Resolving with a d20 against a DC (Difficulty Class), AC (Armor Class), or TN (Target Number) is a bit flat.
How about granting 3d6 or 2d10 instead? If it's routine, grant 3d6, if the character tries to go beyond her or his limit, grant 1d20. A d20 might give a 1 or a 20 (critical failure or critical success), 3d6 yields neither 1 nor 20, safe from failure and grandeur.
I have included 2d10 as well. It might be easier for some addition challenged players. It yields no 1 but may yield 20, and it's less "successful" than 3d6 when the target number is 9 or below.
There are the numbers for Advantage and Disadvantage. For 3d6, I let roll 4d6 and take the 3 best (or the 3 worst). For 2d10, roll 3, take 2.
It might be interesting to go with 9 possibilites (3d6 | 2d10 | 1d20 ) × (disadvantage | plain | advantage). What is granted by the referee? What is selected by the player?
"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is not iteration 108.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection.
Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a TTRPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.
I have to focus on other things, I am putting the "End of Week" links on pause.
About the OGL? Others already explained to us that the trolls tunnelled out of the dungeon long before.
"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 107.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection.
Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a TTRPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.
My favourite for this week is For RPGs, storytelling will win, "story is the only thing unique to the medium of the role-playing game"
The posts about OGL have been moved to the bottom of this list. The week has posts from before and after Friday 13th...
I feel like it should be mentioned that, in the work considered the poster child of Euro-fantasy, nearly all of the characters are speaking something explicitly modeled on Semitic and Mesopotamian languages. No Greek or Latin to be seen. That seems like something a lot of people miss.
The Secret of Wealth (plus Bonds, Arbitrage, and More)
Bonds could have at least one gameable element: as treasure
Ezra Bloom in the comments
The “app” is a HTML file that you can save on your computer and open in your browser. It contains some CSS to make it look good (well… taste differs, of course), some HTML for the buttons and the title, all the tables you need, and some JavaScript to generate the actual output.
Alex Schroeder, over at RPG Planet asked for any random generators that people have built, well here's my contributions.
Free Kriegsspiel Roleplaying — Here We Go Again
Because a lot of the FKR relies on sometimes implicit culture of play, we over here in the FKR cult try and make as many social and game processes transparent and explicit, although because in my case it is all I've ever played and all I play or run, it can be tricky to see things from another perspective without seeming preachy or dismissive.
Free Kriegsspiel Roleplaying — Old Manifestos
with some regain of interest for FKR shit and a recently emerging next hot thing born out of the OSR, NSR and FKR - the Free Rules Movement, I decided against my better judgment to indulge in theory rants a little bit before I burn out again. So here's two texts from the Before Times.
An Example of FKR (near-)diceless combat
We are playing using a framework common to Sam Doebel's Skörne, my various home games (Dreamlands, Shadowrun, etc.) and Cosmic Orrery's Pernicious: there are no attack rolls, no damage rolls. Instead, Hits are either traded (ala "trade harm" in PbtA) or used as part of a Dilemma (cf. Hits as Dilemma on Dreaming Dragonslayer, follow the thread of blog posts from there onwards to learn more).
Madame Kovarian: The anger of a good man is not a problem. Good men have too many rules.
The Doctor: Good men don’t need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many!
Not Naturalistic: I have 1,000 experience points. I am level 1.
More Naturalistic: I have 1,000 gold. I am a veteran.
In my perfect world, we have craftsmanship, fantastic new gygaxian building blocks, evocative writing, brilliant art and layout. In the world of limited time, single creators, limited budgets and massive competition, that perfect storm seldom occurs.
Don't Use AI Art (Except for Fun)
while there's no harm in playing around with AI art for shits and giggles, we can't and shouldn't countenance its deployment in serious creative endeavours. Art is our domain and needs to be defended as such. It's for humans. Not robots.
Generations who grow up knowing nothing other than these mediated mediocre media come to accept them as the norm, which will shape their own expectations, thoughts, and behaviour
This is me starting to build on the idea of a TTRPG ruleset designed around inventory / capacity.
I am a very reluctant writer of rules. I’m tricking myself by starting in fiction.
The idea is that this ruleset is diegetic; its abstractions represent the cosmology and worldview of Azza Amma’s priests. Your soul has seven parts, like the seven hands of the mother goddess.
Puzzles are unreliable. Sometimes players get frustrated and walk away. Sometimes people don't want to do puzzles. Sometimes the answer is simply outside of their reach.
If you need the players to get to the final boss room, don't put the boss room behind a puzzle.
The Lo-fi Online Gaming Manifesto
Technology can only enhance a game so much. At the end of the day, sound effects, cool visuals, music broadcast over your VTT, the fog of war, and buttons to execute complex die rolls aren't that much enjoyable than a game simply played Theater of the Mind over voice while players roll real dice on their desks.
For RPGs, storytelling will win
The tools of wargaming are where everything gets confused; this has arguably been the case for the last fifty years. Wargaming mechanics provide challenge, they provide mathematical rigor (or the perception thereof) to our make-believe. There are definitely some people who engage more with the math of role-playing games, bench racing Pathfinder builds or figuring out how to break Exalted charmsets. The problem is not and has never been that people are interested in these things or that they can do them, it’s that RPGs are, among all the options for strategic gaming, kind of a mediocre one.
There are several points where the player can instantly win or lose the game, with one spot “Eternal Hell” that the player is unable to escape for the rest of the game.
However! With the passage of sufficient time comes the hour of all things - my friends had aged sufficiently that their kids in turn were old enough to be playing things like this and it being the Christmas season families were gathered. A happy coincidence saw one of those friends already booked to visit and they were convinced to take it off my hands in a very stereotypically Irish - "please take this thing" "I couldn't possibly" "You would be doing me a favour" "But you could sell it" "Just take it so I don't have to deal with it" etc. etc.
And then happily, not two hours later, I get action shots back.
Beef! A simple session zero tool
They got beef with you. Something you did has upset them or made them angry! The idea is this helps provide an immediate antagonist or villain, even if only short term...
You got beef with them. The idea is this can provide an antagonist as above, and/or a plot point where the party might need someone's help and need to get over their beef...
They owe you a favour. The idea is to set up an ally, willing or reluctant, that might be able to help the party overcome a problem...
You owe them a favour. The idea is to provide a hook for, or add a complication to, immediate or later adventures...
Goals for Players | Goals Group | Bi-weekly – agreed | Genre | Quorum | Open or Closed Table | Absent Players | Play Style | Safety Tools | World | Character Creation | OOC Discussion | Character Sheet Update timing
The Hive Mind on the Hidden Genre Canon
I don’t think Salammbo can be considered a hidden classic? It’s one of the most republished of his works, especially in English. I dunno that it’s that rare, especially during the 19th century when genre divisions really didn’t mean anything, and the gap between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction didn’t really exist. Which I could go on about ad nauseum.
Serious war games — controversial or not
Taking a different approach to conveying the horrors of war is This War of Mine. I’ve not played the game myself, but you’re taking on the role of a civilian trying to survive from day to day in a wartorn country. The board game is based on a computer game with the same name. It deals with terrible experiences and forces the player to make impossible decisions. The age rating of 18+ is very appropriate. It’s not a game for a light games night.
Pathfinder 2nd Edition — Introduction
I’m not going to lie, trying to tackle a book as dense as Pathfinder is a little bit intimidating even to someone who has been reviewing RPGs for a while. That said, I was doing my best to approach this particular section from the point of view of someone who was new to the hobby, and I have to admit that from that point of view, the Pathfinder 2nd Edition Corebook manages to do pretty well.
Initial Description: GM move. GM gives an initial description of the encounter.
Question: Player move. Players request more details about initial description or information gained from other moves.
1) Affordable
2) Manageable rules as player & DM
3) The oldest RPG, no claims to greatest
4) Powers that be were gamers, not suits
5) Established good time, not threatened by other games
6) No backstory or other ego crutches, PC personality came out during play
Mordheim: The Thronetaker Campagin
The rules are … old school: there are tables, lots of dice rolling, and rules scattered throughout the book. Warcry feels like it’s the stronger game, but people aren’t playing Mordheim for its tight game design. Mordhiem is a narrative game, and its the story of this campaign I’m looking forward to seeing unfold.
You Can Run Anything As A One-Shot
There are lots of games like this. “It runs better it an a campaign, I can’t see how it’d work,” people say. But how often do games like this actually get played? I want to see how a game plays before I invest multiple sessions in it, and I refuse to believe any game can’t be run as a one-shot.
Disconnected Thoughts on Running Medieval Settings
The world is alive. This might seem odd, since we're not used to the idea of medieval Christianity as "animistic," but the reality is that the medieval mind treated the entire cosmos as hylozoic — they describe physics, geology, weather, everything in terms we would reserve for plants and animals.
Do not overthink treasure placement
The point I’m trying to make is that the stocking and restocking rules are essentially an expert system that TSR employees wrote up because they felt it resulted in a good game, not necessarily that running a game by those rules on Hurt Me Plenty mode is the best game ever.
Agriculture, large-scale organized warfare, elites, rulers, bureaucracies, writing, and monumental architecture evolved independently in many world regions at markedly different times. These are truly universal features of complex human societies. Moralizing religion is different.
Dungeon23 Roundup #3: What Riches!
The tables are a lovely spin on the idea of the dungeon as a hostile space that one finds in the "mythic underworld" conception of early D&D. They're also a nice example of how, for example, you can introduce setting, lore, and atmosphere through random tables.
Creatures & Commoners, Barely/Explained
In this game, you play a character adventuring in a world prepared and portrayed by the Referendary (ref). They set up a situation and you act on it as if you were there. The ref tells you what happens based on their prep, their knowledge of the world, and possibly a roll of the dice.
Honestly, I don't know. I have to change a lot here because I rely on the OGL. Then again, I don't I am going to be sued, though I am still going to make the effort. If I made my own system (unlikely) it would be CC BY 4.0.
Thinking back to tribal goblins, I still like the idea of having goblins operate primarily in the Morlock Model, hiding in underground dens during the day and then emerging to pillage the countryside at night. This makes rooting out goblins clearly an adventurer activity rather than a problem you can throw mercenaries at - you can fight them in their holes or you can fight them at night, but either way you're gonna be fighting them in the dark.
Why it’s rude to suck at Warcraft by Folding ideas takes a look at the instrumental play culture of World of warcraft and how it affects the game and its players.
Here!
Reason one. From my very first roleplaying experiences, cobbled together from half-understood and ill-matched books, I’ve felt no loyalty to any corporate rules-as-written game. I saw roleplay as an activity, akin to playing in a sandbox, and not as roleplay® the licensed and correct game.
My main takeaway from the post, aside from the obvious fact that Wizards of the Coast is behaving in a "rude and unfair" way, is that the existing version 1.0a of the OGL is, unfortunately, not written as clearly as one might like, if the goal is for its terms to be legally irrevocable.
Good riddance to the Open Gaming License
This is exactly the kind of thing that trips up people who roll their own licenses, and people who trust those licenses. The OGL predates the Creative Commons licenses, but it neatly illustrates the problem with letting corporate lawyers – rather than public-interest nonprofits – unleash "open" licenses on an unsuspecting, legally unsophisticated audience.
The Legal Fight Over Happy Birthday and What It May Tell Us About D&D’s Rumored OGL 1.1
Intellectual property law as related to games is an unsettled subject. The general understanding is that you can’t protect game mechanics, except with a patent. As a result, a game manufacturer’s primary protection against other people using its IP is a trademark.
Needless to say, we are making various contingency plans in anticipation of the official release of the new OGL. Once the official release happens and we've had time to fully digest its implications, we will announce any possible alterations to our publication schedule.
Cleaning up the ecosystem, strengthening the already strong companies putting out good product and reducing the influence of WotC on the hobby outside of D&D seems like a good thing to me.
My Response to WotC's Announcement on the OGL 2.0
The "game" doesn't matter to you. You see it as a "lifestyle brand" now. You want to sell lunch boxes, underwear, toothbrushes...the game is barely on your radar. The only "risk" is you.
Intellectual Property for Gamers
The process by which one plays a role-playing game, as far as US intellectual property law is concerned, would be patentable, not copyrightable. That said, there has never been (and never will be) a patent on a role-playing game because by the time TSR was founded and the RPG was being productized, fantasy worlds and wargames had been around long enough that it would be very difficult to claim that such a game was novel, or even non-obvious.
Yikes!
Better to use Creative Commons (CC) licenses!
Open licenses and what not to use
Also, don't not license your work. Saying that you don't want to bother with licensing is cool until it's not. The modern world is still coming to grips with what copyright means in the digital space. Clarity is essential, not only to protect yourself but to protect the people you want to be able to benefit from your hard work.
The Open Gaming License and Potential Attempt at Revocation
In this time of disruption and chaos we will see a burst of creativity and invention. We’ll see an interesting inversion of “rulings not rules.” And other unpredictable things; though one thing we can predict: Hasbro in executing its sharehold obligations will seek to
extractsyphon all that it can from the waters of the once declared safe harbour.
That's the opening salvo in TSR's "war on the Internet" of the mid-1990s, when the company dubiously claimed that "any software, bet books, modules, tables, stories, or rules modifications which contain elements from our copyrighted properties, including characters, settings, realm names, noted magic items, spells, elements of the gaming system, such as ARMOR CLASS, HIT DICE, and so forth" were "infringements of TSR copyrights" unless they had been produced under license from TSR. Such belligerent and litigious behavior is what earned the company the nicknames T$R and They Sue Regularly.
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. The first blogger of the internet, named Justin Hall, a college undergrad, was found in 1994. That site was links.net and still active till the date. Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic.
Wikipedia — Blog
I started this blog two years ago because I was inspired by the freedom I felt in writing about imaginary worlds and game rules. The level of responsibility seemed sufferable, I have nothing to sell.
I found RPG Planet and I liked the openness. If you have a TTRPG blog, you can contact Alex and he will add you and your posts will spread to a wider audience.
For my blog, I asked the "for everybody else" all encompassing RPG Planet category. I am not an Indie Game or Story Game blogger, and I am not an OSR blogger.
In Keep the blogosphere alive!, Alex says "link to other bloggers (remember blog rolls?)". My blog is homegrown and self-hosted, I don't have a setting panel with a an off-on switch for a blogroll. I started thinking about making one, but soon I thought it was somehow a shame to link only to "top dogs" or friends. A blogroll comes usually in two forms. The first one is a list of links to favourite blogs. The second one is a list of "latest posts" of those favourite blogs.
The RPG Planet showed me that there is a cornucopia of blogging out there. On the other hand, often, the blogs listed in a blogroll are mostly asleep. Some blogs bypass this problem by including RPG Planet in their blogrolls, but that shows 1 post for the whole planet (IIRC the blogroll system used on blogspot.com).
