Sex & Romance in Role-Playing Games

PCs should be getting laid. If fiction is any guide, the three universal motivators are love/lust, greed, and revenge. They are human urges so basic that when presented in fiction they need no further justification. This is what people do and have been doing at least as long as we’ve been writing about it. Sex and violence are just good story-fodder.

The thing is, this tends not to be the case in RPGs. Yeah, we get plenty of money and violence, but where’s the sex? Where’s the romance? I’ve always wanted to find a way to encourage fictional romance at the table, but the problem seems three-fold. The first issue is that games very rarely touch the subject. When it does come up, it’s often in some form of generational play, concerning the joining of families or creation of offspring. This is more logistics management than romance. PbtA games buck this trend slightly, with Apocalypse World having moves based on sex: “When you sleep with someone, take +1hx with them”etc. This at least brings the thing into active play, rather than a background strategic element. Still, it’s... lacking. In my experience, even the sex Moves aren’t enough to pique a player’s interest unless it offers some kind of strong strategic advantage.

The second problem is that players, out of character, do not care if their PC gets laid. Players are goal-driven creatures. They want to win. They want to earn points, they want to beat the mission, they want to accomplish their goals. For the player, there is no real temptation to divert time and energy into a romantic interest that does not bring them closer to said goals. Compounding this, we’ve sort of trained players to want the exact opposite. If you do get romantically involved with an NPC, you’re just asking the GM to take it as leverage to use against you. Combine all this with the lack of mechanical attention paid to the topic and even those players who might be interested in romantic story elements may not be aware it’s even a valid option. After all, games communicate what they are interested in by the rules they choose to include.

So what do we do with this?

Sex and romance are a pretty hardcore set of biological drives for most humans, at least at some point in their lives. They are a unique area of focus that is difficult to sublimate just by focusing on other areas of development. They are such powerful drivers that we often do very dumb things in the pursuit thereof, eschewing our more rational priorities for even a fleeting glimpse of that rush (or release.) This is such a powerful factor in most of our lives  that as an audience, we don’t even balk when fictional characters risk upending their entire lives because they were lonely or the bartender was cute. Many of us have been there, man. 

In general, the way you get PCs to act like real people is by making the mechanical incentives of the game mirror the physical or psychological incentives the PC would have in-character. You are never going to get a player to really care about their PCs level of comfort or discomfort, or worry about the quality of their sleep. However, if you mechanically reward them for being exceptionally well-rested or start punishing them for getting shitty sleep on a bad mattress, the interests of player and PC align. Suddenly, the PC will be very concerned about the quality of their mattress and a good night’s sleep.

If we want players to be tempted to actively court romance or be tempted to make dumb decisions concerning their gender of choice, then we need to creative incentives for the players to do so. Getting this right, however, requires a few things:

• It needs to be a discrete subsystem, the very existence thereof drawing attention to the fact that this is a valid thing to explore in play.
• It needs to be built in such a way that it can be accessed or ignored at the player’s preference, without having to specifically build your character around taking advantage of it. This is ultimately why relegating the concept to a drive or trait doesn’t quite work. It’s fine for the P/PC who is specifically set out to do that thing, But for anyone else it may as well not exist.
• The rewards must be unique enough that you can’t get them from other systems in the game and compelling enough to tempt goal-oriented players into making trouble for themselves to do so. This is even more important when you remember the liability potential of tying yourself to an NPC.
• And ideally, we’d want it to (wherever possible) integrate into other areas of the game and plug into/make use of the existing mechanics so that it feels a natural extension of play. Accessibility is key.

You may have noticed above that I said three-fold problem and only listed two. The third and perhaps largest issue comes from the topic itself. Simply put, people have baggage. For a lot of people, sex is a significantly greater taboo than violence. The same group that will happily engage in fictional sword-fights and describe a disebowelment in gratuitous detail will get squirmy at even vague descriptions of physical intimacy. Even someone who is otherwise very comfortable with the topic of sex and their own sexuality may not be terribly interested in role-playing the details thereof with and in front of their friends at the table or watching said friends do the same. Unless, you know, you’re into that.

Existing RPGs haven't done themselves many favors. When people think of the topic, they often think about things like FATAL where the its inclusion is about simulating the act itself. Add to this the above issues of social-squick and potential prior bad experiences due to either group immaturity or deliberate bad actors and it's easy to see where this can lead to uncomfortable territory. Further add in the lack of representation of the topic in RPGs and it creates a culture where sex and romance are neither a normal part of expected RP experience, no one people know how to explore in a safe, productive fashion. No one wants to end up on r/rpghorrorstories.

The thing is, all of this latter point is a red herring. Most of the discomfort (and prior bad experience) comes from the idea of playing out sex-scenes at the table.  As ludicrously amusing as it might be to develop a God of War-style sex mini-game out of Full Contest (how else would you know who won?), that's not only unnecessary, it misses the point. The reason that sex and romance are valuable as a story element is through the exploration of character motivations and the relationship dynamics it creates. While the gratuitous nudity is good for HBO's ratings, the physical act of sex is not where the drama lies. From a dramatic standpoint, it's all about the lead up and the consequences to the relationships involved.

From a game standpoint, the purpose of such a system would be both to demonstrate sex and romance as a legitimate are of play and encourage PCs to behave in ways that feel more natural to reality and fiction. In so doing, it helps close the gap between the kinds of stories that S&S generates and the kinds of stories S&S seeks to emulate. 

Creating such a system would be a delicate balance. To feel legitimate, the system would require enough structure and guidance that it was teaching players the right way to use these elements in a story and explore them safely through play. That will include a necessary emphasis on the relationships themselves, in and out of character, and handling the subject matter in a way that's comfortable for everyone involved. Such as keeping the actual climactic details safely veiled and off-screen.

I don’t have more specifics, yet, but it does occur to me that this is a very close cousin to the social conflict topics I’m currently developing. One could easily plug into or effect the other. It’s thus worth a bit of consideration, as I’m solidifying the latter. It’s also a very, very big element in the kind of fiction that S&S seeks to emulate. How many Scoundrel-esq characters practically live out of a brothel?

At this stage, I’m seeking input. Any thoughts, questions, ideas, or suggestions? Have you seen sex/romance used as a part of play at the table? How did it go? How do you feel about the topic and its inclusion? Is this an area of development that interests you, or something you’d prefer left to HBO?

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.

OSR Project #2: The Danger of Skills

There's an argument floating around that will claim that skills expand what your character is capable of by letting you invest in a bunch of different things, rather than being confined to an archetype like a class. I'm here going to have to argue that the opposite is true.

Skills by definition impose limitations on what your character is capable of.

When OD&D was released, there were only three classes - Fighting Man, Cleric, and Magic User. All of these characters were assumed to be dungeon-delving adventurers and have all the skills and abilities appropriate of such. Later, Greyhawk was released as the first D&D supplement and it added Thief as a class. Suddenly, the dynamic of the game changed.

The thief is essentially a class based around having skills. Climb walls, hide in shadows, move silently, pick locks, disarm/detect traps, etc. The Thief as originally written is Dungeoneer: The Class. This creates a lot of weirdness compared to how the game was played before. If you listen to Arneson talk about his early D&D experiences, everyone acted like a thief before the thief showed up. Everyone was sneaking around, picking locks, hiding and setting up ambushes, disarming traps, etc. The creation of the thief changed the way the distribution of abilities was perceived. Because the thief has a mechanical means of doing these things on their sheet, suddenly those things became the domain of the thief. Worse, because the thief had a mechanical ruleset for doing these tasks, it gave the implication that because no one else had access to these mechanics the thief was the only one who could do it. (There is a very interesting argument to be made that the nature and wording of the thief's abilities was supposed to imply a slightly supernatural character to them, thus everyone could sneak but a thief could literally disappear in a shadow. I actually prefer that interpretation, but it is outside of what I want to discuss here.)

When there is no mechanic for a thing, it's in the common domain. Anyone can attempt it by navigating the fiction. When you introduce a mechanic for a thing, you codify it and ultimately limit it in some way. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's an inherent side-effect of having a mechanic for it.

