DMG as Hackers Guide for 5e D&D

From an interview with Mike Mearls over at the Escapist:

Mearls: The DMG is, well - going back to Basic D&D as a starting point - if you think of the Player's Handbook as for the player who is looking at character classes and played a couple of them and wants more options or wants to fine-tune what their character is, or who says "I want to play a paladin." The DMG serves the same role for the DM. Basic D&D hits core fantasy, it's stereotypical fantasy adventuring. If you're the DM and you want to do something more exotic, you say "I want to add technology to my game" or "I want to have more detailed rules for a grim and grittier game, more of a horror game." That's where the DMG comes in, it's for really fine-tuning your campaign, and creating a different type of experience than your standard fantasy campaign. It's also for expanding the scope of the game. So we've talked about things like ruling a domain or things like that. The more detailed rules for that would be in the DMG. We've talked about having some basic rules for things like that in Basic D&D but we're not 100% into it either way - is it confusing to new players or is it nice that it gives them a clear progression? We're still not quite decided on that yet. It's for if you want more depth on specific topics.

The DMG also has a lot of utilities in it, like for dungeon creation, adventure creation, creating monsters, creating spells, even if you wanted to create a character class. It's not quite the point-buy system from 2nd Edition, but it does say things like "Well if you want to create a class for your campaign then here's a good way to approach it."

So it's really for getting under the hood of how the system works and building up your campaign.

Bolding: So really, besides maybe Unearthed Arcana, there's never really been a hacker's guide, as it were, for D&D.

Mearls: No, exactly. And that's what we were inspired by. People like to tinker with their campaigns, and especially if you've been DMing for a while and you kind of want to do something different. Really going into in-depth [changes]. And now, it's not going to be deconstructing everything, but it's giving you the tools you need to make your own changes. And there's always going to be art to it, like monster creation, we can't give you a formula that's perfect. What do you do with a monster that has one hit point, one AC, and can cast harm once per day? How do you balance that? There's no simple answer, but even just telling DMs that helps.

I'm actually pretty happy to see this.  Others may disagree with me, but I've found the advice for DMs in post-Gygax-era D&D to be of questionable value.  ("Here's some problem players you may run into and some passive-aggressive methods for dealing with them, since expecting you to act like adults never occurred to us!")  Getting at what the rules are trying to do and how tinkering with them might affect things would have been great advice back at the beginning.  Having these sorts of assumptions and ideals spelled out in advance will give new DMs a leg-up on understanding what the game's about and what they'll need to do to make it be about something else.

EN World Interviews Monte Cook and Shanna Germain

In which we learn that gaming is rising in popularity among 30-something women, D&D nearly didn't survive the '90s, and OD&D is utterly lacking in a resolution mechanic.

• How D&D nearly didn't survive the '90s and (some of) the thinking behind the OGL @ 10 mins & 17 mins.
• Thoughts on Kickstarter and how it's changing the RPG industry and landscape @ 35 mins.
• OD&D and what the early years of RPGs were like @ 43 mins.  

Lots of good stuff here, worth a listen though you don't necessarily need to watch it.  So perfect for doing the dishes or as a break from your usual podcast feed.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Not sure if this would be hella cool or just annoying.

An OGL for 5e

So, assuming WotC decides they want an OGL of some flavor for 5e, what should it look like?

The original OGL was intended to encourage DMs to publish their adventures. At the time, the conventional wisdom was that adventures were necessary to support an RPG, but in general cost more to make than they brought in. As with “box sets killed TSR” it was part of the conventional wisdom that turned out to be untrue as Paizo and James Edward Raggi IV proved, both building empires on a foundation of adventures.

Granted, the OGL and d20 license didn't work as planned. Instead, they resulted in a rash of splatbooks. If WotC is lucky, they'll get that again with 5e.

It's pretty obvious that WotC is following Paizo's lead with their linked adventure “storylines” like Tyranny of Dragons. They want to continuously publish entire campaigns worth of adventures, teased and supported by their weekly play Encounters program. And they want to keep the barriers to entry into the game low, hence the free-to-download Basic D&D PDF.

And because of that, they need to avoid 4e's new-hardback-every-month policy like the plague. It didn't take long for that to result in needing software to actually generate a character. Keep that sort of nonsense up, and D&D will lose its status as gateway product into the hobby.

(In comparison, notice how Paizo, in the 6 years they've been doing the Pathfinder thing, have only released two additional books of character classes. Frankly, even that may be a bit fast; it'll be interesting to see how far they can ride this train. Conventional wisdom says that they'll need a reboot via a new edition in the next two years, but Paizo's made their money by bucking the conventional wisdom.)

Letting third party publishers generate extra character classes and feats and all of that would allow WotC to keep the core of the game simple and approachable, but still have the variety people will start to desire once the new has worn off.

That said, I do agree with Mythmere that sooner is probably better than later. After all, part of the appeal of 5e is that it's back to being the sort of game we all know and love. So some of us are going to want some sexy newness or oddness right out of the gate.

Which is why I disagree with Matt Finch. The whole purpose of “open sourcing” is to invite variety and adaptability. If the goal is to get as many people as possible playing D&D, then they want a 5e version of Carcosa and they want Zak's nephilidian vampires and Aos' sci-fantasy Metal Earth and Jeff's rule-of-cool Saturday-morning-cartoon fueled insanities.

Because that sort of stuff is where enthusiasm and excitement come from. Because that makes D&D more than just Middle Earth with the serial numbers filed off. WotC can handle Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance just fine. But while they want a 5e Death Frost Doom, the last thing they want is to actually publish it themselves. Letting others do that via an OGL gives them the best of both worlds: edgy and exciting content AND plausible deniability. D&D can be “dangerous” and cool (and weird and silly and steampunky and sci-fi and...) without WotC needing to actually dilute their core product by publishing it.

More importantly, it would allow for a plethora of splat books with variant character classes, spells and magic systems, skills, and whatnot. Again, WotC gets the best of both worlds: the 3rd party splatbooks give D&D the variety experienced players crave, but since they are 3rd party, the game doesn't get buried under a mountain of official material that makes it increasingly harder for new players to join in on the fun.

This would free up WotC to focus on setting material and adventure “storylines,” and the supplemental material players want to make the most of playing in them. It also allows them to focus more heavily on profitable “side projects” like Lords of Waterdeep and novels which grow and strengthen the IP.