I decided to not do a blogroll but to do proper web logging. It gives me one static post theme each week and I followed the "link to other bloggers" injunction by compiling End of Week links. It requires more effort than a blogroll, I have to filter each day and then compile on the weekend, but it is up to date, many blogrolls out there are stale.
Every week, I hope to find a gem in the non-"top dog" blogs. RPG Planet simplifies the discovery, hopefully new blogs announce themselves there and can thus be picked up. Hopefully more people pick up blogging, real, open blogging, not newsletters, not posting behind walls and put more fuel in the furnace of the TTRPG blogosphere.
I should probably not wish for more blogs, that would increase my compilation workload. Hopefully these days, most of the work consists in ignoring the pure #dungeon23 progress posts and scanning posts about game licenses. Will #dungeon23 fall as collateral damage to the OGL 1.1?
Let's not forget that we're not here for blogging itself but for playing tabletop role-playing games.
When it appeared in the sky, we asked about it to our elders. They were as ignorant as us. We then went to ask the long-lived ones. You know how it goes with them. They travel from meadow to meadow, in style and in merriment, and there is no way to get a straight answer.
The first night, they got us drunk. The second night, they tried their drugs on us, two of us did not make it, and all the time their laughters and their poetry and their intricate word bundles.
Music, poetry, games, taunts, delicacies, muddled language of the past tainted with recurring portemanteaus biting their tails like snakes.
The Elves see us as dogs. We are many and we die quickly. I write "they tried their drugs on us", was it cruelty or was it inattention? They took interest in the results, hence my judgement pointing towards "cruelty".
The third night, they explained to us that the comet kept coming back, no big deal. "What is it?" we asked. They said it was something trapped between the close sky and the far sky, the tapestry of the far candles.
My head still hurts from speaking with them. Everybody says that they taught us to speak, that they gave us the language, but their language is foreign, now. Some Elves try to learn our language, most of them don't have the patience. Our fathers gave names taught them by the Elves, we gave similar names to our children, but the Elves never seem to remember our names and our faces.
"Who lives on this 'comet'?" "The White Lady" one replied, "And her hair enters in the composition of fine magical artefacts" added another Elf.
We obtained a finely drawn map of the palace on the comet and instructions on how to climb on it. We were told to dress warmly as we have to hop on it as it passes along a mountain summit. A young demi-Elf is accompanying us, he certainly is the key to our success.
Elves are a bit like butterflies, especially young ones. Will he keep the necessary focus on the task we set ourselves? My mind is full of me running here and there as I try to come up with ways to tie the fair haired one into our fellowship, skin in our game. I raise my eyes — I trust the scouts — and look at the young Elf and he smiles back, so innocent, so out of my reach.
We're going to hop on a comet and loot the palace carved in there.
"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 106.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection.
Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a TTRPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.
My favourite for this week is The particular way 5e has no replacement, "The best you can do to actually play is get a concept in one or two sentences and either roll or distribute attributes pick one or two things and get to play in twenty minutes."
The posts about OGL have been moved to the bottom of this list.
The Stupidity of Social Skills in Combat
Social Skills as I conceive of them can only be used in four contexts:
1) Out Of Combat — To elicit a situation-specific response if proper conditions are met
2) Before Combat — To de-escalate conflict
3) During Combat — To taunt your foe into reckless attacks, but (…) they'll come at you harder (…)
4) After Combat — To beg for mercy when you lose, or negotiate (…) conditions acceptable to both parties.
I’d suggest that a third benefit is that I believe it’s helping me to shift away from some old, outdated beliefs I had about GM prep and embrace a much looser and more fluid approach.
The particular way 5e has no replacement
In my experience a lot of OSR, NSR and whateverSR games are focused in getting to play right now. Having read Old School Essentials, yes that sort of captures the spirit of the old game. But a lot of modern gamers don’t really want to play, they want to imagine themselves playing their cool idea of a character.
(…)
Meanwhile, the rest of us with our Mörk Borgs, Knaves and Troikas are arguing for actually playing. The best you can do to actually play is get a concept in one or two sentences and either roll or distribute attributes pick one or two things and get to play in twenty minutes.
[FR] Naturalisme et Narration en cartographie imaginaire
The naturalism of a map can be an obstacle because it does not sufficiently put forward the strength lines of the narrative. An illustration is necessary, suggesting choices, and immediately setting an atmosphere and giving pieces of information that escape the scale of the representation. We must strive to seek potential stories and enigmas rather than mere likelihood.
Modern D&D has a coolness overlap problem where you’re constantly getting upstaged by some even purer expression of the trope.
Building An Online Amber Diceless Role-Playing Campaign
Amber is a demanding RPG experience, even for players.
The mechanisms of the system are revealed in character creation.
There is a certain amount of player vs. player dynamic in the game.
Much of what makes the game work is the element of surprise.
The RPG hobby has seen spectacular growth recently with 5E, and that's allowed a lot of very cool OSR and OSR adjacent projects to flourish. I have a shelf full of cool zines and boxed sets and rule books because people have been excited and able to make quality content for classic D&D type games.
You have to understand that GURPS is not your ordinary tabletop RPG. It’s more of a toolbox which allows you to create a roleplaying game. Before starting the GM hast to make up their mind on which rules to use, which advantages and disadvantages or which skills are available in the setting. Using every rule and allowing every option is just insane. Some people might actually do this, but in my perspective that’s just a recipe for disaster.
For those not in the know, FUDGE is a descendent of GURPS, and like GURPS, eschews the randomness of a single d20 for a bell-curved core mechanic. The result is a very not-swingy game, where your stats and skills are very important. GURPS uses 3d6, but FUDGE uses proprietary dice that have six sides with two marked +, two marked -, and two left blank. You roll 4 (or sometimes 3) dice, add any modifiers, and compare to a target number.
One of the benefits of keeping a Bullet Journal is that, over time, you can begin to see patterns in your behaviour and thinking. (…) Prompted by a conversation last night with a friend, I decided to dig out some old note books and was stunned to discover just how amazingly recurrent certain ideas have become.
. An academic look at OSR not based on nostalgia or equality with old D&D and its biases.
. Non-wrong use of GNS, which is surprisingly rare for all GNS is cited by academic rpg theorists.
. Using hobbyist theories as a lens to see at motivations and methods for playing.
. Writing down the wargame perspective on OSR.
And one of my very first Games Workshop experiences was spending an afternoon in the Hammersmith store watching some guys play epic scale and reading and re-reading the epic battle-report in White Dwarf ... 138?
Thoughts on Actionable Empty Rooms
The empty room contains a clue to the encounter table. So in the stew pot is a skull. Most players will ask what kinda skull. This is an opportunity to help them be informed about the level they are on and what monsters or humanoids exist.
. it should be simple and quick, people don’t have the patience to play the whole weekend
. mechanics-wise: ideally everything should be in your mind, you only need a short primer
. if something’s going bad, it’s a chance to add new color
. keep it simple: a map, a few encounters, a big baddy, a bag full of treasure, maybe a village
. …
When my players arrived at this pub, I didn't have much detail to work from. But I was provided this image, so... I started running the scene straight off the illustration. Rather than merely flavor to inspire the right mood or idea, I treated this image as a canonically accurate description of what the players see around themselves as they entered the building. These are the NPCs around you, the activities they're engaged in, the room elements to draw your interest, etc. This is the "room key," it just doesn't have any words.
A Tale Of Two (and a half) Trophies
I can see Trophy Gold easily becoming your default fantasy system. Use the Hearthfire template to create your own campaign tracker, shoehorn in some not-incursion free roleplay, maybe leaving dark dice and the risk of Ruin entirely out of the game except when you’re in hostile territory, and you’ve got yourself a fast, lightweight fantasy game that’s distinctly Not D&D.
J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.
Terry Pratchett — via Corbusier & Cockatrices in the comments
Rusted: The Early D&D I Briefly Had…
What I lost was a bulette, an owlbear, and a rust monster. Apparently I lost an umber hulk, although I never saw the family resemblance. These iconic baddies first appeared in a collection of so-called prehistoric monster toys from Hong Kong (every cheap childhood toy was tengentally connected to the place); and I'm sure I found these gems in the impulse aisle of the neighborhood Win Dixie, cheap and easy for an indulgent mom.
Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
It was, however, an extremely powerful reminder. It was helpful to read in black and white (well, black over parchment and phantoms of an ornate book over) that my players don't care about the minutae of my setting. Nor that I have to make my campaign adhere to facts that the players have never heard and exist purely in my head.
The magic of Risus lies in the “Clichés” used to define characters. The Risus Companion helped me to see the power of the Cliché, even if I still am not comfortable with the terminology and jokey style of presentation. In short, as a gamer who is exploring ways to encourage players to describe their characters with words and rely less on numbers, this has been an interesting journey.
Ships can go rogue. Not the crew, the ship itself - just like any other logic core, a shipmind can fall into the obsessive feedback loops of rampancy. It's a terrifying prospect; the metal can at whose mercy and cooperation you are kept alive might just decide to stop listening.
Callers, Multilogue, and the GM as Ant Queen
The caller acts as a delegate representing the party to the GM. The caller doesn’t decide what the characters are doing; that would reduce the other players to nothing more than dice-rolling machines. The caller simply listens to player intentions and then presents the GM with an executive summary of the party’s plans.
Meta-Narcotics — Experimental Rules for Extra-Diegetic Drugs in RPGs
Psycho-Survival Instinct: Avoid character death by ripping your character sheet in half at the moment the DM pronounces your character's death. You have to repair your character sheet manually and your character is out of action until the sheet is repaired.
A one-shot usually has custom characters and an elaborate set-up. Playing one tends to take from one session (three to five hours) to maybe three sessions, as they tend to not be done in time, and depending on the precise scenario.
A vignette is shorter, more of an (extended) scene than an elaborate situation, typically for 2-3 players and a game master. It might be over in a couple of rolls or require use of extended conflict resolution systems, all based on how the game goes.
How to illustrate your own stuff
I like fountain pens and water colours and I have a real brush, paper and ink at home, too. But these materials I can’t undo, and I can’t quickly paint over mistakes. Perhaps, one day… But not today.
So, #Dungeon23. The hype is real. But the hype will be gone by February.
Over the past month I’ve gotten tweets and DMs and messages about the rules of Dungeon23 and if you can do this or that or is it okay if I…
Stop.
The idea is to write. The game is simple. One room a day. One level a month. 365 rooms this year.
The energy in the lead up to #dungeon23 is really exciting, but so much is happening so quickly that I don't think I can claim to sum it up here. Take this as one readers report of the things which caught my attention before whirring by as we approached the starting line of #dungeon23.
Creatures & Commoners, Basically/Explained
This game is released under a Creative Commons Attributions Share Alike license (CC BY-SA 4.0) The rules are incomplete by design (and also it’s almost 1am). Make up whatever you need, possibly looking at old editions of the Ampersand Brand and the games they inspired.
Let’s Take A Minute To Talk About D&D’s Open Gaming License (OGL)
First, let’s get some terms out of the way.
The OGL 1.1 from My Perspective as a FLGS Owner
I've dealt with Wizards of the Coast for close to twenty-five years as a vendor. I own two comic and game stores and I sell a lot of their products. Hasbro has spent the last five years or so trying to find their customers floors and ceilings. I've noticed the Magic: The Gathering team doing this in the last three years and I think they are now turning their attention to Dungeons and Dragons.
Time to switch all the shit to Creative Commons licenses!
The entire point of using a good license was so we could do this and not worry, ever. And now we have to redo it all, with many of the people we’re building on no longer active.
It’s a huge busywork. They are wasting the time of all the people that want to do this right.
Section 9 of the Open Game License
In other words, there's no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway.
A Vision for the D&D OGL – Part 1: Reasons Part 2: What We Want Part 3: WotC
I would argue that the secret sauce of a good RPG isn’t the existence of third party products for a prior edition or that someone can create a retroclone. I think the strength of a good RPG rests on the growth of an active community. Excited GMs who are dying to run a session, players who are eager to try out a new character, and fans talking about the latest buzz – that’s the sauce.
The 2022 winter issue of Casus Belli is numbered 42. Casus Belli is the main French TTRPG magazine, it is the fourth iteration of this publication since the 1980s.
Once I receive my paper copy, I do a small recapitulation of its content here. It is one window into the French-speaking slice of the role-playing hobby. I previously looked, unsurprinsingly, at Casus Belli 41.
If I am not mistaken, the cover of the magazine depicts the characters of the Rôle'n Play actual play promoted by Black Book Editions, the company currently supporting Casus Belli.
There are 28 reviews of TTRPG products, 11 reviews of products adjacent to the role-playing hobby, 3 scenarii, and 8 game helps. A regular Casus issue has usually six scenarios, but this time only three, because it holds a full minigame "Montgascon", more on it later. There are also 11 articles (interviews, editorials, ...)
Among the TTRPG reviews, the game that caught my attention is Les Risque-Tout, the French version of The Troubleshooters. Nostalgia. The French version of Historia looks awesome as well.
Eight of the twenty-eight TTRPG reviews are about French products (I had to double check for most of them, to make sure they're not translations, Casus just says "VF" for "French Version").
The non-TTRPG reviews start with a non-review titled "Playing in the Berserk Universe". It's short and dark, it gives clues on how to acquaint oneself with that setting and then lists systems that might be used as vehicles into it. It also points at the Official Guidebook, looks like a must.
The three scenarii are:
There are four "psycho-scribe" articles about the Crusades (XIth and XIIth centuries slice) and the latin states in the Levant. There is a small insert about Florine de Bourgogne, interesting character, she died fighting alongside her husband, she was hit by seven arrows but still holding her weapon.
36 pages of the magazine are dedicated to "Montgascon", it's a "Carved from Brindlewood" game, complete and ready to play. It's set in fourteenth century abbey in the Dauphiné. A game of cozy murder and darkness in a medieval abbey? The nun of the rose? Yes!
"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 105.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection.
Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a TTRPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.
My favourite for this week is Follow The Thread, "Meanwhile, silk cloth production was already a staple in China 400 years before!"
Happy new year 2023!
Campaign Wiki and More Cool Things
There is also a very helpful Online Archive for the One Page Dungeon Contest. This archive goes back to the beginning in 2013 and has links to every submission. A real treasure trove!
My First Dungeon (January 1976)
My prep for the game was selecting nine quotes.. When the game started they set out across a desert for two weeks until they came to an old set of ruins (...)
I used each quote as the improv prompt and created each dungeon area and contents on the fly from each quote.
The Year of Blogs on the Desktop
And if you have a blog about role-playing games that isn’t listed on the RPG Planet, please get in touch.
