The Numbers Guy

I was talking to a friend the other day about what some people say was the real meaning of the "1d6 per 10 feet of falling" rule in original D&D. In short (per Frank Mentzer, I think), it was supposed to be 1d6 for the first 10, then 2d6 added to the first for the next 10, and so on; so a fifty foot fall was 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 15d6 damage, or an average of 52.5 points—not 5d6 (averaging 17.5).

He said, "that's too much math." I was flabbergasted.

He's a smart enough guy; how hard could counting to five, and adding five single-digit numbers, be?

But then I got to thinking about some of the mathematically illiterate statements I've read on reddit or stackexchange. Things like:

• "A 3d6 bell curve roll is better than d20 because with a d20, you're just as likely to roll a 20 as you are to roll a 1." (And you're just as likely to roll a 3 as an 18 on 3d6—so?)
• "I have 65% in my Drive skill, but I still fail one-third of the time... why?" (Because you're 1.67% luckier than the statistical average.)
• "2d8 + 1d6 -2? That's too much math." (Adding and subtracting four numbers?)

I don't want to have to calculate the parabolic arc a missile takes when I fire it (taking wind resistance into account, of course), and I don't want to have to break out a calculator whenever I decide if I should attack from a higher or lower vantage point. I love how Lamentations of the Flame Princess simplifies encumbrance so I don't have to tally up every point of weight I'm carrying. But part of envisioning a world, even a fantastic one, is knowing that going up and down a hill takes longer than walking in a straight line, or that if I have only three arrows left, I'd better start looking for a fletcher.

Heck, even Candyland involves counting; how hard can it be for people ages twelve and up to do just a little bit more math than that?

cheers,
Adam

Session Report (a First for me)

Last night I played the third game of my new campaign over skype with my girlfriend, D, and her roommate, Q. She's not primarily a gamer; he is. I skyped with my tablet (a Nexus 7), but something was wrong with the sound, so I had to call her up on the phone as well. With headphones, this wasn't so bad.

They had encountered Lilanni, a young woman who, by birthright, should have been the high priestess of the main Temple in town; there had been an attempt on her life as an infant, and so she had been spirited away, returning now just before her 21st birthday to claim her rightful place. The current high priest, her half-brother, knows he is not the true heir, because the ordaining ritual is designed to kill impostors; one must place themselves bodily in the arms of the statue of the God, and if the arms magically embrace them, they are proclaimed the High Priest/Priestess. Pretenders, however, will be crushed.

They approached the Temple in disguise; Lilanni was polymorphed into an old man, so nobody would suspect her. The Temple had ceased to function as a holy place since the false priest was instated three years ago (on the death of their father), but if the true heir set foot in the premises, it would be cleansed immediately, which it was. This alerted the magician in service to the Pretender, but the entryway to the Temple is a place of public business so there was a crowd to hide in.

Long story short, they got into the restricted areas of the Temple, charmed a guard and disguised D's thief as an acolyte, and discovered that there was a faction (as per Alex Schroeder's recommendation) who knew the High Priest was an impostor and was waiting for the True Heir to be revealed. But the folks who wanted the Impostor in power included the Emperor, and so a coterie of city guards just happened to be at the Temple that day...

The interesting thing about this session was, it was almost entirely role-play. By that, I mean there was no combat, and little skill use except for one successful pickpocketing roll by D's Thief character. I attempted to use the process outlined at Hackslashmaster and later fleshed out with his (overpriced, IMHO) supplement, On the Non Player Character. I quickly found out two things: one, the method Campbell describes to create an NPC is fairly slow if you try to create a personality type ahead of time; two, and as a consequence of this, it's easier and relatively painless to decide on-the-fly if, say, bargaining will fail or succeed automatically, or what the NPC will do once he/she arrives at their final disposition.

Since none of the NPCs died in the course of this interaction, I can use the experience later to flesh them out, if they survive the combat that is all but certain to erupt next session. I'm going to give my players a handful of NPCs to command (more or less, depending on morale rolls), and play against a numerically superior force. We'll see if there's any tricks up their sleeves.

cheers,
Adam

Appendix N Prime

A lot has been made about the books different editions of D&D have cited as inspiration. The Dying Earth, the various tales of Conan, the Swords series by Leiber featuring Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Lovecraftian tales, the Elric books—it's not hard to see those elements of the game that sprang from these sources. But, truth be told, for the beleaguered DM, almost any work, fantasy or not, can serve as an inspiration, i.e., a source of Stuff To Put In Your Game.

I just took a look at the bookshelf in my study (one of five bookshelves in my home), and listed a couple dozen works (and in some cases, series) that jumped out at me. Several are fantasy, some are 'literary', but all of them have elements to mine for a game:

• A Prayer For Own Meany: A halfling-sized protagonist with a literary bent and a prediction of his own death; after the fatal event transpires, he possesses a minister and forces him to reveal secrets of the narrator's heritage. This could easily become a literal halfling, and if we pushed the magical end, maybe a gnome magic user or illusionist. His relevance to the players could come in the form of helping them with other NPCs, perhaps by magically digging up the dirt on them. And what about that possessing spirit? If our gnome/halfling is still alive, perhaps it's a ghost that accompanies him and can be persuaded to do favors for the NPCs, if they do one for him.
• The Catcher in the Rye: A wealthy, disaffected teen has a personal oddyssey through Manhattan after being kicked out of school. His wanderings bring him in contact with prostitutes, cab drivers, a former teacher, some would-be girlfriends, and his own sister. A picaresque masterpiece; Holden could easily become a low-level Thief/rogue who knows where the secret doors and back alleys lead. Being broke and without a girlfriend, he might lead the PCs somewhere they need to go for a modest fee. He might also have a completely unrealistic view of his ability to handle danger.
• Howard's End: A rich, dying woman wishes her home to be given to a poor but intelligent friend. Her pencilled note isn't legally binding, but the controversy over it eventually leads to the man's demise. Although we know whodunnit in the novel (the death is unintentional, but he did physically assault the victim), removing that piece of information could make for a good mystery scenario. And the dead man's ghost might not rest easily.
• The Trial: A man is accused of an unspecified crime, and spends a year trying to find out what it is before being murdered by one of his oppressors. Of course, in your campaign, those oppressors may be a secret society, and perhaps, in perfect Conspiracy Theory style, he's accidentally stumbled upon their operation, but doesn't know it. Maybe they're the power behind the throne. Maybe their power is even more widespread, and the players are in for a world of hurt if they try to investigate.