Now to make this less esoteric, consider for a moment Aragorn as a Ranger. In OD&D or AD&D, I can stand on the wall at Helm's Deep and make an impassioned speech because there is no Oration or Speechcraft skill. I can get up there, do my thing and feel pretty damned heroic about it because of course I can do it. I'm a big deal adventurer. The GM might nod and approve. The GM might even let me roll something to see if it has a mechanical impact on the fight. Who knows.. But it's entirely within my wheelhouse. Because there is no mechanic for it, it's up for grabs.

Now pretend we're playing 3.5e instead. Now there's a Diplomacy skill (or whatever it's called in 3.5) that exists for trying to influence NPCs. The existence of this skill means that in order for my character to be good at the thing governed by the skill, I need to invest mechanical resources into making them do so (in this case, skill points). What was something that I might have done and could have done because I thought it was cool and might have made a memorable scene becomes an area of the game I can no longer meaningfully interact with unless I spec out my character specifically to do so. I have to buy back the thing I could have done before, had the skill not existed.

Worse, because there is now a mechanic attached, if I do give an impassioned speech at the walls of Helm's Deep, the GM might make me roll for it anyway and because I don't have the skill I've introduced a risk. I might botch the roll and the GM penalizes the troops for my good intention. The GM might decide that I get up there and somehow drop my speghetti because a lot of games are written with the assumption that a bad roll means the character fucked up.

Where before this was a fun and optional thing that at worst would have been neat to play and at best might have given me some kind of fun bonus from a GM trying to encourage such things, I now have to weigh the risks of even attempting a thing that the game says I'm mechanically bad at because I don't have skill points invested in it. At best, I look unheroic and dumb, at worst, I might accidentally penalize my troops for having tried.

In the 3.5 ranger's case this is even more punitive because I've spent all of my skill points buying the abilities that previous editions gave me just for being part of my class.. And we'll not even talk about how different classes in 3.5 don't have access to certain skills and thus you have to invest even more character resources if you want to do something like be a fighter who also knows how to talk to people.

If you want an even more banal example.. There is no AD&D, B/x, or OD&D character who can't ride a horse. And yet, in 3.0/3.5/pf, Ride is a skill. You can technically ride without it, but if you want to do anything with the horse or avoid any perils of said horse, you now need to drop points in ride.

Making something a skill inherently walls the thing off from the open domain of play. If there's no cooking skill and you want to cook something, you are generally assumed to be able to do it because it's beneath what the game cares to simulate. The moment you create a cooking skill, you are mechanically a shitty cook until you invest resources in being able to do something you otherwise would have been able to do for free.

OSR Project #1: Deconstructing Ability Scores

I've gotten my freelance work done for the day, I've gotten some Scoundrel work done for the day. Now I'm allowed to write about OSR stuff. That's how this works, right?

I've been kicking around the D&D six-scores setup for a while now. While they are a fairly well-rounded way to measure a character, they've always struck me as a bit odd for an OSR game. Ironic, I know.

In OSR (for the duration of this post, being shorthand for "TSR-era D&D editions and the games that directly mimic them"), the overwhelming majority of things in the game have no ability scores whatsoever.  Looking through the monster manuals very few, if any, entries bother listing ability scores. Most will give a broad category for intelligence so that the GM knows how to play them. Every so often a rare monsters of impressive strength will have a strength score listed in their description just in case it comes up. Even monsters comparable to PCs (Elves, Dwarves, Humans) have no ability scores RAW, even when those NPCs are given character levels.

What this means is that ability scores are mechanically a player-facing mechanism. RAW, they are unique to player characters. NPCs only have them if the GM decides to detail one out for whatever reason. Immediately this makes any real concerns about ability scores as a kind of simulation moot. Instead, they seem to exist only as a source of player character bonuses. This becomes even more apparent when you look into OD&D, where attributes played a very small roll overall compared to modern games. Dexterity would get you a bonus on missile fire, Constitution increased your HP, and Charisma played heavily into retainers/followers/hirelings... but the main function of Strength, Intelligence, or Wisdom's seemed to be as prime requisites. Later editions add further bonuses and modifiers to different ability scores, but they ultimately remain PC-specific bonuses.

If ability scores are less "defining the simulationist parameters of your character in the world" (because again, NPCs don't have them, RAW) and more "bonuses PCs are eligible for" then it changes how we have to interact with them. The question becomes: in what ways do we want characters to be defined that interact with the mechanics of the game?

 Let's examine the traditional six and what they do strictly from the mechanical bonuses they (usually) provide.

Strength: to-hit bonus in melee, damage bonus in melee, ability to bend or break things.
Dexterity: to-hit bonus for ranged weapons, bonus to AC,  bonus to initiative
Constitution: bonus HP, sometimes resurrection chance.
Intelligence: ability to speak, languages, sometimes bonus spells.
Wisdom: magic-based saving throws, sometimes bonus spells.
Charisma: reaction adjustment, maximum retainers, morale of retainers

I already knew that I didn't want modifiers for to-hit or AC, so a whole lot of what Strength and Dexterity do immediately goes out the window. Intelligence and Wisdom also ring kind of hollow, for me but for different reasons.

Intelligence has always struck me as at-odds with the premise of OSR, at least in regards to the play style in which I am interested. It's incredibly difficult to play a character who is smarter than you are, as so much of intelligence is in the ability to make decisions and collate information. You as a player are only as intelligent as you are. You can get around this to some degree if the game has significant skill-like mechanics your Intelligence score can influence, but an OSR game typically doesn't and "roll to see if your character figures it out" goes against the player-skill principles that I want to pursue.

The opposite arrangement tends to be no better. When you give an intelligent player a dumb character, they wind up being a comic relief most of the time (which may or may not be good, depending on the tone you want in the game) but they also tend to wind up being far more clever than their intelligence should suggest because in most scenarios players want to succeed. For an OSR game that is supposed to be challenge or objective-based, trying to get players to make decisions that they know are going to be more likely to fail is putting the player at cross-purposes with the game's reward mechanism.

The mechanical weight of Intelligence is unimpressive as well. Bonus languages are okay, but aren't particularly interesting and I'm not at all interested in modeling your ability to speak properly. I've heard quite Lenny impressions already, thank you. Meanwhile, Wisdom basically only exists as a saving throw adjustment which is also kind of lame.

Given that I want a game that is more explicitly about player skill, I'm thinking that the best move here is to merge Intelligence and Wisdom. Wisdom will remain as an ability score and take on the linguistic functions, as well as any kind of knowing or noticing-stuff roles it might have otherwise had. Most of the functions of Intelligence are better left as player discretion. It's up to you how smart your character is and you ultimately display that intelligence through the choices you as a player make for your character.

The other major impulse I have is to merge Strength and Constitution. There's an argument to be made that lifting capability and endurance are not intrinsically related (the power lifter vs the distance runner) but in a game where we've already decided that most things don't have ability scores at all, this level of simulation isn't strictly necessary. Further, if we strip Strength of its combat bonuses (as I planned to do for dexterity as well), then the ability is left somewhat anemic on its own.

Suddenly, we're down to four ability scores:

Brawn: Physical fitness, strength, endurance, vitality. Plays a roll in carrying stuff, improves HP, bends bars, unsticks doors.
Dexterity: Agility and fine motor control. Increases initiative, is probably useful for mobility stuff.
Wisdom: Knowledge, willpower, judgement. Bonus languages. Interacts with magic in fun ways (saves, spells, etc).
Charisma: Leadership and bearing. Reaction adjustment, maximum retainers, morale of retainers

For what I want to do, I think that's perfect. As an aside, if someone was interested in a 3e style "three saves" setup, it winds up corresponding perfectly. As an added bonus, fewer ability scores make it much harder to have a dump-stat. Dexterity is mechanically the weakest of these options, but I've got some ideas on how it can come into play more as well. 

Until part 2.

What I Want in an OSR Game

OSR appeals to me in specific ways for specific reasons. Because I'm already doing character-focused story-game stuff with other games I'm playing (or writing!), I don't need OSR to be my end-all-be-all general purpose tool. Here the attraction is in what makes OSR different.