The No-news on the 5e OGL

Mr. Mearls' Legends & Lore blog continues to be the place for breaking news about 5e. Only, in this case, the news is nothing will break before autumn, and nothing will actually be happening until 2015 sometime.

The official reason given is quality control; they want folks to have the DMG in hand and time “to absorb the rules and how they all interact.” That seems a bit odd to me, considering the open beta testing period and online discussions about the rules organized by Mearls & Co.

So, being the suspicious git that I am, I suspect that WotC really doesn't know what they want from an OGL at this point. On the one hand, everyone expects them to have something, and they may actually feel they could benefit from one. On the other hand, they want to take the time to do it right because doing it wrong last time allowed the worst thing possible to happen: Paizo's Pathfinder RPG.

Make no mistake, WotC's fumbling about with an OGL for 4th edition is entirely responsible for the creation of the Pathfinder game. They should have been bending over backwards to get Paizo on-board with 4e. Instead, WotC left them dangling in the wind and forced them to remain with the 3.x OGL. It could have been, and should have been, handled differently.

So the big question is, does WotC understand this? It'd be easy enough to blame the whole situation on the mere existence of the 3.x OGL. After all, without that, Paizo wouldn't have been able to scoop up all those players who didn't want to migrate to 4e.

I think that's missing the point, however. After all, nobody's talking about True20, or Hackmaster, or Dungeon Crawl Classics, or Castles & Crusades, or even all of them combined threatening D&D's dominance of the market. The real threat is Paizo. And that's because Paizo has something that WotC lacks: an effective marketing juggernaut.

People know about Pathfinder, people are excited about Pathfinder, people love showing off their Pathfinder stuff. Pathfinder is bright and shiny. Paizo is seen as friendly and excited about gaming and eager to promote new talent and neat ideas. Paizo oozes cool; people may doubt whether or not they'll like Paizo's next adventure path, or think that Golarion is too generic or mish-mashy, or worry they're putting out too many hardcover rulebooks, but nobody doubts that the next things coming from Paizo will resonate. They will look cool, they will feel cool, and lots of people will be interested in reading them.

Paizo's tapped the same lightning that Games Workshop has held bottled for so long now. Sure, there are other games out there, but Warhammer and Warhammer 40k are the ones that fire imaginations and induce passionate obsessions (both pro and anti, as we also see with Pathfinder). In both cases, the rules barely factor into things. In both cases, the aesthetics created by the companies are gripping and inspiring and enticing.

And that's what WotC needs to worry about. They should fear looking like also-rans, which is why the discussion of their covers does matter. They wallowed for six years in the New Coke debacle that was 4e marketing and trade dress.

5e is a chance for WotC to start over with D&D and it certainly looks like they're taking. A strong and focused OGL would be another potent arrow in their quiver, so I can absolutely understand them taking their time in crafting one.

Cover A5t Update

So this weekend I was at Comicpalooza. So was David Petersen and I was lucky enough to see him give an artist a very in-depth and detailed review of her portfolio. Among the things he mentioned was the dangers of making an image bigger. If you've ever taken a computer graphic that looked great on the screen and tried to blow it up to be a massive poster on your wall, you know the troubles he was speaking of: sharp lines become blurred (or even pixelated), details grow fuzzy, definition is destroyed.

I'm wondering how much of this we're seeing in the 5e covers? Apparently, this is the full picture Tyler Jacobson created for the PHB:

I gotta admit, as an image, I like this (even if it does look like the giant's been cut off at the knees). It's got action and scenery and reveals a lot of imagination. I love the hellhounds chained beside the throne and the dragon wing hanging from the giant's fancy hat.

I still don't like the crop they made for the cover, though. And blowing up the image like that didn't do anyone any favors.

Someone (Stuart Robertson? I can't find who now.) commented about the bad crop jobs done on these covers, how they're too close, cutting out interesting details and reducing important figures to illogical bits. Seeing the full version of the PHB, I can only agree.

I'm still not a fan of the art for the DMG. It's neat, but really doesn't knock my socks off. Apparently, the liche is raising the recently deceased to join it's legions of undead. Neat idea, but I think I'm just not on the same page as the artist when it comes to motivating DMs:

The lich is extremely powerful and we wanted the DMs out there to get excited about wielding that power. From my angle, I wanted the lich to be looming over the viewer and seem unstoppable as he raised the corpses around him. Heroes that just fell in an attempt to destroy him are now working for him. Very demoralizing.

The First Hit is 5ree!

Today we learn that Basic D&D will be a free PDF. We'll get the basic four classes (fighter, wizard, rogue, and cleric) up to level 20 and the basic four races (human, elf, dwarf, and halfling). The analogy drawn is between Rules Cyclopedia and AD&D. I'm not entirely sure how well that analogy holds up (TSR made a big deal back-in-the-day about D&D and AD&D being completely different games), but it does make it fairly clear where their thinking is.

This isn't, of course, exactly unheard of. LotFP has had their rules available for free for years now. So are the rules for Pathfinder, via the SRD. Skirmisher's Bookforge project is largely tentpoled by free rules.

I suspect Basic D&D will be different in that it'll be a much prettier thing. It will include art and layout and such optimized for an electronic document. If WotC is serious about this thing, it should also include a basic character generator that will walk you through the process and give you a character sheet you can print out at the end of it. It should also come with a basic dice-roller for folks who've downloaded the game but don't have a local store to get dice TODAY! I doubt they're that serious about it, alas, and we'll just end up with a basic PDF that might include bookmarks and have lots of pretty art in it.

Of more interest to me is how this turns the conventional wisdom, well, not quite on its head. WotC is still planning to sell big, expensive coffee-table books (though those who claim they'll never play the game due to the expense have just had the rug pulled out from under them in an amusing way by Wot€) and I suspect the sale of those books is considered the backbone of their income strategy. The loss-leader is now a bit more out-and-up-front for them. After all, while many RPG publishers do offer free PDFs of their rules, they don't treat those PDFs as “product” in their own right. This is WotC making a big production of the loss-leader, which, honestly, is how you're supposed to do it. If it doesn't come with a lot of how-to advice and a holding-the-first-time-DM's-hand starter adventure, I'll be disappointed.

Not surprised, mind you, just disappointed. After all, an RPG loss-leader should leave everyone hungry for more, and the best way to do that is to get them to roll up characters and play them. A solo-adventure followed by a beginner-DM-friendly adventure that's also really cool would seem the obvious ways to go.

