Monsters and Manuals

No Abstract Wealth Please; I'm British

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Sun, 27 May 2012 19:30:00 +0000

I ran a second session of Diaspora yesterday afternoon. I think my overall feeling is that the jury is still out. Some aspects of the game worked well, but others really didn't (although I have to hold up my hands and say that for some reason I felt really off form, like a striker snatching at chances).

What I dislike most about the system is that it abstracts wealth. The way economics works is, you have a "wealth track" which represents how financially secure you are. If it goes down to zero - you're out forever: fiscally dead, reduced to a lifetime of flipping burgers or serving as a debt slave, or whatever. (This in itself is something I strongly dislike, by the way - as long as a PC is alive I want his player thinking about ways to get out of whatever difficulty he is in. That seems like a large percentage of "the game". I recognise that there is a sort of 'story' oriented view that it is interesting to have available the negative consequence of being removed from the narrative permanently, but death seems to me to be the only genuine way of doing this. Though I digress.)

You take financial 'damage' by failing an assets roll. What this boils down to is, to see if you can afford something, you roll against your assets skill. If you miss the required target, you take hits to your wealth track. You can mitigate this damage by taking consequences - from the minor (you are worried about your finances and it might affect your concentration) to the major (you owe a loan shark a shit load of money), but you always get what you want to buy. This is supposed to represent an interesting choice (either don't take a risk and never get anything, or get whatever you want but take a huge risk, potentially involving what is effectively death, in the process), but at least to my gaming style it feels like it takes away something interesting.

That "something interesting" is that, by keeping wealth concrete and not abstract, you prevent players being able to get all the things they want - and this forces them to do interesting things to get the money they need to do that. Wanting better stuff is one of the key seeds from which adventure sprouts, to use a rather shit metaphor. You want a spaceship but don't have the credits? You go out and do whatever it takes to afford one - or you steal one. You want a sword +5 but you don't have the gold? You know there is one at the bottom of that huge abyssal chasm full of hordes of demons - so you go down. Maybe keeping track of gold pieces is a bit bean-counter-ish to some people (I get the sense the Diaspora designers are that kind of person), but it seems to me to be a vital element in giving the game any sort of engine and stopping the players being reactive.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding something, but I have to confess to feeling as if there is something crucial missing when wealth is abstracted in this way.

Chaos My Ride

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Thu, 24 May 2012 21:50:00 +0000

I postulated a theory on Google+ just now: if you put the word "Chaos" before any animal, monster, or mythical being, it instantly makes it sound cooler.

Try it. Chaos dog. Chaos monkey. Chaos unicorn. Chaos goat. Chaos wasp. Chaos ghost. It never gets old.

To make an animal a chaos animal, take the ordinary version and then roll d3 times on the following table:

1. Extra hit dice
2. Can phase as a phase spider
3. Can breathe fire (2d6)
4. Can breathe ice (1d6)
5. Can breathe poisoned gas (2d6; save vs poison halves damage)
6. Can breathe lightning (2d6)
7. Can breathe CHAOS (3d6; save vs magic or be teleported d500 metres in a random direction)
8. Immune to normal weapons
9. Half damage from fire
10. Half damage from cold
11. Two heads
12. Three heads
13. Four heads
14. Extra pair of legs
15. Human hands instead of feet
16. Human face
17. Human nose
18. Can speak; always lies
19. Can cast a random spell once per day
20. Can cast a random cleric spell once per day
21. Can gate demons d3 times per day
22. Makes no sound
23. Translucent
24. Invisible
25. Blue
26. Red
27. Purple
28. Yellow
29. Zebra striped
30. +4 AC
31. Moves at double speed
32. Never surprised
33. Extra eyes
34. Deadly poison (save versus poison)
35. Spits acid (d6 damage first turn, d3 damage second and third turn)
36. Causes fear
37. Gaze petrifies as medusa
38. Can always detect nearest source of treasure
39. Can always detect nearest source of treasure; always goes in the other direction
40. Can cast darkness, 15' radius three times per day. Always does so when 'stressed'
41. Likes women, hates men
42. Likes men, hates women
43. Can fly

Bored now. Add your own.

Big is Beautiful

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:19:00 +0000

It's long been my view that TSR-era D&D, taken as a whole, is the most brilliant game there is. No - I don't mean the system is brilliant: it isn't. No sensible person would design a game that way nowadays, knowing what we now know about game design, which has undoubtedly got better since 1974.

D&D's brilliance comes from the fact that, plain and simply, it has the biggest "brain trust" of any game system on the planet. Like Manchester United, who can draw on football playing talent worldwide, or like the USA, which can siphon off the intelligent and talented multitudes from every corner of the globe, D&D has for decades been the biggest game around, and that means that it can draw on more creativity, talent and innovation than any other system.

The perfect example of this is, of course, the OSR and what is going on nowadays on Google+ (mainly, it has to be said, thanks to this guy more than anybody else). There are hundreds of extremely talented, thoughtful, entertaining and clever gamers pooling their ideas daily on teh internets, and the dead giveaway is that almost (though not entirely) all of it feeds into one game - D&D.

Far from seeing this as a bad thing, I embrace it. Perhaps if I wasn't interested in its own peculiar and idosyncratic take on the fantasy genre I would bemoan D&D's dominance. But I love it, so I don't.

D&D, you are the bestest game in the whole wide world.

Food and Drink have a Special Significance

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Tue, 22 May 2012 22:44:00 +0000

I was involved in a forum thread on Japanese RPGs recently, and this naturally lead me to look up the Japanese wikipedia page for RPGs, or "TRPGs" as they are called over there. (This, oddly, is not an abbreviation of Table Top RPG, but of Table Talk RPG. As is often the case with loan words from English to Japanese, it turns out that it's not so much a loan word as word that has been borrowed in an inappropriate or unnatural fashion, at least to native English speakers' eyes.)