Objective, Challenged-Based Gaming

Most of the games I love actively embrace failure. Burning Wheel, Apocalypse, and yes, Sword & Scoundrel — all of these games are designed in such a way that failure is not only expected, it's inherently part of what drives the story forward. You are not playing these games to accomplish things so much as to see what happens.

OSR is pretty well the opposite of this. In the majority of games in this family, you have two sources of XP: defeating enemies and recovering treasure. Both of these are objective-based reward mechanisms. If you want to advance, you have to succeed. You have to overcome challenges in order to get the rewards both in and out of character.

Sometimes, I'm in the mood for a tragic, twisting narrative. Other times, I want to be challenged. I want my players to be challenged and to be rewarded for beating those challenges.

Encounter-Based High Adventure

As a corollary to the above, most of the games I'm into are intensely character-focused and built around exploring who that character is and what they are about. It's a lot of fun but it can also be emotionally exhausting. I'm not always up for it as a player or a GM. Sometimes you want to be playing Game of Thrones where it's all character-focused drama built around their individual goals and passions. Other times, you want to play Conan or Indiana Jones, where the protagonist is less a focus and more an excuse for us to go on cool adventures and see weird shit. OSR is definitely in the latter camp.

This shift in focus also gives you an entirely different kind of creative outlet. Prepping for a character-focused game is all about finding ways to reincorporate aspects of those characters into the game. In an OSR game, the GM's creative efforts are almost the opposite -- outwardly focusing on creating interesting scenarios, locations, creatures and other encounters. You have a ton of freedom to do random interesting things.

Random Stuff and the Impartial Adjudicator

The more story and character-oriented the game is, the more deliberate you want to be with events. OSR tends to be all about the random. Aside from giving you all kinds of neat weird play artifacts (mutation tables, weather tables, random encounters..), the more randomized the elements become the more objective you can be as a GM. When I'm playing B/x, my job isn't to actively challenge the players or find ways to highlight their character. My job is to prepare a situation for them to explore and then impartially interpret the results of the dice as they do so, adjudicating any fictional elements as impartially as I can. Whether they succeed or fail, the amount of XP they earn, all of that is between them and the dice gods. I am simply the messenger.

Player Skill and Fictional Engagement

One of the major draws to OSR for many people is the way these games allow direct engagement with the fiction. In many cases, you can bypass challenges through role-playing alone, whether this is negotiating your way through a social encounter or narrating your way through disarming a trap or solving a puzzle. In a way, resorting to dice can almost be seen as a fail-state, as it means you have to instead fall back on your mechanical abilities -- and in the process, you're putting yourself at risk.

This approach is supported fairly well by OSR play.The lack of skills in most of these games means that players have to look elsewhere for solutions to their problems. Risk management is the primary player-skill to master in the game, so any time you can overcome a challenge through fictional positioning you're better off than you would have been letting the dice decide your fate. This works well in conjunction with the earlier point about challenge-based gaming. I love the kind of creative problem-solving that the gaps in OSR rules foster.

Adventure as Expedition

In nearly any other game I play, equipment and supplies are basically hand-waived. Tracking time, speed, and distance are all just irrelevant trivialities that interfere with the story you're trying to tell. In OSR, they can be a crucial part of the logistics of exploration. Early D&D editions were big on treating dungeon-delving as an expedition. Players would have to carefully balance their supplies to ensure they had enough goods to make a journey, but the more stuff you brought the slower you move, the less you could bring back and the more easily you can be overrun. You could bring hirelings with you to help you fight or haul, but the more people you bring the more supplies you need and the more attention you'll attract. And of course, time is also against you, because the more stuff you bring the slower you go the more time it takes the more supplies you go through, the more likely something will eat you.

In any other game time, speed, and inventory are unnecessary simulation and best ignored. In OSR, they can be an important expression of player-skill through risk management. I also personally love the Lewis & Clark or Oregon Trail vibe that you get once the players have started an adventuring company, set out into the wilds, their packs laden with junk and a dozen hirelings at their side. It's a unique experience and one that's nigh-impossible to manage in most systems.

I could keep going on. The rules-light nature of most of these games, the flexibility in hacking, etc., but the purpose of this post was specifically to talk about what I wanted in an OSR game that wasn't what I was already getting in my other games. In turn, as I kick around design ideas, these highlight the areas I really want to lean into and focus on.

OSR & TROS

In terms of role-playing preferences, I've always been in kind of a weird position. There's always been a weird undercurrent of animosity between the different camps of the role-playing community. Within the indie/nar/forge/story-game crowd there are certain elements that have a tendency to look down on D&D in any form as an unsophisticated and unsatisfying experience. This sentiment is often extended to the OSR movement, which can be seen as a nostalgia-fueled leap backwards in gaming. In turn, the certain elements of the OSR crowd have a tendency to look at the story-games people as elitist hipsters trying to pass off their game experiences off as high art.

This isn't universally true of all parties on each side — how often is anything universally true of a group of broad group of people? — but I've gotten in debates with people on both sides about the legitimacy of the other as a valid game choice. This brings me back to the first sentence: I've always been in a weird position between the two communities, with one foot on each side. I enjoy both kinds of games quite a bit, as they offer very different experiences that appeal to me for different reasons. The more I've thought about it, though, the more I've realized they have in common.

Intentional, Focused Design

The hallmark of both movements was a dissatisfaction with some element of the hobby that was so widespread as to spark the creation of new games meant to answer a specific question. For the forge/nar/story-games movement, it was largely a dissatisfaction with games on the market in terms of creating the kind of stories that people wanted to tell. For OSR, it was largely a reaction to the introduction of 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons that made a whole lot of people realize that the current official version of the game was no longer giving them the kind of experience they wanted to have. In both cases, this dissatisfaction lead to intense critique, analysis, and eventually the cultivation of a body of design philosophy.

DIY and the Indie Explosion

In both cases, fierce forum debates quickly became blog posts and ultimately an explosion of games designed to embody various elements of the design philosophy. The primary focus on both ends was on a specific way in which the game was meant to be played in order to deliver a very particular kind of experience. Both scenes have flourishing online communities where people are constantly churning out games and hacks and other content. Both scenes are to this day dominated by independent publishers, many of whom have turned their passions into a legitimate business. 

As I chewed on this subject, I realized that if I went a bit deeper I could actually draw far more parallels in my own journey through this. My gateway drug into the narrative scene was a now largely forgotten game called The Riddle of Steel. It was a formative game for me, in that it not only introduced me to a whole new way of playing, but ultimately changed how I played everything after that. The parallels between TROS and the OSR are striking, even beyond their amusingly similar abbreviation.

Red-Handed Pulp

The Riddle of Steel is a reference to the classic Conan the Barbarian movie, from 1982. Both TROS and the OSR ultimately take their origin from early pulp Sword & Sorcery as filtered through popular culture. Amusingly, both also then sort of obscure the human-centric and exotic pulp quality to do a Tolkienesq medieval fantasy with elves and dwarves.

Modular Mechanics

Like the overwhelming majority of OSR games, TROS had no single unifying mechanic. Instead, it had a handful of different self-contained systems the game leaned on for different situations. Much like with OSR games, this both told you rather explicitly the arenas in which the game wanted to focus but it also gave you a ton of room to add, remove, and tinker with the guts of the things. Almost as soon as the game was out, people began to customize and hack it to suit their campaigns much in the same way as even today people hack their OSR system of choice to customize it for whatever they are doing.

Gameable Gaps

Many OSR enthusiasts will argue that the lack of rules for certain situations is a feature, rather than a bug. TROS benefits from a similar gap in its rules set. While it features a rudimentary skill system, it was obvious that combat and sorcery were what the game was really interested in. Everything else was a simple test and you moved on. It gave the GM quite a bit of leeway and in practice I found playing TROS to have a lot in common with my memories of playing AD&D: you basically ignored the book most of the time until someone got in a fight or cast a spell, with the thief-type character usually being the one to do nearly all of the task-resolution kind of rolls.