Characters, factions, locations, magic items, secret information. Even the most high-brow 'serious' work of fiction has Stuff in it; Stuff that can be extracted, exaggerated, twisted and disguised until it becomes a seemingly natural, organic part of your campaign.

cheers,
Adam

At the End of the Day

D&D 5th edition is out, partially. The PHB and Starter Set are available at my new FLGS. From the intro rules (available as a free download), it looks to be more like the D&D I know and love than 4th edition, and much cleaned up and simplified from 3.5. "Advantage" and "Disadvantage" are rules worth stealing, and backgrounds are cool ways of adding roleplaying flavor to your character. Further proof of my contention that the only good editions are odd-numbered ones, ha-ha.

I will play in such a game, and steal the rules I like. I'll even pay for the books, eventually. (I have another expensive book that's a higher priority for me right now.) But I'm still happier to run my OSR mish-mash. The killer feature, for me, is the simple game prep.

You can argue for and against certain rules, and you can reasonably assert that 1st edition AD&D was a disorganized mass of rules and odd exceptions, but for the most part, those rules did not slow down game prep or character creation once you got them under your belt. Not so for, say, 3rd edition, where the concept of a character "build" really took flight. Creating a character, NPC or player, takes a lot of time in 3.x, due to the need to worry about where to spend your skill points. 5e has reduced the skill list dramatically, and added "backgrounds" which allow you to customize your character in a simple and reasonable way, but it's still faster using the old rules.

This is important to me because (as my blogging record of late might indicate) I don't have a lot of free time, and I don't want to spend too much of that doing game prep. I like having a reasonable amount of detail in my game, but only in the areas I choose; I don't want to have to include game-mechanic complexity in my prep time, because I want to focus on character complexity, or the details of a dungeon map. Rolling 3d6 six times, picking a character class, selecting equipment and (possibly) a spell list is still faster. Especially when done during gameplay. And most monsters only need a single roll to determine hit points. At the end of the day (literally), I want something that isn't going to bog me down, and old-school prep fits that bill nicely. cheers, Adam

Hit Points Are Dumb.

Hit Points are old and outmoded. Everyone says so on Reddit. We have so many more modern and sophisticated ways of making combat meaningful and dramatic now, ways that enable the players to take Narrative Control. I agree.

For instance, I had an idea recently, where if the GM says something like "the bandit stabs you in the heart; you're dead", the player can take narrative control and, if they can give a good reason why it doesn't happen, then it doesn't happen. So I might say "we're fighting on uneven terrain, so when he takes a swing at me, he slips on rubble and it throws his aim off". It doesn't have to be any one particular thing. And then I hand the GM a glass bead or some token that represents what I call the Locus of Narrative Combat, or LNC for short. You don't want to be able to do this indefinitely, so you only have a few. You'd get them back at some point, similar to the way FATE has the concept of a "refresh rate", so they're not gone forever. And over time, you'd get more beads to represent how much closer to his or her Heroic Destiny your character is.

Now, sometimes when someone attacks you, it's could be anything from a superficial cut on the side of your arm to slashing your throat. So we'd have some mechanism of determining a variable amount of LNCs I would need to protect myself; maybe only one for a scratch, but maybe as many as four for a really good shot. And it's more realistic if a sword had more opportunities to stab or bash or cut me when he attacks; the GM might even give it a narrative flair and say that, because he got my weapon in a bind, my enemy was able to punch or kick me for a few points when he wasn't able to before. So we might have to give up anywhere from one to eight LNCs to stop that.

You don't actually have to hand over the glass beads or poker chips, of course. That's simply a convenience. If you wanted to do it the hard way, you could keep track of your LNCs on your character sheet somewhere. If you lost five, for instance, you could just subtract five from whatever your current number is. But that's math, and you shouldn't have to be good at math, or have a desire ever to improve your real-life skills, to have fun in a Narrative Game. So you can just use a big pile of beads for convenience.

The only problem is, Locus of Narrative Combat is a mouthful, and even LNCs is a lot to say over and over again. I thought of calling them your Fate Tally, but for some reason that sounded bad. Calling them Destiny Dots was too alliterative, and implied that you could spend them for other things, and I didn't want them to be just an automatic Success button. So I'm stuck with the term Locus of Narrative Combat, because there's really no better term I can think of for Points that protect your character when they get Hit.

But yeah, Hit Points are dumb.

cheers,
Adam

RIP, DAT

Dave Trampier has passed away. He had cancer and had suffered a stroke earlier this year.

Trampier (a.k.a. "Tramp", a.k.a. "DAT") created many of my favorite illustrations for the game. Many of his best were oddly naturalistic, in the sense that they depicted monsters or adventurers engaged in everyday activities, whatever "everyday" might mean for a salamander or a band of halflings or a team of dwarven miners. His style had what I like to call a strong design sense, making heavy use of fields of black both as representational figures and as abstract shapes, beautiful in their own right. Individual figures often struck tableau-like poses, but he was capable of drawing dynamic scenes, such as a fight with a catoblepas or Emirikol's fatal ride down some unnamed city street.