Anyway, the most interesting section on the page is "TRPG中における飲食", or "Food and drink in TRPGs". Here's a rough translation:

In TRPGs, food and drink, focusing around snacks, have a special significance. Having food and drink while playing the game with friends lets you enjoy the flavours while livening up the conversation, and is another element of the fun involved. In Mishio Fukuzawa's "New Fortune Quest Replay" [whatever that is], snacks and drinks are listed in the book as "necessary items". Other TRPG books don't go so far as to say they are necessary, but many recommend them.

In replay books [basically a sort of novelization of a game session - yes, really] there is not usually a commentary, so there is also no commentary on snacks, but in the Sword World replay "[Title Untranslatable Because I Can't Be Arsed, it's Something Like 'Rhapsody of the Marauders']", there is some out-of-character commentary by the players regarding snacks, such as "I'm going out to get some juice", or "I want some ramen".

TRPGs are played with a number of people, and take a few hours, so food and drink is also used to alleviate the hard work. It is desirable for all participants, including the GM, to prepare and manage the food. If this is not observed, the other participants will likely judge the offender unfavourably and be unsatisfied. It is usual for all the individual participants to to bring stuff, because expecting one person to bear the burden of providing food and drink is rather onerous.

It is important to watch out during play that food and drink do not become a hindrance, especially when using a board or maps and so on. For instance, drink might be spilled and ruin a character sheet. It can also get on ones hands and make them smell. When the game approaches a meal time, it is usual to have a break for a while and then start again afterwards.

During online sessions there is no chance the other players will take your snacks, so you can enjoy them in comfort. However, you also can't take other players' snacks either.

Those Japanese, eh?

The Luck (Stat) in the Head

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Mon, 21 May 2012 22:46:00 +0000

As long-term readers of this blog may know, I spent probably more of my formative years playing Cyberpunk 2020 than any other game. Cyberpunk 2020 is a kind of messed up system, very much "of its time", but one of its great qualities is its Luck stat, which is at least as systemically important as any of the others (Intelligence, Reflexes, etc.). Naturally, the tendency for beginner players and GMs is to treat Luck like a dump stat - give it 2 points, the minimum required, and use your points to improve your other skills. This is because Luck in the core rules is pretty useless - you just spend Luck points to get bonuses to rolls. Zzz.

I gradually developed a more expansive approach to Luck - so much so that anybody who treated it like a dump stat would be a fool, a fool I tell you. Luck in my Cyberpunk 2020 games became, essentially, a primitive form of FATE point, giving the players a kind of control over the narrative: if a player asks me something and I don't know the answer and feel like making one up would be arbitrary on my part ("Is there a CCTV camera nearby?", "Is there a stapler in the office?", "Is there a taxi passing by?") I have them roll a d10. If the result is less than their luck, they get the answer they wanted. If not, they don't. I might also use luck if I can't think of a way to resolve something (there's a car crash and the players didn't decide in advance who was in the passenger seat - they all roll a d10 and add their luck and the lowest is the unfortunate one who gets thrown through the windscreen).

I've always liked this approach, because it makes me feel like it aids my objectivity (I'm neither giving players what they want nor deliberately refusing them what they want) and I enjoy the thought that luck is an actual 'thing' that has real-world effects; there's not only an element of luck in the things that you do as a player (rolling dice to see if you succeed), there's also an actual, almost physical phenomenon in the world which shapes the destinies of the people in it. And because it tends only to be used for things that are relatively trivial ("Is there a taxi nearby?") but which could literally be the hinge between life and death, it feels true as an accurate reflection of the rather random nature of life.

Let's Stat Up People Appearing In Old Paintings

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Sun, 20 May 2012 20:31:00 +0000

See that guy in the foreground, on our left? Who is he? And if you were statting him up for the game of your choice, what would his stats be?

Zonal Combat

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:10:00 +0000

What do you say we lighten things up around here and talk about abstract mapping?

Diaspora has an interesting approach to combat, which would work equally well with D&D - indeed any game system you can think of with a bit of tinkering. I've been tinkering with it. It goes something like this:

When combat looks likely, the DM draws a map, and then divides it up into zones. Zones are not a grid, and do not represent strict distance. Rather, they represent a combination of space, ease of travel, view, and time to pass through. Thus, an open field might be one zone, but a nearby cottage with three rooms might be made up of three separate zones, because the time it takes to sprint across the open field is the same as the amount of time it would take to move between rooms cluttered with furniture. Likewise, a thick forest full of boulders might be divided up into three zones, whereas an area of light woodland of the same "size" might just be one zone - representing the speed with which one can move through each area.

With me so far?

If there are borders between zones (a hedge, a wall, a ditch, a door) these have numerical ratings indicating how long it takes to pass through them. So a hedge might have a rating of "2", indicating that it takes 2 "zones" worth of effort to cross over. (You can climb over in the same amount of time it would take to cross 2 zones.) This is called the "pass value".

Pass values can change if there is a doorway. If there is a doorway, the pass value is 0 - unless the door is shut, in which case it costs "zones" to open it, indicated by a number, called the "opening value". (A wall would cost 2 "zones" to climb over, so it has a pass value of 2, but it has a gate which would cost "1" zone to open, or an opening value of 1. So the hedge has a pass value of 2/1.)

Each turn, the player gets one zone of movement and an action. The zone of movement might consist in eroding pass value (e.g. getting half way over a hedge with a pass value of 2), or opening a doorway (e.g. eroding an opening value from 1 to 0.) The action would be the usual sort of thing (cast a spell, attack, whatever). Or he can give up the action to make two zones' worth of movement.