I strongly suspect Starship Troopers only falls into this category for me in hindsight, but it was important to me as a young reader and a beginning writer, because I didn’t know until then that it went this way. I was used to being an Asian boy who had to figure out how to write white people. But I never thought it’d go the other way, that a white man would bother figuring out how to write such an effective Filipino character. But it did instill in me an early confidence that this was something white people could do.
a sandbox suitable for a campaign, in 3-4 hours, step by step
Draw a Hex Flower of 7 hexes in the middle of the paper |
Draw the borders with a thicker line |
Write a H in the center hex: this is the Safe Haven |
(...)
The mycelium refers to a network of countercultural groups and events, and it’s a term we first heard through theatre-maker Daisy Campbell. In nature, a mycelial network is the inter-connections that grow between fungi. Also known as the wood-wide web, these networks allow communication between different plants in a forest.
The warm community spirit of Sean’s initial ask seems to be giving way to the cold notion that a few “high-functioning creators” will have finished products by 2023’s end, and others will be left out or burn out.
Social media is the market’s handmaiden. And this turn in feeling is 100% the market exerting its pressure on us, to turn the things we love doing into work, into commodities.
The Takamatsuzuka mound is located in the Nara prefecture, close to Asuka City and was investigated in the seventies. It's a circular mound with a stone funeral room whose content was looted during the Kamakura period (XIIIth century). When it was investigated there was great surprise in finding figurative frescoes adorning it. A first then in Japan!
Avatar Legends: A New Approach to Session Zero?
No hierarchy or player / GM split – I like that there aren’t really defined rolls for players and GMs in the procedures. You’re all just a group deciding what you’re going to do. I’d imagine that GM probably still has veto, but we didn’t really need it. It’s easy for the GM to set some parameters at the start (I’d picked the era, for instance) and then have players work within those boundaries.
Fudge holds the key to descriptive characterisation. Words instead of numbers increasingly appeal to me because this technique allows me to help the players to remain in the imaginary world. The fact that Fudge is a toolkit also resonates, encouraging me to design my own version of the game which fits the methods and ideas I want to focus upon. I sense that somewhere in there, lies the key to a warmer and more deeply imagined fantasy.
OSR Rules Families: FAQ & Methodology
Statistically analyzing OSR games works because OSR games tend to be formal and predictable variations on games that are otherwise played similarly and with the same aims. Is it roll under or roll over? What classes or abilities does it have? Does it have procedures for underworld or overworld exploration? And so on.
Follow The Thread: A Worldbuilding Guide
He wore a hat, breechcloth and belt with leggings tied to the belt, knee-length coat held closed with a second belt, and shoes. In his sewn belt pouch, he carried precious tools: tinder for lighting a fire, antibiotic fungus, and a repair kit consisting of a bone awl for piercing holes in leather and a flint flake for cutting long narrow strips. More than the bow and arrows, more than the short-bladed flint knife, more than the very latest thing, the copper ax — it’s the sewing kit and what it means that anchors Otzi’s technology level. The wheel doesn’t come along in the archaeological record for another 2000 years, possibly inspired by the drop spindle, which was going strong in Egypt in the manufacture of linen thread not too long after Otzi fell. Meanwhile, silk cloth production was already a staple in China 400 years before!
All the nerdy kids are doing #Dungeon23 and so can you!
Yes, and it’s not going to be pretty. Some days, it’s going to be an empty room with just a few details. Some days, it’ll be a scribbled and a bit of text. Part of the reason I’m doing this is that I want other referees with less experience to see that adventure and dungeon creation for your home game doesn’t need to look like (or read like), a published polished module. Those things are designed and written to take something from one person’s mind and put it in another person’s mind. Dungeon#23 is a practice to get in the habit of creating something.
Here Be No Product Identity Monsters
If none of the above names work, Dislocation Beast is a suitable replacement. I like keeping the beast because it isn’t just a dislocating puma, cat or tiger, the tentacles definitely elevate it to a beast.
Pseudorandom vs. AI-Generated Dungeons?
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how this method - i.e. have the machine do the hard work and fill in the empty spots myself, and gussy it up some at the end - is any different, philosophically, from the GAN-network or GPT-Chatbot method that I am seeing go around. To be absolutely clear, my method doesn't cause me as much internal strife as letting an AI do the majority of the work, but I'm on the fence! Could I ever be expected to do ALL the work involved in generating a vast, demon-haunted underground death-complex?
#dungeon23 Should be a Metacampaign
People would play for a couple of hours, their characters jumping from world to world with little focus on believability. Rules differences were handwaved, and people just played.
Understanding who shaped the realm is a good prompt, and seeding the local surrounds with remnants of those institutions is a good idea. I liked this quite a lot and I can see it being helpful at the table. It also, through the institutions and the rival adventurers, provides a great store of answers to 'who is active around here' if a party asks.
Grands Exploits & Petites Mains, an FKR-inspired tongue-in-cheek fantasy game. Instead of playing the epic hero chosen by the prophecy, players take the role of their backstage crew: selling goodies, booking inns, managing the hero's public image, damage control… Each character has a single spell and a few descriptive traits, no numeric stats. Ran it four times so far, we had a blast.
Ask the players to provide their motivations. I got this idea from the Bandit's Keep YouTube channel. He suggests, after setting up an adventure, just asking the players directly what their motivations would be to actually engage with this, whether it's a dungeon, an event, a faction, or a quest. Get them involved.
Cruel Intentions: The motivations for fae cruelty
But they hate this too because they know it's not true love from humans as the gods know it.
Athasian Diseases and Treatment
A couple of years ago, I wrote three articles about Athasian Diseases and how they can be used in a game. (...) I took some time and combined the disease and treatment rules into a pdf.
Turn D&D’s Swingy d20 Checks Into a Feature That Can Improve Your Game
When someone fumbles a roll, instead of describing the failure in a way that makes the hero or monster seem inept or comical, describe the stumble so the fault comes from tough opposition or an impossible situation. DMs feel tempted to narrate bad rolls for laughs. (...)
But too many descriptions like that turn characters into clowns and their opponents into jokes. Instead, use a 1 to describe a foe’s superhuman speed or the swirling hot ash clogging the air and stinging the heroes’ eyes. When you describe outcomes, even the fumbles, flatter your heroes and monsters.
Moldvay Basic D&D Character Generator
I’ve created a character generator for Moldvay Basic D&D. It generates a random, level one character and is similar to my other generators. I did this pretty much by-the-book, although I did make one change to use the Expert set saves for Dwarves and Halflings.
This series inspires just the right feeling of fantasy that I would enjoy running in a medieval pseudo-historical campaign. The magic is low-powered, with the most flashy spell being when the evil Baron sets fire to Robin’s bow in the second episode. The mix of spiritual visions and memories of Animism hit the notes that I would choose when I talk about primal magic.
Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality
I think this book is necessary. It's not a utopian piece, at least not on the societal level. In fact, Campagna makes it clear that Magic is just one more way to contextualize reality beyond that of Technic. And while he doesn't, alas, provide any other concrete examples, he has shown a way (though not the way) to reconstruct reality, along with a roadmap or intellectual structure of how one might find their own way.
What Makes for a Good Dungeon Entrance Chamber?
Which leads to the third and final thing that a good entrance chamber should contain: evidence of past explorers and/or current inhabitants. Veteran dungeon delvers know that information is crucial to dungeon mastery, and this opening chamber provides the DM a legitimate place to provide such information to attentive players.
A Simpler Checklist for Jaquays-style Dungeon Maps
By keeping Jaquays-style dungeon design principles in mind, we can better select dungeon maps. Fun dungeon maps include an asymmetric design, multiple entrances, loops, multiple paths, secret doors, and shortcuts. Keep these criteria in mind while hunting down maps for your next D&D game.
Some people get concerned that a player might be familiar with an RPG module, and they believe that any level of familiarity renders that module useless. After all, how can a game be fun when the player already knows the plot of the adventure? How can it be a challenge when a player already knows the key plot points?
To get to next level, do something mildly interesting | interesting | that changes a small group | that changes a large group | that changes a whole building/structure | that changes a town/settlement | that changes a whole biome/environment | that changes a whole continent | that changes the whole world | that changes reality.
I'm interested in thinking about qualitative encounter calibration rather than quantitative. Runehammer of Index Card RPG (ICRPG) fame has talked about "challenge tuning." It is, I think, insightful and accessible for even the laziest of old-school referees. To summarize, break an encounter down into three dials that you can adjust as needed: damage, disruption, and duration. When designing an encounter, you increase difficulty by either 1) creating new sources of enhanced damage, 2) introducing environmental effects that harass players, and 3) inducing time pressures that force the players to rush.
New Game For Me: Forbidden Lands
Choose a Dark Secret. Another offered one - I once left a wounded friend to die in the woods to save myself.
Black Hack tabletop RPGs using Gamma World-style settings.
Looking at starting a campaign with some coworkers in the spring, and consequently looking again at OSE. But I realized I already had B/X in pdf from DriveThru, and all the late-70s early-80s TSR rulebooks I've looked at so far have been interesting (ex: OD&D, the 1e DMG), so I figured it was worth a look. Obviously mechanically there isn't going to be anything new here after having read OSE, so it's all about presentation and non-rules remarks.
Game Master Advice I Never See
Why would one need to become a scholar of a particular genre to be a good Game Master? It is the underpinning, scaffold, colossal structure supporting every decision the game's referee will make at the table. Creating your mind into a rolodex of genre tropes transcends mechanics and system in such a degree to almost make game of choice irrelevant.
Artificial Distinctions In Fantasy Magic
From a practical point of view, most distinctions made between “magic,” “psychism,” “sorcery,” “witchcraft,” “psionics,” “shamanism,” or “miracle working” are simply not relevant to magic in the real world, although as artificial distinctions, the terms are useful for anthropological classification and to add variety in games.
Also known as timesickness or deep time disorder, anachronosis is a malady known to afflict many adventurers, especially on their first forays into the Old City, though it may affect even seasoned delvers at times. The disorder produces a sense of being “out of time,” a sort of temporal dislocation. Although it has a range of presentation, there are several typical stages of anachronosis, as detailed below.
Received my physical copy of In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard, issue 1.
The logo is reminiscent of the MIT Press logo, but instead of seven pillars, there are three of them. On page iii, the pillars support an architrave which is not present in the smaller logo adorning the head of each page. Maybe it's simply three notches, it is the third blue wizard after all. The colour of the notches changes from light blue to a light grey to a darker blue, it doesn't go white. The colour changes as we go from one article to the next.
I do not know why but "The First Fantasy World-Builder" title immediately attracted me. Maybe it's the simple joy of finding something immediately anchored in the history of the art. Or simply because it's the longest, most imposing, title with its full span going: "The First Fantasy World-Builder: William Morris' The Well at the World's End".
But Tolkien was not the first world-builder. The late-Victorian polymath William Morris, best known as a poet, artist, designer, and socialist, was in his final years an author of fantasy literature which Tolkien read and acknowledged as an influence.
The article explains us why William Morris matters to fantasy readers and fantasy creators. The world whose end sports a well is then invoked more practically with map, pointcrawl, encounter tables, and glossary. Dance me to the end of, well.
This article makes the Third Blue Wizard, issue one, a must.
The Chevrelier intrigued me. A Chevalier who rides a goat? I was expecting to find an OSE class description, with its advancement table, but instead I found an engaging slice of fiction, an encounter with a Chêvre-eater. But what Chêvre? Names are dropped, there are cow milk and ewe milk cheese mentioned, but no doe milk cheese. There is a hint of powdery ash from the rind of a breakfast on the moustache of the rapier wielding chevrelier, but ash is not limited to chêvres.
From our "cheesary" or "cheese manual", let's evoke the Crottin de Chavignol for its name, its closed-fist size, and its hardened rind which makes it suitable for the adventurer's pocket. Crottin, salami, shepherd's knife and some vin du pays. Exploration and fights make one hungry, and thirsty.
Should I cast the spell and materialize the filter that blocks any #dungeon23 post? What would I miss?
the thing that worries me the most at this moment (let's worry about Skynet in a couple of years) is the amazing pile of trash that AI will bring into existence. (Condensed information in an ocean of trash)
If I set up a filter, I'll have less posts to process for my End Of Week Links, each time I discard a post based on its title, I always hear this little voice: "What if there was something to learn in there?" (and we're still in 2022).
Reading is this magical power that lets one acquire experience and knowledge from another person, and it's faster than listening. Of course, one has to go from read to understood, sooner or later.
By the way, I was looking at The Perilous Wilds, the first point in its a note on the Revised Edition is "The dungeon generation procedure (page 56) has been completely rewritten. We cannot escape dungeons (I was hoping the dungeon generation to get its own booklet, oh well, it's about Dungeon World). The wilds are just filling between the dungeons.
What if the goal is not to crawl the dungeon to its bottom but to crawl to the bottom of our imagination? It might be fun to consider the adventure as the creation and not the end product. How about setting up a page or a set of posts tracking the progress of all those #dungeon23 endeavours? Who'll go deeper, who'll make it to the end? That would be cruel.
There'll be two kinds of posts — #dungeon23 dumps and #dungeon23 reflections, and we're already seeing both pre-instances of them. There is actually a third kind of post, the #dungeon23 techo porn post. It's "tetcho", not "teko". I like those posts, they anchor the concept on paper. One chooses their kit carefully before this analog delve.
The old voice is still echoing: "you can not have meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept", keep quiet, we're using planners, not loggers.
Back to my Ocean of Trash quote at the top of this post — Am I fearing hundreds of hobbyists dumping their megadungeon in the blogosphere or in their patreon-only newsletter? Am I fearing a dozen of hobbyists riding the algorithm and dumping effortlessly twisted megadungeons? Probably the latter. I don't mind a megadungeon that is a pile of trash as long as there is something that has been learned from the drilling of its tunnels and that has been rehashed into one or more posts.
If a computer has to be used, why not run virtual parties inside the dungeon? Run millions of adventure parties in it and see where they die? All fighters parties, die on the average at level 3. Three fighters and two clerics? Total party kill at level 6. And so on, ad nauseam, and not a single once of fun or fear felt.
And here, it's me who's lost the way.
"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 104.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection.
Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a TTRPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.
My favourite for this week is Condensed information in an ocean of trash, "the thing that worries me the most at this moment is the amazing pile of trash that AI will bring into existence"
Merry Christmas!
[Competence Map for Game Masters] discusses Japanese attempts at certifying skilled game masters and building a competency map for them.
Until now I have run 6 games for this group, all in 5e, and am surprised with how much fun we are having despite everything I dislike about 5e. Remembering how much I didn't like using 5e before, this made me wonder how I was having this much fun despite adhering rather strictly to 5e rules.
(...) When I say it is FKR inspired, I mean two things: rules flexibility where 5e is lacking and a emphasizing the world, rather than the rules.