He left TSR in 1988, frustrated by company politics, and vanished from the gaming and art scene. He was believed to be dead until an article mentioned a cab driver in Carbondale, IL named Dave Trampier. But he shunned attention from the gaming community almost up to the point of his death last week. When it was suggested that he might publish a re-print of his Wormy cartoons, he implied that he might be willing so long as TSR had no rights to the product; he was unaware that TSR had long ago been bought out by Wizards of the Coast.

I do not know what inner conflicts might have made him throw out the baby with the bathwater. He seemed to change his mind right at the end, selling some of his original artwork and offering to show up as a guest at a local game convention. He may have been in need of money, and still bitter over slights suffered over a quarter-century ago. Even so, I'd like to think he eventually realized how much his work meant to a generation of gamers.

RIP, Dave A. Trampier, 1954 - 2014.

I'm Both an Analyst, and a Therapist...

Okay, Lindsay, are you forgetting that I was a professional twice over

 - an analyst and a therapist. The world's first analrapist.

-Tobias Funke in "Arrested Development"

I'm trying to categorize all of the traits that one might use to describe monsters. This is a fundamentally analytic practice, adding nerdity on top of nerdity, but it has a reason. Although there are many random generators for dungeons, encounters, and adventures out there, and although many of them are quite customizable, I don't see any that allow you to specify, to the degree of fineness that satisfies me, what types of monsters to include, and what types to exclude.

I envision an online generator, or a simple program, that leads you through an interview process, in much the same way that certain software "wizards" lead you through a set-up of your installation options; at the end, you have a set of encounter tables customized to your specific adventure or campaign. If, for example, you never want to see Brownies in your game, you would have the option of excluding that creature. Or, if you have an underwater adventure, you might specify that all of the creatures must be aquatic.

I envision something with a little more subtlety than that, though; something where you can specify the main type, an anomalous entry, power groups, and the like. But the main goal is to create encounter tables, and from those, possibly encounter lists.

So I came up with the following list of traits to describe monsters for some kind of D&D-like game:

• environment : sylvan, subterranean, aquatic, aerial, elemental, desert, ethereal, astral; (one may be primary)
• order - ophidian, reptilian, mammalian, insectoid, arachnoid, plant, fungus, slime, avian, draconic
•       humanoid - goblinoid, human-like, giant, other
• unnatural : summoned, undead, magical, extra-planar, lycanthrope, animated, incorporeal, construct
•           elemental : earth, water, wind, fire
• size - tiny, small, medium, large, huge
• sociability - unique, solitary, group, horde, swarm
• intelligence - animal, low, average, high, genius, supra-genius
• dominance : leader, follower, independent
• special defenses: bonus to surprise/not surprised, invisible,
•         resistant to : magic, cold, heat, sleep, charm, edged weapons, pointed weapons, non-magical attacks, blunt weapons, gas, electrical
•         camouflaged : magically, naturally
• special attack : no normal defense, area effect, zone control, save or die, save or condition, gaze weapon, natural missiles, level draining, attribute draining, initiative bonus
• speaks : human languages, own language, other beings langauges
• mobility : overland, flying, swimming
• alignment - LG, NG, CG, CN, CE, NE, LE, LN, TN
• other : hybrid, mutated, polymorphing, nocturnal, teleporting
• primes - physical, mental (A Castles & Crusades-specific trait.)
• challenge level - I to XV

I'm sure I'm missing many, and might want to group some things differently, but that's my first go at it. (And yes, I know that "order" includes some things in Kingdom, Class, and Genus, but it also includes dragons, so what were you expecting?)

cheers, Adam

Happy Belated Birthday, Kid, Now How Old Are You?

D&D's 40th anniversary, determined by acclamation to be January 26th of this year, passed me by since I was sitting in an airplane that ultimately returned to its starting point because of mechanical failure with the landing gear. Fortunately, it was stuck in the down position, not up.

Prior to that day, I spent my vacation mostly being sick and cold, and in a place with spotty internet access. But my troubles are few in the grand view of things, and I'm writing this just to say thanks to everyone who's created, played, blogged, bought, or otherwise supported RPGs in the past four decades. Here's to another four.

cheers, Adam

OCEANs and Streams

It occurred to me belatedly that yesterday's post amounted to an elaborate way of randomly selecting one of 40 character traits. Then I realized, this is a roundabout way of doing what every other random trait table does. What would make this more systematic or scientific (not saying that anything needs to be either of those in an RPG) would be to have a way of clustering traits together. So I came up with a quick alteration of this method:

1. Roll on the 1d20 - 2d6 table first, and roll three times.
2. Determine which of the three numbers is the most "extreme", i.e., the furthest from seven. Two and twelve would be equally extreme, as would eleven and three, et cetera. If all three numbers are equally distant from the middle, or if the two most extreme values are, choose one at random and bump it up (if over seven) or down (if below) by one. If all three are either twelve or two, select one at random and move the other two closer to seven by one point.
3. Randomly determine which three of the OCEAN criteria these represent. The most extreme one will be the Controlling Aspect.
4. Determine which two traits the NPC has by combining the Controlling Aspect with the other two.

For instance, suppose you roll 7, 12, and 15. Checking the d20 - d26 chart, this represents rolls of  5, 9, and 10. 10 will be the value of the Controlling Aspect. Now determine which three aspects they are: suppose they come out Openness, Extroversion, and Neuroticism. Combining with the other two, in order, that means High Openness, Low Extroversion = Un-Filtered, and High Openness, High Neuroticism = Sensitive. So we have a romantic type who wears his heart out on his sleeve.

Combinations that wouldn't happen, however, would be something like Volatile and Amiable, because one requires Neuroticism to be High, and the other requires it to be Low.

