allow the PCs to pay sages and such for identifying magic items plundered from the dungeon. This also tends to be expensive, usually costing 50 gp or so to identify a potion and 300 gp for weapons and armour.

Fates Worse Than Death - catch a nasty disease from the giant rats? Or get cursed by the witch? Getting that sort of thing undone can cost some serious coin. The typical price I've seen for having a spell cast for you is 100 gp per level of the spell, making cure disease and remove curse cost 300 gp for each casting.

Transportation - Do the PCs need to travel by sea to get somewhere? There won't be regular cruise-ship traffic to the Isle of Dread, so they may need to buy their own war galley (60,000 gp) and crew it with rowers (300 at 2gp per month), sailors (30 at 10 gp per month), and a captain (250 gp per month). If the trip requires they sail out of sight of land, they'll want a navigator too (150 gp per month). Some marines (up to 75 at 4 gp per month for hazard pay) might be nice in case they run into pirates or sea monsters as well. And all these people will need potable water and provisions to consume on the voyage.

Throwing Money at Problems - Allow the players to solve some problems with money. Let them hire and outfit henchmen to accompany them on their adventures. A sage (2,000 gp per month) might be able to learn more about the dungeon or the evil duke who is threatening the region, while a spy (500+ gp per mission) might be able to ferret out the Duke's vile plans. Maybe the orc tribe will take a bribe to go pillage elsewhere, or could be hired to help take on the hobgoblins next door. Maybe the dragon won't eat you if it let it eat your horses.

Making Friends and Influencing People - Being known as philanthropists and high-rollers can result in beneficial modifiers to local reaction check rolls. This can include things like sacrifices at the local temple of a patron deity, weregeld paid to the families of henchmen who died on the last adventure, or rebuilding the orphanage burned down by the goblin lackeys of the evil duke. My college crew celebrated important milestones and achieving long-term goals with wild parties, in which they invited many of the important NPCs from past adventures. These were fun to RP, and allowed me to sow the seeds of future adventures. And, of course, they required the spending of lots of coin on food, entertainment, and clothes.

Bling - Every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man. Allow them bonuses to reaction rolls when they dress to the nines (after spending money on it, of course). Maybe a high-plumed helm or banner gives a morale bonus to their henchmen in battle. You're more likely to get an audience with the Lord Sheriff if you're dressed like someone who ought to be given an audience with the Lord Sheriff. A few bribes and a fancy gift might make things go smoother, too. If you really want to look the part, you'll need servants and a carriage and all of that as well.

And if you're knighted after rescuing the count's daughter, you'll owe him a certain amount of military service every year. To avoid having dull patrols and sentry duty interfering with far more profitable dungeoneering, pay enough scutage to his lordship so he can hire mercenaries instead.

Property - There's no need to wait until reaching "name level" before allowing the PCs to start spending money on lands and property. A small house in town can serve as a start, with a few servants and guards to protect it while they are away on adventure.

The nice thing about most of these suggestions is that they don't make the PCs feel like they are being punished for their success. Taxes and theft only make the players suspicious and angry. They can be used, but only with moderation. Instead, let the players use that money to make the lives of their PCs more fun and comfortable. Once you get the ball rolling, the players are likely to make suggestions of their own. Whenever possible, let them get what they want; "no" just shuts things down, but "yes, and..." creates new adventures and new fun.

Art by Joseph Mallord William Turner, Jean Limbourg, and Hans Makart .

Proving Grounds of a Million Mad Overlords

A bit over a year ago (Friday, July 17, to be exact) I complained about the lack of outreach to potentially new gamers. Apparently, I should also start complaining about not having a million bucks because oh what a difference a year makes. Old conventional wisdom: box sets are impractical and led TSR to financial ruin. New conventional wisdom: box sets are teh awesome! It's like everybody and their grandmother has a box set coming out now. Troll Lord Games has something like a dozen of the things now, including rules, campaign settings, and adventure construction sets. The two biggies right now are, of course, the D&D Essentials starter set and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying. Both of these are ostensibly aimed at new players. This is undercut somewhat in Flame Princess by the cost of the box and the game-store and online-order focus of Raggi’s distribution model, which seems more aimed at existing gamers, and the nostalgia-based design of Essentials. In spite of these issues, both boxes have contents clearly designed to get the neophyte up to speed. They both have a choose-your-own-adventure style introductory adventure (Flame Princess actually has two), they both sport simplified rules, and they both include an additional DM-run adventure as an example of how these games can be played.