Open Gaming License: A Brief History | Part 2
The OGL ended up being more successful than anyone could have imagined. Dozens of companies began publishing third-party support for D&D. Entirely new companies were founded, many of which have become major players in the RPG industry. And for players and DMs there was an unprecedented wealth of amazing material – new adventures, new classes, new settings.
All of this fueled a D&D renaissance.
I set the Story Engine aside for now because the Deck of Worlds was exactly what I needed to shake some life into a regional hex-crawl. I got this from a kickstarter where it scratched two itches, that of dabbling novelist and also of dungeonmaster. The sub-title across the front of the box says 'the deck of endless world building' and I can see this getting a lot of use if it works.
History of bonus and malus dice
Bonus dice: when you roll dice, and add a certain number of extra dice, roll them, and take away a number of dice equal to how many you added, but you take away the worst dice.
There's another way to look at this, which I think would have an even bigger impact. In this view, the OGL is a living document that you agree the WOTC can update from time to time. When they do that, the new terms apply to everyone's use of the OGL, immediately.
Condensed information in an ocean of trash (and some thoughts about AI)
the thing that worries me the most at this moment (let's worry about Skynet in a couple of years) is the amazing pile of trash that AI will bring into existence.
In no particular order, here are some possible games/universes and ideas for each of them. I might incorporate seasonal themes or use some of the spark words lists out there.
Other Hands and Other Minds Fanzines
What I’m looking for is the fandom; folks who craft things for the love of the thing. To all the bloggers and pod-casters who write and share to, what I assume, capture and/or rekindle that feeling of talking with some friends after you’ve just wrapped up a game session.
These conversations about games, I’m looking to not be “real-time” but instead to have a more deliberate cadence. Whereas at the game table, if ever I find myself there again, I expect full attention and shared story-telling.
discussing the question whether the thief in B/X would be better having a d6 for hit dice instead of a d4, and one point that was brought up against that is that the thief gains new levels very quickly and as such has more Hit Dice than other characters with comparable XP, and that this would even things out already.
Puzzle Design – is it possible to try to make a (more) rigorous system?
other than a mind looking for D&D connections, there is nothing you can do to harvest pure inspiration. (...) So, I began to think about my thought process in how I built these puzzles, and began to think – could I codify my thought process and would this be useful?
Eat everything, aka the rule of rations
It would take 20 pounds of berries to meet an adventurer's food needs. They'd have to eat the equivalent of fifteen potatoes in wild tubers. Just forget about salad - most leaves contain less calories than it takes to digest them.
So hunting it is. How much meat is in a wild animal?
Fast forward months or years of me poking at that one elusive corner. That’s my curse. It happens with just about every game I make to some degree or another. Some designers might just go “meh whatever” and send it out with some spackle over that hole. And ironically, I’ve seen games that were accidentally genius, because some part of the rules did something the designer never anticipated, but that’s not in my genetic code. I want to know what my game is going to do.
The proposed OGL 1.1 is not an open license. Fight for your hobby.
At various times in the history of open source and creative commons, unscrupulous companies and individuals tried to put out their own licenses including ones with terms very much like the above. Each and every time this has not ended well for the bad actors and their licenses. Either they reverted back to a traditional commercial license and ceased their use of the open content. Or they came into compliance.
About the Current D&D Conversation.
I am all for open minded people trying OSR games because it looks like something they would enjoy.
I do not want gamers who decide to play classic adventure games purely because they dislike WotC. They will likely cause more trouble than good.
The one remaining worry now it’s how they present commercial as the antonym of share-alike. If by SA they mean NC-SA, that’s not ok. That’s still left ambiguous, but if they wanted to imply that more strongly they’d write non-commercial instead of share-alike, which brings me hope.
What does practical subtext have to do with game writing? In adventure design, we don’t want to avoid explaining things to the GM. Blatant “expository” writing is a good thing when it comes to telling them what’s really going on. However, sometimes designers go a little too far and say too much.
but 1st-level characters in D&D 3E felt like 1st-level characters. They felt like neophytes, newbies, and greenhorns. Their skills, talents, abilities, and equipment were limited. They had room to grow and evolve.
NPC Adventurers in the Megadungeon
Still, fallen adventurers are a great source of unguarded or poorly guarded loot. Canny use of Speak with Dead can provide PCs with far more than just a coin purse and rusty dagger, while the various Animate Dead spells provide PCs with more sword-fodder. Even a more mundane analysis of the corpse may provide some clues as to what type of monster may lurk in the area.
At this rate, in another 90 sessions, we might actually get somebody to level 9.
Megadungeon Practical Example 2: Rough Maps of Levels and Contents
My own preference is to take a blank piece of paper and just scrawl a few largish circles (say 4-6 in number), with each circle representing a subdivision of the level proper, in the region of 5-10 rooms on average. This provides the level with a very basic shape that can be properly fleshed out during the process of detailed mapping/keying. It also provides space in which to jot down ideas about contents.
Dungeon Design, Process and Keys
As useful as random tables are for sketching in repeated character experiences, the word is "repeated". Random tables are fetishized (a lot of things in post-OSR spaces have an element of fetishization - beware taking maxims about how to play literally) and this leads to some weird uses. Even in generally well regarded adventures I’ve started to see tables used to determine the result of a single experience or a very small set of them.
Developing A World Through Encounter Tables
Random encounter and wandering monster tables are underused; not only from a mechanical standpoint, as thy have fallen out of favor in modern play and so their power to build tension has been lost, but from a world-building angle as well. A good encounter table is capable of providing hooks and lore by showing, not telling.
It’s a game of high-gonzo Hong Kong action movies, and it leans heavily into the genre allowing players to have a great time pissing about with tropes and scenes.
It’s also a relatively complex beast for what it is, and there’s some nuance to how to approach it – so here are five tips for prepping and running one-shots.
it seems to have revealed how OSR-style rulesets have developed over time, especially with respect to prioritizing class versus character capabilities. My favorite grouping was the one with six clusters because I think it picked up on enough differences between groups to be able to draw conclusions about each of them, without getting bogged down in differences which are (in my opinion) almost semantic.
You believe you should go left, and do so. After wasting hours heading down the wrong path, you finally make it to a room with mysterious levers and gears. Make an Investigation check.
The thing with old-school D&D is: if you're in a fair fight, the situation is not good. It might not be bad, but it's certainly not good. And if you're considering whether or not to flee or fight to the death, the situation almost certainly is favoring the enemy, and that's very bad. Especially at low levels, you have got to get an advantage before or during combat – preferably before – or you're especially risking it all.
Hexcrawling Procedures: a Simple Guide
Speaking of roads, these are links between civilization. However, they should be used sparingly. Adventure happens in the Wilderlands, not under the watchful eye of a tightly organized society. Roads indicate safety, security, and a strong enough force to maintain and patrol them.
imagine a fictional world of vampires where the old and experience play it among another and with the younger once as a proof that their minds are still alive. That the burden of the ages has not dimmed their wit, clouded their minds or have them degenerate into a more bestial stage. It would be a constant test-and-proof, with nothing to gain but a lot to lose if one is seen as losing in ability. A tiring and dull activity without any thrill, a chore. An mere act of maintenance.
Inscriptions Charged With Occult Force
Odin, father and chief of the Norse gods, passed on his knowledge of magic and rune-lore to poets, sorcerers, sages and other especially favored mortals. The runes in his gift constituted an alphabet for writing. But they were far more than mere symbols: Initiates knew them as actual sources of power—tools and weapons of wizardry.
Will One D&D Patch Up The 5e Armour Table?
before starting my latest campaign (more on that another time), I decided it was finally time to tackle the 5e armour table and tidy up some of its weird disparities; while also throwing in a few penalties that will at least pay lip service to realism and force players to make some choices, based around the trade off of protection vs. practicality.
The Tome of Adventure Design is an impressive volume, but there is something lacking.
It feels bland. The cover betrays it immediately, it's not leather, it's not embossed, there are no strings. The fore edge is uniformly darker, no helpful contrast, the book has four parts but there are no shortcuts to each of the four chapters, no tone change on the fore edge. The Apophenia Engine monopolizes the outer edge of the page and darkens it.
I really like this engine, I like oracles, hints givers and the like. I find myself granting the Tome a double A4 area on my table and opening it at random, "Gem is cursed", "Movement", "Colorful Boots" it says... That is very pleasant.
Does the Apophenia Engine save the Tome? Without the Engine, the rational way to use the book is to start at the table of content (page 3), pick "Principles Starting Points" (page 15), "Monsters" (page 87), "Dungeon Design" (page 193), or "Non-Dungeon Adventure Design" (page 419).
The apophenia starts here for me, drift, and find as Matt Finch writes. "Anima/Monster Part", "Unusual Cliffsides", "Tail Attacks", ... There are 9 pages in the table of content, and despite its ordering, it already works for me. I feel tempted to draw out the Stabilo and highlight all the content words in the table of content...
Should the Apophenia Engine save the Tome? I have the impression that the engine second goal is to invite us to open the Tome at random points and get hooked. Why don't I get hooked? Does the stacking of words work when moving from the edge of the page towards the spine? There are certainly words, in tables. What table is that? Oh, the top of the page states it's the "Complex Architectural Tricks continued", that table runs on three consecutive pages, it has four columns, and it feels broken.
What got revised in the revised edition? Is it simply old edition plus Apophenia Engine? Does this engine make sense in a PDF? Does a PDF make more sense than a physical book when tables flow from one page to the next? It's a tome of adventure design, not a PDF of adventure design.
Those spread tables provide no hook for me. I cannot grasp a table in one glance, I am turned off. Using the Tome feels like work, get to the table of content, state what you want, get there, roll (browse a bit), get back to the top of the table, roll again on another of its columns.
The tables look blank, air flows through them, but "Tripwire activates trap when pulled" repeated four times, triggers the same samey same pattern acknowledgement in my mind. The illustrations are rare, they are natural hooks, the rhythm of the table goes on without hookable disruptions. I have trouble orienting myself in the tome.
I am reminded of oyster farms, it's nicely distributed on the surface, there might be loot down there, but what shows is just an array of floating platforms.
My favourite sets of random tables are the D30 DM Companion and the D30 Sandbox Companion, their tables are compact, they're easily printable and can be put behind a referee screen or pasted in a personal compilation of randomery.
The picture next here is of Stars Without Number on top of the Tome of Adventure Design. I'm placing it here not just to show the better binding and the bookmark ribbon that would make the Tome feel more like a tome, but also as a reminder that Kevin Crawford is a master in crafting concise tables and arraying concepts on a page spread.
What is the Tome of Adventure Design lacking? It should arrive and sit on my shelf and trigger as soon as touched and make me want to draw out the dice and roll something. It lacks work on my part. It's not the dice that will have to come out first, it's the Stabilo and the page markers, I need to make this tome mine.
Or, I should scan/re-digitize the random tables, re-layout the ones I like/need and then paste them in my own compilation book of randomery? Along with the tables from other games or from blogs here.
I'd probably paste the Apophenia Engine as well, it is excellent, and it stands and shines on its own.
The community has this tradition, all the youngsters, as they reach sixteen years old, must go through the maze kept by the elders.
The maze has to be kept, as younger people absolutely want to explore it and overcome it a little earlier than their friends and rivals. The mazekeeping is hard work. The creatures living in the maze have to be contained and they have to be fed somehow, a potential meal per sun revolution isn't enough.
There is also the threat of outside "sapper cultures" mines reaching into the maze and "contaminating" it, or simply making it branch into the unknown and the uncontrolled.
The elders share a checklist compiling check points and common fixes necessary to maintain the initiation maze. The checklist is a monotonous song in an archaic version of the village language. The youngsters are keen to intercept pieces of the song as it's performed.
The easiest part of the song to understand are those about the orientation within the maze, hence the motivation to "steal the song", it gets a bit weird when the song branches in the description of the fixes necessary for the maintenance, and then there are the parts of it that are just for flourish, actually prevention of performance errors (and loss of memory).
Seeding pieces of the song to the young people is a kind of amusement for the elders. There is an inoffensive fake version of the song that circulates. There is an offensive fake version that is used in the long feud between some of the families of the village. The maze also takes the lives of elders and thus eliminates the versions of the song that have too much drift.
There is a belief that says that the song makes the maze, that the song is not a map but a generation technique.
Not all the youngsters survive the initiation maze. Some youngsters fail completely by refusing to enter, they will live but will not be considered as adults (most of them leave after a while).
Not entering the maze makes you an outsider.
Fast forward a century. The village is still here, its population has doubled, but the maze has been almost completely forgotten, but it's still here.
Entering the maze are only outsiders. Some of them guided by a tune overlaying the noise of their minds.
"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 103.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection.
Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a TTRPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.
My favourite for this week is Why D&D has Hit Points per Level for the Acquisition of Gold, "Hit points are a way of simulating significance in a story. Significant characters don't die easily. We want to see them continue."
What this table shows is the range of hit points into which 96% of all random rolls will fall. (...) You can just assume that pretty much all randomly rolled hit points on a d8 will fall into the shown ranges.
What "Dungeon" Means to Different Players
Because the dungeon I create for this event is something I want to be able to pull out and run for people who get fantasy but maybe are not steeped in D&D or know the exact difference between "trad" and "OSR". But I still want the dungeon to embody several of the quality of good old-school dungeons — mainly decisions making, while being something that people "grok" immediately. This is why I'm constantly trying to design good "french vanilla" fantasy.
Culture of the insectfolk — Beetlescale
So - cultural aspects of the insectfolk:
. Things and space are fleeting, give generously
. Know one another by their deeds, accept all who join the great work
. Work hard to be lazy
Follow The Thread: A Worldbuilding Guide
Washing leads directly to health. It’s amazing to me how few people know that penicillin was figured out in 1928, and before that people died of infection Extremely Often. It’s not “what would you have died from in medieval times”, it’s “what would you have died from 93 years ago?” (...) Before that, if you got an infected hangnail, you could wind up dead. If you’re looking at morbidity and mortality in your imaginary people, what are they doing about infection?
Baking in the Flavor — Campaign or Rules?
I think it's the campaign that is responsible for baking in the flavor. Rules should be there as scaffolding. The systems to determine what happens. Not to tell me that a bear will grapple to knock you on your ass, then bite your damn face off, as versus a guard fighting a defensive battle while calling for reinforcements, then going all medieval on your sorry butt. What if my bears are stealthy stalkers in my campaign? What if my town guards are mystically enchanted so that they take only 1hp of damage and deal 3d6 of damage? (...)
I want the rules to stay out of my way of my imagination.
I do think that by modern standards Cryptworld is clunky, overwritten, and often clumsy, but that doesn't preclude it from being fun. Take this with a grain of salt as I've only run it once, but my group had a great time with it because we leaned in to the creaky, olde timey feel of the game. Any roll that needs to reference the Action Table absolutely did slow the game down, but we treated these moments as an event.