You could, if you chose, average out the values that went into composing a trait, so in the example above, the average of ten and nine would be (rounding up) ten, so our Poetic Soul would have Sensitive(10), and averaging ten and five, we'd have Un-Filtered(8). Or just use them as simple descriptors, and go by that. In any case, knowing two character traits makes for a better grip on the character than knowing only one.

cheers, Adam

An OCEAN of Personality Traits

The OCEAN theory of personalities gauges five criteria:

Openness

Interest in new ideas or different points of view.

Conscientiousness

Placing value on doing what needs to be done.

Extroversion

Attraction to other people and social situations.

Agreeableness

General likability, without implying leadership quality.

Neuroticism

Susceptibility to emotional hurt.

I have no idea whether this is even remotely scientific (although it seems a heck of a lot more plausible than Meyers-Briggs), but it occurs to me that you could use these to cobble up NPC personality types using a 2d6 scale and rating each aspect from two to twelve. If an event occurs (a PC-NPC interaction, for example) that looks like it would strain or test one of these aspects, roll 2d6: if the result is under, the NPC behaves according to the definition of the aspect. If it is over, they violate that behavior.

When rolling for a quick personality, however, it makes more sense simply to set three aspects at seven (not outstanding one way or the other), and select two to be Roll 1d5 to get first aspect, then 1d4 (and skip the one you already selected) to determine a second aspect. For each, determine if this aspect is high or low. Since average aspects are, well, average, you'll want to come up with a different distribution for the other two.

A neat co-incidence appears when you take away the three middling values of a 2d6 roll (6, 7, and 8): there remain exactly twenty dice combinations. Ergo, you can roll 1d20 for the two aspects, and consult the following chart:

d20	Equivalent 2d6
1	2
2-3	3
4-6	4
7-10	5
11-14	9
15-17	10
18-19	11
20	12

A result of 2 through 5 is Low, 9 through 12 is high. 2 and 12 are extremes, but the following charts only take into account whether the result is Low or High.

High - High correlations:

Agreeableness	Conscientiousness	Extroversion	Neuroticism	x
Polite	x	x	x	Conscientiousness
Lively	Bossy	x	x	Extroversion
Sychophantic	Obessive/Compulsive	Volatile	x	Neuroticism
Empathetic	Curious	Un-filtered	Sensitive	Openness

Low - Low correlations:

Agreeableness	Conscientiousness	Extroversion	Neuroticism	x
Boorish	x	x	x	Conscientiousness
Glum	Whiny	x	x	Extroversion
Cruel-hearted	Sociopathic	Self-sufficient	x	Neuroticism
Secretive	Shifty	Unnoticeable	Single-minded	Openness

High - Low correlations:

Agreeableness	Conscientiousness	Extroversion	Neuroticism	x
Smarmy	x	x	x	Conscientiousness
Aloof	Sedate	x	x	Extroversion
Charming	Diligent	Amiable	x	Neuroticism
Diplomatic	Driven	Sly	Anti-social	Openness

Low - High correlations:

Agreeableness	Conscientiousness	Extroversion	Neuroticism	x
Dour	x	x	x	Conscientiousness
Pugnacious	Reckless	x	x	Extroversion
Obnoxious	Lost	Asocial	x	Neuroticism
Pessimistic	Flighty	Observant	Calm	Openness

This gives us the following 40 possible traits:

Aloof

Pleasant when engaged with, but not seeking attention.

Amiable

Easy to get along with, dislikes conflict.

Anti-social

Not necessarily hateful, but doesn't like people.

Asocial

Doesn't seek company of others; is likely to take offense at imagined insults.

Boorish

Blames everyone for his/her problems; causes most of them.

Bossy

Has firm ideas and tries to enlist others to enact them.

Calm

Engaged, to the limit of their intellectual capacity, with others' ideas.

Charming

Likeable, if not inspiring. Can be a clown, or a true leader.

Cruel-hearted

Dislikes people; tries to assert dominance by hurting others.

Curious

Fascinated by philosophies, but has firm ideas of his/her own.

Diligent

Unafraid of hard work and long study.

Diplomatic

Tries to sway others to his/her point of view, tries not to be swayed.

Dour

Hard-working, resentful of those who look like they're having a good time.

Driven

Centered on a goal. Does not stray far from that center.

Empathetic

Able to see and feel others' ideas and emotions.

Flighty

Will agree to things that others say, but not stay true to their ideas.

Glum

Down on the world, and the people in it.

Lively

Up on the world, and the people in it.

Lost

Tries many things, rarely if ever sees a project through to completion.

Obessive/Compulsive

Like Driven, is centered on an idea, but may not know why.

Obnoxious

Loud at gatherings, but quick to take offense.

Observant

Sees the world of people mostly from the outside.

Pessimistic

Sees the down side of everything. Thinks they're doing people a favor by this.

Polite

Sees manners as a way to grease the wheels of social interaction.

Pugnacious

Willing to get into fights just to prove some ephemeral point.

Reckless

Thrill-seeking. Wants an audience, or co-conspirators.

Secretive

Doesn't like people asking questions about them. Their secrets are usually petty.

Sedate

Mindful of own business, and persistent at it without getting heated up.

Self-Sufficient

Keeping to oneself.

Sensitive

Wildly romantic and imaginative, but prone to mood swings.

Shifty

As untrusting of others as others should be of them.

Single-minded

Like driven, but less focused on action and more on simple faith.

Sly

Likeable, but slick.

Smarmy

A yes man, but not trustworthy.

Sociopathic

Willing to take from others, and living by an obvious double standard.

Sychophantic

Wants to be liked. Agrees to anything as a result.

Un-Filtered

Says whatever's on their mind, even if inappropriate.

Unnoticeable

Tries to be self-sufficient; may or may not succeed.

Volatile

Friendly one moment, ready to snap the next, something else the next.

