A Question of Quests

I'm not one to quibble about semantics, usually. But one commonly-misused word is really grating to my ears. I'm not talking about trivia like 'irregardless' or 'begging the question'; if you use the first or misuse the second, you're only making yourself look silly. That's no skin off my nose. No, the word I can't abide being abused is one that is commonly tossed around in RPG circles, especially since the advent of MMORPGs.

That word is quest.

This was the offending use that broke this particular camel's back. Someone referred to his adventure as a "simple fetch quest". I refrained from commenting, but that trivialization of what was once an awe-inspiring term has been gnawing on me for a while now.

If something is "simple", then, by definition, it's not a quest. A quest is an arduous search for something that severely tests the mettle of any party bold enough to attempt it. It is epic in scope, and poses extreme challenges and perils along the way. Think of the Holy Grail; Odysseus' return; Jason and the Golden Fleece; and (do I even have to mention it?) the destruction of the One Ring. A quest changes you, and not always in pleasant ways. "Simply fetching" something isn't a quest: it's a Chore, perhaps, or even an Errand, but it's not a quest.

I don't know when this depreciation in meaning began; for all I know, it started with MUDs, or maybe even with television, outside the gaming realm altogether. But I hadn't heard it much until World of Warcraft became the phenomenon that it did. I've never played the game, but my former roommate was an addict, and he would throw the term about casually, labeling as "quests" such non-epic tasks as escorting a merchant, killing X number of goblins, or retrieving a low-power magic item from a known location. "Quest-givers" were NPCs wandering around the city with question marks over their heads. The character record could even list which quests--plural--your avatar is currently pursuing, a kind of fantasy "to-do" list.

Maybe it's just me, but I just don't see Frodo ticking off "Destroy Ring" on a sheet of paper and then looking down to see if there's a Grail he needs to pick up somewhere.

Now, anyone who thinks that the best first response to something is to head to the Web and correct people's usage is living in a very different world than I am. But it's good to get things off your chest occasionally, and to whomever finds their way to this blog, I advise you not to engage in any arguments about it. Just use more precise terminology yourself; calling something a Task is dramatic enough, and a hard one might even be called a Labor. But let the word Quest settle for a while; it will be that much more awe-inspiring when you have a legitimate chance to use it.

cheers,
Adam

An Experiment in Narrative Form

Random Idea:

Most role-playing is done in present tense, in first- and second-person narrative, at least in the case of the PCs. ("You see an eerie red light emanating from behind the throne.")

But if we could get everyone on board with using third person for PCs exclusively, players and GM, and using the past tense, what kind of psychological shift might we find in the way we play? Something like:

GM: After opening the door, they saw an eerie red light emanating from a throne at the other end of the room.

Player: Magda approached it carefully, holding her staff in front of her.

(Dice and game rule stuff happens.)

GM: Suddenly, a shadow flickered from within the red nimbus, and a creature like the shadow of a long, hungry panther leapt out at her. It clawed, but a shield of light sprung from Magda's staff, protecting her from its claws.

This could be cool. Or totally dorky. But I like the idea, for now.

cheers, Adam

Minigames

I've noticed a term popping up here and there lately in the OSR world: minigame. No, not those minigames, but smaller, home-brewed rules for covering some aspect of character life that wasn't reflected in the official rulebooks. Telecanter's Port Trading system and Zak's Mass Combat suggestions are two excellent recent examples.

To me, the reason this kind of supplementalism is hitting stride right now stems from a couple of things:

Like I said before, many old-school gamers don't see, beyond a reasonable minimum, the need for niggling consistency, or at least uniformity, in a rules system. The problem with Core Mechanics is that they reduce every possible modelable situation to the same die roll, whether it's a dice pool or a d20. Reducing a search through a port town for goods to trade to one or even a series of d20 rolls loses all of the flavor that searching, stealing, bartering and bickering provides. Transforming all of that flea-bitten nastiness into a sum of dice roll modifiers and a target number is best reserved for people who don't really want to play it out.

(As an aside, this seems to be what Complex Skill Rolls in 3.5 and Skill Challenges in 4e D&D seem to want to be: a way of embracing a different dynamic flow while still reducing everything to a d20 roll. I'm fascinated, but ultimately unconvinced, by this approach.)

But this kind of situation is exactly the challenge-the-player-not-the-character style of play that many in the OSR prefer.

The characteristics I've seen of this type of minigame are:

1. It lends itself to that fabled desideratum, "player agency": as Zak says, the GM can give the PCs "...a choice of choosing the enemy rolled or any tougher one. Choosing the tougher one subtracts from the number of total encounters." In Telecanter's case, it presents a mini-challenge with more information than dungeon exploration typically offers--a role-playing puzzle of sorts.

2. It also lends itself to using/creating random tables, which are both a boon and a curse for the GM. It's a curse if you want to come up with your own tables, but a boon once you have them, because now you can quickly and painlessly generate a batch of content. And there are countless tables available from the web.

3. The tables, however, are optional: one benefit of them is that the players can't game the GM by trying to diving "what Adam would put here". But if they're not available, there's no reason why this style of content generation isn't amenable to good old seat-of-the-pants making it up.