Of course, I'm going to give the advantage to the OSR. Granted, it's a very slim advantage; the Essentials box is inexpensive, designed to grab the attention of lapsed gamers more likely to introduce the game to their children, and it'll show up in places where non- and lapsed gamers are likely to stumble across it. It's an exceptional piece of marketing, and is likely to sell 100 times more units than Flame Princess. And I, for one, hope this is a pessimistic prediction.

Still, I think the OSR has an inherent advantage in the simplicity and flexibility of its games. For instance, check out this character sheet that Robert gave out at the Old School game he ran at GenCon. In spite of the fact that over half the table didn't play these games regularly, we had no problem generating characters, even though there wasn't a single rulebook at the table. That's right, we did it all based on the character sheet and these other handouts. Now it is true, all of us were familiar with gaming. We were, after all, all attendees at GenCon. Still, making characters was a snap.

You can see this in Flame Princess as well. The last two pages of the rules book is an annotated copy of the character sheet, making it easy to understand what goes where and what rules apply to which parts. Even better, like with Roger’s character sheets, everything you really need is right there on it: skill rolls, to-hit numbers, even a quick and elegant way to figure encumbrance. If nothing else, the OSR is all about quick and easy.

It's going to be interesting to see where these developments take us. The starter set is, to the best of my knowledge, the only box set in WotC's Essentials line. Raggi still isn't sure if the next printing of his weird fantasy role-playing game is going to be in a box (which he prefers) or in strictly book form. 2011 should prove to be another very interesting year for RPGs in general, and the OSR in particular. And that's not even considering what Frog God Games might get up to.

Personality Inventory

Odyssey asked:

Personality inventory? Like, "What are the important elements of my character's personality, and do I want it to stay that way?"

On the face of it, this kind of sounds like something you'd expect to see in a very modern game. In fact, this is a very subtle process, and until recently, I hadn't really been consciously aware of it. A year or so ago, I could've talked about the hell I put clerics through in my campaigns, which is an extreme example of what I'm talking about here. If it's more comfortable for you, think about this as stress-testing the character concept. The goal here is to make the character change with time in subtle and interesting ways.

When players create a character, they usually think about things they want to do and experience with that character. Sometimes it's fighting a particular enemy or wielding a certain powerful weapon or quite commonly walking in the footsteps of some of their favorite characters from literature and movies. This last can be especially interesting, because these characters are often defined by their weaknesses and their challenges. Elric has his thin the blood, Cudgel his poor luck, Darth Vader has the arc of his redemption, and Odysseus keeps annoying gods. It's the struggles and challenges, even more than the cool gear, which usually defined such characters. Maliszewski has mentioned how, in the groups of his youth, the listeners of heavy metal music made intriguingly dark and doomed characters. For certain sort of player, this is the stuff excellent gaming.

All well and good, but the point isn't to create an angst-fest where you just constantly dump horror and tragedy on the characters’ heads. Instead, the goal is to make the non-mechanical, more subtle aspects of characters important in the game. They're all sorts of little ways you can do this; old school games are rife with this sort of thing. Changes to the character, or the character’s circumstances, necessitate reevaluating the place of that character in the setting in relation to nearby cultures and how the character is expressed through play, the setting of goals, and the various attributes of personality. And you can find the mechanisms for this all over the place in the games you already play.

Charm: the granddaddy of them all. Even the otherwise laconic Moldvay rules mention “orders against [the target’s] nature (alignment and habits) may be resisted". These sorts of spells really get to the heart of what a character wants and what they're willing to do to get it. It's very much an invitation to review how the character has behaved up until this point. Characters willing to stab their comrades in the back to get what they want are less likely to resist these sorts of spells than those who adhere to a very strict code of honor. Most characters fall somewhere in between these two extremes, of course, but the basic principle remains. Who they've been and what they've done dictates how the spell works and its limitations.

Transformations: changes in circumstance require changes in behavior. Let's start with the most dramatic: polymorph other. A character who's been transformed into another race or even class is going to find people treating them differently. Their role in the party he changed. More importantly, their role in society may have changed. The extreme example is, of course, xenophobia. The elf becomes an orc, or the champion of the dwarves becomes a goblinoid. However, there are much more subtle options. A human transformed into a gnome suddenly has to deal with a world built for people twice his height. An elf turned human suddenly has their life expectancy drop to 10% of what it was before. Moving to or from the dominant form of life in a particular area can have significant consequences for characters’ social standing and opportunities. And we haven't even touched all the fun you can have shifting genders.