Whiny

Sees no value in people who don't agree with them; never sure what they really think.

cheers,
Adam

Treasure Finders, but not Treasure Keepers?

If we assume that the g.p. = x.p. equation can be hand-waved away by saying that the challenge in finding/retreiving the treasure is figured into the value, the question still remains: at what point do those x.p. accrue? There are three obvious places:

1. When the treasure is found. Open up the treasure chest and bang! -- you get the x.p. It was hard to find, and you fought or outwitted the guardian or traps that protected it, so now you get the benefit.
2. When the treasure is taken out of the dungeon. The rationale behind this is that part of the difficulty with treasure is hauling it all out, so you can't really say the equation has been balanced until that happens.
3. When you spend the treasure in a character-appropriate way. This seems to be a new-ish idea, coming out of the OSR in the last couple of years. This runs into the "Brewster's Millions" problem, where the players have to find ways to spend them, rather than, say, hiding it in their own vault or investing it somehow.

The first one has a hidden side-effect: since you don't actually need to remove the treasure, there's less incentive to rationalize why, in a quest to stop the ravening horde from descending on the city, you need to stop and pick up every coin you see. I.e., less incentive to play "murder hobos", even while retaining the old-school formula for x.p.

This occurred to me while playing the latest Tomb Raider videogame. Lara Croft is on some expedition on a Japanese island, something something Sun Goddess, something something Chosen One--the story isn't particularly new, and video game dialogue and acting has yet to thrill me. But as she zips around the island, fighting off cultists and drawing nearer to the certain Final Showdown, she can raid various "tombs" (a term used as loosely as tabletop gamers use "dungeon") to find the various artifacts they contain. Although she does, in fact, take them (and gets x.p. for them, and points for "cargo"), they have little effect on the game after that point. Certainly not in terms of encumbrance. She may as well never have touched them.

Of course, x.p. here has less effect than it does in a tabletop game, but the idea struck me that this could be a way to have the best of both worlds, by having character-driven labors and story-derived challenges, and still being able to account for x.p. in the tidy, old-fashioned way.

cheers, Adam

Michael Jordan, Baseball player

Although I believe multiclassing has its place, I feel that the modern, "take a class level here, take a class level there" style represents neither the kinds of fiction I like to model, nor reality, very closely. This is chiefly because I feel the first level of experience represents a long background of training and study, but also because being good at one thing doesn't necessarily prepare you to be good at another, especially something that isn't closely related. And here, by "good", I mean "has a level's worth of experience".

As a case in point, Michael Jordan's Baseball career. No doubt he was a better baseball player than I am, but a .202 batting record in the minors and an undistinguished performance as an outfielder does not speak well to the idea that he "took a level" in baseball. Less so if we consider that some of that performance was due to raw athletic talent (a high DEX and CON, say, in D&D terms).

In the pulp source materials for D&D, some exceptions are bound to occur. The Grey Mouser, for instance: is he a M-U/Thief? Perhaps, although his actual spellcasting in the stories is limited, and not too far out of line with thieves' skills anyhow. And Elric? Isn't he a Fighter/M-U/Cleric? Doubtful. He isn't much of a fighter at all without Stormbringer, and he hardly "worships" Arioch (or any other god). He's pretty much a straight-up M-U with some specialty magic items that allow him to function on the battlefield, but that don't make him a "Fighter" in the D&D sense at all.

That's why I feel that multiclassing should be used as a personalization of last resort when deciding what your character can and can't do. In OD&D, what you could do, regardless of class, was far wider than it is today, or even than it was in 1st edition AD&D. You want your M-U to sneak around, lob oil flasks at monsters, and devise some contraption to break down a heavy door? Describe how to do it, and (within reason) it shall be done. I like it that way.

cheers, Adam

Those Poor Goblin Babies

This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’ (1 Sam 15:1-3)

Every so often I see a post or a reply, on reddit or on other RPG forums, where someone raises a question like: "What about the innocent orc women and children? Isn't it just as 'evil' to kill them as it is for the orcs to kill humans?" Some people like to pose this as an ethical dilemma for their characters, while others use it as a reason to critice D&D's alignment system. Saving the alignment criticism for another day, I have a question: in a fantasy world where Good and Evil do exist, why is it hard to imagine a species that is always one or the other? 

Some people think it's just a matter of making shoot-and-loot games easier to justify, because Evil becomes a target that you don't have to think about. But I think there's much more to it than that. One advantage of thinking of orcs or goblins or other humanoids as existentially Evil is that it makes them truly fantastic creatures. It also makes them horrific, because if they're otherwise like people but lack any capacity for Goodness (however you choose to define it), then that means they're really monsters and not just people in boogeyman suits.

Conversely, in a game where we wanted to explore, say, the shortcomings of xenophobia, we could create our own non-human race, the individual members of which may be any alignment. I feel that this is arguably a better route, rather than shoehorning kobolds and bugbears into roles that they were not intended to fill.

And if people want to play out ethical dilemmas in-game, why not have them play them out against NPC humans? The definition of Neutral is sufficiently broad that it can encompass plenty of people that you'd like to be out of the way forever, but couldn't justify slaying. For that matter, some people may be Evil, but their transgressions don't rise to a criminal or atrocious level worthy of meting out bloody justice.

I've dealt with the "goblin baby" problem a couple of ways in my games: in one, goblins were human once, but through their cruel and violent ways they fell out with most people and wandered into a realm where Evil corrupted their bodies and souls. Their transformation, moreover, is voluntary: they know full well that it is an evil and irreversible act. Alternately, these non-humans are spawned by magic or powerful entities solely for the purpose of doing their bidding. In neither case can you ever run into an "innocent goblin baby".

