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
Friday, November 30, 2012
Saturday, October 20, 2012
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
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
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Simple-ish Grappling Rules for D&D
So, like, grappling:
Adam
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Adam
Monday, August 13, 2012
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
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
Sunday, July 15, 2012
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....
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....
Thursday, June 14, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Sooooooper Geeeeenius
I changed the description of this blog because, although I prefer old-school RPGs in general (and old-school, pre-2nd edition D&D in particular), I do play in a variety of games.
Two weeks ago, Marvel's The Avengers came out and smashed all sorts of box-office records. (Of course, I don't know what happens if you normalize for inflation and population growth, but in any case, some execs at Disney are happy that they bet on this particular horse.) As I watched, I couldn't help but think about setting these characters up as RPG characters.
My first thought was for Champions, by Hero Games. This stalwart game, which later morphed into the more generic "Hero System", was among the first superhero games, and one of the early "point buy" systems. It was, as far as I know, the first that allowed you to buy extra points with disadvantages, so if your flying strongman weren't quite strong enough, you could take a susceptibility to, say, glowing green rocks, and boost your strength attribute a bit more.
But another supers game has caught my eye recently, the independently-published Capes. Not a traditional RPG by any means, it's more of a so-called "story game", but more fun than other games that call themselves that. There is no GM in Capes; players take turns setting up scenes, and one player may suggest the overall conflict for the night, but that's about the limit for how much one person influences the game.
Instead, players try to spend down their emotional Debt and gain Story tokens in order to influence the outcome of the game. They do this by using character abilities, but who plays which character can change from scene to scene. To counter this apparent anarchy, Capes has a more rigidly-defined structure than most other RPGs; play, for example, always goes around the table to the left. If I start a scene and Greg is the second player, next scene he'll be the starter and I'll be the last to jump in. And, barring some house rules, that means he can start playing the character I was playing last scene.
Conflicts are resolved by creating and claiming Goals, and using your character's abilities to raise the dice (starting out as single d6's) For or Against them. Every power is ranked from 1 to 5, and you can only influence a die (by rolling it down in case of the opposing die, or up in the case of the supporting one) if your ability has a higher rating. If you stake Debt (a resource representing the emotional burden of such astounding responsibility), you can "split" the die, turning it into two evenly-matched dice; so a four turns into two twos, and a five would split into two and three (as close to even as you can get), so you can raise the total even higher.
There are more intricacies, but that's the basic gameplay. Half the fun, as it often is in point-buy-based RPGs, is coming up with your character. It is very simple with Capes: you create twelve powers in three columns, Powers, Attitudes, and Styles. No column can have more than five or less than three entries, which get numbered from one to however many slots are in that column. Powers are whatever you can think of: rocket boots, laser eyes, super strength, power armor, magic hammer, whatever. Attitudes are personality traits: shy, idealistic, loner, leader, etc.
Styles are not simple traits themselves, but are common events or situations that arise as a result of powers and attitudes. My favorite example in the book is for a Giant Robot character, "Massive Property Damage".
Anything not in one of these three columns can be normal or extraordinary, but will not affect the game. So you could have a character who flies, but if it's just the way he gets from scene to scene, you might not even list it as a power. Advanced rules show how objects and locations can be treated as characters and brought into play on a scene-by-scene basis, or how one character sheet can represent an entire horde of ninjas or mooks.
If this sounds pretty abstract, it's because it is. It's the responsibility of the player to determine what happens when they use their powers, and specifics (flight speed, upper weight limits) are hand-waved away; only the numbers on the character sheet and on the dice make any difference. In fact, you could do away with the superhero trappings altogether and make it a dice game about gaining and losing points in certain categories, but despite this, it really plays like a fast-paced RPG.