A turn is however long it would take to cross a zone. This means that combat can scale up and scale down to suit the situation. A fight taking place in an area covering a square mile of countryside, or taking place in a few rooms in a hotel reception, would follow exactly the same pattern - it's just that the zones would represent different levels of abstraction. The zones in the former would probably be bigger by area on average, and a turn would be longer (maybe two minutes in the former as opposed to around 10 seconds in the latter). But the rules are exactly the same. Only two things would really change. First, the larger the zones and the longer the turns, the more abstract attack rolls (the attack roll would represent a period of maneuvering and trading blows), and the smaller the zones and shorter the turns, the less abstract attack rolls would become (the attack roll would represent literal single attacks). The other thing that would change would be pass value. A hedge separating two open fields, each about 100 square yards and represented by a zone each, would perhaps have to have a higher pass value than a hedge separating two small gardens of 10 square yards each.

Example:

Here, the open spaces are fields and easier to cross than the woodland areas, so their zones are spatially larger. The stream and hedges have a PV (pass value) of 2. The barn in the middle is its own zone, full of bales of hay. Red lines indicate zonal boundaries; green lines are hedges; blue is the stream; the black line is a road.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess and the Virtues of A5

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:28:00 +0000

I've been playing a bit of Lamentations of the Flame Princess [Grindhouse Edition] these last two weeks, and I have to say, I'm impressed: the game is intuitive, easy to use, retains basically all what makes D&D, D&D...in fact, I'll go out on a limb and say it's what D&D 4th edition always should have been and what D&D 5th edition should be. (If I have a complaint, it's that the art feels like it's trying too hard to be shocking in places, though if that's your only complaint about a game...)

But that's not even the best thing about it. No, the best thing about it is that the rulebooks are in fucking A5. If there ever was a way in which God intended rulebooks to be set out, it would be A5 format paperback. Easy to flick through, light, will fit in a man-bag or brief case, and way more readable in bed or on a train than clunky A4 hardbacks. For that alone, James Edward Raggi IV, I salute you.

Do We Need Villains?

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:48:00 +0000

On this podcast Zak is asked what his favourite villain is. There is then some discussion of what makes a good villain, and the interviewer postulates that in a game, "the villain is the plot"; or, if I understood him correctly, a game is all about how the players react to what the villain does.

That's all very strange to me, and it got me thinking about villains in my games: in short, there aren't any. It's just not how I set things up. I start off with a big list of NPCs and they have their own motivations, goals and relationships, and some of them are very bad, but none of them are really villains in the narrative sense. They're not opposed to the PCs unless the PCs do something to piss them off or go out of their way to set themselves up in opposition to them. (In fact, in D&D in particular, the notion of a Big Bad Evil Guy never made any sense to me: this is a world where there are 20th level Lawful Good paladins, gold dragons, and kirin running about the place, right? So why would any BBEG even care about what this gang of 1st level no-hopers is doing? And why would those no-hopers have to get involved in the first place?)

But that's just in short; in practice, of course, villains emerge spontaneously through play, because if there's anything players are good at, it's doing things that piss off powerful NPCs. Once the game begins and the PCs are doing what they do, it is more or less inevitable that some NPC or other(s) will end up being "the villain" by default. This is as true of dungeoneering-type fantasy games ("Oh, we just pissed off the evil wizard") as it is of cyberpunk-type games ("Oh, we just pissed off the sinister faceless megacorp") as it is of SF ("Oh, we just pissed off those aliens"). In other words, villainy is something that comes about from the game, not something that is there from the start. It's bottom-up, not top-down.

That got me thinking further: is it, perhaps, inherent in role playing games there has to be a villain somewhere? That if there is not a villain from the start, ultimately the actions of the players will necessitate one emerging, unless they literally sit around doing nothing all day? Can there be any genuine interest without a villain existing at least as a corollary?

How to Get the Players to Stop Being Selfish

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:11:00 +0000

I don't normally read the RPG.net columns (I have no idea what qualifies the people who write them to say anything authoritative about anything in the world, ever), but for some reason I decided to read today's. It is called How to Get the Players to Play More In-Character, and it strikes me as the perfect example of something that I've never really been able to understand: the idea that the GM in a gaming group has the responsibility for fiddling around at the margins, trying to come up with ways to incentivise things that should be basic requirements for gaming. Like he is the dad and the players are a gang of 8 year olds who haven't yet developed the rudiments of maturity. This all feeds back to something I've written about before, but why is it that for so many people the basic assumption is that it's the GM's job to cajole the players into just properly participating in the game?

To spin the question another way, why is nobody writing a column entitled "How to stop pissing off your GM and the other players at the table by completely failing to find the shred of human social skills required to realise that you are being a hindrance to the enjoyment of others?" You could call it HSPYGOPTCFCSHSSRRYBHEO, or something.

Creation by Question

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Sat, 12 May 2012 21:44:00 +0000

I ran a first session of Diaspora today; it was entirely comprised of setting- and character generation, which went well - so far, the system looks interesting, and I can't wait to get it started and see how it works in practice.

What struck me while playing is that it's important for lots of questions to be asked during the game. That sounds like a banal observation, but it isn't: I'm not talking about the necessary sort of questions that players have to ask ("Where is the exit?" "What are the orcs carrying?" etc.) but questions which spur the questionee to think, and thereby create.

For instance, I was describing one of the worlds, in one of the systems we were creating, as being a water world, populated by Melnibonean-esque decadent epicureans. One of the players cut in, "Do they live on the surface in big floating cities, or under the water, or what?" And I was forced to think, "Well, where do they live?" And in answering the question more detail was added to the setting: creation by question in action.

There is a lot of power in this, and it applies not just during shared setting-creation type games like Diaspora: it applies in any kind of game - I'm reminded of a Yoon-Suin session I ran online in which one of the players asked whether hijras existed, and I had to think, "Well, do they?" The answer was yes, and another detail was added to the world. But it just as frequently happens during character generation too: "My character is about six feet, built like a brick-shit house, and he's carrying a glaive." "What does the glaive look like?" "Well....It's engraved with runic patterns." "What do they mean?" "Er...he doesn't know, it's a family heirloom and it's a mystery." And so on: questions have power.