What also would be cool? A collection of head-shots to use as character portraits, sure, (and WotC certainly has access to a large collection of that sort of thing) but what would make people getting this PDF really want to play it RIGHT NOW? What could they do to make sure that first experience was so cool that nobody can wait to do it again? I think the focus should be on that first adventure, and it should include printable maps and fold-over minis, art the DM can pull up on a screen to show the players during the adventure (like the cut-out pictures from Tomb of Horrors), and LOTS of good advice about how to run and build fun adventures.

But that's just me off the top of my head. Coming up with ideas like this isn't my 9-to-5, nor do I have access to WotC's playtester feedback and marketing research. They ought to be brainstorming on this question like mad. Or, rather, they should have been doing that when they started the Basic D&D project. So far, they haven't said anything that leads me to believe that this will be a stand-out, knock-our-socks-off product. But then, we're only just now hearing about it, so who knows what else they may have up their sleeves?

Parlez-vous Melnibonéan?

From France, the land of epic comic books, comes this:

Industry! (Hunh!) What is it Good For? (Part the Second)

Among other things, giving us (the consumers) the benefits of bulk discounts:

Approaching the Last Two Days for the Simple System Kickstarter

The Simple System is in its last 50 hours of Kickstarting as I write this.  This is the RPG with the card-based resolution system I blogged about last week.  Mr. Matthews is also looking for feedback on design changes he's experimenting with to make the cards easier to read for those who are colorblind.  I know a number of my readers know a think or two about graphical design; please stop by and give him your two cents.

Thanks!

Cover A5t

Oh.

Um.

Oh dear?

Ok, it's not that bad. But it does like rather generic. I mean, these look like, hey, look, another fantasy RPG. Nothing exciting here.

Granted, part of that is how front-and-center the art is, with the titles very minimized. They're almost not there. I want to click or swipe to make them woosh off the screen. That's not a bad thing.

It would be a better thing if the art was knock-my-socks off.

Anyone have any idea who made these? I'm about to horribly insult them, whoever they are.

First off, the good: they all clearly belong to the same product line. No confusion there. I'm not entirely certain they are all the work of the same person (the lighting and textures for the MM and DMG are very different, and there's a subtly muted, almost simplified feel to the colors and textures of the starter set). If that's the case, the art direction is all the more impressive for it.

The cover for Hoard of the Dragon Queen is fun: shiny dragon, cool (ha-ha) attack, neat use of color to highlight the action. My favorite of the bunch.

But I'm seeing nothing here I'd want to put on my wall, and absolutely nothing that makes these leap off the shelves.

The MM has the most painterly look to it. It reminds me a bit of WAR's work, but with much less character. In fact, it almost looks like it was fashioned from cut-and-pasted elements. Haven't we seen that exact pose of a beholder before? Is that a dwarf from an interior 4e illustration? What's up with the screaming, turbaned person of indeterminate gender? Are they in the same picture? Do they know there's a beholder behind them? And why is that statue spitting lightning bolts? Or is it getting hit in the face with lightining bolts? And why is there a staircase to nowhere in the background? Seriously, it's a jumble of elements which aren't really interacting with each other.

The rest have this odd, overly sharp 3d feel to them, as if they started as poser art and then were hit with oil-painting filters in Photoshop. The teeth of the green dragon, the hands of the giant, all have this oddly sharp feel to them even though, as you look closely, you can see the brush strokes and other artifacts of painted work. It's very odd.

And the DMG, I'm sorry to say, has the look of poser art from a distance: the electric glow that washes out all other colors, the plastic-looking skin, the shadows. A second, closer look reveals the painterly techniques, but...

And what, exactly, is going on in this picture? Is he animating a corpse? Killing a dude? And is it just me, or does the liche's amulet (clearly a shout-out to the Green Devil-face) look like it was added in later?

One thing that does jump out is the central place of the monsters. The heroes barely fit in the frame, clearly playing second-fiddle to the monsters, each of which commands center stage. I'm curious to see how far we've moved away from the character-centered art of late 3.x and nearly all of 4.x. In none of these pics do I recognize a hero who's doing something really cool. Maybe the Viking sorceress on the cover the PHB, but it's hard to make out any details on her. Dress her in something other than her furs and I'm not sure I'd recognize her. Ditto for the elven-warrior-of-indeterminate-gender who's with her  All-in-all, the giant on the PHB, with his awesome white-dragon-pelt hat is the coolest character in the bunch.

(So is the difficulty of assigning gender to the figures part of WotC's way of foiling the folks who count and comment on that sort of thing? Or an artifact of conscious effort to make the heroes cyphers upon which the viewer can project their preferences, rather like the art in the old Choose Your Own Adventure Books?)

The covers for 3e were daring, unique, and put you in the world of D&D; you, the player, were holding artifact tomes from magical realms of lore and adventure. The 4e covers were clearly attempting to ride the zeitgeist with their comic-esque, uber-cool figures.

These 5e covers do not look like the flagship products of an industry or a hobby. These look plain, almost timid. They look like the work of, well, hobbyists throwing things together in their spare time, with only a modicum of design knowledge gleaned from Google-found top-five lists. Seriously, how are these very meh covers supposed to share shelf space with the likes of these:

 It's official: so far as production values go, WotC is getting their behind handed to them by a guy in Finland working out of his living room (NSFW!).

Addendum: I haven't been as clear as I should be when I describe the art as "generic."  What I mean is, this doesn't look special or noteworthy or of greater renown or quality.  That's what I mean by "generic" here.  Not so much that this is a game based on standard tropes of fantasy gaming, but rather that these are nothing to get excited about. These do not look like the flagship products of fantasy RPGing. They look like just more in a sea of interchangeable products. Nothing here says, "This is D-and-motherfucking-D, the 500 lbs gorilla of RPGs, the game that started it all, the standard by which all others should be judged." Walking into my local gaming stores with no real knowledge of the hobby, I'd be just as likely to pick up Dragon Age or DCCC as these, just based on the covers, and far more likely to grab Pathfinder, ACKS, or RuneQuest (all of which I can find at local gaming shops in town).