Player Choices, Player Skill

Much like the OSR, TROS was not a game you could by any means just "roll play" your way through. TROS has one of the highest player-skill curves of any game I've played. You, the player, have to become very good at both engaging with the system to get XP (Spiritual Attributes, in this case) but the combat and magic mechanics require a huge amount of system mastery to play. What's awesome about this, though, is that the system mastery here means "picking strategies and making interesting choices in play" rather than something like 3.pf where system mastery means "knowing how to build your character in order to get the most amount of bonuses."

This, more than anything, is probably why I was so attracted to TROS back when.  The idea that you would win because of your choices rather than having the highest numbers or the biggest sword or whatever was enthralling. It gave me a taste for something that I've been chasing ever since.

Player-Driven Play

This may not be true for all of the OSR, but it is generally true for the parts of it I enjoy. I love sandboxes, huge, sprawling dungeons, and anything that lets the players have a significant say in the strategies and engagements they will attempt. Even if you've all agreed to the premise "we're going dungeon-delving" the gold-for-xp nature of so much OSR tends to mean that players are in charge of their own advancement. The OSR assumptions of balance mean that the players have to pick and choose their battles and are making decisions that ultimately puts their success and failure in their own hands. Contrast this with later D&D (or other games) where you are often a participant in a pre-written story and are rewarded for hitting milestones within that story.

TROS did this in a way that no other game I'd encountered had, with the PC's Spiritual Attributes making them masters of their own destiny in a massively compelling way.  The two camps take massively different approaches, but both games ultimately empower the players to make decisions that matter and let them drive the game onward in a compelling way. 

In hindsight, it's not surprising to me at all why Sword & Scoundrel inherited as much TROS DNA as it did or why we retained what we did after all of these revisions. By the same token, it's not surprising that I'm gravitating towards OSR even as I work on the former. In a lot of ways, they are the answer to the same kinds of desires taken in two different directions.

Sorenson's 3 Questions - Sword & Scoundrel

In ye ancient days of yore, Jared Sorensen (designer of many things) put forward three questions that now collectively bear his name. Between writing on the subject, I've been attempting to decide how I wanted to answer.

What is your game about?

Sword & Scoundrel has the tag: A game about Passion, Violence, and General Skullduggery. Above all, the game is a passion play. It's medieval morality theater presented as an HBO or AMC-style character drama. Players decide what's most important to their character, what they care about, what they want, the lines they will not cross. Through play, we challenge them to see how far they are willing to go and what they are willing to sacrifice. The game is about moral conflict, with forces set in motion against the player's goals and beliefs. Finally, it's a blood-opera with the player's passions leading to quick and brutal violence. We wanted the fantasy equivalent of a western or a john woo film, with swordplay being quick, flashy, and lethal.

How does your game do this?

Mechanically speaking, characters are not just their attributes and skills. Their goals and beliefs are represented by player-nominated phrases called Drives which have a mechanical weight to them. Similarly, characters have Traits which can represent everything from the character's history and background to their physical or personality quirks and their relationships with other characters, including the players in their group. These all have mechanical significance in play, often giving them additional dice for their pool when relevant.

On the other side of the coin, the game is written in such a way that it is explicitly about conflict. If there is nothing in conflict and nothing at stake, there is no roll made. Further, while the game goes out of its way to play up its blood-opera persona with a detailed combat system, the rules support conflict in a broad range of arenas. The current beta supports anything when rolled as a simple conflict, but as we get the opportunity we intend to add a fully formed social combat system, faction rules, magic, and other forms of more abstract conflicts.

How does your game encourage/reward this?

The primary reward mechanism is through the accumulation of Drive Points. When players engage in conflicts with their drives, they are rewarded for it through additional dice that drive is worth. These dice come up as bonus dice in any conflict that is directly about the drive in question. Further, when players engage in certain behaviors that highlight their drives and traits, they can gain additional points that can be added to the drive of their choosing. The quickest way to earn these points is often to allow your drives or traits to get you in trouble, rewarding the player directly for making choices that are in line with who their character is even if those choices are not the optimal way to get what the player might want. Finally, these drive points can be spent to increase any of the character's abilities or traits or learn new of the same.

In short, players advance solely by making the kinds of characters suitable for good character dramas (ambitious, resolute, yet flawed) and then role-playing them in the fashion that these characters tend to behave (struggling between who they are and what they want). When they do this, the game not only gives them more dice to throw around in the conflicts they will face but also gives them the means to improve their character's scores as they play.

Waxing on Gaming Autobiographica

I first started playing RPGs by hacking together a functional game out of just what I could glean from the AD&D1e DMG. I later moved into Alternity, Cyberpunk, and then I was all over the place. Back then, I played games the way most people did—or maybe still do—without a hell of a lot of thought about design, "creative agendas" or any of that.

My big shift came when I discovered The Riddle of Steel. It was in many ways, unlike anything I'd ever seen. It completely challenged my ideas of what role-playing was or could be, how games should be run. The combat system was like nothing I'd ever seen. I had already been a major history nerd, but it was through TROS that I'd developed a love of HEMA and all that was entailed. I was too late to the party to be around when The Forge was kicking hornet's nests, but damned if I didn't pursue The Riddle.

The next big shift came for me in discovering Burning Wheel. This was nowhere near the paradigm shift that TROS was, but it was perhaps the clearest demonstration I've ever had of the idea that "system matters." In both my own Burning Wheel experiments and those I've watched/listened to (I have a weird fascination with actual play recordings) I've gained a huge appreciation for how the system influences and informs play.

At that point in my life, I don't think you would've been able to convince me to play D&D if you paid me. My few attempts to experiment with it again were... painful. My experiences with 3.x and pathfinder were abysmal. When 4th edition came out, I couldn't even finish my read of the player's handbook. Striker? Defender? Controller? Ugh. I couldn't get past the terminology. In my mind, it immediately left me thinking about MMOs. Would we be drawing aggro and baiting spawn points next? This is without touching that the game designated which classes were "leaders" of the party (we'll decide who leads our party among ourselves, thank you). Making this impression even worse, I watched Chris Perkins DM a 4e game on youtube. It was a four-hour session which took place entirely on a battle map. It started with the party in the dungeon with some exposition to put them there, followed by three or four combats interspersed with a couple skill challenges. Read: someone had to throw some dice at something. It took them four hours to run four fights. I wouldn't be playing 4th edition. (Later, I did actually come to appreciate it as a kind of combat-based dungeon crawling board game, I just wouldn't want to run it as a D&D game.)

The next weird step in my gaming evolution was encountering the practically unheard of Chronica Feudalis. This was a system I found so interesting and hackable that it actually prompted me to start blogging about it. The original blog those took place on has long-since been abandoned, though I've migrated several of the most interesting posts here. Oddly enough, one of which is in my "Popular nonsense" stuff on the sidebar, making it my number 2 most all-time viewed post. I guess someone out there has heard of this stuff after all.

What struck me most about CF was just how flexible it actually was. The structure of the wounds and maneuvers system gave me nearly as cinematic and bloody combat as I was getting from TROS (or, by this time, Song of Steel -- the game that would eventually be rebranded as Band of Bastards). Was it meant to be used in such a bloody faction? I have no idea, but some of the most bloody and cinematic combats I've ever played were in a hacked version of Chronica Feudalis.

Perhaps the most radical departure for me in this was just how simple it actually was, by comparison. How quickly it played and how little effort as a GM it took to run. I can safely blame Higgins for introducing the game to me. I had previously been playing a great deal of Savage Worlds specifically because it was relatively simple for players to wrap their head around. When I'd argued for SW to be a relatively rules-light game (how naive I was!) Higgins scoffed and rightly put me in my place. He may have been nicer than that, but I certainly remember there was scoffing.

This is when I bumped into the OSR movement for the first time. I had already had a lot of fond memories of AD&D as a kid. For whatever reason, I never really mentally categorized those experience into the same box as my encounters with 3.5 or 4e D&D. They seemed like completely different kinds of games. It wasn't until I started getting into the OSR scene that I understood why.  They were  fundamentally different types of games. Whatever one might say about indie games and The Forge, the whole culture will get you thinking about how games are designed and played, even if you disagree with their conclusions.