I think this comes from the fact that, like using random generators, questions spur creativity through restricting the options. It is the same adage that I've used before: give a man a paper and pencil and say "write a story" and he'll take 10 times as long to come up with something than he would if you'd said "write a story about a murder", and it'll probably be 10 times less interesting. Likewise, saying to somebody "Come up with a world" is a thoroughly different proposition to saying to him: "What is the geography of your world like? Is there a desert? What kind of people live there? Are they warlike? Do they do drugs?" By restricting his creativity, you give it legs.

D&D: Enabling Amorality Since 1974

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:57:00 +0000

I played in Patrick's weekly LOTFP game on Wednesday. (There's an actual play here.) The highlight of the night was probably Patrick's off-the-cuff "Don't you die on me, man!" rule: if you are willing to shout "Don't you die on me, man!" at the top of your voice while stabilising somebody on negative hit points, you automatically succeed. It only works if you play in public, though.

But I digress. What I really wanted to talk about was amorality, and how D&D in particular (but role playing games in general) facilitate it. It really was remarkable how, literally within 10 minutes of joining the game, my character had conspired to loot a crypt, burgle a church, and murder an innocent old woman in cold blood for the crime of being a witness to our theft - and that such goings-on were treated as an almost mundane event within the context of the game (although the DM, to his credit, did disapprove of our awful behaviour regarding the old woman). That could almost be a motto for D&D, I think: the mundanity of amorality.

Let me make a few things clear before I proceed: first, I don't think this is a bad thing. Secondly, I'm well aware that D&D doesn't have to be played this way, often isn't, and perhaps shouldn't. And thirdly, I use the term "amorality" advisedly - what I am talking about is not so much evil or badness but merely the absence of ethical thought: a total deliberate abandonment of moral sentiments, almost nihilistic in its scope.

D&D enables amoral behaviour: that is my contention. It allows you to give voice and effect to actions and beliefs that you would never exercise in real life - in other words, to give free reign to your id without that pesky super-ego getting in the way. In this respect it is rather like Grand Theft Auto, or Grand Theft Auto is rather like D&D: it is a sandbox in which being bad has no real consequence, and your inner demons can come out and play.

There are, however, limits. There are behaviours and beliefs that are not even acceptable to air within the context of a game of D&D (probably rightly, in my opinion); there are lines that oughtn't to be crossed. And the laws of the jungle - a kind of quid pro quo altruism - intervenes too: players help each other in the hope and expectation the favour will be returned. So, despite the fact that my character partook in the murder of an old woman without a second thought, he was kind to the lantern-girl he hired to join the party in entering the dungeon, and assigned one of his dogs to protect her. When the idiotic fighter (complete with irritating 17-year-old player) ran off and fell down a pit trap, the rest of us helped him out because he'd sacrificed material gain in order to find us healing earlier that day. There are moral rules, of a kind.

This suggests that morality enters D&D alongside the "real world", when that intervenes. Player-characters tend to behave better towards one another than to NPCs, because what happens to them matters in the real world: they have players who are real people and who are really invested in them. And likewise, player-characters tend to behave well towards in-game children and animals, because cruelty to children and animals is so utterly unacceptable in our society that it cannot be seen as anything other than abhorrent and evil even in the context of make-believe. (Rightly, I might add.) This is also true "at the margins": rape and torture are likewise so unacceptable in our society that they can generally only be seen as evil in-game, again probably rightly.

Otherwise, all bets are usually off. As I said, I don't particularly see this as a bad thing: it is probably a sign of good mental health that you are able to let your id loose and reign it in at will. The capacity to switch off one's own capacity for moral thought is probably an indication that, otherwise, one's moral compass points in the right direction.

If this entry has been somewhat rambling, it is because it's been 3 weeks since I blogged, and my blogging muscles are atrophied. Bear with me: I'm like a footballer returning from a hamstring injury, or a Carlos Tevez-esque lay-off - I can't quite do the full 90 minutes yet, and need a 60th-minute substitution.

Grist for the Hard SF Mill

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:19:00 +0000

The BBC has a fascinating article about real-life asteroid mining today.

Apart from being, to me, an amazing story about human ingenuity, and proof that future resource constraints will just make humanity cleverer and more ambitious in all manner of ways - there are two things about the story that strike a chord with me.

First, this:

If you look back historically at what has caused humanity to make its largest investments in exploration and in transportation, it has been going after resources, whether it's the Europeans going after the spice routes or the American settlers looking toward the west for gold, oil, timber or land.

That's an elementary lesson in setting design (people don't settle new lands for the hell of it), but also for game design. What do characters do in a Traveller game? Go after resources, or do something related to that. How will society develop? It will be focused on resources. So the message to GMs is: think about where the resources are in your subsector and how they are connected. Everything should come after that.

Second, this:

Water from asteroids could be broken down in space to liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen for rocket fuel. Water is very expensive to get off the ground so the plan is to take it from an asteroid to a spot in space where it can be converted into fuel.

This ties oddly into conversations I've been having by email with Patrick recently, but the future is water. I don't think we'd end up using ice as currency, because it would be too useful as fuel (it's a bit like using steel for currency a la Dragonlance), but you can easily imagine wars over otherwise completely insignificant icy rocks orbiting Uranus some time in our semi-distant future, can't you?

Apology

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:37:00 +0000

I'm moving house this week and have a lot on at work, so posting will continue to be sporadic over the coming days. Apologies. As a teaser, Patrick came up with a great way of hacking the Diaspora rules for a Moons of Jupiter game, and I'll explain how that works at some point.

Po Fe and Xolo

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:41:00 +0000

Centuries ago, a eunuch mercenary-turned-warlord called Po Fe had the archmage Gulvedra take the soul from his body and put into a ruby as big as a large man's fist. Through this, Po Fe thought he could cheat death - Gulvedra would later remove Po Fe's soul from the ruby and put it into a younger, fitter, more virile body than Po Fe's original ageing and genital-less form.

