Trollsmyth

You Say "Industry," I Say "Potato!"

2012-04-26T14:01:00.000-05:00

Recent discussion about Monte Cook bowing out of the development of 5e has lead a certain someone to declare that her initial decision to not care about 5e has been validated. This (all happening on G+ where the cool kids hang out and your humble troll occasionally lurks) lead to the requisite argument about the importance of the industry to RPGs.

I think this is one of those areas where people are talking past each other. Watching Zak of all people poo-poo the industry is a bit twitch-provoking. Sure, he doesn’t need the industry, but I don’t exactly see him sending the money WotC’s paying him to advise on 5e back to them.

The DIY community can absolutely point to things like Fight On! and the gorgeous books shipping from Raggi’s living room and proudly proclaim that they can produce high-quality products just like (and often better than) the industry. But that only begs the question of where, exactly, is the line between the industry and the DIY folks.

The line has gotten really blurry with 5e. So far, 5e marketing has largely been about getting the blogging world yammering about it. In just under a month, WotC is promising to unleash a playtesting blitz similar to what the Paizo crew did for Pathfinder. Are all those playtesters part of the industry? What about people who drop some cash into a kickstarter project and get their names in a book? I think they are, and I’m fairly certain Paizo and WotC want them to feel like they are. The products Paizo sells are not nearly as important as the culture they foster, with their wide-open playtests, their organized play, and their RPG Superstar contest all working to blur the line between industry and hobby. Spend some time on the Paizo boards and you’ll discover that Pathfinder isn’t so much an RPG as a friendly, geeky cult. The fans send the corporate headquarters pizza for crying out loud! Even Apple fanatics don’t got that far.

It was recently announced that Tor is going to drop DRM on their ebooks. They can do this because the relationships authors have with their readers is becoming warmer and closer. Readers want to pay for books because they know that’s how writers keep the lights on and afford time to sit down and write. They want to say “thank you” to the authors for what the authors have given them. Paizo’s fans want to do the same thing, as do the fans of Steve Jackson Games. WotC is trying to build the same sort of rapport with their audience.

It’s coming slowly, but the relationship between consumers and producers is transforming. It used to be we just bought what we were offered. More and more, however, we’re developing relationships with the folks who make our stuff. I think RPGs are ahead of the curve here because the line between producer and consumer has always been rather hazy, and is only getting fuzzier with time.

A Swing and a Miss?

2012-04-06T12:47:00.001-05:00

Looks like it to me:

Our current plan is to condense skill and feat choices into two choices: background and theme. Background tells you where you came from, who you were, and what you are trained to do. Your background gives you a set of skills, specific tasks, areas of knowledge, or assets a character of that background ought to have. The thief background gives you Pick Pockets, Stealth, Streetwise, and Thieves’ Cant. The soldier background gives you Endurance, Intimidate, Survival, and an extra language. We want your abilities to carry the weight of basic task resolution, so these skills improve your chances when you perform tasks related to them or just let you do something, such as cook a meal, speak Goblin, or run for twice as long as the next person.

Where background speaks to the skills you possess, your theme describes how you do the things you do. All fighters, for example, kick ass in combat because they are fighters. A sharpshooter fighter is awesome with ranged weapons while a slayer fighter dominates in hand-to-hand combat. Your theme helps you realize a certain style, technique, or flavor through the feats it offers. Each theme gives you several feats, starting with the first one right out of the gate. As you gain levels, your theme gives you additional feats that reflect the theme’s overall character.

There's a lot of maybe here for me. Maybe this will work if skills and feats don't have prerequisites. If they do, then I'm still going to have to build out my character to level 10 or whatever to make sure I pick up the right ones. And maybe it'll work if everyone doesn't decide your fighter must have a certain feat and skill package to be "viable" in the game. If that happens, your attempt to tie background to mechanics has backfired, and now everyone is playing the same background over and over again.