I was hooked pretty quickly. I'm not sure if it was my newfound craving for simplicity, a touch of nostalgia, or that the games so openly embraced a lot of things that I'd sort of lost sight of from in
Somewhere between my newfound craving for simplicity, a touch of nostalgia, and an open embrace of a lot of things I'd lost sight of somewhere along the way. Likely, all of the above.

I have to really credit the OSR scene for bringing a lot of balance back to my gaming tastes. There's a lot of people out there who like to try to pit indie/nar/forge types as being in one camp and OSR as being two opposite and non-overlapping things, each vying to be the One True Way and the other being badwrongfun. I've gained a lot from both communities and I greatly enjoy both kinds of games. They provide radically different experiences, and in a lot of ways follow the same "system matters" ethos. In a curious way, they even both seem to be a response to the same thing - dissatisfaction with "Adventure path" (read: railroad) style of GMing and systems that are bad at what they are supposed to be doing.

I actually had a reason for going into all of this besides my own nostalgia. I have a handful of topics that have been digging at me for a while now, but I thought they could use some context before I began. Unfortunately, this post is far too long already. So those will wait until next time.

The Problem With Assassination in Role Playing Games

This is mirrored from a discussion the GH forums, but I thought I'd throw it up here as well. The discussion is specific to the way Band of Bastards works, but it applies to any game with moderate-to-high potential lethality.

As I've been hammering out the rules for 'Bastards, a topic has been eating me for a while. Since Higgins and I were unable to come up with a good solution, I thought I would offer it up for discussion here.

We are going to define the word assassination in this discussion to mean "a situation in which the target is dead without a meaningful chance to prevent or react to it." The primary examples to be discussed are sniper shots and poison.

Both of these things are extremely effective in killing people. That is why they exist. It's realistic and good simulation that they should kill people pretty effortlessly when they happen, and it's fitting that the rules should encourage players to make use of them (if it is the sort of thing their character would do). After all, getting in a fair fight is usually a very poor tactic utilized by the foolish, idealistic, or desperate.

The problem is that this blade that should cut both ways, but in practice doesn't. Mechanically speaking, there's nothing stopping me as a GM from rolling some dice and announcing "Your conversation is cut short when the window shatters. Blood and brains fly out the back of your skull and splatter the wall behind you. A half-second later, your friends hear the report of a high-caliber rifle some distance away." The rules support it just like they do if it were a player character doing the same to an NPC.

The problem is that any GM who would actually do that out of the blue is ..well.. probably an asshole. For a game like 'Bastards to work, you have to have some kind of trust in your GM and killing a PC off without any meaningful chance to prevent it is a gross abuse of that trust. Poison is the same way. An option is always some kind of perception test to spot the sniper or detect the poison first, but even that seems grossly unfair when the fail-state of the test is "you die."

Thus in practice, this becomes an extremely strong tool for the PCs to use, but one that they are essentially plot-armored from ever receiving. At best, the GM is going to have to either intentionally miss the first shot, or an NPC winds up eating a bullet to alert the players to the danger.

In our discussion, Higgins did point out that we are primarily simulating fiction - not reality - and that protagonists very rarely die suddenly and without warning from assassination attempts (George R. R. Martin notwithstanding). This is a good point, but the counterpoint I offered was that the protagonists in fiction aren't aware of their own plot-armor. By contrast, players can generally trust that their GM isn't just going to kill them without a warning or a chance to prevent it - which has a strong tendency to translate into player-characters operating under the same assumption.

So the question we are forced to grapple with is "how does one balance assassination as a useful and effective tool for the PCs without making it so effective that it can never be used against them?"

Following this up with some broader-applicability to other games - I find this isn't an issue in OSR games specifically, or D&D games in general. After first the first couple levels, you generally have enough HP that a single crossbow bolt to the face isn't going to kill you, and even then in most D&D games death isn't permanent. Poisons lose a lot of their efficacy, because you can still try to make saves for them. In general, dungeon-crawling also usually means the characters are always on the lookout for something trying to kill them anyway. 

On World Building

World building in role playing games is a strange beast, with about as many approaches as there are people who do it. I tend to do a lot of it, myself. I rarely get particularly into pre-written campaign settings, for a variety of reasons. Being really into history, religion, and mythology, I tend to find things in published settings that will strike me as silly or unnecessarily complicated. I also tend to dislike the idea that one of my players may have the same book at home and have spent as much time with it as I have. Given my natural love of tinkering, by the time I've made the adjustments to taste, fixed glaring inconsistencies, and then rewritten parts of it so the players don't already know all of the setting's secrets, I might as well have written my own setting anyway. 

Once the decision to write a setting is made, the questions are "how?" and "for what purpose?" The latter will largely determine the former.

When I was younger, I took a lot of time in writing extremely long-winded backgrounds, deep and detailed settings, wrote cultural notes and all kinds of nonsense. I could start a campaign by handing out a fifty page primer to the setting. Pro tip: Don't do this.

The problem with creating that sheer volume of information is that your players are never going to read it all. Once in a rare cosmic alignment, your vision for what you wanted a setting to be will so line up with the tastes of a single player who just happens to also love reading setting material that they will, at some point during the weeks or months you spend in that campaign, actually finish your handouts, but this is such a rare occurrence as to be unworthy of mention.

If you absolutely must write a fifty page world bible on your campaign, then be prepared to handle that information the way a novelist does. A writer knows that you simply can't info-dump on your readers, whether we're talking about a prologue of exposition written in the beginning of the book, or pages scattered throughout. Any time you spend more than a paragraph or two outside of the flow of narration, you are in danger of losing your audience. Instead, you have to sprinkle tidbits throughout and show through the characters actions and reactions how thing go. This latter part can be tricky in a role-playing game, where you can't control everyone's actions, but you have an additional advantage. While readers can pick up on a hint and simply have to wait to find out more about it, a player who is curious about a piece of information can actually ask you to expand upon a subject. You should encourage the behavior.

If you're very into the world-bible style of world building, check out this article by Writer's Digest. It has a lot of interesting tips for this kind of project.

As for myself, what do I actually wind up doing these days?

Ultimately, every setting I create for gaming falls somewhere between two extremes.

On the one hand is traditional sand box, hex-crawl style preparation. I create a list of relevant elements and then populate an area with NPCs, factions, things that can happen, hooks to roll with, and so on.

On the other end, I've taken to embracing shared setting creation. If you're unfamiliar with the term, the idea is that rather than the GM having sole narrative discretion over the world, the players can invent elements and introduce them on their own. Depending on how far you want to go with this, it can mean anything from allowing the players to introduce details through their character's background and mannerisms, to sitting down and making the "lets make up a setting" the first session of the campaign.

In practice, what usually happens for me is some combination of the two. I will very often create a specific piece of a setting, often a single city or town, and through creating it establish the broadest strokes of the setting itself - general technological era, the kind of country / region it is in, etc. I'll usually expand on this, creating a very small sandbox at the beginning of the game, but inviting the players to create additional details about the world, its setting, its history and cultures, etc through their background and the player's mannerisms.

This approach has a bunch of advantages. The GM's investment up front is relatively minimal, but I can still plant mysteries and hooks as needed or desired. The players also find themselves more invested in the world as they establish facts about it. It ceases to be "my" world, and becomes "our" world, and the longer the game goes on the more true this is.

Most importantly, rather than writing 50 pages up front about the world and setting that may never be seen, the story played out will add its own details as they become relevant, and the longer you play the more rich the setting becomes.

Try it sometime, you might be pleasantly surprised.

Until next time,

Sacred Cows in DnD

Yesterday I talked a bit about Iterative design and the inherent problem of The Ship of Theseus. That got me thinking about my own current projects. Specifically, my AD&D/Lamentations mash-up, and the nature of D&D itself.

The wonderful thing about the OSR movement is that it's a bit like Linux. The core mechanics of D&D are extremely versatile and can be made to do a ton of different things. Everyone in the OSR movement is basically working off the same Kernel, but everyone has customized their own distro to suit their preferences.