The best point of all of these rules options, however, is that they are short, simple, and above all *optional*. Each one could be hammered out by players and the GM through verbal give-and-take, or
skipped over with a die roll, or otherwise hand-waved away. But the use of these mini-systems, and the selections of what situations to model with them, becomes an element of gamemastering style. And that embrace of individual difference, while still holding to a core set of rules, is why I think there's such a recent explosion of them.

cheers,
Adam

Simple-ish Grappling Rules for D&D

So, like, grappling:

1. You must Close to Grapple, which is a combat stunt like the Simple Combat Maneuvers listed here. I envision something like Escrima Stick Grappling, so if you aren't armed with  a 1-handed weapon, your intended target gets a free counter-attack against you. A successful counter-attack spoils the Close attempt.
2. Upon a successful Close, you roll your Hit Dice plus the better of your DEX bonus or STR bonus, if any; your target does the same.
3. If your total is higher, you have successfully Grappled the enemy. They may not move and have a 4-point AC penalty. You may drag the enemy 5 feet per round (more, or less, at the GM's option) if you wish.
4. If their total is higher, the Hold is Broken and they may push you back, or initiate a  grapple on you, without needing to Close to Grapple and without allowing you a free attack.
5. 3 successive Grapples on a combatant in a row indicates a Choke-Out, and they are unconscious for 1d6 rounds. That is, you must succeed on a Grapple, then continue succeeding without the Hold being Broken at any point. If it is, start over.

Possible considerations:

• The opponent must be grapplable: no slimes, dragons, or beholders.
• Sure, you could Grapple a skeleton or an iron golem, but you can't choke it out.
• Opponents with high hit dice (say, in multiples of 3) may take longer to choke out, so a 4 HD fighter takes four grapples and a 7 HD fighter takes five.
• Multiple assailants can dog-pile a single opponent; each assailant may add their Hit Dice to the next successive Grapple roll. They must still Close to Attack, but they don't suffer free attacks against them, and the target still has the aforementioned 4-point AC penalty.

cheers,
Adam

A couple of Holmes-isms

My blogging has been sparse due to my computer being stolen. However, I wanted to point out a couple of interesting tidbits I found while re-reading Holmes D&D over the weekend; why these were unknown to me before, I don't know, but I suspect it had something to do with my ingrained AD&D habits and assumptions:

1) Prime requisites can be lower than nine. There is a considerable experience penalty for very low stats, and there are other reasons why having a 3-STR fighter wouldn't be a great idea tactically speaking, but you can do it, according to the rules.

2) A round is one minute, and a turn is ten rounds, but during combat, a round shrinks to a (in my opinion, more reasonable) shorter span of ten seconds. I haven't seen where this affects spell durations, but it is one of those places where I wish D&D had, from the start, (a) picked a more reasonable default, like 10 seconds, and (b) decided to use actual, and not scale, numbers (i.e., instead of measuring distances and spell radii in inches, then converting to feet).

cheers,
Adam

Death to Thieves

Been meaning to blog more, but have encountered a non-trivial setback: someone broke into the house I was staying at and stole my laptop.

If only the house were trapped the way I trapped dungeons, I would be gloating while contemplating their heads on pikes. But alas, they are, at the moment, at large.

Grrr....

Lords of Waterdeep

I played Lords of Waterdeep with my co-workers tonight. LoW is what is known as a "worker placement" game ostensibly set in the world of the Forgotten Realms. I'm no  fan of the realms, because magic is slung about willy-nilly in that setting, and I like the idea, even in a fantasy setting, of magic being something dangerous, mysterious, and rare. But LoW is a so-called "Eurogame"; one of the characteristics of these games is that the theme or flavor of the game is less important than the abstract mechanics. In other words, it doesn't make much of a difference where it takes place.

Unlike other Eurogames, though, a little bit more of the theme cross-pollinates the abstraction. You place your 'agents' on spaces on the board, named after locations in the game city of Waterdeep, to gain resources; many of these resources are named after familiar PC classes from D&D: Warriors, Rogues, Clerics, and Wizards. The object of the game is to accumulate as many points as you can in eight turns, and one of the ways you gain a lot of points is to satisfy "quest" cards--"Domesticate Owlbears", or (paraphrasing here) "Uncover the Secret of [Some Wizard's] Hideout".

The quest cards are where the flavor seeps in the most, because they come in five types themselves: Pious (clerical), Skullduggery (rogue-like), Warfare (for warriors), Arcane (for wizards), and Commerce (a usually-even mix). The Arcane quests, for instance, usually require you to obtain and trade in multiple wizard units, although few quests use only one type. Get, say, two wizards, two rogues, and a fighter, and bang!--quest solved. The themes of the cards seem to map pretty well to the resources needed, so that Warfare cards need a lot more warriors than clerics or mages. The rewards, in addition to points, may also be resources, like gold or character units.

This completely abstracts away the actual adventure--not very roleplaying like, but the notion of different styles of quest card using different balances of character types struck me as theft-worthy. Many, many adventure-writing pieces of advice say something like "make sure every character type has something to do", but creating an adventure better suited for fighters than clerics strikes me as a little more pseudo-naturalistic, and allows for more possibilities; of course, in old-school gaming, there's a lot more overlap between what the fighter and the magic-user can do. And to me, providing multiple quests which fit different mixes of character types (or fitting them better than others), is a sand-boxy notion that opens up the game world to multiple avenues of player exploration.

As of this moment, my imagination is officially stoked, thanks to Lords of Waterdeep.