Although I realize that others don't see it this way, I've got to say it works well for me. It does make the game faster paced, and like I say, if I want to include ethical dilemmas in a game, I reserve that for humans or other non-goblinoid races.

cheers,

Adam

Hello, Handsome...

Social Combat

I'm trying out Courtney's rules for the Gameable NPC (and considering buying his book, although the price is pretty steep). One thing I see about this set of rules, however, is that it presents the game of social interaction within a fairly neutral framework. In other words, the NPC has not decided one way or another about the players, and so there's not really a "Social Combat" aspect to it. When a character has already decided on a confrontational stance, though, there should be a gameable way to convince/seduce/deceive/intimidate the NPC into changing their mind (or, at least, not following through with their original decision).

Here's what I came up with:

1. Set the Social Resistance Value (SRV) between 1 and 9, depending on circumstances. Bribing the city watch to let you go before they bring you in would be a 5 or 6, say; convincing the king that you're not in his bedroom to kill or rob him would be a 9.

2. Determine the opposed attributes. Common ones would be:

   • Deception: CHA vs. INT
   • Seduction: CHA vs. WIS
   • Debate : INT vs. INT
   • Oratory : CHA vs. CHA (when two characters fight for the sway of a crowd, for instance)

3. Determine the Present State Penalty based on the current Social Resistance Value:

   • 1-3: -1
   • 4-6: 0
   • 5-9: +1

4. Each side rolls 3d6 against their own relevant attribute. Compare the roll to that attribute's value:

   • Over: No result
   • More than 2 times: -1 success
   • At/Under: 1 success
   • One-half : 2 successes
   • One-third: 3 successes, etc.

5. Move SRV up or down by the difference in successes. E.g., if the PC gets 1 success and the NPC gets -1, move the score down two points. On a tie, move the value up by one.

6. Adjust the SRV by the Present State Penalty, determined in step 3.

7. Repeat until the SRV = 0 or SRV = 10.

There's a little work to be done with this; for one thing, there aren't many options for players other than what kind of contest to enter (deception, seduction, et al), and possibly when to bail out. Failure on one front (say, deception) might suggest taking up another (say, seduction).

I'm thinking there might also be actions to take (flatter, threaten, go off on a tangent, bribe, etc.) that may have a bonus if they succeed and a penalty otherwise, and tying those actions to the NPC and situation. Also, the SRV can move up and down a lot, and might not resolve for a long time. GMs could consider adding a time limit to the process.

Nonetheless, the basic mechanism seems sound to me. I'll give it a try on my next game and see how it works out.

cheers,
Adam

OSR Means Simple Rules, or Something

Everything should be made

as simple as possible, but no simpler.

-- various attributions

The current state of rules for my OSR game:

I start with Labyrinth Lord, except I use the 1st ed. AD&D/OSRIC hit dice for character class and weapon damage. Which character classes to use is still a fluid concept, including race-as-class. Thieves are still a conundrum, because I like Procedural Lockpicking and feel that many of the listed thieves' skills can be performed by anyone, although I'm intrigued byDyson Logos's 2d6 thief skills table.

Speaking of skills, I don't use them. Everything is based either on a character sheet ability, the resourcefulness of the players, common sense judgments, or a die roll as determined below.

AC ascends, and starts at 10. I use the Dex bonus to hit, and add the Str bonus to damage, for both missile and hand-to-hand combat. Intitiative is individual, roll 1d10 + Dex modifier.

Saving throws are mapped from Castles & Crusades, except the base number is determined by the saving throw in Swords & Wizardry. I add a modifier to the roll based on class, any attribute bonus, and selected prime attributes" (from C&C, but with different values), and use the C&C mapping of old-school saving throw types to new (e.g., "Breath Weapon" = Dex).

Anything not covered in the rules that can be resolved as a yes or no question, I use a d20 and a save. Anything where success can be measured in degrees, I use either a generic 2d6 table adapted from the Moldvay/LL "reaction roll" table, or 3d6 (or more) vs. some attribute. The latter is more likely to be used in contested challenges.

Magic use is per Holmes, plus a bit of 1st ed. Material Component fluff. I use the Holmes scroll creation rules so my low-level M-Us can have a little more firepower. I have two house-ruled exceptions to spell use: Read Magic and Detect Magic are both innate skills of Magic Users, although it takes 10+ minutes to use, whereas casting them as spells is near-instantaneous.

I have my own set of grappling rules. Combat maneuvers are like Telecanter's, except I use a saving throw to determine whether damage is taken or the maneuver succeeds. Languages are also per Telecanter, although I have a slightly more detailed way of handling them. Encumbrance is per Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which is also mentioned in the Telecanter document.


It's that simple.

cheers, Adam

A Melody In Your Name

I call everyone "Darling" because I can't remember their names.
-- Zsa Zsa Gabor

One of the things that has turned otherwise interested parties away from Tunnels and Trolls is the silliness of the spell names. One of the reasons Ken St. Andre gives for the names is that, at the very least, they are more memorable than their counterparts in other games. Although that may be true, it can ruin the atmosphere of a gritty, swords-and-sorcery flavored game if, when faced with some shadowy apparition from the netherworld, your wizard calls, with a flourish: "Oh, Go Away".

(As a side note, it seems like it's easier to make a 'serious' game silly than the other way around. Worth pondering, that.)

Following is a list of Level 1 Spells from the 5th edition, along with suggested translations.

Detect Magic: Sense Magic
Lock Tight: Holdfast Portal
Will-o-Wisp: Glimmerlight
Knock Knock: Unbind Portal
Oh There It Is: Expose Hidden
Take That, You Fiend: Vexing Smite
Vorpal Blade: Keen Edge
Oh-Go-Away: Repulse Foe
Teacher: Instruct
Hocus Pocus: Ensorcel Staff

Some of the names aren't so silly, as you can see by the list above, but if the impetus behind "silly" names is to make them more memorable, I suggest that these alterations would do that, without compromising the atmosphere of the game.

cheers,
Adam

Players Only Playin'

Thunder only happens when it's rainin'.