In layman's terms: we're all basically using the same engine to power the game, but every variant uses that engine in slightly different ways. And that's awesome. Not just because it allows for ridiculous flexibility, but because the end results are largely compatible. It doesn't matter if the module I'm running was written for AD&D, AD&D2e, Moldvay Basic, White Box, BECMI, OSRIC, Labyrinth Lords, or Swords & Wizardry, it takes very little effort to use it in the framework of Lamentations of the Flame Princess or my own home-brew.

This does raise some interesting questions though. It would be easy to define D&D as the above system, but we also have to take into account 3.x, 4th edition (controversial, I know), and even 5th or D&D next. Each system is as alien to each other as it is the TSR era game. Clearly, changing the way skills work, classes work, special abilities work, spells, etc.. can all be heavily modified without worry.

At what point does the game stop being "D&D?"

The easiest argument would be "If it has the name, it's D&D," but this is intellectually dishonest. First, it precludes Pathfinder, which is effectively a direct iteration of 3.5, and it ignores the fact that the name only has meaning because people associate a certain kind of experience with it. Yes, we could take a 78 Chevette and call it a Mustang, but that doesn't mean people will accept it as a Mustang.

My immediate thought is that D&D requires the following design conceits in order to be "D&D."

• Iconic Six Stats - you could certainly switch this around, but it's such a trademark by now.
• Character creation based on classes - I just can't see a point-based character creation system being accepted as "D&D."
• Earning of experience points - The moment it switched to something like Spiritual Attributes or BW style "beliefs" I imagine people would disqualify it.
• Level-based advancement - This is a constant throughout every incarnation of the game, and something that separated D&D from other fantasy games early on. 
• Saving Throws - this is such an odd and counter-intuitive abstraction that it's practically unique to D&D style games.
• Attack roll - math directly tied to class advancement, rather than being an independent skill

That's my immediate thoughts. I can also imagine some questions coming up if you changed, say, the d20 to 3d6 or something but I'm not necessarily sure either of those would "disqualify" the game from being a D&D game.

What do you think? In your opinion, what are the constants required for a game to feel like a D&D game? 

Why Make a New System? (RPG Design)

Yesterday, I talked about about "Why use a new system?" Today, I want to talk a little about the other half of the discussion. Why make a new system? When is it worth the effort?

If you're making something for yourself, then the answer is simply: when you want to, because you want to. I enjoy making systems and experimenting with them. If you're remotely interested in game-design, there's no better way to start than to start.

If you're making a system with other people in mind, then the situation changes some. So, when is this a good idea? A discussion on the Story Games forum provides some insight. The ever-knowledgeable Eero writes:

"I generally create a new system for one of two reasons: either I want the small, tight, to-the-point experience that only a highly specific custom job can provide, or the manner of play I'm envisioning has not been evocatively presented in a prior system, and I thus need to write a new one."

I've argued before about mechanics being inherently representative of the game-world, and that's usually the baseline criteria I have. If I'm going through the effort to write a new system, it's because I am looking for fiction to be defined and experienced in a way that I don't get from an existing system. You write a new system when no current system adequately facilitates the kind of experience you want to have.

When designing a new game though, you might not need a new system at all. If your focus is on setting or genre, and you don't have specific ideas about the mechanics or mode of play, then you may just want to look at something like Savage Worlds, or even Apocalypse World. If you have more retro-tastes, look at some of the OSR games that were published specifically with the intentions of allowing new people to produce content for old games. OSRIC is a great example. After having really fooled with B/x for a while, I can honestly say a number of game concepts I've had over the years would work just fine on that platform with a little tweaking. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a brilliant example of this.

That creates the second point of discussion, iterative game design vs designing from first principles.

In iterative design, you begin with a basis of some other system or concept, and continue making tweaks and changes until you have arrived at your desired result. The Burning Wheel family of games are a good example of this, as Torchbearer and Mouse Guard have a lot of shared mechanics with Burning Wheel, but are indisputably separate games. This actually brings up the Ship of Theseus. How many planks can you replace before it's a different ship? At what point of tweaking have you created a new game? Is LotFP inherently a new game, or is it an elaborate modification? It's something of a moot point, only important insofar as it illustrates that "new design" vs "existing system" is a smooth gradient, rather than a hard dichotomy.

It is not a false dichotomy, however, as you do have the choice of designing from first principles. In this mode, you are starting from scratch. Literally "I want to use a handful of d10s" scratch. In this case, you're completely free to push things in whatever direction you wish.

In most cases, you're actually better off working with iterative design. This is especially true when you're either relatively inexperienced in designing a game, or a system you're already familiar with does a reasonably good job on its own. This is also extremely handy as a process when you've already built a system from scratch, but want to tweak it towards a specific end (see: Burning Wheel, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, or Blade of the Iron Throne).

Sometimes though this approach can actually hold you back. Working iteratively keeps you in some ways tied to basic assumptions from the original design. When these assumptions become a constraint, you need to be willing to toss out whatever you need to make your mechanics work.

This is actually what happened to us in Band of Bastards. Like Blade of the Iron Throne, we began as an iterative hacking of The Riddle of Steel, but halfway through the process we realized the origional chassis were holding us back. Instead, we wound up tossing out everything and began again from first principles.

Designing from first principles is way more work, but you get a ton of valuable experience out of it and have more flexibility than you otherwise would. This is especially important for games where you want to change the actual mode of play from other default assumptions. Starting from a blank slate is a huge boon to creativity. This is also an excellent place to play with design for design's sake. I have a handful of mechanics that are floating around in a notebook looking for an excuse to use one day, with no immediate game idea in mind.  I recommend anyone interested in game design try this at least once. 

My two cents, anyway.

Until next time,

Why Use a New System (RPG Design)

In my crooked journeys through the role-playing blogosphere, I came across a post by Monsters and Manuals entitled Ryuutama and the Tiresomeness of New Systems. It was an interesting read, and there wasn't anything in there I'd like to directly argue with. It did get me thinking on the subject, however.

Obviously, there are certain circumstances in which you want to make the switch to a different system. Yes, I could run D&D style adventures in GURPS, but would I want to? So the discussion becomes when and why would I want to use a new system, and when and why would I design a new system? The latter question becomes particularly important for me, as I enjoy designing systems and I'd like to think I knew at least a little about the subject.

When talking about a "new" system for play, the question is always "what does this do that my old system doesn't?" There are only two real working answers here. It either offers a different experience than the old system did, or it simply does it better. You can make an objective argument for the former, but the latter is going to be subjective. Even if we established that game B was objectively simpler / more elegant / whatever somehow, there will still be people who think game A's clunkiness is charming or desirable.

For me, the former reason is why I read so many game books. I'm very interested in how different mechanical design choices impact the experience of playing a given game. This is the main reason I don't generally play universal or generic systems. It isn't because I don't think GURPS or Savage Worlds are fine systems in their own right, they are. I actually like Savage Worlds a good deal (in fact, I have a supplement planned for it one day.. one day...) but when I decide I want to run a specific kind of game, it's hard to make an argument for using a generic system over a system specifically designed for the kind of experience I want to play.

Fortunately, that seems to be the direction modern RPGs are heading. Whether we're talking about Dogs in the Vineyard, Apocalypse World, Sorcerer, or whatever else, the indie-RPG community has been pushing towards focused games providing a specific kind of experience and doing it very well. The market has evolved past the point where "create a better D&D" is a goal post. The OSR guys are doing a hell of a job playing with the original formula, but even that experience is being honed to a sharper focus on what they believe is "old school play," as opposed to the way modern D&D is trying to broaden its horizons and become everything to all people. (Protip: that never works).

So if that's why to use a new system, the next question is, why make a new system? When is it worth the effort?

That's the question for tomorrow.

Until then,

A Question of Nomenclature

There is an extremely under-appreciated skill in game design. Naming stuff. I literally cannot tell you how many times I've written something or worked something out only for progress to grind to a screaming halt for want of a good term to label it. As an excellent case in point, I present the following from the Introductory chapter of Band of Bastards.

