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