Things can get even more fun if you cast your net a little more broadly for opportunities. Usually, a character infected with lycanthropy or turned into an undead is no longer playable. However, you can have a lot of fun with the character who is trying to live with such a condition. Disfigurement in combat can subtly alter how a character interacts with the world, or even force them to be more dependent on others. Gaining the ability to use spells at higher levels can also dramatically transform how a character is perceived and in turn how they behave.

Getting rich and leveling up: nearly inevitable and usually momentous. Most games have mechanisms for characters to gain power through the mechanics. Even those that don't usually allow the characters to amass great wealth, and with it usually comes local political influence. That’s not everyone’s cup of tea, of course, but even if you don’t want your PCs wielding considerable political influence, you need to explain why they don't when they can toss fireballs and toast the entire local militia, or routinely lose more wealth in their couch cushions than the local nobility spends on the upkeep of their castle. Many players and DM's look forward to the day when their used-to-be-pipsqueak neophytes suddenly demonstrate their newfound confidence and abilities. It used to be fairly standard practice for GM's to introduce some sort of bully early in the campaign to annoy the PCs with who was later trounced handily, and publicly, by the player characters to demonstrate their growing power and confidence.

Such displays almost invariably change the opinion of those who witness it. It would be odd indeed if characters who had saved the realm a handful of times, defeated menacing ogres, and slew giants and dragons were not treated differently by those whom they had both helped and thwarted.

How players and their characters deal with success can be as telling, and is interesting, as how they deal with adversity. Into every life a little sun must shine, and most people don't pay as much attention to how they handle success. Good times are seen as a chance to let your guard down. The true nature of the character may be revealed in such moments, often with consequences that outlive any momentary good fortune.

Again, this is not something overt and certainly not something that should interfere with gametime. Instead it is very much part of the give and take of play. Characters change, and the world reacts to that change. Characters then react to the world’s reactions. This creates a chain of events that follow logically from each other in ways that are largely predictable, but allow for great variations. This is where players craft their characters. This is where two fifth-level fighters exhibit their unique individuality from each other. This is where the magic happens. This sort of thing is far more flexible, and infinitely more powerful, as well as frankly more interesting, than anything mere mechanics can achieve.

Art by Joseph Mallord William Turner and Claude Vignon.

Playing with the Sword-and-Board Fighter

Ian over at the Swashbuckler's Hideout has a neat new variation on the "shields shall be splintered" house rule. It's considerably more attention-intensive than mine, but he also has very different goals:

My goal for this rule was to make defending with a shield an active, rather than a passive, ability and to create a large difference in play styles between the sword & board and two-handed combatants.

I'm really looking forward to hearing what his goals are for his game. Everybody plays the game differently because everyone gets their fun in different ways. So what follows should absolutely not be seen as a criticism of Ian or his rules. That's not my goal here at all; I'm really looking forward to seeing what he has in mind and why he's doing things the way he's doing them.

That said, I see in Ian's rule a tendency I see in myself and most other designers. If we want one choice to "play differently" from another, we give them new dice rolls. I see two issues with this. First, modern game design loves its central mechanics. The whole point of the central mechanic is to make every procedural dice roll similar in execution. This makes the game a lot easier to master. Learn the central mechanic, and you've pretty much learned the whole game. Of course, this means that relying on dice rolls to make classes play differently doesn't work very well. If you're using a central mechanic, all your dice rolls are going to be extremely similar. Ian’s starting with an older version of D&D I believe, so this isn't as big an issue for him as it is for some of us, but it's something to keep in mind.

The other issue is something I've been harping on lately: when you're rolling the dice, you're not playing the game. Dice rolls are what happens when the game stops and we wait to see what sort of curveball randomness is going to throw us. People think dice rolls are the game because that's mostly what we see in the books. But games are about making choices, not rolling dice; the game of craps is in the betting; rolling of the dice only tells you who won.

So as an exercise in what-if, let's take a look at Ian's goal of making the sword-and-board warrior play differently from the two-hander. In the faux old-school game Mazes and Minotaurs, there is a rule that gives warriors in a shield wall bonuses in combat, specifically giving them a +2 defensive bonus.