How to Use This Book

Band of Bastards is based around an idea we can credit Vincent Baker for: Concentric Game Design.  The game is divided into four Books within itself of escalating levels of complexity.

Book I contains everything you need to play the absolute core of the game, including task resolution and character creation.

Book II escalates this, including the rules for Full Contests, as well as Melee and Ranged combat sequences.

Book III includes all of the additional optional rules for fighting giant beasts, customizing weapons, and other topics.

Book IV is the province of the Game Master, and includes the rules for generating NPCs and running games in the ‘Bastards style player-driven narrative.

You don’t need to learn or use all of the rules at once, especially if you’re playing with a more experienced group. start with Book I and get used to the basics. It’s even possible to play the game using only the rules from Book I. You’re missing out on a lot, but it can be done. Many groups will be entirely comfortable just using Books I & II for most of their game-play, and certainly for the first few sessions or campaign. When you’ve got a handle on everything else, then you can expand into Book III, or not. Use everything, or just what you want, it’s in your hands.

Toolkit Mentality

Ultimately, this is your game, not ours. What you choose to do with it is more important than any suggestions we might make and we’ve designed it that way from the ground up. The division of the rules above supports a modular approach, and many systems can be tweaked or replaced entirely without damaging others in the game. We’ve even included some of the most common tweaks as Levers in Book III. Ultimately, we’ve set the game up to imitate the kind of world we want to play in, and expect that you will do the same. Look at this entire manual as a toolkit of interesting potential rules, and assemble them in the way you like. We just ask that before you do, play it our way, just once. After you’ve had a chance to see what we’ve done and why we’ve done it, tweak to your hearts content.

On the one hand, labeling things Book I - IV is direct and utilitarian, but also doesn't really do anything useful beyond being a placeholder. Burning Wheel was quite brilliant in this regard with its "hub," "spokes," etc.

Wanting for clever metaphor, I considered going something like "Core," "Basic," and "Advanced" but that doesn't seem like it accomplishes anything more than Book I-IV would. On the other hand, it would be pretty funny to have "Basic Bastard" and "Advanced Blades & Bastards" as terms. I'll have to pitch AB&B to Higgins. I can hear him groaning all the way from Estonia. It will be awesome.

Thinking on nomenclature will be my task for tonight. I'll have to sleep on it.

Until next time,

Man vs Nature in Roleplaying Games

I've been on something of a survival / woodcraft / bushcraft streak lately, and it got me thinking about gaming. Doesn't everything?

Common literary theory boasts that there are essentially a Big Four of conflict in story: Man vs Man, Man vs Nature, Man vs Society, and Man vs Self.

Man vs Man is of course, the easiest to import into a role-playing game. Man vs Society can be slightly more obscure, but depending on how you want to handle it, it can be imported either through deliberate conflict, or by a motivation-based system, like Spiritual Attributes (The Riddle of Steel) or Beliefs (Burning Wheel). Similarly, Man vs Self can be explored as a theme through those motivation-based reward systems.

But how does one make use of Man vs Nature? Sure, you can be as direct as dropping a grizzly bear in front of the party and making them fight it, but that doesn't come close to capturing the feeling involved, or making that struggle a meaningful one.

For a long while, I've wanted to set up a campaign in such a way that exploration was an important part of the story: Charting uncharted lands, coming across the ruins of lost civilizations, the whole thing. While ruins and dungeons and whatever else are a way to make things interesting, is it possible to make man vs nature itself an interesting and vital aspect of the journey? It seems to largely be either hand-waved away, or worse: devolve into a series of rolls for fatigue or travel speed.

I seem to recall Mouse Guard had a mechanic that actually allowed you to make opposed rolls vs abstract concepts (I remember an episode of The Strand Gamers in which someone was rolling Weatherwise vs Spring? Or something), but I can't recall the specifics. Does this make things more evocative? I'm not sure. How do you make it impact the character - the player - beyond some rolls to resist fatigue, or cold, or whatever else.

Feel free to leave comments on this one. I'd love to know if there are any systems that do this well, or is it simply something that doesn't translate? I suppose it is hard to be cold, starving, soaked and annoyed at the rain when the player in reality is warm, dry, comfortable, and eating potato chips.

Until next time,

D&D: Customization vs Complexity

The problem with rules-light games is that after a while, characters can begin to feel mechanically samey. The fewer the options you have to individualize them, the more likely Fighter dude A is going to look like Fighter dude B. The reverse issue is that the more options you have to differentiate Fighter dude A from B, the more rules you need to add to the game, the more reading that has to be done, and the more things that have to be remembered.

Let's say for the sake of argument that I have a specific idea I want to play with. I want to pattern my character after Logen Ninefingers, The Bloody Nine of Joe Abercrombie's First Law books. What are my options?

Specificity by Fluff: Core Archetypes Only
In OD&D, BECMI, Moldvay Basic and games that mimic these (Lamentations of the Flame Princess, for instance), Logen is just a fighter. My character customization options are: roll up stats, choose fighter class. This is simple, effective, and relatively fun. It's how people played for years, and stands up pretty well I think. The only problem is, if I want to play Logen as he is written, I'm either just role-playing his berzerker-rage, or the DM has to make something up for me (usually a rule stolen from another version of D&D). This is perfectly servicable, but you can't take house-rules into account for a discussion on game design.

Specificity by Diverse, Narrow Classes
In AD&D1e variants, the core classes give way to "sub classes," which become more specific. I can now play him as a berzerker class if I wanted, and that does give me more specificity and preserves the ease of learning / ease of play, but it still constrains my customization options to being stats+class (though AD&D generally gives me the option of race as well). Some people play this level with weapon proficiencies as well, which can be nice. The real rub here is that now his berzerkergang thing is the defining feature of his character, which can be a bit confusing when faced with the question of "why can't he do the things normal soldiers can do?" (after all, he has to lose something in order to avoid simply being better than the fighter.) What I gain in specificity, I lose in flexibility.

Specificity by Layering rules: Kits, Skills, and Powers
AD&D2e seems to have made an honest attempt to address all of this by introducing the much loathed Skills & Powers book, as well as making Non Weapon Proficiencies part of the core book. If that wasn't enough they also have the Complete Guides around for me to choose class kits, in addition to my pre-existing ability to choose sub-classes. Honestly, this all sounds pretty good in theory: I can now roll stats, choose class (or subclass) and race, choose weapon and non weapon proficiencies, fiddle with Skills and Powers, and tinker with all of the above via the class kits. In practice though, this can become a tangled mess. The various sub-systems don't interact well with each other, the implementation of kits is clumsy and notoriously unbalanced. On the bright side, it does address my original problem: Logen can now be a fighter with the berzerker kit and not feel like he's pidgeon-holed himself. On the down-side, it is an absolute crapshoot to deal with. The redeeming factor here however may be that all this clutter is optional. The new player sitting down for the first time can more or less roll up a dude without having to learn much of anythign about the system up front, just like in B/x.

Specificity by Integrated Abilities
D20 takes all of the above and integrates it into a unified system. For a lot of people, this was awesome. All of the customization options of 2e, but inherently meant to work together (and thus theoretically balanced). I'll not get into how well that succeeds. I never was much of a fan of the setup, but it does allow me an incredible amount of control over exactly what kind of character I want to build. The rub here is that for me to have all of those choices as a standard, non-optional part of the game as written, I need to read all of that and understand all of that. The first time player needs to read all of their class skills, all of their class abilities, all of their available feats and what those feats require as prerequisits and coordinate all of this so they can make sure they can get what they want down the line. Gone is the "roll up a character and go," but you do have more direct input over your character.

Specificity by Classless Point Buy
This doesn't apply to D&D, but it's the obvious other extreme counter-point to b/x. Abandon classes entirely, and make all skills and special abilities available on a customizable point-buy. It is the ultimate amount of customization, but also the most complicated player buy-in.

What we're seeing here is that you can't really have your cake and eat it too. The more you are allowed to tweak your character, the more complicated the system becomes. AD&D2e might have been the closest attempt to a compromise, but suffered from poor implementation. At the outset, it seems like 3e attempted simply to codify and integrate all of the ideas of 2e but in so doing it made them all mandatory, losing the flexibility and ease of play. 