Shiny Object Gamer: Role-Playing From A Neurodivergent Perspective
Sometimes, neurodivergent players move more often or use stim tactics (I draw while I’m listening). If they are not disrupting gameplay, consider allowing them.
Basically, it's a journalling challenge where everyone is working on a megadungeon, one room a day, for a year. (...) Here's the roundup of stuff that's caught my attention so far.
Gathering Resources for #Dungeon23
The nifty part about all of these links is that they run to sites that are packed with usable information. Furthermore, I am likely to add to this list as time and the project wears on.
This post was born when I read Ava’s spirited defense of hexcrawls against a rising tide of pointcrawl enthusiasm in the P/OSR blogosphere. However, hexcrawls and pointcrawls need not be eternal enemies. There is a method to use both in what I call the “hexcrawl-pointcrawl combo 3000”. This combination consists of a large pointcrawl where at each “point” there is a hexcrawl.
Borges wrote a story – The Library of Babel – about this situation, and about how it might actually be easier to write your own book than to search an almost infinite library for the extant one – even with our modern search tools it’s most likely to be hidden way down in the cheap end of the search results. But AI art promises (perhaps) to short-cut that search. It will make something maybe close enough to what you wanted – close enough that the extra value in making exactly what you want (if, in fact, you are able to achieve that) is a frivolous luxury.
In some forms of entertainment, lying is accepted because the audience knows they are being lied to. Nobody believes the magician is actually sawing the lady in half. OSR games are not like that. We want the truth, even when it’s not fun.
‘Why can’t anyone make a decision?’ My first time as a D&D Dungeon Master
When the zombies started shuffling out of the ocean, they had a long debate about what to do. “Can they be affected by normal weapons?” asked Albie. “Can I see them clearly enough to throw a harpoon?” asked Cole. “Can I make a molotov cocktail out of some oil and a bottle?” enquired Zac. This led to a long discussion about whether zombies are affected by fire damage. I wasn’t prepared for this because of my video game sensibilities: the first set of baddies are usually just sword-fodder, quickly dispatched and forgotten. This was like trying to play The Witcher 3 with the Oxford University debating team.
First, Crits aren’t worth jack s—. Second, if you insist on putting Crits in your game’s combat engine, it’s way more critical that the baddies can dish out Crits than that the players can. Third, TTRPGs without Fumble Mechanics are way harder to run properly than TTRPGs with Fumble Mechanics. Fourth, Crits belong in combat and Fumbles belong outside combat.
Therefore, the best TTRPG is one in which the monsters can roll Crits on attack rolls and the PCs can Fumble non-attack actions.
Why D&D has Hit Points per Level for the Acquisition of Gold
There are lots of intelligent "old-school" essays that attempt to justify giving power-ups (level increases) in return for treasure recovered, valued in gold pieces. The justifications are usually clever, but they are mostly retroactive, concocted long after the rule they justify was coined.
Blackmoor's dungeon expeditions were the first of their kind, as far as I know. But why were parties of individual characters going into the many levels of dungeons beneath Castle Blackmoor?
HeroQuest: The "Pac-Man Quest" Set-Up
One of the improvised HeroQuest games I played with my 7yo son was particularly interesting so I thought why not share it on the blog? You can see it in the picture. I shared this very pic on facebook and one user said it looked like Pac-Man, which is quite accurate, so here's my "Pac-Man Quest" set-up.
Santa’s reindeer, Odin’s horse, and Siberian shamanism
Sleipnir was an amazing horse, to be sure. He had eight legs. His mother was Loki. He was stupendously fast. But his main disqualification as a parallel for Santa’s reindeer, aside from his species, is that he couldn’t fly.
This number had been discussed among my ancient friends along with comments of how some are running multiple tables and so their DM-to-player ratio is ~3% or the like but we figure most DM's are not running lots of tables at once. Certainly for the most of my time and most of what I see among different circles and different places, the most common model appears to be 'run one game at a time, perhaps play in others simultaneously'.
Victorious losses – games without loss or victory condition
I think we’re so used to winning and losing, that trying to imagine playing a game where that isn’t a thing has become very hard. It certainly is a different experience when you’re not adding up points or racing to be the first across the finish line. However, when you’re not focused on winning or losing, you have time to actually think about what you’re doing as you play the game. You can actually learn something.
Esoteric programming languages as spells and vice versa
One might say, my players won't use that, that's impractical. But there are lots of non-player characters in a game world, why not make one of them be an esoteric bored wizard that makes things harder for herself, not because she has to, but because she can.
Why D&D’s d20 Tests Make Experts Look Inept
I have come to love the unpredictability of the d20, because so often it will create moments that will challenge the DM and the players to really stretch their storytelling ability to come up with a fun reason for why this transpired. Why did the ace rogue who triggered this battle, why did she end up going last?
I encourage everyone with a blog to ensure their site is backed up on the Internet Archive. This page explains how to archive individual pages manually or with browser extensions, and there is an option to crawl pages you specify.
Fail Forward is bad for gaming
Fail forward is a railroading tool.
“This is going to be the story of how the characters stole a gem from a safe in an 30-story skyscraper.”
That’s not a game. This is a game:
“There’s a gem in a safe in a 30-story skyscraper and your characters want that gem. OK let’s kick this off, 3-2-1 let’s jam—anything can happen!”
These are two abilities PCs can pick up; I would consider putting them at the end of their own adventures, seeding them in as treasure, or making them the result of magic research. I would think they’d fit most into what characters can do around level 5.
The Purpose and Joy of Role-Playing Subsystems
In playing a game, procedures create support structures from which to build the fiction of the game. The procedures are design considerations for modeling and evoking the desired sensation.
Not everything warrants a procedure, but in the “rulings not rules” ethos, the purpose of procedures is to provide some mechanical guidance for adjudication.
One D&D Exhaustion Rules: Pros & Cons vs. 5e
One of the main reasons I prefer the old rules is that they feel more organic and ‘real’. Gaining two levels of exhaustion and being so tired you can hardly move is something players ‘feel’, while a mathematical formula that mildly reduces your effectiveness over time just doesn’t feel threatening at all, and won’t affect the way a player thinks or approaches the game in the slightest.
The Dark Horse has released volume one of The Witcher Rōnin. Eastern European folklore is replaced with Japanese Yōkai and it blends nicely.
I admit it, I only know The Witcher from Netflix. I know nothing from its video game incarnations. What drives me toward the franchise is the "field trip" aspect of Geralt. He is very strong but it seems he always has to consider context and knowledge to solve the threat's equation.
Survive long enough, take a step back, see it all encompassing and shut down its system.
The original books are in my reading queue. My Netflix viewing queue has gone bankrupt. Books are better, games with friends are better.
I have this romantic belief that the original books are weaving on a forked interpretation of D&D in a fertile "east of the west" soil. A "Summer will end soon" stasis behind the curtain and a writer that still remembers his grand-mother and the tales from the farm, in the time before the roadside got littered with jerricans.
This Dark Horse Witcher approaches farther eastern reaches. The woman of the snow is lovely, almost that Galaxy Three-Nine profile, eyes much colder, a beauty for our century. The tunnels ends for Geralt, snow country and then what? Golden bridge?
This volume one of the Witcher Rōnin ends with a treat for us role-players — each of the Yōkai encountered by Geralt is detailed in a bestiary, explaining the monster in the Japanese tradition and how they weaved it in Geralt's path.
It is a small book, small in size, it feels compact, you want to pocket it and take it on the streetcar or into the dungeon. It has thirteen essays, and the first one, the longest of them, hauled me on its back for a 31 pages one-breath ride.
D&D is not a tutorial in high minded virtues. It is an instrument of fabrication, where we're free to ignore virtue. Life is full of boundaries, limits, restrictions, expectations and respect for decency, all of which close doors against freedom for the good of others and us. In fantasy, no one needs protection. We're free to indulge, to conduct ourselves with all the trappings of delusion, being whatever hero or villain we desire.
Morality has no place in our dreams. Acquisition gives us experience, more health and more combat prowess — thereby providing greater power to plunder more and more. It is a lovely system.
This resonates with the way I experienced the game when I was a teenager. The ability to transgress had a strong appeal. It was a kind of valve for pressure.
The essay goes further and locates this valve in the dungeon itself.
We should define a 'dungeon' as any place where the players are secure about their interaction with the events at hand. Whether this is a castle, a tomb, an isolated village, a point crawl or a railroading adventure, the dungeon is a place where the players are able to grasp how action A leads predictably to consequence B.
Where this is not clearly understood, the scene becomes the 'wilderness' — where the framework is vague, uncomfortable and uncertain.
He distinguishes between the Dungeon and the Wilderness. What happens in the Dungeons stays in the Dungeon (except for the loot). Also, in the Dungeon everything has a target sign on it, unlike in the Wilderness in between.
When the 'rules' are known perfectly to the DM and not the players, the situation is unbearable.
The trick is to make every part of the world like a dungeon — even the outdoors; even villages where there are few enough combatants for the party to handle at their level. Every part of the world should be as comprehensible.
I love the play with words here. Com prehendere means to take with oneself, "Every part of the world should be as lootable".
Good rules are not measured by their approximation to real life, but by the challenge or the satisfaction they provide. (...) Spin the bottle is both shaming and wonderful; Truth or Dare is humiliating. Yet these games thrive from generation to generation because they allow people to act stupidly in a structured way.
That brings me back to my teenager enjoyment of D&D, acting stupidly in a falling apart structure that was extremely fun. Unease at the lack of limits of play, challenge and reward within the constraints of game.
And a final quote for some DM humility:
Players are far more in love with the game than they are with any DM. It serves us well to remember this. We are not indispensible. Players will only ingratiate themselves for so long. If truly driven, they will fight to create their own worlds, if only to play the game as they feel it should be played.
But, how will they create their own worlds? By becoming game masters? Or by clamouring for something more like a story game? Regime change? Most likely by immigrating towards another referee.
Alexis Smolensk blogs at The Tao of D&D and his books can be found on Lulu. Once I'm done with this excellent "The Dungeon's Front Door", I'll read "How to Run", it's not as pocketable, but I'll loot it anyway.
"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 102.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection.
Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a TTRPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.
My favourite for this week is Dark*Matter Reflections, "the rules went behind the screen and we were not really paying much attention to the numbers on the character sheets"
The tension sits between me wanting to get back to having a gaming group and the separate but similar desire to play in some games. These are different things that might look very similar but which, as Justin Alexander points out, aren’t. Being in a gaming group is something qualitatively different to wanting to play some games. I want to enjoy both.
Brecht’s plays are very different to this. The characters are effectively explorers, learning about the play-world as they encounter it. The lessons are such that it doesn’t particularly matter in which order they are experienced; it is more a process that leads to an understanding of the dramatical world.
Allowing players to put themselves into bad situations is one of the most important protections against RR. Anyone can see how unfair and frustrating is to save your beloved villain from the PCs with dice-fudging and "deus ex machina" only to have him reappear later. But there are lots of GMs who think it is fine to save the PCs from the villain in a similar way. It is not. It is equally RR. You're negating player’s (bad) choices.
Setting up for Session Minus One
I've got an idea for the campaign but my first area for focus is the session minus one or 'do I want to play with these people, do they want to be in a game I am proposing to DM.' Assuming the answer is yes, we will proceed straight to Session Zero - but the question must be asked first.
X-in-6: one of my favorite tools when GMing old-school games
. Is there a rule? Cool, use it.
. If not, can something adjacent be adapted to it? In old-school D&D, I usually fall back on “Can this be an ability check or a saving throw?”
. If not, make it an X-in-6 roll.
A comment says:
I am much more a fan of “1 in X”. (...) I just tell them “roll a dX” and they always know that “something always happens on a 1”.
It has a neat acronym, which makes it memorable. Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism: OCEAN. As noted before, I like to do my solo play tools-free. Anything that helps in memorising is a plus for that. (It would be better if the terms weren't multisyllabic words, but that's not how psychologists work.)
When my wife took over, she essentially stopped using most of the rules and switched to playing with a greater degree of GM Fiat. We didn’t know this at the time, of course, but she was focused on the “make believe” element of the game far more than on the “wargaming/rules” stuff. It made for compelling dramatic stories that arose from the collective experience of play.
In effect, the rules went behind the screen and we were not really paying much attention to the numbers on the character sheets. The GM was interpreting and adjudicating with very little meta-discussion and much more descriptive detail. We became increasingly immersed in the world that was like the real one but twisted.
Every week I email a list of ten excellent D&D links to my newsletter subscribers. Last week I sent out my fiftieth list! To celebrate, here is a list of the most popular items from each email.
Is there a “correct” way to use your settings?
No, there is no correct way. Generally, I write things with the assumption that player-characters are encountering these locales for the first time—mainly because that’s the experience (most) players will be having?
Refined House Rule Armor Class in Old School Essentials
The damage reduction is a property and advantage of armor over speed, toughness and/or magic properties. A wolf or dragon does not receive a damage reduction because they probably don't have armor. An orc or horse in armor or barding does receive damage reduction.
I propose rolling for wandering monsters once every 10 minutes (or whatever interval) of real time. This may seem radical, even nonsensical, but I think there's merit to the idea. For one, it's much easier (for me anyway) to consistently keep track of actual intervals of 10 minutes. Second, it's an additional incentive for the players to get things done.
Understanding what creates Immersion and the effects that has also has some explanatory power for those of us wrapped up in game design theory and thinking. The descriptions of what makes an experience Immersive, I found myself reflecting on my favorite, most memorable game and story experiences. I will be using these ideas in future games and stories.
Tedium and the Limits of Simulation
I've used this chart or ones like it many times in the past, since figuring out how to operate the tools of the Ancients is an important part of the fun of Gamma World. However, what I noticed is that the fun very quickly dissipates. After a half-dozen or so uses of the chart, the whole process ceases to be enjoyable and simply becomes tedious.
So here's my rules for actually searching those interesting furniture pieces, each with different results. Wanna taste the potions on the alchemist's bench? See who's hiding inside the cupboard? Do you dare disturb the tomb? Are you sure you want to be scrutinized by the evil man in the portrait above the fireplace? What grim findings await you in the torture rack?
Deadly Encounters vs Deadly Dungeons
But remember that they need to not-die every single time if they want to survive.
Experience of war and combat in XVth century Castilla
Lope Garcia de Salazar was a paradoxical figure. A brutal thug even by the bloodstained standards of the Viscayan nobility, he spent most of his life pursuing violent feuds with his neighbours. Sexually predatory, he fathered illegitimate children on an almost industrial scale.