Players only love you when they're playin'.

--Fleetwood Mac, "Rumors"

Someone with a writing style markedly similar to mine has been writing posts on reddit, and by pure coincidence, I've not had much of a chance to write here. But a question there--what advice is there on being a better player?--caught my eye, so I thought I'd write up a few observations of my own.

Like many simple questions, this one hides a lot of complexity behind it. Being a good player means at least two things: first, it means making good decisions for your character; second, it means being a good member of your gaming group. The two reinforce each other, but are not the same. A third meaning--how to dramatize your character--is mostly orthogonal to these, so I'll skip over that for now.

On the most basic level, making good decisions for your character involves two steps--first, gather as much information about your surroundings as possible, and second, think about your options and select a good one. When I say "gather information", I'm not talking about rolling the Gather Information skill, or anything that requires a dice roll or any movement by your character. Instead, I'm talking about visualizing what you've been told, and asking questions of the GM for anything that you personally, as a player, don't have a grasp of.

Visualizing: It's pretty basic, and most people don't have a real problem with it, but it never hurts to take it a bit further. The simplest advice I can give about visualization is to close your eyes for just a few seconds and mentally plant yourself in the space your character occupies. If you're exploring a throne room, for example, visualize the throne, sure, but realize you're probably looking up at it, not down (unless you've climbed a wall or are flying somehow). Think of where your fellow adventurers are: to your left, to your right, in front of or behind you? How far away are they? How far away are any NPCs? Mentally triangulate and connect the critical elements of your immediate location.

Asking Questions: Mostly, this is to ensure that everything your GM thinks you know, you know. The first 3 of the journalist's 5 Ws--Who, What, Where--are the most likely candidates for questions. Engage your senses and ask what color is the magic wand, does the air feel cool or warm, are there any funky smells, and do you hear anything unusual. Be quantitative, at least approximately. Ask how big the stone doors are, or roughly how many people are in the market square.

(A good practice to accompany this is to let the GM know why you're asking. Don't just say, "How deep is the pit?" Say: "How deep does the pit look? Because I'm thinking of jumping it, but not if it looks like missing the edge will kill me.")

After that, selecting a good option is highly situation-specific. The only advice I'd have for that is to think ahead while the GM is resolving actions with another player. Pay a little attention to what happens with them, but keep an eye on what you want to do next.

As far as being a member of your gaming group is concerned, it can be mostly summarized as: be an adult. Don't pout when things don't go the way you planned. Ask for advice, offer help, and don't interrupt when others are talking. Don't check your phone messages. Don't play other games when your character isn't in the spotlight. Don't bring in any electronics you don't need, unless you have the game rules on a pdf or maybe your game's SRD, if they have one. Be someone that people like to be around.

But for RPG-specific advice, I'd add: know your character sheet. Know the rules that pertain to what you have written down there. Know the difference between acting dramatically and hogging the limelight. Remember that characters may have lots of conflicts, but players should have few. Be prepared for your turn, when it comes.

And lastly, ask yourself the question, why am I playing this game? That's not a deep philosophical question, although you could certainly follow it up with one. But I really just mean, what kinds of things do I want to happen in the game? RPGs do not have a single goal, so you have to come up with them on your own. Ask yourself: Do I want to show off my acting chops? My problem-solving skills? Do I want to imagine dragons and castles, or do I just like getting out of my own skin for a while? Knowing your own motivation is the best way to gauge whether or not the game is meeting them, and the first step in ensuring that it does.

cheers, Adam

Mapmaker, mapmaker...

I like maps; I like them for their aesthetic value alone, but I'm old-school enough to want maps for any location my players explore. I'm not adverse to making them up as I go along, but I feel even then that preparation improves improvisation. In any case, being spatially precise helps me visualize the scene and makes things like combat easier to adjudicate.

Some posts about random and semi-random map generation caught my eye recently. I almost never go by random generation alone in anything, but I certainly use it as inspiration. This post, while about computer methods for an as-yet unpublished video game, got me to thinking about how to create random maps in a way that doesn't generate strangely incongrous results.

I took the method described above, and developed my own manual procedure, as outlined below. It requires a little aesthetic judgment, but is still pretty fast:

1. Start at the center of the map. Roll 3d8+1 to determine the size of the room, in squares. Do not worry about doors at this point. Immediately, we have two considerations:
      a) Rectangles are the easiest shape to draw on graph paper, but can get boring fast. So you either need to round up or down to the nearest factorable number ( 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25 ), or you need to add alcoves and projections to get the exact number you rolled.
      b) If the room is not square, determine which way the long axis runs with a simple d6 roll: 1-3 = the long axis runs north-south, 4-6 = it runs east-west.
   
   There's an upper limit of 25 squares with this method. Borrowing a concept from Tunnels and Trolls, however, whenever you roll triples, note what size that would be and roll again. Stick these two smaller rooms together to make one larger one.
2. Starting at the 12:00 position, roll another room in the same fashion. Place it somewhere above the first, spacing it out by rolling 1d4+1. This number is the number of squares between the top edge of the lower room and the bottom edge of the higher one. Place the room somewhere at this point; it probably looks better if the centers aren't perfectly aligned, but that's a matter of taste.
   
3. Continue in a similar manner at the 3:00, 6:00, and 9:00 positions.
   
   

   

   At this point, they're just a series of boxes with no relationship. 

   
   
4. Now, starting with the second room you created, repeat this process for every direction that doesn't already have a room filled. In this case, it means that the 6:00 position will already be filled.
   