If we import this rule, or one very much like it, we can see that it will encourage the sword-and-board warrior to fight with other sword-and-board warriors, shoulder-to-shoulder in a shield wall. One way to do this would be to have other fighters in the party also fight sword-and-board. That would work well for a large party, but what if the party's very small or the other players don't want to play sword-and-board fighters? It might be best for our sword-and-board warrior to instead rely on retainers, hirelings, or henchmen to fill out a shield wall. This gives us a very different sort of warrior. Now we've got a character for whom Charisma is not a dump stat. He needs that high morale bonus to keep his guys in the shield wall. He is also a lot more worried about logistics. He's got a crew to feed and transport and arm. The other warriors in the shield wall need arms, equipment, food and their own share of the loot. Our sword-and-board warrior is now more commander and leader and less of a lone-wolf like his two-hander swinging counterpart.

So now we have a sword-and-board warrior who plays very differently inside and outside of combat. The interests and concerns of the player are noticeably changed from those of a generic fighter. And we did this without adding a single dice roll, just a simple rule that modifies certain already-existing combat rolls. I suspect this doesn't do Ian much good; this is probably not the direction he wants to take his game at all. This is just a fun little exercise in thinking outside the box. Often our first instincts are spot on, but it's useful to poke around and see if they are other and better ways to accomplish our ends.

Art by Walter Crane.

More Neoclassical Social RPG: Mass Effect Musings

Josh of brilliantgameologists.com recently asked about making a Mass Effect pen and paper RPG. Gamefiend responded as follows:

First thing you need to define is what makes ME compelling in the first place. I thought it (and Dragon Age) were compelling in it forced you build relationships between characters and to make hard decisions. Everything else, from the combat to aesthetics, could be interchangeable with something else. But the relationships and difficult decisions really are what I would seek to emulate more than anything else.

What followed was a fairly traditional implementation of social mechanics in modern RPGs. What I'd like to do is take a look at how a neoclassical game might handle similar challenges. (Do keep in mind I have never played Mass Effect. So the ideas I'm proposing here might not work for a game that is modeled on it.)



First, the neoclassical mantra: the rules reinforce the theme obliquely. That is, a game about exploration (like D&D) has rules that reward exploration, but not directly. So in our science-fiction game based on relationships of hard decisions, are rules are going to play off these themes without touching on them directly. We're not going to have mechanics that quantify relationships or play off those numbers.

Instead, what we'll craft is a series of mechanics that promote the building and maintenance of relationships. So our combat rules are going to give bonuses for having a lots of people helping out. Things like cover fire rules, overwatch mechanics, or air support and orbital bombardment which encourage players to build the sorts of relationships that allow them to call in all sorts of resources. Our more generic resource rules, things like gold pieces in D&D, are going to be based on your ability to call in help from various organizations. Your relationship with other law enforcement agencies, or even underworld types, give you access to people, information, and equipment you might not get otherwise. Finally, our basic mechanics for adjudicating uncertainty will give lots of really big bonuses for cooperation. Expert advice, hands-on assistance, and maybe even inexpert aid or even just the well wishes of others will give large bonuses to success.

But we won’t have any hard numbers to measure your relationship with others. That is up to you and the GM. It will probably be fairly binary; if you have a good relationship with these folks then they will help you. If not, you're out of luck. Of course, this leaves a lot to the discretion of the GM, but that's a fairly standard hallmark of the neoclassical style. It also gives players and GMs a lot of leeway in defining how relationships work, who you can have a relationship with, and how strong those relationships are. What we're interested in as crafters of the system is the utility of these relationships, not so much the relationships themselves. Some things are fun just as they are and don't need the extra help.

Hard decisions are like that. Again, we’ll leave a lot in the hands of the GM. The hard decisions come from the adventures and the situations that the PCs find themselves in. In a well-networked social space, these will invariably lead the PCs to choose sides. In making these choices they will almost certainly annoy some of the factions from whom they could get resources. Hopefully, the same choice will reinforce the relationship with another group. But that's not necessarily the case. Sometimes, doing the right thing angers everybody. Whether or not some recognize the virtue of these sorts of difficult choices is entirely up to the GM. But if you're simply moving back and forth on a sliding scale of being liked by group A or being liked by group B, that's not really a hard choice. Eventually, the players will decide that one side or the other can serve him better, and just max out their "faction" with that particular side. Really tough choices involved sacrificing something in return for doing the right thing, even when the right thing is not likely to win you points with anybody.