It also depends on how skills and feats are used in the game. Are they additive or subtractive? By this I mean, do the skills work as they do in the Lamentations of the Flame Princess RPG, where everyone has a 1-in-6 chance of finding a trap, but the Specialist can improve his odds? Or can nobody swim unless they have the swimming skill (which, as 3e taught us, means that nobody can swim because, seriously, how often does that come up). They've made noises in the past that indicate that it's more the LotFP style, with everyone at least getting a roll based on the appropriate stat, which is promising.

Ashe and Earth

2012-04-05T15:30:00.000-05:00

If you're a regular reader over at the LotFP blog, you'll have seen Ashe Rhyder's entry in Raggi's March art contest. Rhyder's also been over at G+ offering to do art at request. Leaping at the chance, I finally got the Gefirir that Taichara created for me illustrated:

Of Combat Acrobatics and Not-So-Frustrated Novelists

2012-04-02T14:36:00.005-05:00

While doing research for the sort of project that will never see the light of day, I came across this comment from R.A. Salvatore regarding fight scenes:

It seems to me that fight scenes used to be vague descriptions of the chaos happening around a major character or characters, who were often more interested in accomplishing something within the context of the fight rather than winning the fight itself. Even 30 years ago, I remember reading Terry Brooks's excellent Wishsong of Shannara. I love that book and adored the character of Garet Jax. In the climactic scene for that character, Garet Jax battles a demon. The fight starts, Terry cuts away, and we come back to see the result. Not the fight, but the result. This is tradition. Go back to Homer and Virgil--they don't describe the fights in actual terms, but in symbolic and grand gestures.

So why did it change? Partly, I think it's got to do with the amazing choreography in movies like The Princess Bride.

I think Mr. Salvatore overstates the case a bit, but he does have a point. Take, for example, this famous fight by Dumas, in which D’Artagnan first draws sword alongside the three musketeers:

This contest at length exhausted Jussac’s patience. Furious at being held in check by one whom he had considered a boy, he became warm and began to make mistakes. D’Artagnan, who though wanting in practice had a sound theory, redoubled his agility. Jussac, anxious to put an end to this, springing forward, aimed a terrible thrust at his adversary, but the latter parried it; and while Jussac was recovering himself, glided like a serpent beneath his blade, and passed his sword through his body.

Jussac fell like a dead mass.

It’s not quite the cut-away that Mr. Salvatore describes, but neither is it the detailed recitation of every thrust and parry, every feint and stratagem, every step of the “dance” as Mr. Salvatore calls it. Here's an example of a more modern fight scene from the novel Tiassa by Steven Brust, a noted fan of Dumas' rather droll style:

I pulled a knife from each boot and tossed them underhanded at the two in front of me--one missed, the other poked a guy in the side; both of them flinched. I drew my blade and slashed the nearest, ruining his pretty face, which gave me time to skewer the other in the middle of his body. He dropped his lepip and doubled over; must have gotten a good spot. I slashed at the first again, but missed as he fell backward.

I took the opportunity to turn around, which was just as well; one of them had gotten past Loiosh and was coming at me. I didn't like the idea of his heavy lepip against my little rapier, so I pulled three shuriken from inside my cloak and sent them in his direction. One shuriken scratched his forehead, one missed, and the last almost clipped Loiosh's wing where he was tagging around the other one's head.

"Boss..."

"Sorry."

And I’m willing to go along with his thesis blaming the movies. Consider this flash of blades, the ring of steel-on-steel, but it’s not easy to tell what’s going on, or why Captain Blood won the fight. A few years later, we get the same duo dueling in "The Adventures of Robin Hood".

(Seriously, follow the links. It's fun stuff. I'd have embedded, but apparently it was disabled for both of them.)

Again, the swift and ringing swordplay is difficult to follow with the eye, but in the end, it’s clear what happened: the fiendish Sir Guy cheated, drawing his dagger to get a sneak-attack on poor Robin, and, thus proving his villainy beyond any shadow of doubt, was slain!

Now, compare that to this:

Aragorn gets a brief burst of flashing blade near the end, but for the most part, this fight is all about special moves and impacts. This is a post Rocky IV/Die Hard movie, where the hero takes a pounding, but stays on his feet to win in the end. The hero proves his right to victory by sheer stubborn endurance.