I wrote up three of the Avengers characters as Capes PCs a few nights ago, a process which took about an hour for all three. You can see from my Thor example that abilities are very subjective things:
Thor
Powers
Flight: 1
Hammer: 4
Strength: 5
Invulnerability: 2
Lightning: 3
Attitudes
Determined: 3
Rebellious: 1
Reckless: 2
Styles
Hammer Returns when Thrown: 4
Appears in a Clap of Thunder: 2
Casually overpowers Mortals: 3
Escapes without a Scratch: 1
Two weeks ago, Marvel's The Avengers came out and smashed all sorts of box-office records. (Of course, I don't know what happens if you normalize for inflation and population growth, but in any case, some execs at Disney are happy that they bet on this particular horse.) As I watched, I couldn't help but think about setting these characters up as RPG characters.
My first thought was for Champions, by Hero Games. This stalwart game, which later morphed into the more generic "Hero System", was among the first superhero games, and one of the early "point buy" systems. It was, as far as I know, the first that allowed you to buy extra points with disadvantages, so if your flying strongman weren't quite strong enough, you could take a susceptibility to, say, glowing green rocks, and boost your strength attribute a bit more.
But another supers game has caught my eye recently, the independently-published Capes. Not a traditional RPG by any means, it's more of a so-called "story game", but more fun than other games that call themselves that. There is no GM in Capes; players take turns setting up scenes, and one player may suggest the overall conflict for the night, but that's about the limit for how much one person influences the game.
Instead, players try to spend down their emotional Debt and gain Story tokens in order to influence the outcome of the game. They do this by using character abilities, but who plays which character can change from scene to scene. To counter this apparent anarchy, Capes has a more rigidly-defined structure than most other RPGs; play, for example, always goes around the table to the left. If I start a scene and Greg is the second player, next scene he'll be the starter and I'll be the last to jump in. And, barring some house rules, that means he can start playing the character I was playing last scene.
Conflicts are resolved by creating and claiming Goals, and using your character's abilities to raise the dice (starting out as single d6's) For or Against them. Every power is ranked from 1 to 5, and you can only influence a die (by rolling it down in case of the opposing die, or up in the case of the supporting one) if your ability has a higher rating. If you stake Debt (a resource representing the emotional burden of such astounding responsibility), you can "split" the die, turning it into two evenly-matched dice; so a four turns into two twos, and a five would split into two and three (as close to even as you can get), so you can raise the total even higher.
There are more intricacies, but that's the basic gameplay. Half the fun, as it often is in point-buy-based RPGs, is coming up with your character. It is very simple with Capes: you create twelve powers in three columns, Powers, Attitudes, and Styles. No column can have more than five or less than three entries, which get numbered from one to however many slots are in that column. Powers are whatever you can think of: rocket boots, laser eyes, super strength, power armor, magic hammer, whatever. Attitudes are personality traits: shy, idealistic, loner, leader, etc.
Styles are not simple traits themselves, but are common events or situations that arise as a result of powers and attitudes. My favorite example in the book is for a Giant Robot character, "Massive Property Damage".
Anything not in one of these three columns can be normal or extraordinary, but will not affect the game. So you could have a character who flies, but if it's just the way he gets from scene to scene, you might not even list it as a power. Advanced rules show how objects and locations can be treated as characters and brought into play on a scene-by-scene basis, or how one character sheet can represent an entire horde of ninjas or mooks.
If this sounds pretty abstract, it's because it is. It's the responsibility of the player to determine what happens when they use their powers, and specifics (flight speed, upper weight limits) are hand-waved away; only the numbers on the character sheet and on the dice make any difference. In fact, you could do away with the superhero trappings altogether and make it a dice game about gaining and losing points in certain categories, but despite this, it really plays like a fast-paced RPG.
I wrote up three of the Avengers characters as Capes PCs a few nights ago, a process which took about an hour for all three. You can see from my Thor example that abilities are very subjective things:
Thor
Powers
Flight: 1
Hammer: 4
Strength: 5
Invulnerability: 2
Lightning: 3
Attitudes
Determined: 3
Rebellious: 1
Reckless: 2
Styles
Hammer Returns when Thrown: 4
Appears in a Clap of Thunder: 2
Casually overpowers Mortals: 3
Escapes without a Scratch: 1
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)