But Gulvedra did not keep his side of the bargain, and he planned to use the ruby containing Po Fe's soul for other, more nefarious ends. Po Fe's followers managed to rescue the ruby but, lacking Gulvedra's skill, they were unable to transpose Po Fe's soul to another human body. Eventually, they constructed a giant puppet, 20' high, and placed the ruby within it, and thus Po Fe finally did achieve an immortality of a kind.

Po Fe can control his puppet to a point, though he cannot speak. He communicates with crude sign language and by writing in sand. This saps his energy and quickly exhausts him, at which point his helpers use cranes and pulleys to help his movements. His followers later constructed for him a companion - a giant wooden puppet dog called Xolo. Seven of these followers volunteered to have their souls imbued into this creature, and they have animated it ever since. Since they are seven in number they do not tire in the same way that Po Fe does, and they will protect him to the death if he is attacked.

Po Fe

Armour Class: 3
Hit Dice: 8+4
Move: 60' (20')
Attacks: 2 fists
Damage: 2d8/2d8
No. Appearing: 1
Save As: F8
Morale: 7
Treasure: Nil
Intelligence: 12
Alignment: Neutral
XP Value: 775

Special: Po Fe quickly tires. After d6 rounds he will be exhausted and be unable to fight.

Xolo

Armour Class: 4
Hit Dice: 8+8
Move: 120' (40')
Attacks: 1 bite, 2 paws
Damage: 2d8/1d6/1d6
No. Appearing: 1
Save As: F8
Morale: 7
Treasure: Nil
Intelligence: 12
Alignment: Neutral
XP Value: 775

Old Dice

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 19:12:00 +0000

I'm moving house at the moment, and you know what that means - opening cardboard boxes that have been dragged down from the loft and examining the contents with a mixture of laughter, puzzlement (why did I keep this?) and nostalgia.

One thing that has emerged from this scraping-over and sifting-through of old mathoms is my first set of dice. These things were bought when I was about 13 or 14 (before that I borrowed friends' dice as quid pro quo for the fact that I had the AD&D 2nd edition books) and they were carried religiously around the town I grew up to a collection of living rooms, friend's bedrooms, and basements for games of D&D, Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun and MERP. Since then they have travelled all around the world, until they wound up almost forgotten at the bottom of a large box which also contained other ancient relics from a bygone age: GURPS 3rd edition and Changeling: The Dreaming.

In Training Day the Denzel Washington character at one stage says to the Ethan Hawke one, "Any good narcotics officer must know and love narcotics." Well, I'm of the opinion that any good role player must know and love dice. Old friends, I salute you.

The appealingly retro sweet tin the dice are housed in, held together with sticky labels because at one stage I had so many dice crammed inside it wouldn't stay shut.

The inside of the tin. I could have sworn I had Warhammer 40,000 scatter dice and autofire dice as well, but they appear to be casualties of the dice tin's odysseys around the world.

The dice themselves. They are cheap and nasty, almost whorish gem dice with suspicious rolling actions and a weightless, soul-less, tacky feel. But time has given them character and significance.

Traditional RPGs are Wood

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 15:47:00 +0000

One of my weekly without-fail podcast listens is BBC Five Live's World Football Phone-In. This week somebody called in and asked Tim Vickery, the "football in South America" correspondent, the simple question: why he loved football. He gave a lot of reasons, but one which struck a chord with me was that he said, in the modern age, there is so much interaction with gizmos and gadgets that sometimes it is nice to just go home after a day's work and touch something that is made out of wood.

To him, football is like wood. It is something from an age before computers, before iPads, before mobile phones, and before the internet. To play or watch football is to connect with the past, but also to the world of physicality and physical objects. It is to feel something natural, tangible, ancient. Something that was around before you were born and will be around long afterwards.

I think role playing games have a similar attraction. There is something about the simplicity of the implements - dice, pencils, paper - that has an actual touchable, holdable charm. They are not the ephemeral, non-corporeal, soul-less products of the computerised age. They are something older and weightier and nicer. There is a trusty, prosaic feel that you get from rolling the dice and scrawling things in pencil that a computer interface can't emulate.

This is why, for me, there is always going to be something unsatisfactory about online gaming, something missing. (Even though it has its obvious advantages.) It's not just the face-to-face interaction: Skype or Google+ hangouts give you that. It's being able to pick up the dice and roll them and let everybody else see the result. It's being able to pick up a piece of scrap paper and pencil out a map. It's being able to decorate your character sheet with doodles of your character. It's being simple in an age of increasingly complex things. I don't know what goes on inside my computer, and I'm fundamentally alienated from it as a result. Dice and pencils are understandable.

Yellow City Crab Fighting

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 20:12:00 +0000

In the Yellow City, crab-men are an untouchable underclass of slaves, as often used for food as they are for forced labour. One of the most popular pastimes in the city is crab-fighting, in which two crab-men are forced to wrestle for the crowd's amusement. "Stables" of crab-men fighters are everywhere in the city's riverside regions, each comprising a handful of fighters and a large number of trainees, overseen by their human owners. A crab-fight is nowhere near as violent as the city's other favourite bloodsport, club-fighting (in which two humans fight with bamboo staves), and generally speaking ends when one of the crab-men ends up on his back, his less-well protected belly exposed. At the worst the loser is boiled alive and eaten, but generally this is a rare occurrence.

Crab-fights often involve a number of fighters on a "winner stays on" basis, with the winner of the first fight taking on a new challenger, and continuing until defeated, whereupon his vanquisher stays on to meet the next challenger.

Crab Fighting Rules

Each crab-man has three combat stats: Strength, Skill, and Speed. These are rated d12, d10 and d8 in whichever order is preferred. Each round, the players roll initiative - i.e. their Speed dice. The winner (highest number) gets to choose whether Strength or Skill is going to be crucial this round.

Then fighting begins. Here, each player rolls their relevant dice, for Strength or Skill. The highest one wins. If the loser has less than half of the total of the winner, he loses immediately - he is tossed onto his back. If he has half or more of the total of the winner, he is still in the round, but is in a weakened position. The winner now gets to roll an additional d6 together with his stat dice and add the totals for the next roll.