Addendum the Second:  via Walser's Raging Owlbear, a mock up by Stuart Robertson that is, if nothing else, a lot more fun than the ones WotC chose to go with.  I'm not entirely sure I prefer the heavier trade dress he uses to the minimalist choices of WotC, but I can see why folks both prefer and expect that sort of thing.  And, as Robertson points out, WotC already has access to (and has been using to promote 5e) art that is more fun and more powerful than the choices they decided to go with.

In Which Trollsmyth Blegs for More!

While I'm busy dusting the shelves and knocking away the cobwebs here in my online home, I can't help but see that the blog roll needs some serious work.  A lot of those links don't actually go anywhere anymore, and some blogs haven't been updated in years.  So, time to fix that.

If you know of any blogs that really belong there, please drop me a note either via email or in a comment below.

Thanks!

Simple System: Heartbreaker for a New Generation

There’s a lot of stuff I like about Derek Matthews’ Simple System tabletop RPG. Mr. Matthews has clearly been hanging around “the community” (or, at the very least, Big Purple) and reading lots of game design theory. The result is a game that plays with some nice mechanical differences at the table.

The most obvious difference is using cards instead of dice. I’ve read quite a bit about how well using plain old playing cards works for initiative, since you can see right on the card who is next, which is why Savage Worlds uses them. Playing cards are also very easy to read, even from across the table.

Mr. Matthews takes this a step further by creating custom cards that include a lot more information than you can gather from suit and number. By making his cards square and putting a different “number” along each edge, he’s allowed a single card to provide results for four different difficulty levels. A second, more inner ring of “pips” offers additional numbers (primarily used for weapon damage and armour damage-blocking). The center of the card is dominated by a teardrop direction indicator surrounding a larger number whose primary purpose is initiative. In short, each card is packed with data that can be used in a number of ways and can be read fairly easily from across the table due to the bright colors chosen (though I’m a bit surprised about the repetition of colors; green and red are used both for results and as background colors which, I would think, would make reading the cards slightly more difficulty than necessary).

Another clever piece of design I’ve read about, but can’t remember actually seeing in practice before, is rewarding players directly for invoking flaws at the moment the flaws come up in play. When creating a character in the Simple System, you can have one skill for each flaw you give your character. When your flaw is invoked in the game, you get a hero card which can be used for “rerolls”, one-use buffs, as extra hit points, or turned in at the end of the adventure as experience points for leveling-up purposes. So instead of having to weigh and value such flaws in a vacuum, players can be encouraged to come up with whatever flaws they like; they only get rewarded for those character flaws that actually come up in the game.

(So far, the only mechanism Mr. Matthews has mentioned for acquiring hero cards is the invocation of flaws and the awarding of three cards at the beginning of each adventure. I imagine there will also be ways to earn hero cards by successfully completing adventures. If the invocation of flaws is the principal method for earning most of your hero cards, then Simple System games are largely about characters getting into trouble. That sounds, to me, like a recipe for very fun games.)

Beyond these innovations, Simple System looks like pretty much every generic RPG you’ve played before: six stats that map nearly perfectly onto D&D’s original six, more complex and detailed rules for combat, and a strong focus on gear (though as the rules stand now, it does appear that stats are the most important thing on your character sheet, with skills and equipment offering bonuses or dictating results). The game also encourages the use of miniatures and maps. While that encouragement isn’t maybe as strong as 3.x D&D’s, you can absolutely see how Simple System is going to feel very familiar to players of Type III D&D.

In fact, it’s easy to see Simple System as a reaction to 3.x’s failings. The focus on simplicity, the “~30 page rulebook,” being able to create a character in “5 minutes or less,” having everything you need to know about your character’s gear and powers printed on cards right there in your hands, and the eschewing of diagonal movement, all look like reactions against 3.x’s greatest sins. There’ll be no flipping through 200 page tomes looking for the exact wording of a rule or spending hours crafting your character’s development path.

It does appear to be similar to Type III D&D in that it assumes a lot of prep-work ahead of time, mostly in the form of preparing handouts (in this case equipment and antagonist cards in addition to gridded maps for the miniatures). There’s no reason you couldn’t play with all that stuff, of course, but the default is clearly prepared adventures with a focus on combat encounters.

That said, Simple System is, well, simple. And RPGs with simple rules just beg for houseruling. With today’s ubiquitous printing and production facilities, I suspect house-ruling and house-printing cards will be a common thing.

I’ve yet to get my hands on this one, but from what I’ve seen, I like it. If I were to run an RPG set in the 40k universe, Simple System’s miniature rules would be a nice nod towards the wargame elements without turning the session into a wargame. The card-flipping mechanic looks nice and quick, the math is negligible, and with all the rules for powers and gear printed on cards players have at the table in front of them, I suspect Simple System games will move at brisk clip, especially compared to more rules-heavy systems like WotC-era D&D or even Savage Worlds. It might even give Fate a run for its money in the speed department. Tailoring the cards for your particular campaign might even give a new shot in the arm to really bizarre settings, making the aesthetic elements more present at the table. I certainly hope we see more of the Simple System, and I hope it inspires others to stretch even further outside the box.

Schrödinger's Personality

I ran across this list of 11 ways to be a better roleplayer. I think the list gets weaker the further along you go, as it delves deeper and deeper into “don’t be a dick” territory (important, yes, but not nearly as useful to those of us who, as a general rule, don’t play with people lacking in basic manners). However, the beginning of the list, and most especially the first two points, are solid gold.

I especially like point the second, Realise that your character does not exist outside of the things you have said:

You can write as many pages of backstory as you like, mate, but they don’t factor in one bit to the game unless you show them happening. Are you a shrewd businessman? Cool. Do some business, shrewdly, in front of everyone else. Are you a hot jazz saxophonist? Play the saxophone. Are you a wild elf struggling through social interactions with civilised people? Struggle through those interactions! Don’t go off and sit in a tree, you prick!

And this ties directly into what you can actually pull off at the table. No, I’m not talking about allowing only people with exceptional social skills to play high charisma characters. The issue is more fundamental than that.

To whit, it’s rather frustrating, as a DM who’s built adventures around a character background full of derring-do and wild escapades, to discover that said character is actually played with all the caution and timidity of a mysophobic in a kindergarten classroom.

Granted, sometimes life, and the game, conspire against you. You meant to play a more colorful character, but traveling with the happy-go-lucky pixie rogue has you playing the straight man. Sometimes that’s just the best way to do things, and you have more fun playing with the other players than your original, conceived-in-a-vacuum idea would have been. No worries there; just adjust and roll with it.