Eventually even his surviving sons fell out with him and locked him up in one of his castles. The chosen castle, however, contained his library, for he was also a highly literate individual. Salazar spent the remaining days of his life writing a massive chronicle of world history which in its later volumes gave a blow by blow account of the feuds which divided his native region.
But where there is widespread abundance of some sort, and reasons to go in many directions, even modest imagination is sufficient to overcome uninspired competition, imitation, and even fear of dictators demanding Progress. So when the wind blows, people scatter to the winds.
Intent — What are you trying to do?
Leverage — What makes it possible?
Cost — Would it use a resource, grant a Burden, or have a negative side-effect?
Stakes — What's at risk? No risk, no roll.
Roll — Make a Save or a Luck Roll.
Impact — Show the consequences, honour the Stakes, and move forward.
The greatest creative advice I ever got was “have something to show for your time.” I’ve found a lot of success on always shipping projects every year. This is one of those projects, once you realize you can create a dungeon of this magnitude, your whole world opens up with what you can do. And it’s insanely fun too!
As a wrap - this is the first year in multiple decades where I have had multiple things running in parallel and it is working only because I have relaxed my world-building instincts and focused on 'just enough' to get gaming. Definitely it has proven to me the benefits of focusing on getting in time at table, even if a session or two is squeaky, compared to over-crafting perfect games that run only when the stars align.
How Chrono Trigger Saves the World
in addition to being one of the greatest roleplaying videogame experiences on any platform ever, CT is also a near-perfect example of an STW campaign done right. A perfect example of an STW TTRPG campaign done right. Structurally and narratively, if you rip off Chrono Trigger for your TTRPG campaign, you’ll have a perfect Save the World campaign.
Threat Levels in Horror Gaming
Note that the key to using threat levels is to communicate them clearly to players and gain their agreement that the current level for individuals or the entire party matches their roleplaying motivation, backstory, or experience.
Build your own adventurer d6 system!
So the way I see the game playing out is every level the players get to custom build their own little mechanics that suit the character they want to play!
before I started running D&D, I came from rules-less, dice-less, stat-less, splat-less, feat-less, class-less, story games. Pure narrative games.
I went to D&D because I was curious about a game where things was happening beyond just what we decided ought to happen. Where we could play to find out.
To me, all that fiddliness with class features, levels, hit points, math, dice rolls, all that’s a huge chore. What makes that chore fun, for me, is seeing to what extent all those decisions matter when that character is faced with the dangerous world of adventure.
The Seer of Mendacium: A one-page OSR dungeon
Over on Mastodon, there’s a little project called #mastodungeon, where people throw together a quick one-page dungeon and post it.
Whatever faction of the OSR you first encountered (and the people in that faction) will heavily influence what you think the OSR is, and importantly if this was an attractive or repulsive experience.
another thing making it difficult to offer guidance for our hobby: by now it all seems to break down into smaller and smaller tribes all over the place. And the loudest ones aren't really good representatives of the hobby in general. The OSR? Done for. Or it's something else now that milks it for what it's worth. The "artpunk" discussion? Blech. Those trying too hard to be the opposite? Yawn. Official D&D? Excludingly diverse, all posture no substance. The next edge lord driving nother pig through the digital village? Pestiferous, at best.
My Go-to Places to Hunt for Art
This means I spend a great deal of time hunting for artwork to use in my books and modules. Thankfully, I've had some good tips over the years. Guilherme Gontijo's How to Make Cool RPG Pamphlets was a good starting point for me. Since then I have slowly expanded my selection of resources.
General yet specific — dungeoneering skills
So we got for now Wrestle (Strength), Survey (Wisdom), Prowl (Dexterity) and Tinker (Intelligence). I think of at least one additional “skill”. I haven’t addressed yet Pickpocket skill of thieves and I think this and other subtle manipulations, juggling, drawing, cheating with cards and making magical gestures would be part of Finesse. It’s the precision part of dexterity.
Your critics aren’t in the arena. Ignore them.
This is not a call to be aloof, and wear blinders to criticism. Stay alert. Listen to legitimate feedback. You will be wrong from time to time. I’ve been wrong, and made mistakes, many times in my life. Own up to errors; use them to get better.
A world like Warhammer 40K except where the lore doesn't implicitly justify the Imperium.
The tragedy is that your players haven't lost trust in an NPC. They've lost trust in you, the Game Master. Your players have recognized that you're trying to trick them into playing a specific kind of game, and because that type of game happens to end in betrayal, they naturally intend to avoid it.
Detailing a semi-successful attempt to build a table to determine the outcome of a task assigned to a NPC.
There was one post this week or the week before writing about Context, Intent, Task and something else.
That reminded of the standard structure of an order or task given to a subordinate, it goes from Context (orientation), Intent (what you intend to do), Tasks (missions granted to subordinates in the context/intent scheme).
If a player character tasks a follower, what happens? I tried here to recycle the Xaosseed 24 table for scars.
Again, hat tip to Xaosseed for coming up with this hidden depths table pattern.
Like with the table for scars, the bad outcomes (rolling low) are on top while the good outcomes (rolling high) are at the bottom
I had to choose a demarcation between success and failure. The table for scars did not present such a challenge, it was just light or heavy scars. If you click on the images in this post, you'll see the full context for the tables. The outcomes are stacked top to bottom or bottom to top to help me determine where to cut between failure and success.
The 24 outcomes got me spreading failures and successes and trying to enumerate nuances. I reached a point where it broke for me. The table on the right is the snapshot at that break point. Twelve failures and twelve successes, the binary outcome and some refinement or inspiration. I could not fill the blanks anymore. I decided to try with less outcomes.
I went from 24 to 12, from 5 die combinations to 4. This second table is complete, well as a first take can be.
Side-effect or consequence? The distinction for me would be that side-effects do "branch out", while consequences stay in the line drawn by the intent and the task. A side-effect brings a twist, a consequence is putting the volume to 11 or beyond.
The resulting 12 outcomes table is not really satisfying. It works, but it's "flatter" than the 24 outcomes one. The dice combos go from 50% success to 69%, while the initial exploration table goes from 52% to 82%.
This goes from "poorly tasked" to "carefully tasked". It is my tentative, compact way to say "the NPC receives a poorly formulated task" vs "the NPC is carefully briefed and has confirmed they understood their task, and the intent and context it's set in".
In game, I'd play the NPC part and receive the task from the player character. I'd then determine if I have been properly briefed or not, and roll. No need to roll immediately, the referee just says "OK, I'll do it" the way the NPC would formulate it, and later on, roll, just in time, and interpret.
I am not satisfied by the result, I am posting anyway. The writing of this post is part of the conception work. I'll rework the table later on, or I'll forget it.
I need to look at 16 outcomes tables as well, 1d12 + 1d4, 2d6 + 1d4, 2d8, etc...
It's a small threat, an annoyance. It deals 1d4 damage, 1d6 for the bigger instances. One can literally not see where the hit comes from. Adventurers that know of the beast understand that it can only hit within 10 or 20 feet from its "contrivance".
Someone constrained a soul in a contrivance and the poor thing's only way to communicate is to deliver invisible punches. It is seen as an effective way to make a worshipping site a bit more supernatural, and secure.
There are three ways to defeat a trapped knocker (or whatever name your adventurers devise for it).
Firstly, it's to avoid it altogether. In some sites, there are oral or written instructions revealing the presence of this unfortunate guardian and indicating the safe way around it. When such instructions are given, it gets easier to locate the contrivance. Some knockers are intelligent enough to obey a warning sign, or a compensation offering (it delights in crushing it, whatever that is, ... a knocker requesting flowers as offering is hard to satisfy in winter).
Secondly, if the contrivance is found, it can be destroyed. The magical force in the contrivance and the contrivance itself have to be destroyed. Each round of attempt grants one punch to the knocker, a reserve of compensation offerings is a must.
Thirdly, the contrivance can be unpacked, releasing the soul. It has to be done carefully, in a definite sequence. Instructions are necessary. Each round grants one punch to the knocker.
The evil person that packaged the contrivance had to actually kill to procure a soul. The level of intelligence of the victim creature determines a lot about the knocker. A rat soul might accept a piece of rotten biscuit as offering, as the scale of intelligence is climbed, behaviour varies. Cat based knockers are said to be quite vicious. Humans are rarely used, the cost being prohibitive.
Hiding the contrivance is as much an art as packaging the contrivance is. Some sophisticated architects place them in bricks or in the fold of convoluted fragments of stone, and cement the contrivance is the place to safeguard.
It is said that a single knocker downed a whole party once. It punched the first adventurer. That adventurer punched his closest companion, believing they were the offender. The fight generalized, peppered with knocker punches, and ended with all the party skulls crushed on the floor.
Those punches are cold, the first of them comes as a surprise, unseen. The main effect is mostly confusion.
"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 101.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection.
Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a TTRPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.
My favourite for this week is Follow the thread, "Where do they get fiber to spin for thread?"
Yes, You Can Resolve Action Without Dice and Do It for Years
We tend to underestimate that players are very chaotic and input a ton of randomness into the game. I don’t know what they’re going to do until they do it.
War stories by Eero Tuovinen suggests why war stories from wargamey play might be more interesting in general than people telling about their characters in games that lack such context.
On all cases, We basically have multiple campaigns running “next to each other” with a little overlap between our responsibilities. On the campaign where we all share the same starting village, there’s more character interaction and more mixing of parties, of course. (...) The [character] roster also contains pre-generated characters that haven’t been picked or hired, yet. That’s one of the things I introduced at the beginning to help newbies get started quickly.
Later, TSR offered to merge with Games Workshop, to move into the UK market. They declined and lost the exclusivity of D&D distribution when TSR UK was formed. Ultimately, a very wise decision.
Sir Pellinore's Advice to Referees
Don't make your world too civilized. If there's no monsters around to fight the players will take to robbery to make life interesting.
You could ask 100 questions about magic in your world and not exhaust all the “What if’s?” Give it some consideration and keep it in the back of your mind as you create your setting and as you place treasures in your adventure locations. You’ll do better simply by being aware that magic has many implications for your setting and how your campaign will play out.
A Very Different Ecology For 'The Troll'
Trolls make excellent Sword & Sorcery monsters especially when their origin crosses human, giant kind, & something else. We would need a race of highly advanced masters of the biological & engineering arts who had been here since Earth's origin & were capable of planar creations & demi planes (Faerie). Oh wait we already have all of those in HP Lovecraft's at the Mountains of Madness Elder Things.
Conflict — what is the overall situation, what threats and challenges exist?
Intent — what is the overall goal the character is trying to accomplish? What impact will this have on the situation?
Task — what actions are the character taking to reach the stated intent? What tools are they using? Do they have any particular advantages or situational elements aiding them?
Risk — what does the potential failure look like, or what will happen if the characters do not act or react? What disadvantages and conflicting elements are at play?
Gaming with Kids: Danger and Violence
They experience their imaginative characters as part of themselves. 10 is just right because they can now understand the difference between imaginary-for-fun and imaginary-as-practice-for-life.
A simple magic system for "cunning folk" type casters. I've used it as a feature of bucolic Halflings and in pseudo-historical settings.
These little spells (rhyming verbal incantations) either replicate a low-level Cleric or Magic-User spell or achieve a small desired effect.
People have explored the possibilities of 5E, and one more splat book of new options is not gonna hold their attention much longer. Part of this is baked into the design of 5E, which like 3E and 4E, was designed as a game of system mechanics exploration more than imaginary exploration within the game world. That gives it a limited (intentionally so?) lifespan with the players.
The blogs which came about in the late 90s, early 2000s, and into the 2010s and 2020s are all going to be more resilient ways to carry on the discussion of the hobby (and a lot of other discussions) than social media ever was or could have been.
RPG books that probably didn’t exist
While never popular in North America, I’m told the occasional AYBS game crops up at most UK game conventions.
Jason Morningstar has stated in multiple interviews that the Innuendo & Misunderstandings subsystem from this book was a major influence on his Fiasco RPG.
In defense of the classic D&D saving throws
the features that make old-school saves unique are that they: Reference specific dangers / Are not tied to ability scores / Use static targets / Vary between the classes /
in your pre-1700 tech level world, you should have all your characters have an awareness of and some experience with spinning. Everyone knew about spinning. Women spun a lot. Queens spun a LOT. Also sewing and embroidery. My goodness, the embroidery. It’s astounding how entirely central to life textiles are. Herds and fields need tending, cloth and clothing need making and selling, all secondary and tertiary trades that show up around that core are the whole of your social structure.
So, from a game design world building angle, ask yourself “where do they get fiber to spin for thread? how do they make cloth?” and follow that thought experiment out. There’s your world.
This should include such things as events the calendar is based on like equinoxes and solstices and phases of the moon. Secular and religious holidays, historical events, harvest festivals, and others based on the cycle of nature are also appropriate.
Some thoughts about sequencing games texts
people writing games texts should think more critically about how their text is going to be used, and to write with that in mind. People like to talk about "intentionality of design" - I'd like to see some intentionality in the sequencing of texts.
People manage to run D&D in spite of its rulebooks, not because of them. Mothership’s Warden Guide is superlative because it breaks down how to get the game you just bought to the table: it understands why these game master books should exist in the first place.
This often becomes a cascading problem: Because the players lose “momentum” in interacting with the world, it can take a moment to sort of reconnect and get rolling again… except the moment they need is a moment of silence, and the GM is nervously filling it before they can get going.
Settings and Locations as Entities with Problems
In Matrix Spiel, and Matrix Spiel Solo an entity attempts an action to solve its problems. To start a game you need at least one entity with one problem. From there, the act of that entity attempting to solve its problems will create new entities and new problems.
But It’s Fiction All the Way Down!
Given this, saying “well why have the Referee be in charge of the world, what does it matter if Ref Sarah or Player Bob decides what’s in the treasure chest or what the villain’s plot is” to me reads a little bit like if an author of a novel stopped midway through, gave the reader a prompt, and said “ok you pen the next chapter.”
Writing is a fun activity, I love to do it – but 99% of the time when I pick up a novel I’m looking to lose myself in a tale, not tell one myself.
The second answer I arrived at back when I started digging into OD&D and Chainmail: The quotes above are holdovers from the early fantasy miniatures campaign. I.e. these "attack on sight" indicators are meant for massive of troops in battle. If one side brings dwarves and the other side brings goblins, don't expect to be able to control those troops. They'll be too busy annihilating each other like matter and antimatter. The rest of the time there may be tensions between the two peoples, but they don't automatically boil over into hostilities.
Reaction Rolls Aren’t All About You
This is a fast, clean, versatile mechanic, and it can produce some extremely fun and interesting results. It can score the PCs a major unexpected win, or conversely create an unexpected challenge! And importantly, it's a fair, impartial game mechanic and a fun roll of the dice.