The players roll again. Once more, if the loser has less than half of the total of the winner, he loses immediately, and if he has half or more of the total of the winner, he stays in the round but the winner gets to roll an additional d6. Additional d6s are not cumulative - a winner does not get to roll 2d6 if he wins for two consecutive throws.

One the dice have been rolled three times, and there is still not a clear loser, a second round begins and initiative is rolled again, and the process is repeated.

Example 1

Titchy is fighting Bull. Titchy has Speed d12, Skill d10, and Strength d8. Bull has Strength d12, Skill d10, and Speed d8.

Initiative is rolled. Titchy rolls 5 on his d12 and Bull rolls 3 on his d8 - Titchy has initiative. He decides he's going to make it a contest of Skill. Both players have a Skill of d10.

Round 1 starts. Titchy rolls 10 and Bull rolls 9. Titchy has won but not definitively. Next round, he gets to roll d10+d6, and Bull must stick with d10. They roll again. Titchy gets 9+5 on his d10+d6, making a mighty 14. Bull needs to get at least a 7 to stay in the fight. But he rolls a measly 1. He is tossed onto his back and Titchy wins to fight the next challenger.

Example 2

Mammoth is fighting Baboon. Mammoth has Strength d12, Speed d10, and Skill d8. Baboon has Skill d12, Speed d10, and Strength d8.

Initiative is rolled. Both are rolling d10s for Speed; Mammoth scores 2 and Baboon scores 10. Baboon chooses Skill.

Round 1. Baboon rolls 8 on his d12. Mammoth needs at least a 4 on his d8 to even stay in the fight. He manages to get a 4, just barely surviving. But next throw Baboon will be rolling d12+d6 and Mammoth will be stuck on a d8. They roll again. Baboon scores a pathetic 1+2 making 3, and Mammoth scores 3, matching it. It's a stalemate and neither player can add a d6 next throw. Baboon is back to d12 and Mammoth is back to d8. They throw again. Baboon gets 7 and Mammoth gets 5. Baboon is the winner, but not by enough of a margin to defeat Mammoth outright. It is the end of the round.

Round 2 now begins, with Mammoth and Baboon both again rolling d10 for Speed to determine initiative...

You get the idea. Full disclosure: the crab fighting rules are partly a bastardization of the combat rules for In A Wicked Age.

Two Themes are a Couple, Three are a Crowd

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:15:00 +0000

In the comments on my post on Shadowrun a few days ago, John wrote the following:

Cyberpunk is already a mash-up of hardboiled fiction and science fiction. Fantasy and hardboiled both combine well with science fiction on their own, but trying to combine fantasy with hardboiled without seeming frivolous or banal is a major undertaking in itself. Throw in s.f. as well and you've got a major oversaturation of themes going on.

This got me thinking: perhaps John is right, and mashing up two themes works fine, but adding a third causes the edifice to collapse under its own weight? Are there any famous or successful three-way, or four-way, genre mashups?

An experiment. Roll 3d10 and mashup the genres in this table. What do you get?

2, 7, 3: Noir, gothic horror, hard SF. There's a female vampire disguised on a space ship and gradually killing off the crew, and there's a whiskey-soaked detective on board who is in love with her and trying to solve the crime at the same time; the way he solves the mystery is through application of a clever scientific theory. Yeah, I can see how that wouldn't work - gothic horror and hard SF cancel each other out; if the vampire is really supernatural it isn't hard SF any more, but if there is a scientific solution then it isn't actually really gothic horror. Though both work well with noir.

10, 2, 3: Victoriana, noir, hard SF. A steampunk setting in which the details are meticulously laid out so that every element of the steam-powered world makes perfect sense. A whiskey-soaked detective attempts to solve a murder, but the solution revolves around understanding something specifically to do with steam engines. That kind of works, actually, though I'm taking a very loose definition of "hard SF". You'd have to really like steam engines, and really understand what they're capable of and what the implications would be.

10, 9, 6: Victoriana, literary fiction, western. A steampunk western in which nobody does anything except mope and ponder the imponderables while having ennui-inducing sex and taking mild intoxicants. Could sort of work if the writer made great play of the fact that steam, social conservatism and violence are sort of like the human condition. But would be boring and wasteful of its setting.

Maybe John is onto something.

Moons of Jupiter Planetcrawl

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:02:00 +0000

A long, long time ago (I can still remember how those blog entries used to make me smile) I wrote about the Solar System and its vastness, pondering:

In light of [the sheer size of space], and the fact that the solar system contains 8 planets, 5 dwarf planets, 335 moons and millions of asteroids, minor planets, comets, trojans, centaurs and the like, you really have to wonder why science fiction has obsessed for so long about interstellar and intergalactic empires. Isn't the solar system big enough?

It strikes me now that the answer is fairly obvious: aliens. There aren't any in the solar system, or at least not ones we can wage war on/fuck/misunderstand, so SF authors by necessity need to look beyond it if they want Klingons.

But the fact remains: the Solar System is massive. Consider this for a second: the distance between Jupiter and Saturn is from 600 million kilometres to 2 billion kilometres. Jupiter has, at current count, 66 moons. Saturn has 62. Uranus and Neptune have another 40 between them. There have been 1,200 Transneptunian Objects recorded. There is a lot of stuff out there to get lost in. Indeed, the question I am currently considering is not so much "Why bother with what's outside the Solar System?" as "Couldn't you just set a game among the moons of Jupiter or Saturn?"