And our neoclassical sci-fi cop game handles this very well. Burning bridges means fewer resources. Fewer resources raise the difficulty of achieving your ends. We don't need to add anything in the mechanics to make certain choices difficult. We may offer some guidelines for the GM on how to handle such situations, but the mechanics handle their end of things pretty well all by themselves. This is the beauty of neoclassical game design. We don't have a whole lot of rules to memorize or look up in the middle of the game, but the ones that we do have reinforce our themes.

Freedom!

In the Doom & Tea Parties game one of the PCs recently had a conversation with an NPC about freedom, or the lack thereof. They discussed how choices are made for them by society (like parents, superiors in their organizations, and just social custom), and how choices were curtailed by past choices. This may seem unusual for an old-school campaign. After all, the whole point of sandbox play is ultimate freedom for the players: freedom from railroads, freedom from plots and storytelling, freedom to explore wherever and whenever they want.

Life, however, doesn't always cooperate. As players explore the sandbox, and the players and DM together fill in the blanks, roadblocks begin to appear before the players. Mostly these are social. Sometimes they are physical, like mountains, oceans, or other impassable or nearly impassable terrain. Specifically right now, however, I’m talking about social constraints. As the players rescue prisoners, fence the loot, and complete little jobs or big jobs for the Powers That Be, they began to entangle themselves in the social network of the setting. As they acquire power the Powers That Be will take notice of them and may in fact act to entangle them in the social network of the setting. This only makes sense after all, since they want the PCs, especially as they grow in power, to be on their side.

However it happens, the PCs will find that certain actions come at a cost. Allies become important, enemies seek to block their actions, and the PCs more and more have to weigh their own goals against the social costs of their actions. Do note, however, that the players are not forced to take actions or follow a plot. There is still leeway in their still choices. However, unlike at the beginning of sandbox campaign where the players can do pretty much anything and there are no real consequences for them, now their choices begin to cost them. The operative word here is "cost." They still can choose to do the socially expensive thing if that is their wish. Freedom is still there. It's just that now there are consequences for the things that they do, consequences they understand and, if everyone's been working together to build the setting and to tie the PCs into the setting, consequences which they understand and which are meaningful to them.

This, in my opinion, is when a campaign really starts to sing. At this point the world is real to the players. The players know where their characters fit into the world, and how the world interacts with the characters. The DM's job becomes a lot easier as well. Finding motivation for the players is nearly no longer an issue. The players will create their own motivations based on that social network. They want their friends and allies to be stronger and safer. They want to thwart the goals of their enemies. In fact, the primary job of the DM at this point is to keep the ball rolling so that the players are always scrambling to keep up with their own plots, their own goals, and missions that they create themselves.

Things might be different in a West Marches style sandbox. I haven't played one of those yet, but it seems to me that if you have a wide diversity in the people who show up from game to game, there's going to be less of this buy-in into the setting. Also, West Marches games tend to deemphasize time spent in the city, which makes it harder for the characters to get entangled in the social web of civilization. That said, they are very likely to get entangled in the social networks out in the wilderness or in the dungeons. Alliances with humanoids, relationships with certain powerful monsters, and attempts, much later in the game usually, to clear the wilderness and settle it, will create something like these same networks of social interactions and social entanglement, but outside of the city, and out in the wilderness or in the dungeons. Again however, if the group is different people every time, this is less likely to happen. This sort of play really requires frequent play by a consistent group of players. As the players learn the world and who the movers and shakers are, and develop relationships with them, they began to build their own networks and find their places in this world. Players who don't put in the time or the effort to learn how the world works socially are not going to have this sort of involvement or investment in the campaign. Instead, they are much more likely to just skim across the surface and focus primarily on the assumed things like killing monsters, exploring the wilderness, and collecting loot.

Which works best for you and your group, of course, really depends on you what you’re after. I myself love this kind of play, and as I said, really think campaigns take off at this point. Other people see it as distraction, or disruptive, especially since it means certain players may start to dominate the game, leaving the rest to twiddle their thumbs while the more socially aware and interested converse about the NPC’s families or recent gossip or things like that. If you're going to allow this sort of thing to happen in your campaign, or even to encourage it, all the players need to be on board or at least be willing to tolerate the sort of interactions with NPCs that may take time away from dungeon-delving, monster-murdering, and loot-gathering.

Art by Giulio Rosati and Konstantin Makovsky.