GURPS is essentially descriptive as a set of rules. This is unusual because most game designers create prescriptive games which give us not only some rules to adjudicate with but also a set of implicit (sometimes explicit) methods.
Faith and Belief Do Not Matter Much in Most Religions
As odd as this might sound, faith and belief don’t matter much in most religions. Often ritual is far more important, as in Confucianism. Or story, as in Yoruba religion.
How I Ran an RPG Con 4 Times a Year For a Decade
Low enough ambitions to feel that you can fulfil them even on a bad day for years to come.
Conceptually this is a Brancalonia re-skin (using E6) with lots of animal-lings mixed in, using the southern hemisphere of my home-campaigns world.
In execution this is going to be something like a West Marches campaign in that I want a pool of drop-in, drop-out players with it being relatively resilient to missing players. It will be online as one of the big hooks was to cater to a distant DM-less group of players who reached out to me.
Some people use a house rule that potions of healing only take a bonus action to quaff. Don’t they know how painful it is to get healed by such drinks? It hurts like a mother as your body relives the injuries backwards and digs you up, yanks out the coffin nails, knits you up, stitches you up, burns you up like a modern swindler.
Dungeon room history, done right
It sucks when it says “this room was an alchemist’s lab used by the great Garbanzo the Magnificent” etc for two whole pages only to end on “anyway, now only glass shards remain”.
5e was a masterpiece of modularity. I referred to it as a very loosely coupled design. You could play a very simple game or you could add in feats, multiclassing, flowers and a wedding dress. This addition gives up some of that modularity and makes (at least this particular aspect) of the game much more tightly coupled.
Railroading, fudging, and cheating
Give people tools instead of scolding them.
. Group by group (loose leaves last)
. Holding light gives you first strike (in your group)
. If you’re attacked it’s your turn right back (as long as you have actions left)
Maintain Shoes. As part of a long rest, you can repair your companions’ shoes. For the next 24 hours, up to six creatures of your choice who wear shoes you worked on can travel up to 10 hours a day without making saving throws to avoid exhaustion.
"I want to play a board game, it is easier to get into it". Or something like this. Someone was confessing to me they preferred board games over role-playing games. It was late, it was three past beer o'clock.
I was reading online someone complaining about a rules-lite role-playing game "it doesn't have rule for listening to doors". So you want a board game?
Exposing myself to Undaunted, I started wondering if its deck mechanisms could be used in a role-playing game. Holding card feels good. Where I come from, card playing was a very important pastime. It spanned three generations, countryside and town. 36 cards and constraints — years of fun, almost instant decisions.
The past beer o'clock board game confession — was it a request? — made me feel alone. Role-playing game gear into mini games for combat and other contested situations. If you strip what surrounds the mini games or establish rules for it, fossilizing it, are you ending up with a non-role-playing game?
When I was a kid, I dreamt of a computer game where everything was possible. Finding role-playing games made the computer game unnecessary for me. But games where everything is possible are boring it seems. Tight, addictive games are more fun.
I felt alone, wanting to play worlds, left to play games. But I remember playing with kids a year ago, once they had understood the width of the door opened by "what do you do?", they delighted in describing knightly actions and there was fire in their eyes.
I indulged in a few solo scenarii with Undaunted: Normandy. It describes itself as
a deck-building game that places you and your opponent in command of American or German forces, fighting through a series of missions critical to the outcome of World War II. Use your cards to seize the initiative, bolster your forces, or control your troops on the battlefield.
A deck-building game? The photo above looks more like a wargame with poor man's hexagons. Yes, it is a deck-building game. You have a deck, you draw four cards out of it, and then each player chooses a card for its top-right initiative value, that card is sacrified for this turn, but it might win you the priority.
The remaining three cards may then be played. Move, Attack, Scout, Bolster, Inspire, Command, ... each card has a different set of actions.
There are three types of cards: officers, soldiers, and, well, fog of war. Those last cards act like dead weight. The scouts as they explore the map move fog of war cards from the supply to the deck (well at first to the discard pile). Playing a fog of war card for initiative won't get you far, it's valued at 1, while the platoon sergeant card ranks at 9.
The rules are light, and easy to learn (and to teach!). There is a one page helper at the end of the booklet, I was trying to use it but it was so summarized that I ended up completing it with my sharpie as it didn't mention for most actions where from and where to a card is transiting.
I was happy with my completed rule summary for 3 seconds. I was making a mess with my cards (especially since playing solo). I wanted a "track" for my deck, with all the transitions illustrated.
Inkscape to the rescue. I devised a track on an A4 page, its goal is to prevent me from referring to the booklet each time I'm considering an action.
The game with this track went well. But I noticed I was still referring to the booklet for casualties. When a counter scores a hit against another counter, it removes a card. For example, if the "Scout A" counter takes a hit, a "Scout A" card has to be removed from the game. I could never remember the search order: Hand, then Discard Pile, then Deck itself. If no card can be found, the counter is removed from the map (but not from the game).
Since I could never remember the order of card removal in case of hit, I added something about it on my track page.
There is a Supply of cards, it's in open view from the other player. Hits don't affect it. If, through a Bolster action, you pick (not draw) a card from the Supply, you can actually bring back a counter to the square with the "spawn" marker on it.
Cards have names on them, for each counter there are three to five cards. Provided a rifleman counter has all its five cards moved from the Supply to the Deck, that counter can take five hits. With those names on the card, hit casualties are not anonymous.
My track for Undaunted is available in its own GitHub project.
Conflict of Heroes was my previous favourite platoon-level wargame, but I think, although, more abstract, Undaunted: Normandy (and North Africa, and Stalingrad) will dethrone it. It is faster to play. Or Undaunted might bring me back to Conflict of Heroes... Cards vs Activation Points...
"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 100.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection. For monthly links, look at The Glatisant.
Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a TTRPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.
My favourite for this week is Describing Rather Than Defining, "Definition is hasty worldbuilding. You’re making the decision on the subject all at once, usually at the beginning"
The Abilities (preliminary thoughts)
If you were going to change from the standard OD&D 6 ability stats (of STR, INT, WIS, CON, DEX and CHA), what would you do and how would you define them? I posted this on my forum three years ago and am still thinking about it. I suppose I should do something with it.
An awesome day: Starting an OSE Godsbarrow campaign with Lark
After looking at all of the awesome options, Lark picked a species — goblin — from an issue of Carcass Crawler, and the beast master class from a different issue, and then asked if their pet could be a giant mantis. Of course! There’s no giant mantis in the OSE monster book, but I bet we can back into it with a couple of other insect entries… hey, wait a minute, there’s a giant mantis in the OSE Advanced monster book.
Lutong Banwa: A Beautiful Experience
At its core it’s a game that teaches you a person’s history through their recipes. It shows you a different kind of history than maybe you were raised with (the one of myths and lies, in my case). It shows you a history baked with kindness. Of sharing a meal. A person’s legacy. It’s a game that treats cooking as holy and generous, and recipes as a human way to share that.
I’ve named it after GTA as that’s the first video game I encountered that looked like this, but it’s generally how open world games are structured now, and I’m sure GTA3 wasn’t the first. In it, as the world opens up, you always have a few missions on your plate, that you can follow in whatever order, some main plot and some side quests. The choice and setting makes for an entertaining game where you really feel in charge of your characters destiny.
Building Blocks of A Sandbox Campaign
My personal style of sandbox game is to create a setting with a number of competing factions and NPCs, along with locations and objects with a history that impacts the game world in the present moment. I wind up the clock work, drop the player characters into an interesting and troubled part of the world and see what happens.
The Phenomenology of Death in D&D
the vast majority of players kind of end up just being a version of themselves during play — same voice, same personality, same priorities. I would be troubled by that if I thought that role-playing should be about exploring the character of the PCs, but as I think it's more to do with exploring a world, it's fine by me that the next PC Pandion's former player takes on will probably be pretty similar ultimately
Scenes from the Ideas Scrapbook
I have a big mental scrapbook of anecdotes, factoids, and little titbits of information that I have never quite manage to find space for in a game or in writing but one day intend to.
My Gods Are Algorithms, And They Are Hungry
It’s set in a future where the world is ruled by mysterious, inscrutable AI gods. The players are Influencers, people who try to obtain power and status by interacting with the worldwide social media networks called The Churn.
We Don’t Need Failure States After All
In a TTRPG, the game’s events form a consistent narrative, right? Every session — and every adventure — follows from the last. TTRPGs aren’t like board games where each session represents a distinct and isolated attempt to win. TTRPGs are about building a continuous narrative one session at a time. Moreover, when something happens in a TTRPG, the event becomes part of the game’s history.
Using Stonetop’s Introductions Procedure in Session Zero
Stonetop is a hearth fantasy PbtA by Jeremy Strandberg (...). Each playbook has two customized sets of questions: one set for the player to answer about NPCs and one set for the player as PC to pose to the other PCs.
Raging against Twitter and the dying of the written word
We’re not too busy. We’ve been hijacked into thinking we are. By our devices, by sensory overload, and the accompanying mental fatigue that comes with consuming a cacophony of shit.
Describing Rather Than Defining
While I love worldbuilding, I resent the implication that it’s somehow a more important or sophisticated task than creating adventures and encounters. (...)
The emphasis on worldbuilding also created a shift in the nature of what an RPG does. Worldbuilding—as opposed to adventure or encounter design—encouraged definition rather than description. (...)
But worldbuilding isn't done exclusively by definition. Both are worldbuilding, actually. Description is just gradual worldbuilding. A lot of different descriptions, in the aggregate, become worldbuilding. The world emerges from observing all those different descriptions.
When to Depict, When to Elaborate
In this sense, depicting is done when a creator tries to represent an image with game concepts (...) This is contrasted with elaborating, which is done when a creator characterizes a game concept.
Inspired by Jeff Grubbs Game Tsundoku blogpost I want to take a glance over my TTRPG book Tsundoku — the books that have piled up.
Choose a card and reveal it simultaneously with your opponent / Check if someone made an attack / Check for disadvantages / Roll your attack dice (start from d8) / Compare the rolls to see if someone's attack connects and whose. / If no one won yet, step dice up or down and go another round (steps: d4-d6-d8-d10-d12-d20)
I love the simple reminder that the DM is a player because I'm a gamist DM in the extreme and I devoutly practice Roll Randomly Then Explain It (RRTEI). Sometimes I randomize a bunch and then fill in the gaps, and sometimes I do the reverse. But I always add some level of randomizaton because I don't want to be in charge. I want to be on an adventure, too. And the game will speak to you and tell you how things are, if you let it — in ways you'd never expect.
There is also a note in the book that "Very few steerers [helmsmen] are good enough to keep a boat within 2 degrees of course in smooth water; in rough weather, steering errors of 5 to 10 degrees are common." One side of a hex is 60 degrees wide, so a 10 degree error in rough weather is one hex side every six hexes or so...
I think AD&D is messy and unnecessarily complex (when compared to B/X) and I would never play it as written (not even Gygax did), but I really enjoy all B/X clones that try to add AD&D stuff to the game: races separated from class, more classes, monsters (including demons), stronger fighters (better THAC0), multiple attacks, thieves with d6 HD, and so on.
Tito’s rules for Sci-Fi Settings: comms, travel and flesh
The third pillar is the Human Issue.
No matter how far-fetched the tech is, humanity is a constant. Evolution takes a long time, so our bodies will largely stay the same for the foreseeable future, unless we deliberately change it.
Six rooms: 1 monster room with treasure. / 1 monster room without treasure. / 1 unoccupied room with treasure. / 3 “empty” rooms.
Keeping time — how time limits can speed up games
Longer games also tend to slow down towards the end. Many people will have come across the “last round syndrome“. It’s when everyone spends ages calculating how many points every possible choice offers, so they can take the action that gives them the most points. It often happens in the last round of a game, or if a game has a fixed number of rounds, it can be the last two or three rounds that slow to an excruciating crawl.
I prefer to assume that players are always doing their best, and if there are things they need to pay attention to, I mention them. I’d rather have players realize that the white chalk balls on the floor are definitely a warning but they can’t figure it out, step inside, get attacked by the spider
The library of Alexandria and its reputation
I’ve often suspected that the library’s popularity has had additional boosts from the Sid Meier’s Civilization games from the 1990s onwards, which have sold many millions of copies, and which feature ‘The Great Library’ as a wonder that a historical civilisation can build. But it isn’t possible to filter out the effects of Civilization among all the noise that Sagan created.
You carry your experiences with you
Lets say you start with 7 Capacity slots: (...) Every piece of meaningful Gear (a bow and arrows, rations, etc) takes up a Capacity slot. (...) A Mastery takes up a Capacity slot. But also adds three Capacity slots. (...) Stuff that hamper a character, like Injuries (broken limb, bleeding wound) or bad Conditions (scared, tired, hungry) take up one Capacity slot each.
Using Inspiration for “Prep Points”
Rather than splitting one character off, pull that side-scenario into a more compressed meta-space. Before going into the situation, and maybe even at the start of the session, ask the person doing the sneaking / hacking / magical scrying / etc. to give you a handful of the relevant rolls.
RPG essentialism — and further explanation
The rulebook stops functioning as a manual, it becomes merely a collection of tools to rebuild your Own Favourite TTRPG Session from the stratch. This is TTRPG Essentialism in a nutshell. An approach to use all different tools, concepts, procedures and solutions to achieve exactly the same, desired features and experience.
abobobo: Illustrations by Hitoshi Yoneda for the Dai Makaimura...
Ghouls 'n Ghosts, known as Dai Makaimura in Japan, is a side-scrolling platform game developed by Capcom, released as an arcade game in 1988 and subsequently ported to a number of home platforms. It is the sequel to Ghosts 'n Goblins and the second game in the Ghosts 'n Goblins series.
Using Microscope for World Building for a Campaign
The core loop of gameplay involves either adding a period to a timeline, adding an event to any of the defined periods, or hosting a scene to elaborate on an event. For instance, we had the idea of Expanse-like gates to handle interstellar jumps. One player created the period “Jump Race: Race to Claim Systems” after this gate technology was invented, and another player added an event to this period, “Illuminati-like group organizes jumps to help direct exodus from earth to other systems.” Scenes are designed to answer questions together and involve more traditional role-playing.
When the gamer becomes the gamed
But by Tier 4, the players have acquired the bulk of the power at the table. They know the plot, they have the tools they need to succeed, and they're on a rampage. The DM now has to react to the players. Sure, the world and the monsters are still managed by the DM, but the players are driving the story. The DM still has the key to the plot, but the players are calling the shots. It's up to the players when they trigger events, and they've got the rhythm of the story down well enough to know when to progress.
Among these Cossacks who lived within the territory of the Zaporizhian Sich, there were said to be some with magic abilities, who were called the Cossack-Sorcerers. According to folklore, these were true war mages, of which legends were born. However, unlike the modern fantasy warriors, they did not throw lightning-bolts and issue fire from their staffs. Their weapons and abilities were somewhat different….