The moons of Jupiter vary hugely in size - from massive rocky Ganymede, bigger than Mercury, to tiny Cyllene, only 3km in diameter. They also vary in character: Icy Europa may have a great warm ocean beneath its surface which harbours life, while Io is a world of magma and volcanoes. Probably only 4 - the Galilean moons of Ganymede, Europa, Io and Callisto - are "settle-able" in the SF sense, but think of the potential in the 58 others. Secret bases for space pirates. Impossibly ancient and haunted alien monuments. Mines to be warred over. Space stations right and left. Orbital rigs for siphoning gas from Jupiter itself, built on construction bases bigger than cities, that circle elliptically around Callisto.

The thing about the Moons of Jupiter Planetcrawl is that the distances make sense. These moons are generally about 200,000 km apart at their closest (although of course, at the opposite ends of their ellipses, they are a heck of a lot further), which is traversable in a few hours at the speed of, say, Voyager 1. An inter-lunar craft would probably be a lot slower, because Voyager 1 is a big fat cheat and has the benefit of decades of acceleration, but still - it's the sort of travel that is do-able in the Star Trek "set a course for Ganymede and we'll be there by Friday" sense, and is imaginable without too much handwaving if you want your SF hard. And since your scope is somewhat restricted, you can actually flesh out your locations in a lot of detail - you don't end up with Traveller-esque abstraction in which each solar system has a single interesting planet about which there is a single interesting fact and a single culture. You can go deep: what's going on with Callisto? How does that affect what's going on with Io? What's with the planetary war on Europa and will the Jovian orbiters get involved?

I happen to have recently bought Diaspora. Maybe the planets are aligning.

On Shadowrun

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 16:12:00 +0000

It's often said that good science fiction is about taking an idea that is initially preposterous and playing it straight. For this reason Shadowrun should really work. The idea is as preposterous as you can get and therefore, you would assume, has the potential to be genuinely interesting if taken seriously. (I don't mean being played seriously in-game; I just mean the actual setting itself.)

Unfortunately it always came across to me as being cartoonish and frivolous, as if the designers knew, in their hearts of hearts, that what they were coming up with was really rather silly indeed - or else a rather cynical attempt to gain popularity through combining two contemporaneous fads (epic fantasy and cyberpunk). Then again, my perception of the game may have been skewed by the gaming group I was in when I was 15 and Shadowrun was at the height of its popularity - the main raison d'etre for the group was actually smoking weed, if anything, which as well as robbing you of your ambition does not generally make for good gaming. (Don't do drugs, kids.)

I think the most interesting take on Shadowrun would be to make it more fairy-tale and supernatural. It's the future, we all have BlackBerrys in our heads and submachineguns which fire cyanide-tipped bullets and the Chinese and Brazilians have taken over the world, and yet at the same time...there are fucking elves around. And not your D&D "Legolas from the LOTR films" elves - your actual sidhe of myth and legend, who steal babies in the night and replace them with changelings, who trick you of your money and sanity just for laughs, or spirit you away for what seems like hours but actually turns out to be years. Or redcaps who lurk in dark alleys waiting to let your blood so they can dye their hats. Or Gibson-esque Voodou Loa who gain actual spiritual form from the worship of their immigrant followers. Or Wiccan gangsters who use magick.

The key to all this would be the interplay between the fairy and the technological, and the failure of high-tech to deal with the fact that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. You know like how, in a cyberpunk game, the black ops wing of a sinister corporation could hack into your personal emails to find out your movements, or wait for you to come online and then fry your brain with hunter-killer software? Well, what would they do if you never came online because you use magick to communicate with your cronies? Wouldn't that sinister corporation want magick user itself?

Played straight, it works, see?

Of All The Splatbooks I've Loved Before: The Complete Thief's Handbook

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 14:35:00 +0000

I'm conflicted about the 2nd edition "Completes". For every good idea, there was a bad one, and I think there was something damaging about the mentality of endless rules-based customization (as opposed to imagination-based customization) they promoted. Instead of just imagining that your thief was a burglar, you now had a mechanical justification for it, which actually functioned to restrict options by sending the message that in order to do something interesting with a character class there needed to be a TSR-sanctioned way to do so. Rather than extremely broad character classes functioning as a canvas on which a player could paint almost whatever he wanted, suddenly people were rushing to the breast of Mummy TSR to suckle on her dangling teats for their imaginative milk.

However, one thing that the earlier Completes had in common was promotion of random generation as a means of sub-creation. This was an unqualified good. And it gave me an abiding love for the random generator which I don't think will ever go away.

A good set of random generator tables is a game unto itself. It makes DM prep genuinely enjoyable, because it allows you to roll lots of dice and surprise yourself with the results. This is intrinsically fun, but it does something extra - it, in turn, sets off creative sparks in your own mind as you attempt to weld the results together into something that fits. This gives the campaign world detail and throws out, like confetti, hooks for the PCs to get caught on.

Let's illustrate this through reference to the The Complete Thief's Handbook's Random Thieves' Guild Generator. I will now use this generator to create a thieves' guild for the town of Swiftly, which I have just thought up (and stolen the name of from the title of a book I recently read). Swiftly is a river port, and it's a decent sized town - we'll say a population of 8,000. Here goes:

First, we find out how wealthy the town is. It's on a trade route, it has a port, and it's a major town, so it gets some bonuses for this. The final result of 19 - it's very wealthy. Naturally Swiftly is plush with cash from all the goods and money changing hands.

Next, we determine the attitude of the law. I have to know the dominant social alignment, but we'll call that neutral. I roll a 20, which means the law is corrupt. Obviously, the wealth in the town makes it easy to buy off judges. Or maybe the judges are just merchants - they're one and the same thing, and merchant courts run the legal system itself.

After that, we find out the relationships of the thieves to the merchants, and to other guilds. Again, we get some modifiers here because the law is corrupt, the society is rich, and so on. The result is a "standoff". The merchants are not in cahoots with the thieves' guild, but nor are they hostile. Their relationships with the assassins and bards' guilds are indifferent, but there is hostility with the beggars' guild. (I love, by the way, how it is taken for granted that these other guilds exist.) Beggars and thieves don't get along in Swiftly.

