Sword & Scoundrel: Now on DTRPG (and I couldn't be more thrilled)

This has been a long, long road traveled. Now it feels like it's starting to pay off. On Wednesday the 0.2.1 release of the S&S pdf was approved on drivethrurpg. That is a pretty major milestone for me, as it marks the first time something Ive designed is really out there. I've released pdfs on my own before, but it's different when the thing is actually swimming in the waters of actual games. As someone who struggles with recognizing the worth of their own work, it was a major feeling of accomplishment — even if I still have so much work to do.

Meanwhile, I've begun the (somewhat painful) process of trying to actually get the work seen. I've been blessed with a small but fairly devoted community throughout this journey. We've picked them up in ones and twos over the years by internet searches alone and they've sort of stuck with us ever since. Now I'm at the point in the development cycle where I need fresh eyes to look at the thing and that's a more difficult task. This is even worse when it comes to my personal dislike of marketing and pathological discomfort with self-promotion.

Still, I recognize that it has to be done. It's not enough to write and design if you can't get people to look at the thing. Ugh.

I've been going with the following pitch:

Sword & Scoundrel is a player-driven tabletop role-playing game of passion, violence, and general skullduggery. Set against a gritty renaissance backdrop, Sword & Scoundrel is a morality play presented as an HBO character drama, where players declare what is most important to their character and see it challenged through play. It's a blood opera of intrigue and swordplay, exploring how far you will go, what lines you will cross, and what — or who — you are willing to sacrifice for what you hold most dear.

The beta document is available at drivethrurpg, where it is and will remain free of charge. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/259404/Sword--Scoundrel-Open-Beta-Document

It currently contains everything you need for core game-play: the core mechanics, character creation, combat, and the weapon/armor customization rules. The GM material is being worked on as we speak, but if you have any familiarity with The Burning Wheel, The Riddle of Steel, or Apocalypse World, you can run this without missing a beat.

As the beta progresses, we also have plans on a fully-developed sorcery system, social combat, faction support, and a few other goodies.

Which seems to summarize things well enough. We won't talk about how many times I rewrote that first paragraph.

Along with that, I've been appending all of the follow-up links so that people can actually give feedback. The website, our forums, our surprisingly active discord server. The latter has been growing at a slow but steady rate, of late. I must be doing something right...ish.

To others out there in the design/writing space: how do you deal with all of this? Self-promotion, outreach, whatever. Is it like pulling teeth for anyone else?

Sword & Scoundrel -- Finally, a Release

Only the gods know how many hours, words, and bottles of whiskey went into this project. What I can tell you is that a 77,000 words, 250 pages, and 379 days later, I have a solid draft available for playtesting. It will almost certainly have mistakes, typos, and broken bits inside.. but it's the single largest and most complete thing I've ever released and that's a personal milestone.

Check it out here: https://www.grandheresy.com/blog/2018/11/15/sword-amp-scoundrel-020

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition

As a game concept, ammunition sucks. There's an argument for tracking ammunition. It's realistic. It costs money. It takes up space. In the context of OD&D it makes sense to track ammunition because resource management is an explicit part of the game. The more gear you take, the more room it takes up in your pack, the slower you go. The slower you go, the more monsters and things you run into. The less room you have in your pack, the less loot you can take back. It's an intrinsic part of the risk/reward.

On the other hand, that is not something Scoundrel really cares about. Encumbrance in our game doesn't care about weight, money is mostly abstract, and even the buying of ammunition is sort of an odd proposition because it's mostly an r1 expense.

So is there any real need to track ammunition?

The only circumstance I can think of in which th game would actively care about ammunition is in the circumstance where running out of ammunition would be narratively interesting and even that doesn't necessarily require marking off each arrow loosed.

In the OSR world, some people have adopted an interesting piece of gaming praxis called a "usage die." You might have d8 worth of arrows. After every fight, roll the d8. If it comes up as a 1, it shrinks to a d6. Repeat until you either buy more arrows (increasing your die size) or you get down to a d4 and roll a 1 -- indicating that you are now out.

The main benefit of this setup is that you aren't erasing and rewriting a total every time you make a ranged attack. You're still doing some accounting, but it's something you do post-combat, rather than during.

It makes me wonder first if such an idea could be adapted to Sword & Scoundrel (there are ways, I'm sure) and then second if that would actually be desirable in a game where we have taken a substantially more simulationist approach with so many other aspects of weapons and combat.
Floating ideas. Feel free to toss in feedback.

Almost a Year to the Day

That's how long I've gone between posts. It's an impressive feat, really. Then again, that's how I've always dealt with this poor blog. I will go through active bursts of content and then get out of the habit for an age.

I won't bore you with the details of the last year. Personal stuff, health stuff. Some ups. Some down. Life goes on. Very little of it would be of interest to anyone who wasn't part of it, and none of it is relevant to this blog's stated purpose. Instead, I'll update you on the one thing that is:

What began as an attempt to make a streamlined "quick play" style rules set for NaGaDeMon last year turned into an overhaul of the system itself. Seventy-three thousand words later, Sword & Scoundrel is preparing for its most complete release to date. Higgins is off doing bigger and better things, but I've wrangled a couple volunteer editors to pour over prose on my behalf. With luck, they will have that back to me in relatively short order and  I can get the layout done.

This is the first version of the game that is "complete." All of the absolute core material is there. The core mechanic, character creation, combat, social stuff, gear and equipment. You can make characters and play the game. It's shocking that it's taken me years to have all of that together in a single document, but it's unbelievably relieving to have the bulk of it behind me.

The only parts of the game now missing from the original vision are the GM section and magic. Both of these are fairly massive things in their own right, but neither are absolute requirements for using the core material. The GM section is my next project, but anyone with significant GM experience can likely run the game as-is. This is doubly true if you've been a Burning Wheel, Riddle of Steel, or Apocalypse World GM in the past.

The magic system isn't strictly necessary at all (the very first version of the game in ye ancient Song of Steel days didn't intend to have one). It's useful for a lot of fantasy stuff, but you can play without it. Much of the Sword & Sorcery genre sort of works on the premise that sorcery is for the antagonists, not the heroes. I'll get to work on that after the core system and GM stuff is all settled. My ambitions for it are as such that it isn't something I would want to rush.

In the meantime, I'll keep you posted.