Even better, however, is when you and your fellow players can actually build these interacting personalities together. This is one of the reasons many old schoolers prefer to begin with minimal background; what’s needed can be invented on the fly that way, after you’ve had a chance to see the character in action, interacting with the rest of the party and the campaign world.

And that leads me to imagine a group character generation system in which stats and skills are created via interacting tropes that are developed through the first adventure of play. That is, you begin with the bare-bones skeleton of a character (perhaps even one suffering from amnesia) and, as you create relationships for your PC with the other PCs, you flesh out skills, bonuses, and quirks accordingly. I’ll bet you could come up with dozens of templates just by browsing through tvtropes.org.

Boobs (Even Badly Drawn Ones) Sell

So the Anti-boob Brigade is tossing around the idea that you can sell more copies of (in this case) a comic book if you don't slap a woman with an unrealistic rack front-and-center on the cover. In addition to complaining about the artist including stray sheets of paper and a paper airplane (because, yeah, you never see those at a school), Janelle Asselin is quite annoyed by Wonder Girl's giganto boobs.

Now, if you want to argue about the shape being unrealistic, and her choice of a strapless top to try to hold them in place being insane, or even the sexualization of a teen (how old is she supposed to be these days?) being more than a little creepy, sure, I'm right there with you.

But don't try to tell us that this is going to drive away female readers. Not without some real numbers or market research to back you up. Why?

Because Cosmo has no trouble selling badly photo-shopped cleavage to women, consistently, month after month. The relaunched Teen Titans sold 26,000 copies in March. Over the past six months of 2013, Cosmopolitan sold, on average, over 500,000 copies each month.

People like Janelle Asselin have no idea what readers actually want. They have very firm opinions about what female readers ought to want, what sorts of covers would be “good for them.” But these busy-bodies have no idea what actually drives sales.

Listen to these sorts of people as they speak on panels at conventions, and you'll hear them trash-talk Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey. They'll tell you to avoid the “masturbatory fantasies” and rape and helpless female characters.

And while they do that, the romance genre of books will continue to outsell all the other genres of fiction novels COMBINED!

And hey, I can absolutely sympathize with (some) of the desires these people have for genre fiction. As a character, I find Bella annoying and far too passive to really enjoy reading about. But I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that writing a character like her will drive women away from your books. Nor will I tell you that having a half-fainted woman spilling out of her bodice with insane zero-g breasts on the cover of your novel will prevent women from reading it. Because, unlike Janelle Asselin and her ilk, I don't think you're stupid.

Like, seriously, is she a halfling?  And what's going on with her legs?!?

Review: Love and Sex in the Ninth World

“Love and Sex in the Ninth World” (abbreviated LaSitNW here) is a 13 page pdf document published by Monte Cook Games for their Numenera line. It’s written by Shanna Germain who is no stranger to erotica, kink, and gaming, and that shows in this little “glimmer.”

LaSitNW is just what it says it is on the tin: the hows (and, unfortunately, also the whys) of adding romance and sex to your Numenera game. I say that discussing the whys is unfortunate because it’s wasted space; if you had no interest in doing so, why would you have picked up this pdf? Beyond a discussion of what sex and romance can do in your game, there seems little point to it, and in a product so tiny, space and time and effort are at a premium. So I don’t see much point in selling the product (or the idea) to someone who’s already bought it, especially when it’s not the sort of thing you can flip through at a store.

The text itself is a mixture of practical advice, egg-shell-walking caution, and flashes of brilliance. I’d love to see what a bolder, unapologetic writer like Zak S. might do with the same topic, but for what it is and who its published by, it’s more than I’d expected.

The very first words of the text are as follows: “Because the Ninth World is so large and disparate, it would be foolish to make sweeping generalizations about sex, love, lust, and courtship among its inhabitants.” Ms. Germain then proceeds to do exactly that. We are told that gender inequality and sexual orientation are no big thing in the Ninth World. This is disappointing from a world-building standpoint, but hardly surprising. Sweeping these broadly off the table right from the start prevents drama, especially in games where people are expected to play their own, real-world genders and sexual orientations.

If this starts you to worrying that Ms. Germain’s Ninth World is some sort of happy-happy rainbow-spangled Seattle-esque love fest where sex is always magical and bright, the brief section on class will relieve your fears. It’s short and deals exclusively with slavery in the Ninth World. The attitudes described are very Roman; slaves are used for sex without much consideration for their opinions on the matter. There’s an interesting fission between the matter-of-fact outlook of the inhabitants of the Ninth World and modern day sensibilities. One NPC, Duke Ingast, is described as “a notorious slave owner”. I can’t help but imagine the phrase would make as much sense in the Ninth World as calling someone in our day and age a “notorious toaster owner.”

The first section closes with a description of the loosey-goosey, term-limited, and rather vague institution of marriage in the Ninth World (called “coupledom”) and an explanation of how attraction is very culturally specific. It’s all very Heinleinian (including legal prostitution and for-hire enforcers of relationship contracts) though without any mention of non-communal polyamory. Which is kind of surprising; one would think that the Aeon Priesthood would be the natural place to find line marriages.

The real juicy meat of LaSitNW comes in the section called Putting Sex in Your Game. These two pages are sprinkled with little gems of wisdom culled from Ms. Germain’s experience as a gamer and author: “Love’s job is usually to portray deep emotional loss… or high emotional joy…” “Sex’s job is typically about power exchange.” “ If a PC is trying to get pregnant, and the guard is clearly expecting (or vice versa—maybe the guard has been infertile for years), the dynamic will have a unique emotional charge.”

Some of what’s in there is your basic adventure-creation advice (romance as a plot point, etc.) and some looks half-baked (an extremely vague section on mechanical benefits from love and sex without any real explanation of how to handle it looks tailor-made to trip up unexperienced GMs). But as an essay on how to use the fact that love and sex complicate everything, it shines. If you’re an experienced hand at writing romance and erotica it may seem like old hat, but for the rest of us, there’s a lot of brain-fodder here to play with.

Unfortunately, it’s followed by a full page on how sex is a touchy topic, “triggers,” and similar warnings. It’s all given the star treatment, but the folks who really need to read it won’t, and it’ll likely scare off the timid.