According to the people’s imagination, the Cossacks were able to find and hide treasures, to heal wounds with spells, and to evade and catch bullets.
Alternate Types of Initiative for Old School Games
What if we used other attributes for alternate instances of initiative, especially those outside of mortal combat? Then we can delineate rules for the advantage this offers, as well as how to resolve these non-combat interactions in a way that favors party members playing their role.
This is a starting point for an adventure, a campaign maybe. The player characters are hostages.
As a boy, Aetius was at the service of the imperial court, enrolled in the military unit of the Protectores Domestici and then elevated to the position of tribunus praetorianus partis militaris, setting him up for future political eligibility. Between 405 and 408 he was kept as hostage at the court of Alaric I, king of the Visigoths. In 408 Alaric asked to keep Aetius as a hostage, but was refused, as Aetius was sent to the court of Uldin, king of the Huns, where he would stay throughout much of the reign of Charaton, Uldin's successor. Some modern historians have suggested that Aetius's upbringing amongst militaristic peoples gave him a martial vigour not common in contemporary Roman generals.
I cannot resist quoting the following, hoping to highlight the difference between the Roman Republic and the Rome of Aetius.
Mutual exchanges of hostages occurred when governments of approximately equal power wished to secure an agreement. Because bilateral exchange is a recognition of political equality, the history of Rome’s successful expansion provides few examples of such exchanges; Rome rarely recognized the political parity of another nation, and it is a striking fact that there is no surviving evidence for even a single instance of Rome’s involvement as an equal partner in a historical exchange.
The hostages are youngsters raised at court, they've probably somehow adopted the customs of their guardians. How about their outlook? The characters could be hostages from different powers, one of them wouldn't be an hostage at all, he or she could be a page or even a royal infant.
At some point, accidentally or not, the bridle is loosed on our characters, and their loyalty is tested. That may reek of For the Queen, but why not?
Or the challenging event may turn into an ad-hoc diplomacy match. The group must survive but each participant must do their best for their power. Or what they believe is the best for their power. They're youngsters, some of them are probably not mature enough to understand the great game.
The sudden freedom could also inspire the group to go on adventure, casting off all the moorings.
Casus Belli, is the main French TTRPG magazine. It started in 1980 and its current iteration is the fourth one. This publication is a reference point for me, it's now a bit "faded" in this world of blogs and micro-blogging, but it's not bad to have tracks with a slower tempo.
This is about issue #41, for Fall 2022.
The scenarii included are:
The magazine contains lots of reviews of games, books, and comics, but the one that stood out for me was that of Aquelarre, a 90's Spanish RPG centered on Spain between 1301 and 1500 replete with sorcery and demonic creatures. The 3rd edition of the game looks gorgeous. It's based on Chaosium BRP but goes further. There are many supplements for this game, I wonder if it's played in Latin America as well.
There is a 22 pages description of a wonderful mini-world. It's set on the back, the shell, of a tarasque. It's divided in 13 valleys and the beast always point its head towards the sun...
It's based on a novel by Ukko and it's illustrated by Mathilde Marlot. I love her work.
Thirteen valleys means thirteen populations and at least as many NPCs. It is intriguing, I am looking forward to sit on my Ikea reading tool and study this.
It's bad but maybe I won't read the novel and try to use the location only as found in the magazine. Sometimes, you read the novels and they set the bridle on you.
Finally, there is the chapter 3 of this report by a junior high school teacher describing how he built and runs a TTRPG club in his school. I find myself reading this piece religiously.
The main learning found in this chapter 3 is the author admitting that the member of his club do not share his rolist profile at the same age. Most of the players there are women and the favourite games are slasher games, not medieval fantasy, nor science-fiction.
When a game master described to the junior high players a runner plugging into a machine, the young people asked: "Why should they plug into a machine to look for information? They don't have Alexa?"
"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 99.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection. For monthly links, look at The Glatisant.
Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a TTRPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.
My favourite for this week is Fractal Subsystems, "This is why I recommend maps as one of the best tools for the DM. Not event flow charts, throw those out the window right now"
On Running Very Different Types of Games
the slower pace required by the more detailed, crunchy combat mechanics and turns in PF2e is pushing me to focus on designing memorable, interesting encounters, but at the cost of flexible, more open-ended play. I feel like a technician instead of an artist: checking moves, maintaining order, applying rules, tracking mechanics (and that's even with a willingness to just make rulings when I can't find the 'proper' PF2e way quickly). I'm really missing the playful, creative sense of surprise that I get when GMing a less crunchy and more open system.
Sometimes, when planning for a game, you look at the blank sheet of note paper and your brain just freezes. I had that problem last night when planning to start up something new with my wife. I'm lucky, insofar as I have amassed a pretty impressive library of game books.
A home and the land it rests on are concrete things that can be worked on, maintained, improved, and passed on. People want space. Space to work out, space for hobbies, space for an office. Space to study. Space to cook. Space to store food. Space to entertain friends.
Once players are aware of their limitations based on encumbrance, they are more inclined to self-police themselves...cutting down on unnecessary equipment, choosing lighter weight armor, etc. They also start to get a good sense of when to leave a dungeon environment based on the bulging sacks of treasure that they are accumulating
I like my boring fantasy setting
Elves and dwarves and goblins are strange in that they have fantasy biology. The elves all look the same, slightly feminine and beardless, and they don’t talk about gender. The dwarves all look the same, hairy and bearded, and they don’t talk about gender. They might come alone or in pairs, or more. Goblins aren’t born but pulled out of magic mud where earth blood leaks. Trolls are stones and tree trunks vivified by the same earth blood. Pushing against expectations is possible. Going against the grain in my boring fantasy is easy.
With Twitter in its apparent death throes, a lot of people are thinking about alternatives. My favorite alternative is the humble blog. If Twitter is the "public square" (where people in stockades yell at each other), blogs are smaller. Cozier. Nicer. Like taverns.
It is possible to say, “I don’t like opera but damn that lady can sing.” It is possible to say, “I don’t like Apocalypse World but Vincent designed a good game for people who like that kind of thing.” You can say that, but it can be hard, emotionally, to mean it.
The Relationship Between Rule Complexity & Rule Opacity
Not knowing is a tension builder. A Cleric player in AD&D might not have known how Turn Undead works. All they know, as the level-sucking wraith is bearing down on them, is that if they thrust out their holy symbol and evoke St. Cuthbert of the Cudgel, he might just save them.
The Passing of Christopher Duffy
It is with a great deal of sadness that I have to report the passing of Christopher Duffy, noted historian and acclaimed expert on mid 18th Century military history. More specifically, he is known for his works about the army of Frederick the Great of Prussia and the collection of adversaries including Austria, Russia, France and the German Empire.
Dungeon Crawling Speed, explained
They mess around with the statue, that’s one tick. Then they listen at the door, examine the door, and then pick the lock on that door. That’s all in the second tick. Then they find a chest and fiddle with it and bork it up and maybe they trigger a needle trap and have to cast a Lesser Restoration spell. That’s the third tick. That’s thirty minutes.
Mishaps are an off-by-default variant rule in the DMG p 140 that I like and use. There’s no risk using a scroll of your appropriate level. It’s only when using, let’s call it “overcasting”, that there’s a risk, that it seems like desperate measures but sometimes it’s got to be done.
Let’s say you’re looking for a seller for a Wand of Yak Shaving you’ve found.
Here’s one of the best parts: Since you have a human running the game, the subsystems don’t have to fit perfectly like Lego pieces or video game mechanics or even a board game. Natural language and common sense are great tools both for resolving overlapping systems and for patching over gaps in between the systems.
There is a common structure to all these - nice art work, with a declared mission statement of recreating the old school feel of "adventure through the eyes of artists like Jeff Dee, Erol Otus, Bill Willingham, and Jim Roslof" and giving a framework for running your own sandbox like such classics as The Village of Hommlet and Keep on the Borderlands. I see a lot of the same artists that used to appear in Dragon magazine in the 90s and it definitely brings back that feel for me.
“So I want to play a Hobbit. A Hobbit JEDI.”
“They are called Halflings in Dnd. Jedi don’t exist, but you could be a druid! They can carry magic weapons AND they can cast spells. The Force is Kind of like how Druids are connected to Nature.”
1 and 8 (and some thoughts about) Monks
Like anything in Fantasty Roleplaying, there is so much nuance and like, so many ideas to be sorted through, especially when it comes to the west’s history of othering Asian cultures, or treating a thousands of specific/regional communities as a monolith.
Sign of the Cross: Early D&D's Clerics...
From crosses (already effective against vampires) to monkish tonsures, early D&D art had a thing for the Church, doubtless because its faith heavily influenced the medieval experience as understood by many.
Why do I keep coming back to the OSR?
I struggle to believe in a world that can be threatened by a handful of villains or saved by a handful of heroes. History is made by the struggle of entire social classes, not just individuals.
Thoughts about Hits in Diceless Combat
having an empirical (probably not the right word) measure of a character’s ability to withstand punishment before death means I can be very brutal in how I run my encounters without worrying about the lethality not being telegraphed enough. I know that technically as long as you state the risks before a roll, you can get away with a pc being one dice away from death feeling fair
It blocks incoming attacks from many angles, and the shield can be used to block or push someone around. D&D gets blocking right and this is also where people become inclined to say shields can be smashed apart. Having sparred with a shield for years, that is very unlikely. It is more likely that you will have the shield ripped from your grasp.
What is the Dragon up to? a mini-Hex Flower
Here’s a thing in case you need to keep track of what a dragon is up to and want the dice to add a bit of chaos spice. Maybe add +1 to the die rolls as the years and decades roll on if you want to get complicated.
Spell-casting. Monsters. Magic items. Non-human races (presuming your game is humanocentric — I know mine is). Competing and allied religions that can do things. Violence as a solution. THESE are the things that differentiate fantasy cities from real world cities. Frankly, most players should suspect such things, and some will actively go looking for them.
So it becomes a question of what are the important laws that will catch players' attention, and perhaps turn into a session or three getting around or dealing with the repercussions of?
The most confident of those was one of the older boys who had claimed the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual, and DM’s Screen. I asked him how it was going: “There’s a lot of words in those books and I think I’d like to find something with less words.”
Thirdly, the rules are a lot of fun to play around with. Although it’s a rather simple set of character creation rules, fitting on just two pages, there is a lot of variety available.
We don't often think about how building handouts helps us prepare our game, but they surely do. Thinking through a handout helps us understand what's happening in the game and in the world we share with our players. It tells us what's important. It forces us to think about things in concrete ways. We need real names, real places, real plots to fill in our handout.
So yes, two similarly-titled books. One is a collection of stories, and the second, a collection of essays reviewing the eponymous stories and novels. So I bought both.
I have to start with the hard news. If you want to run a game where the players change the world, you have to let them change the world.
My favorite part about supporting a successful Kickstarter is forgetting that I did so, then finding something that is equal parts cool and unexpected in the mail. So it was for Downtime in Zyan.
Dungeon! Created 50 Years Ago Today
It was 50 years ago this weekend, in a perfect storm of despair, driven by not finishing my degree; not being drafted at the last minute and thus becoming unmoored from an expected future; and breaking up with my girlfriend, I entered a 72 hour creative flow and produced Dungeon! I showed the game the following weekend to Arneson & Co. and they liked it.
Yet another extract from The Dawn of Everything.
For most of our evolutionary history, we did indeed live in Africa — but not just the eastern savannahs, as previously thought: our biological ancestors were distributed everywhere from Morocco to the Cape. Some of those populations remained isolated from each another for tens or even hundreds of thousand of years, cut off from their nearest relatives by deserts and rainforests. Strong regional traits developed. The result probably would have struck a modern observer as something more akin to a world inhabited by hobbits, giants and elves than anything we have direct experience of today, or in the more recent past.
Those elements that make up modern humans — the relatively uniform 'us' referred to above — seem only to have come together quite late in the process. In other words, if we think humans are different from each other now, it's largely illusory; and even such differences as do exist are utterly trivial and cosmetic, compared with what must have been happening in Africa during most of prehistory.
Let's not forget the Trolls!
The picture above features a reconstruction by Élisabeth Daynès.
Simplifying attribute derivatives in my house rules, here are some intermediary notes to self.
I am using a system where an attribute score is likened to an Armour Class. If you have a STR of 16, an opponent challenging your strength has basically to roll 1d20 ≥ 16.
As seen in Ability and Roll High, when challenging yourself, you use the TC instead of the DC, where TC = 21 - DC. So if you exert yourself, the referee might require you roll 1d20 ≥ (21 - 16).
I liked the concept of the Physical / Evasion / Mental saves in Stars Without Number & al, so I took it but made them averages between two attribute scores instead of best of the two attribute modifiers.
Instead of six attribute scores, there are now nine attribute scores. I [naively] see it as a) granting the referee more granularity when adjudicating a roll Difficulty Class, and b) bringing back in some attribute scores, ensuring they don't become dump scores.
In the current iteration of my house rules, I went a bit too far and added Body and Soul averages. They take as input three attribute scores (guess which). It's a bit unwieldy. Averages of two scores are easier to compute without a calculator. And I'd like the character creation to be fast, especially that mechanical part.
I'm dumping Body and Soul but keeping IMPulse and Learning.
IMP (impulse) is the average of DEX and WIS, and it's used in initiative, currently you roll 1d20 + IMP to determine initiative rank, but I'd like to turn it into a check 1d20 ≥ IMP, to part between those who are in and those who are out.
Impulse stands between quickness of hand and awereness, hence my using it in the initiative field.
LEA (learning) is used when upgrading, acquiring new skills. It's used as a check, to determine if your knowledge acquisition is fruitful or not.
The graph is a bit unbalacend, with WIS sitting in the middle, and STR and CON isolated like a british island.
I reconnect the STR CON island thanks to FORtitude and COOrdination. Is there a need to reconnect or is that my wish for symmetry? It's still quite unbalanced, but if you look at the last image in this post, you'll see my original note about it and it forms some kind of E or Σ.
Still that leaves CON and CHA as "leaf" stats.
There is the temptation to connect INT and CHA, maybe labelling it PERsuasion, where have I already seen that?
What would I call the average of CON and of WIS? Some kind of quiet strength?
I need to rearrange the character sheet along that Σ sigma pattern.
This rabbit chase is probably going too far, but at least this post is witness to it. It could also give ideas to other house rule developpers.
I am trying to stick with the six attributes and to make them matter somehow. The modifiers are nice but they feel like a dissolution. Directly using attribute scores or averages of attribute scores as DC feels right to me.
The players anchored their luck in the attribute rolls at the beginning of character creation. It has to matter.