5. Iterate this process in order of room creation, if possible. Some rooms will have to be skipped because all of the adjacent spaces will be filled. Continue until your map is filled, or the number of rooms is otherwise to your liking.
   
6. Start connecting the rooms with a Minimum Spanning Tree. Don't worry about the math. Basically, all it means for our purposes is, start drawing corridors connecting rooms that are two squares away, then three squares, etc., until you have a path that connects every room.
   
7. At this point, there should be no looping paths, so add a few corridors to create them.
   
   

   

   The room just north of the center was the one I started with.
   The spaces enclosed by looping paths have been darkened; these
   are important because they give multiple routes through your map. 

   
   
8. Add entrances and exits as you will.
   

This process can be done in about a half hour, and creates functional, decent-looking maps. There is certainly a good amount of corridor space in there; I'll show a method of generating more closely-packed rooms at another date.

Of course, populating the area is another matter altogether. When in a pinch, I'd recommend some of the stuff you can find at hackslashmaster. But I often find myself needing a layout for a scenario I've already anticipated, so this step isn't usually a big concern.

cheers, Adam

Trust in a Savage World

I find the frequency with which I blog mirrors the frequency with which I game, and the last couple of months have been scarce due to a variety of issues, not least of which being a bout of Strep. Thank goodness for modern medicine.

But I just GM'ed a session of Savage Worlds, and tried to apply some of the wisdom from hackslashmaster while doing it. Primarily, I was going to give the players all of the information they needed to play, without requiring spot rolls or perception checks; if they said they were looking in the right place, they'd find any relevant information.

They kept on asking to make notice rolls anyhow, and in the spirit of making the game go faster, I let them roll; Savage Worlds is a game where, if the characters want it enough and are willing to spend the Bennies to make it happen, they will be successful far more often than not. I don't think anyone missed a notice roll all night long.

The setting was pulp sci-fi in the style of '30s-era Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. They were members of an underground resistance on a moon orbiting a Saturn-like gas giant, in a city modeled after Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The adventure was twofold: first, their previous excursion had almost been sabotaged due to a traitor in their ranks, and since they were also under suspicion, they wanted to root out the mole.

Hidden information is something that requires a die roll in most game systems, but I let them know that three members of the resistance were in a position to be the mole, and they basically guessed the right on on the first try. I role-played a bit of him trying to get one of them into his chambers, where he'd set off a bomb that he could conveniently hide from and survive. That didn't work, and after a few intimidate rolls, he cracked and let details slip that only the mole would have known, at which point I had notified them that the city guards were bearing down on their underground hideout.

That's where phase two came in; I drew up a simple map of the corridor they were in: on either end of a 140' hallway, two empty elevator shafts provided entry for teams of rappelling guardsmen. Crossing this hallway at two points were shorter hallways, and on the end of those, I placed escape routes in the form of maintenance access shafts. I told them that three out of the four shafts were guarded, and let them do as they would.

Long story short: the next session is going to be a jail break. What I thought would be the obvious thing to do--see where the guards were coming from, go the other way--wasn't as obvious to my players. They did a decent amount of damage tactically, but I let them know that the guards would keep coming in waves. Instead, they tried to go up a shaft from which guards were sprouting, so I informed them that they'd not be able to get past them in such a narrow space, and the reinforcements from behind them would catch up soon enough. Even if they shot a guard, he'd only fall down--on them--and obstruct their escape.

I guess the moral of this story is, old habits die hard, and the players didn't take up the information that I was handing out to them. Sometimes it's hard to trust the GM. But hopefully, if the games keep being fun, I'll be able to condition them until they do.

cheers,
Adam

New Magic Item: The Abacus of Xallim

Lamentations of the Flame Princess points out that, in a world where magic items can be made, not all of them will be made to benefit the adventuring professions. Since upwards of 99% of people won't fall into that category, in fact, it seems like most magic items will not have direct applicability to exploration or combat. I do like the idea, however, of something that might be pressed into adventuring service with a little cleverness, so I came up with the following:

The Abacus of Xallim.

Looks something like this, but more awesome.

It is widely believed that the wizard Xallim bound the spirit of an obsessive savant into the abacus. Some say he bound it into the very wood of the frame, while others speculate its powers have something to do with the strange engraving on the side: an imp, viewed through a four-paneled window, handing a fruit of some sort to a small, flightless bird. Regardless, it appears as a well-made example of its type, capable of counting up to 9,999,999,999. Four red beads on a rod running perpendicular to the rest, on the top of the frame, count the number of daily charges it has left to use. These slide up and cannot be pulled down until the charges reset.

To operate the abacus, the user must say, in any language known to mortal men, the following: "The task has come to you, servant of Xallim, to tally and report the number of [X] that lies [or stands, etc.] before you." Then, placing fingers on the bead, the user will feel an urge to slide the beads back and forth for a frantic period of 10 - 15 seconds. Doing so will reveal the number. If secrecy is desired, the command may be whispered, but it still must be physically uttered.

Without expending any charges, it can instantly size up the number of objects of a type in plain sight.

For one charge, it can discern between real and fake, or pure and adulterated, coins, by counting how many apparent and real numbers of an item are under consideration. The beads will flip back and forth between the two tallies; although it may confuse the outside observer, the user will be able to read the values instantaneously.

For two charges, the abacus can determine if any hidden/secret doors or traps (and how many) exist within viewing range.

By using up all remaining charges for the day, it can determine, as the answer to a yes-or-no question, if an item is magical or legendary. A count of 1 means yes, 0 means no.

While all of the daily charges are exhausted, even the chargeless function ceases. It still works as a regular abacus, however.

There is a 3% chance per use that the user will become afflicted with the compulsion to remain obsessively clean and orderly, which would preclude most adventuring activities. This effect will remain until someone casts a Remove Curse on the user.

cheers,
Adam