With that last bit of dreary business taken care of, Ms. Germain allows herself to get playful with her subject matter. She discusses love tokens (instead of rings, Ninth Worlders exchange badges), STIs, pregnancy (“Getting pregnant is a level 5 task between two fertile people of the opposite sex who are not using devices to alter fertility.”) and childbirth, and prostitution. That last is perhaps the most fun. We learn, for instance, that prostitution is not the final refuge of the skill-less and destitute, but rather the domain of highly trained, celebrated, and well-compensated professionals. These professionals are known by their specializations and styles. Goldglams are the rockstars of the sex world, advertising their presence with street performances and then picking their sexual clients selectively. Daupsams trade sex only for numenera, and include aeon priests among their number. Flute boys seemed misnamed to me; they bear little resemblance to the musician-whores of Athens and seem more like the geisha of Japan.

We then get another page of apologia for use of non-traditional sex and gender roles. They do brush against the real issue (using traditional assumptions to limit people’s options at the gaming table) but it’s another page that could have been put to better use.

The final section gives us three artifacts, five cyphers, and eight oddities. Most are good, offering intriguing bits of roleplay and strange abilities that will find all sorts of creative use inside and outside bedrooms. The weakest of the bunch is what amounts to a levitating sex-swing, but even that is fraught with creative uses once you get it into the hands of devious players.

If play that includes sex and romance intrigues you, and you’re not intimately familiar with the art of crafting romance or erotica stories, this is certainly worth your time and treasure. (You should probably also invest in a beginner’s guide to writing that sort of thing, especially if you haven’t read much of it.) The bits of numenera and background details are interesting, but by themselves are not worth the price if that’s all you hope to get out of it. I would have preferred a more in-depth treatment of the subject with greater emphasis on cultural permutations, but I also recognize that I’m odd in that respect. As such, while I bemoan the short shrift such a limited form allows the topic, I’m thrilled it got even this much attention and that it was handled as expertly as it was. I hope we’ll be seeing more of Ms. Germain’s kinky creativity in the near future.

If We're in Heorot, it Must be Wotan's Day

There's been some fun chatter about calendars and their uses over at G+ lately, resulting in a post by Oddysey over at her blog. She mentions that she has no idea what the date actually is in the Doom & Tea Party's game. By the in-game calendar it is, in fact, the 20th day of the Second Moon of Spring. But that's not terribly important.

Generally speaking, in your standard Old School game there are few reasons why players worry about dates and time. The first is logistics: do they have enough food, principally. And food is measured in days-worth of rations. So knowing how many days it will take to travel from point A to point B, or how many days travel away from civilization they are is what they're really worried about.

And for that, you don't really need any calendar at all. But there are other issues that might make knowing specific dates important. Some of these are cultural: festivals, legal proceedings, birthdays, stuff like that. Some are merely window-dressing; are the peasants in the fields harvesting, sowing, mending fences or what? Some are logistical; are the roads smooth and dry, muddy swamps, or under two feet of snow?

But a few issues can be of vital importance to adventurers. The two that repeatedly pop up in my campaigns are the times of sunset and sunrise, and the phases of the moon. And for those, you need something a touch more robust. But only a touch. You'll notice that the calendar for Doom & Tea Parties is ridiculously simple and terribly unrealistic. But it makes it very easy to know both the season and the current phase of the moon. No math or tables required.

I did something very similar in my Numenera game. The setting dictates 28 hour days and a 313 day year. So I made that as simple as I could, with four seasons divided into three moons, and each moon having 26 days. The full moon falls on the 13th day, and the new moon falls on the 26th. The extra day is New Year Day (falling between the last day of the Third Moon of Autumn and the first day of the First Moon of Winter), keeping things both easy-peasy and in line with the official setting dictates. And again, no funky names for days or months. The Third Occlusion of the Octopus means nothing, but everyone has some idea of what the 20th day of the Second Moon of Spring ought to be like.

As it turns out, one of my players chose Howls at the Moon as their Focus, so knowing when the moon is full is actually pretty important. He doesn't have to guess, I don't have to fiddle with tables or calculations, and life is good. This is the Zen of the Lazy DM. ;)

Great Gobs o' Goo!

Here's an example of cyphers for Numenera, and one artifact at the end. Level is a basic catch-all for anything you might want to do with the item: reverse engineer it, identify it, add it to another device, or whatever. External just describes how it's applied. Other cyphers are internal (like pills or injections), wearable (like jewelry or temporary tattoos), or useable (basically describing hand-held devices like tricorders or flashlights). Depletion is the roll you make every time the item is used to see if you've used it up or broken it.  If you roll a 1, this is the last time the artifact works properly, if at all.

Anoetic means the cypher is fairly simple and stable: it's a pill or has only one button and is extremely easy to use.  Occultic cyphers have lots of levers and controls on them and are more complex to use, though generally only one combination of settings has any noticeable effect, and it's still a one-use item.

Goo actually describes a variety of substances that are usually found in soft synth tubes.  The tubes, even empty, are greatly prized by explorers for their near indestructibility while their bright colors make empty tubes excellent toys for children.  Being brightly labeled (usually), most folks enjoy a +2 on rolls to identify a tube of goo.

The tubes tend to be about an inch across and almost four inches long.  They’re pinched closed at both ends.  One end is just sealed soft synth, and it’s as difficult to pierce or damage as the rest (Difficulty 7 to penetrate or pierce) while the other end sports a brightly colored tab of stiff synth.  To use most goo, you tear off the stiff synth tab then squeeze the goo out onto yourself.  With only a bit of coaxing, the goo will spread to cover a single being.  There’s usually more than enough goo to cover a single creature or object, though attempting to spread the goo out over multiple uses or people causes the stuff to immediately decompose.

Decomposing goo usually liquefies and slides cleanly off the person or object it’s been put on [GM intrusion: the goo stains clothing it’s been spread over.] or evaporates in a quickly dissipating cloud that smells like mulch or a bog.  This decomposition tends to be rather sudden when it happens.

Goo spreads to cover the entire body in a shiny, clean layer.  It will go over clothes and does the cover the face, smoothing over the features to make who ever’s wearing it unrecognizable.  However, those wearing goo can (usually) see and breathe through the goo easily.

All goos are anoetic cyphers.

ARMOR GOO
Level: 2d6
External: goo
Effect: This midnight blue goo forms small, rigid scales across its entire surface.  The result is heavy armor that lasts for 14 hours.  If it’s spread directly across the skin, it imposes no penalties; if spread over clothes it imposes the penalties of medium armor.