We now find out how many thieves there are in the town. The population is 8,000, and it is wealthy, and the law is corrupt, so the number is 2d10+3+10%. So that makes 15, rounded down. Some of these may not actually be in the guild itself - we'll find out shortly.

Now, the characteristics of the guild. I roll a 4, which indicates the leader is a guildmaster. A little disappointing, because if you get a 20 you get to roll on a special sub-table including results like "the guildmaster is a dragon". But you don't want to overdo things. We then turn to the nature of the rule, which is based on three axes: strong/weak, cruel/just, and despotic/populist. The leadership rolls reveal it to be weak, fairly cruel, and fairly despotic. A further roll, on another table, indicates that the membership is cohesive.

From this a picture emerges of a rather pathetic guildmaster who resorts to cruelty and despotism in an attempt to hold sway. The thieves in the guild remain cohesive, perhaps because life is good in Swiftly (it is so rich, and the law is so corrupt), and perhaps because none of them are particularly willing to challenge the guildmaster. They'd prefer to avoid being head of the organisation and thereby becoming targets themselves. They like the easy status quo - the guildmaster is not powerful enough to be anything more than a nuisance - and they are willing to let him be the fall guy if necessary.

The number of thieves in the guild is 75% of the population of thieves as a base rate, with -10% because leadership is weak, making it 65%. That's 9.75, rounded up to 10. The members are neutral to the 5 thieves who are not in the guild. The picture of a relatively lazy, laid-back guild solidifies. The thieves of Swiftly have it so easy, it isn't worth fighting - except, apparently, with beggars.

We now find out the levels of the thieves in the town. There are 2 of level 4, 1 of level 3, and 5 of level 2. The other 7 are 1st level. It makes sense for one of the 4th level thieves to be the guildmaster, with a the 3rd level guy/girl as his lieutenant. The remaining 4th level thief, and 4 of the 2nd levellers, would be independent - being of a certain level of competence, they don't need the guild and prefer to keep all their loot to themselves rather than pay guild fees. The 1st levellers are all good members - probably mostly youngsters.

And there you have it. The next steps would be to flesh out the names, personality and equipment of the higher-level thieves, think up a reason for the war with the beggars' guild, perhaps jot down some other NPCs - notably corrupt merchant/judges, high-up beggars, and so on - and there you have it: a finished thieves' guild. About 10 minutes' work, and something for the PCs to interact with should they ever end up in Swiftly.

Incontrovertible evidence that random generators are your friend.

The Minimalist Approach

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 19:45:00 +0000

In a bid for minimalist efficiency, I am going to attempt to transfer all my notes (and computer files) on Yoon-Suin into this squared/graph note pad and set of index cards. Bottle of wine, cakes and so on are optional extras.

The idea is to be able to carry round the entire thing in one hand, and flip through it at will. I am, from now on, travelling light.

The Platonic DM

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 15:06:00 +0000

The people at Story Games have been going OSR-crazy, it seems. There are at least half a dozen threads about either the OSR generally or OSR games on the top page. (Although to be fair, it seems one of them was Zak baiting the site's denizens.) This one asks what makes an old school game old school - what are the mechanics? - and it inspired me to give a response:

GM neutrality is the bedrock on which old school play is founded. The GM is objective arbitrator, referee, judge. He is neither against the players nor for them. He presents them with the world they interact with, and he provides the consequences for their actions.

I elaborated a bit further:

No human being can be totally neutral, but he can try. That's really what it's about.

There will always be some level of illusionism, because in giving the players freedom they'll go where you don't expect, so you have to just make shit up (NPCs, locations, etc.). You try to do this as "neutrally" as possible by thinking to yourself, "Okay, in this game world, what would happen? What would be here?" Not what would be "fun", not what would be a challenge, not what would kill your players, not what would make a good story... but what would happen.

Random generators help a lot to keep you honest. Roll the dice and go with the results, and don't ever fudge.

That's what I think it's all about, really. If I was listing DMing best principles, or drafting a manifesto, there would probably only be three points:

Try as hard as you can to be neutral.
Think about what would happen, not what would be fun, what would be a challenge, what would kill your players, or what would make a good story. Just what would happen.
Use lots of random generators to keep yourself honest.

None of these points are actually realizable 100% of the time. We are human beings, and human beings are flawed. But you can try as hard as you can, and you'll get better at it. (As Zeb Cook put it, you need to "Take the time and effort to become not just a good DM, but a brilliant one." A big element of that is training yourself to be neutral. At least as far as my own DMing preferences go.)

The platonic DM is, basically, a deistic God who is utterly objective and dispassionate. And being a deistic God is not really such a bad thing to aspire to.

The Yuthada Vaanara of the Eastern Barats

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:22:00 +0000

The foothills of the Eastern Barat range, which extends southwards from the Mountains of the Moon, are home to hereditary bandit clans who make their homes in the thick forests and range far and wide to raid farms and river traders.

They breed and train captured apes who they use as shock troops. Each clan might have a herd of 100 or more of these apes - or yuthada vaanara as they are known - and they are typically allowed to roam free around the clan's territory to scare away intruders. When the time comes for a raid, the clan gather up as many adult males as they can using special calls and whistles (each clan has a different variant) and lead them to the attack.

Yuthada vaanara are fearsome in battle. They target the eyes, jaws, and hands, and typically horribly disfigure those they leave alive. They have dark green fur which camouflages them well in the undergrowth, and they move with alarming speed.

Armour Class: 5
Hit Dice: 2+1*
Move: 180' (60')
Attacks: 1 bite/2 fists
Damage: 1d8/1d4/1d4
No. Appearing: 2d8
Save As: F2
Morale: 7
Treasure: Nil
Intelligence: 3
Alignment: Neutral
XP Value:50

Special: In forests, ranged attacks against a yuthada vaanara are at -2 due to their speed and camouflage. If the bite attack does the maximum damage (8), it randomly removes the left eye, right eye, left hand, or right hand (roll a d4 to determine).