The ideal system (for me, at least) would be one that featured some kind of escalating complexity. First level characters can start somewhat broad, but as they develop and earn experience points, they have some way of becoming more specified if they so choose. In a game like this, I want players to be able to get started as easily as possible. The less player buy-in required, the more likely you are to make things get going. Once everyone is moving forward, they can dip into the more advanced rules at their own leisure.

I'm kicking around some ideas on how to best make this happen, but I'm not willing to commit them to paper just yet.

Until then,

Promiscuity in Genre

I think like most gamers - and particularly writers - I have extremely promiscuous tastes in genre. I love a little bit of everything - fantasy, pulp, science fiction, mainstream fiction, mysteries - the list goes on. I recently discovered Prepper Fiction, at that. Ho boy. The samples I've come across have been amazing as they are terrible.

Likewise, I find that I often want to game in vastly different settings and genres, and I find it somewhat frustrating that the choices seem to be so few. It's not that there are no games in a given genre, it's that there is often one, maybe two, and they are frequently not all that great. Or worse, they are supplements for a generic system which by definition isn't actually built around said genre. Even if one finds an adequate game, you face the larger trouble: finding players.

What is it about gamers that make us cleave so closely to a given genre? Elves & Dwarves fantasy seems to be home base for most people, but there is a large swath that never seem to want to leave that realm. This isn't bashing that kind of game, it's an honest query as to what power it holds over the audience; what it is they perceive about the genre that they seem to be unable to satisfy elsewhere?

As for myself, I have a handful of genres I'd love to get a legitimate campaign in one day, if I could ever find a system and players to do so.

Sword & Sandals: I have a deep and abiding love of sword & sorcery fiction, but my history nerd often bristles at the bizarre anachronisms frequently employed. One day, one day, I am going to run a hyborean style game set in a post-mythic bronze age, with all of the scale and grandeur it deserves. I'm frequently told RuneQuest is a good system for that, but I've yet to get my hands on it. I'm skeptical of d100 systems though, so we shall see.

Westerns: Westerns are literally made for adventurers. Seriously. Isolated frontier towns fighting off marauding bandits, people searching for gold, angry indigenous types raiding? The pulpy frontier is made for adventuring.

Steel & Shot: Anywhere post renaissance, from Alexander Dumas style three musketeer stories, to thrilling tales of piratical adventure or even up to the tumultuous times of the American or French revolutions.

Dark Ages: legitimately a norse or saxon era campaign (think 900AD), played completely straight. As with many of the above, half the interest is going to be in interacting with the world and culture. 

There are a number of others I would love to get in one day as well - post-apocalyptic survival, space opera, etc - but those are the big ones.

If you happen by and feel the urge to comment, especially if you're one of those people that games primarily or exclusively in classic fantasy, leave a comment. Why do you prefer that genre? What do you get out of it that you don't think you would get elsewhere?

Until next time. 

On Skills (A Praise of Hack & Slash)

Ever since I posted I Hate Skills, I've been doing some research and thinking on the subject, taking quite a few notes and batting around some ideas, but that's a post for later. Today, I just wanted to share with you an extremely well produced and thorough series of posts by Hack & Slash on the subject. It's quite a few posts, but if you're into game design at all, the author has some very good points to make.

On Skills in Games (A Surprising Insight)
On Skill Deconstruction: An Assessment
On Skill Deconstruction: Why Roll for Resolution
On Skill Deconstruction: Why Skill Light is Not Pixel Bitching, Nor DM Fiat 
On Skill Confusion: The Character Customization Conundrum
On Skill Confusion: The Accuracy of the Roll
On Skill Deconstruction: FUDGE
On Skill Deconstruction: The Middle Road
On Skill Deconstruction: 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons
On Skill Deconstruction: Rolemaster
On Skill Deconstruction: 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons
On Skill Deconstruction: Hackmaster
On Skill Deconstruction: A Summary
Skills: A conclusion with 10 Rules

If you've got a bit of time, it's well reasoned and presents some food for thought. It's certainly added a few entries to my notebook. Hope you get as much out of it as I did.

Until next time,

Fickle Fortuna: The Oracular Powers of Dice (Angry DM Part 3)

In the last two posts, I've built up some thoughts in response to The Angry DM's article Angry Rants: Randomness. If you haven't read them, checking them out can provide some more context but they aren't totally necessary for the discussion to follow.

Angry DM Rants: Randomness (An Alternate Take)
Lessons from Mordheim (Angry DM Randomness, Part 2)

As stated in the first of the two articles, the problem The Angry DM faces isn't randomness. It's when the application of randomness feels as though it overturns player agency. At first, it would be easy to argue that the problem is that we don't like randomness of outcome, but that's completely false: after all, if the game were played as "I want to kill the orc." "You swing your sword and kill the orc, now what?" it would be painfully boring.

We want a certain degree of unpredictability in outcome, it's what makes things interesting. It's what makes them role playing games as opposed to simply playing make believe or telling stories. Unpredictability is not enough, however. It must be tempered with the understanding that in some way, the players influenced their fate, either by the choices they made in the fiction, or through mechanics. Even just the idea that I invested specific points into making my character good at something is often times enough to make me feel as though I had some power over the situation.

This is the biggest issue in the example The Angry DM cites. Not only did the players lack agency in designing the characters they were playing, the characters themselves were largely irrelevant to the outcome. A 50% miss chance even if you hit? Who on earth thought that was a good idea? Why not just flip coins to find out who wins? 

I earlier made the argument that the problem was 'doing it wrong,' which directly implies a 'correct' way exists. I'll step up. 

Randomness is done right when it meets two basic criteria:

The first is that the actual probability of a thing should in some way match your expectation of that probability. If my character is a high-level grandmaster blacksmith, I shouldn't have a 50/50 chance of successfully making an axe. I should be able to guestimate probabilities of a thing without actually knowing the mechanics, just on based on my understanding of the fictional reality.

The second criteria goes in hand with the first. As a player, my actions have to matter. If they don't, I immediately check out. If I can't influence what happens, you've made me a placeholder. Why should I actually care about what's happening? The more influence I can have over this probability of outcome, the more willing I am to accept everything going totally badly.


Give the players enough agency, and they will happily accept hanging themselves.

All of the above chiefly speaks to the idea of randomness of outcome. Where the true beauty in randomness shines is through the generation of circumstance. 

I love random tables. My DMing style for games like AD&D or OSR titles is very heavily dependent on the idea of creating systems for myself that generate circumstances for the players to confront. I set up the sandbox, set up the system, and let them run wild. In practice, this means having lots of random tables.

Dice have a particular kind of oracular power to them. With the right kind of setup, and the right kind of tables, the story can bend in interesting and unpredictable ways all of its own accord. They make the game take on a will and a life of its own. They can shape the parameters of the fiction in ways that no one in the group would have thought of or chosen if they had the opportunity.

This is a major point for me, as I'm kind of a softie as a DM. I don't want to kill my PCs, I want to see them succeed. I want them to do awesome things and feel awesome doing them. This is why things like damage being random are a godsend - if I had to choose damage for the PC? I would feel even worse when they died than I do now. If I carefully scripted every encounter, I would always find myself leaning towards going soft on the party, always making sure everything was just under what they could handle. Worse, if I did kill them off, they would feel their deaths were arbitrary and unfair. It would cause hurt feelings and OOC issues. There is no winning.

Operating from a system that randomly generates content is extremely liberating. The players and I are on the same page, and my role becomes an impartial adjudicator and interpreter of the fiction rather than forced into some adversarial position, and because the results of many of these things are random players are more willing to accept it when things do go badly. As a special bonus, players quickly lose their video-game expectation that everything will be carefully balanced to their ability and become more cautious as a result.

At least for me, however, the greatest benefit of all is that I as the DM get to take part in the excitement of the story. Rather than setting up a careful script and wait for the PCs to figure out how they will act it out, I get to watch the story unfold with them, learning information as it is established.