INVIGORATING GOO
Level: 2d6
External: goo
Effect: Translucent crystal blue, this goo must be spread across bare skin to be effective.  It tingles on the skin and massages the dermis and higher layers of muscle.  It improves the wearer’s Edge for all stats by +1, but won’t raise any above 3.  It lasts for 14 hours and evaporates into a minty-fresh cloud.

HEALING GOO
Level: 2d6
External: goo
Effect: This rich green goo restores +1 point to any one stat every minute.  After half-an- hour, it will restore a level of health, then dissipate.

COCOONING GOO
Level: 1d10
External: goo
Effect: This goo seals a person in a tight cocoon of purple goo.  Legs are pressed together and arms are trapped at the sides.  Those outside the cocoon can change the translucence of the goo (blocking the sight of the captive), as well as how well, if at all, sound travels through it (though they cannot suffocate the captive).  The cocoon lasts for 28 hours, or until someone outside dissipates it.  From inside, it’s a Might feat with a difficulty of 8 to break out of the cocoon.

SENSATION GOO
Level: 1d6
External: goo
Effect: The translucent crimson sensation goo heightens the sensations of anyone wearing it.  While it can reduce the Difficulty of a challenge to a character’s tactile sensitivity (lock-picking, safe-cracking, reading Braille, and the like), it also reduces the difficulty of torturing, seducing or otherwise influencing the gooed character via touch.  In addition, anytime a character wearing this goo is hurt in combat, the sensation is so overwhelming that they must make an Intellect check against a Difficulty of 4 or pass out for 1d6 minutes.  This goo last 14 hours + 2d6 hours.

X-RAY GOO
Level: 2d6
External: goo
Effect: X-ray goo is translucent green and glows with a cold electric light.  It allows others to inspect the internels of whatever or whoever is covered.   It lowers by one the Difficulty of any task where such x-ray vision could be useful, such as picking locks, diagnosing disease or internal injuries, or the like.  It lasts four hours.

PSYCHEDELIC GOO
Level: 1d6
External: goo
Effect: Once smeared on a body, this opaque goo writhes with brilliant colors in wild, mind-bending patterns.  The colors and patterns appear to be affected by the mood of the wearer, but just how isn’t entirely clear.  Wearing this good impedes the vision of the wearer not at all, but it can be an asset in public performance tasks.

POISON GOO
Level: 1d6
External: goo
Effect: Whatever this goo was originally designed to do, it’s toxic to most life in the Ninth World.  Anyone wearing this goo (which comes in a variety of colors) immediately suffers a wound equal to the level of the goo and then another every 5 minutes they continue to wear the stuff.  Removing this goo is often (50% of the time) easy, but the rest of the time it’s a Might task with a Difficulty of 4.

TEMPERATURE-CONTROL GOO
Level: 2d6
External: goo
Effect: While wearing this white goo, you’ll never be too hot.  Or too cold.  It keeps your body temperature constant, which for most people makes it feel like it’s a pleasant spring day.  It lasts 28 hours.

GOO FACTORY
Level: 1d6+1
Form: a crystal and synth box six inches tall, 14 inches wide, and 16 inches deep.
Effect: this artifact has a panel on the top perforated with thousands of tiny, octagonal holes.  If a pound of organic matter is placed on that panel it will start to “melt” into the machine while an array of holographic controls will appear in the air over the machine.  Using it to get the goo you want is a Difficulty 7 Intellect challenge (anything that beats Difficulty 3 will produce a tube of goo, just not necessarily the one the user was trying to get).
Depletion: 1-10

[GM Intrusion: the machine spits out a goo with a completely blank label.  The only way to learn what’s in it is to use it.]

Numenera in the Wild

Ran my first game of Numenera last night. Character creation is quick and easy, but you have to be a bit careful as you go through to hit and understand every point. Weapon skills, for instance, work differently from other skills (not sure why) in that you start at a negative, and then train up to no modifiers before getting the usual modifiers. Also, since each of the three aspects (adjective, noun, and phrase) can overlap in certain areas, you need to go through each carefully to make sure you note everything, plus sometimes hopping back-and-forth to avoid redundancy. Even at our level of inexperience and with flipping around in the book, we went from concept to completed character in something like a half-hour.

The mechanics are fairly simple, but nearly all of it is in the hands of the players. This can cause some confusion. I’m working on a cheat-sheet of ways to lower target numbers for my players. Hopefully that’ll make things run more smoothly, though honestly they ran pretty smoothly last night.

It didn’t take ‘em long to discover the double-jeopardy of stat pools being both dice-roll modifiers and hit points. They were quick to utilize the environment to help them avoid dangers and to pit monsters against each other Harryhausen-style.

And yeah, Numenera has a definite old-school feel. It promotes rulings over rules. Its rules are fairly simple and few in number. There’s not much emphasis on gear (weapons, for instance, are categorized as small, medium, or large and that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about them; in the mechanics of combat, there’s no difference between an axe, a saber, and a spear). A monster’s stat line looks like this: steel spider [level 3(9), health: 9, Damage 3, Armor, see page 260]. As stated above, it encourages lateral thinking. The setting is atmospheric but also wide-open. And a good game requires an interesting locale.

Mechanically, the cyphers are central to the game. They provide most of the weird feel (so I think we’re going to see a lot of new ones, especially from folks who like a lot more weird in their games) as well as the best options for lateral thinking and planning.

But beyond them, the rules are not terribly interesting in-and-of-themselves. They do their job and then get out of the way. So if you’re used to running games where manipulating the rules largely is the game (3e and 4e, I am so looking at you), you’re likely to find Numenera a little flat there. Hell, I found Numenera a little flat there, and I tend to run Labyrinth Lord.

Mr. Cook calls Numenera a game about exploration. I think he’s right, but he certainly doesn’t mean it the way old-school D&D is a game about exploration. Numenera isn’t about logistics, encumbrance, or keeping strict time records. It is about solving problems through clever use of one-shot wonders, powers, and the environment.

And that means your Numenera game will largely rise or fall on the quality of your adventures. Interesting places with intriguing, open-ended challenges that give your players lots of room to play should be the order of the day. Think more Myst’s intellectual playgrounds and less of tactical challenges, linear stories, or even the dependable ol’ five room dungeon. A good Numenera location, whether it be an ancient ruin, a skyship, or a royal court, needs to be full of opportunities for players to be clever and challenges that encourage them to be so.

Yeah, ok, that’s rather vague, and I’m still teasing out just what that means in terms of location design, though at this point I’m pretty sure you should be designing locations more than adventures.

Unpacking Numenera's Cypher Economy

Two of my players have created characters, I’m waiting on two more, and then it’s nailing down a time and place for play (which will absolutely be after WorldCon sometime; just how long will depend on my recovery time).  As I work on a first adventure (because the four in the book are real stinkers) I’m going over the rules bit-by-bit in more depth.  One thing that stands out is how stats work.

Your character has three stats: Might, Speed, and Intellect.  Unlike most beat-the-number mechanics, your stats, by themselves, don’t modify your rolls.  They do create pools of points you can burn to modify your rolls, however.  So if you have an Intellect of 16 and you’re attempting to break a really difficult code (Target Numbers are three times Difficulty, so a Difficulty of 5 means you need to roll a 15 or better on a d20), you can choose to burn 3 points of Intellect to lower the Difficulty by one (and thus the Target Number by 3; from 15 to 12 in our example).  This lowers an Intellect pool of 16 to 13.

So far, so good.  Having high stats means you can put forth more effort (ie burn points from your pools) to make tasks easier.  (Having the right skills, tools, situation, or help can also make tasks easier.)  Things get exciting when fights and traps and such kick in because these pools are also your hit points.  Get chewed on by a Broken Hound and you’ll lose 4 points from your Might pool.  Once your Might pool drops to zero, you start losing points from your Speed pool.  Lose all the points in all three pools and you’re dead.

But wait, there’s more!  Each time a pool goes to zero, things get worse in other ways as well.  Not only do you not have any points to use from that pool to make tasks (like avoiding getting bit) easier, you also endure additional penalties.  A character with one pool at zero is impaired.  It now costs four points from a pool to lower a Difficulty by one.  They also don’t get special bennies from rolling high.  A character with two pools at zero can do nothing but move, unless one of the pools at zero is Speed, in which case they can’t even do that.

Put it all together, and you’ve got one nasty death spiral. 

Death spirals are generally decried as a blemish on the face of RPGs. Sure, they make sense from a simulationist point of view, but they are generally not much fun at all. They drag out combat even as they make the final result more and more a foregone conclusion. So why did Mr. Cook include such a nasty one in Numenera?

While Mr. Cook and I appear to have diametrically opposed ideas as to what makes a good adventure, I have to give the man props for his rules-design skills. Numenera has some really slick design work in it and the interaction of the death spiral and the core themes is probably the crown jewel of the book.

First, the death spiral works in steps. Yes, every time you get hurt or burn points from a stat pool, you do have fewer to work with. However, as any veteran Magic or D&D player will tell you, the only hit point that really counts is the last one. Just so in Numenera; so long as you have enough stat points to apply effort or activate a power, it doesn't appear to matter whether or not this is the last time you can do it or the first of many times.

(This assumes that powers don't stack in synergistic ways. That is, if activating your Vapor Cloud power made using your Lightning Bolt power more effective, then it might begin to matter how deep your pool was. My brief glance through the powers didn't reveal any like that, but folks who've actually played might tell a different story.)

Granted, reaching zero in a pool is a double-whammy with the damage track penalties on top of not having any more points to burn from that pool. However, it's more a stepped spiral than a sloped one; that is, until you pass over the edge of the step, things really aren't much worse from the beginning of the step to the end of the step. This gives you lots of time to see the train coming while you still have the resources to get off the tracks.

And when I say “resources” I don't just mean points in your pools. Mr. Cook is also a big fan of single-use get-out-of-jail-free cards. In Numenera, there are two kinds of such. The first is EXP. You can burn an EXP to reroll any single roll, even one you didn't roll yourself. And you can do this as often as you have EXP to burn. (Which goes very well with Numenera's the-players-roll-all-the-dice. And note that since the players roll all the dice, no dice are rolled behind the screen.)

However, the biggie is the cyphers. Cyphers are one-shot techno-magic devices that work very much like potions in D&D. However, unlike potions, cyphers are not bought or sold in shops, and they should be so ubiquitous in adventures that each player should always have a handful in their packs:

Cyphers are found with such regularity that the PCs can use them freely. There will always be more, and they’ll have different benefits. This means that in gameplay, cyphers are less like gear or treasure and more like character abilities that the players don’t choose. This leads to fun game moments where a player can say, “Well, I’ve got an X that might help in this situation,” and X is always different. X might be an explosive device, a short-range teleporter, or a force field. It might be a powerful magnet or an injection that will cure disease. It could be anything. Cyphers keep the game fresh and interesting.

And, in fact, the cyphers range from generic healing potions to devices that muck with time, or cause the PC to teleport around like a blink dog, or open up small black holes! They can give you temporary skills (“I know kung-fu!”), allow you to remotely control machines with your mind, record audio or video, or fix a nearly-unmoveable spike anywhere (even midair). And those are just the ones in the core rulebook.

The cyphers are the key to making the game work differently than other games. Numenera isn’t about playing for years before a character is allowed to teleport, travel to other dimensions, lay waste to a dozen enemies at once, or create a mechanical automaton to do his bidding. He can do it right out of the gate if he has the right cypher.

Where most RPGs are built around a leveling treadmill, Numenera is built around cypher-churn. The players should constantly have new cyphers (that is, new abilities) to play with and plan around. The game stays fresh, the players stay eager for that next cool thing, and they also stay focused on out-of-the-box thinking and going places to get more cool cyphers.

Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational Monte Cook:

• Stats as fuel for special abilities plus stats as hit points creates a potentially vicious (but stepped) death spiral. 
• Players, recognizing the dangers of the death spiral, look for ways to solve problems that avoid burning stats. Cyphers are the obvious go-to solution but... 
•  …each player can only carry so many cyphers before they start interacting in their packs in ways reminiscent of D&D's old potion miscibility table (only without any of the good options).
• Luckily, cyphers are plentiful for adventurous types who go places cyphers can be found.
 

Thus you get a benevolent feedback loop of using cyphers and hunting cyphers. Unlike old school D&D where players could wind up buried in mountains of gold, you never run out of uses for cyphers and, in fact, are encouraged to find novel uses for the things.

How does this all actually work in play? I'm anxious to find out.