And notice how slow and big the moves are. Even with the editing to add a sense of speed and danger, it’s easy to see what each of them is doing with their weapon, what part of the body they’re aiming for, the results of every swing and thrust. It’s all about the big moves, the sudden reversals, the equipment, and the moments of impact.

The comparison to D&D style combat is obvious. TSR-era D&D has its 10 second and 1 minute combat rounds, the action is vague with the clash of steel, and the sudden end to the fight. One moment, both combatants are fighting to their utmost; the next, one of them is dead.

Meanwhile, 4e is about the slow whittling of resources: healing surges, daily powers, action points; special individual moves like “Fury of the Sirocco” and “Cloud of Steel.” There are even mid-fight transformations to the combat in the form of the “blooded” status. The fights are less climaxes to slowly rising action and more events in and of themselves, sometimes with nary a preamble.

I don’t expect 5e to do much to reverse this trend, but it’ll be interesting to see what they do with it. The 4e/”modern” style combat requires more time, more resource tracking, and more granularity to pull off. The reward is really detailed combats. Getting the latter without the former would be an interesting trick to pull off.

What Dangers Will be Found in the Snake Museum?

2012-03-30T16:05:00.002-05:00

For those of you involved in my G+ game this evening, here's some information you might find useful.

The Snake Museum is a ruin sheathed in creamy jade. The collection of domes rests atop a broad, gently sloping hill. It's a known haunt of the dreaded white apes who sneak out at night to prey upon the spidergoat herds of the simple villagers who live nearby.

There are two known entrances into the Snake Museum. The main entrance on the eastern side, atop a brief flight of steps, was once sealed by a pair of massive doors. Those doors have long since vanished, and this is the preferred exit and entrance of the white apes today. One of the domes on the northern side of the complex has collapsed. While the break there is strewn with rubble, the entrance is nearly for three men abreast to march into the ruin.

Among the rules we'll be using tonight are Shields Shall be Splintered and a variation on my old Table of Death & Dismemberment:

2d6	RESULTS
2 or lower	instant death (decapitated or other grevious wound).
3	fatal wound (gutted, stabbed through lung, broken back, etc.) die in 1d6 turns.
4	severed limb (DM's choice or roll randomly) will die in 3d6 rounds unless tourniquet applied, wound cauterized with fire, or Cure Serious Wounds cast (CSW used for this will not restore lost hp).
5,6	weapon in use broken (if not magical) or armour damaged raising the PC's AC by 2.
7,8	knocked out for 2d6 rounds, unless wearing a helm. With helm, only stunned for 1 round.
9	stunned for 1 round, unless wearing helm. With helm, only knocked down.
10	knocked down.
11	no effect.
12+	a surge of adrenaline returns 1d4 hit points per every other level (1d4 at 1st and 2nd, 2d4 at 3rd and 4th, etc.) At the end of the combat, the adrenaline drains away, hit points are reduced to zero, and the PC faints for 2d6 rounds.

FLAILSNAILS, Ho!

2012-03-26T19:19:00.002-05:00

Sphere of the Shattered Autarch

Adrift upon the Seas of Fate, the Sphere of the Shattered Autarch is a ball roughly 85 miles in radius (giving its surface roughly the same square footage as the British Isles). While it is a disturbingly tiny sphere, its curvature obvious to any creature standing upon it, it exerts as much gravity as a far larger world. It bobs and tumbles slowly upon the Seas of Fate, with half its volume submerged when the seas are relatively calm. By slowly rolling in the Seas, the Sphere creates a facsimile of a day-and-night cycle. All land on one side of the water line is lit nearly as bright as day by a sky full of brilliant, rainbow-hued nebulae. The other side is shrouded in a deep mists and shadow. The line between them does look, to both sides, like the surface of the Seas, but passing through it doesn’t make you wet (though the fogs on the mist side are sometimes thick enough that standing in them long enough will make you soggy).

In ancient times, the Sphere was the battle-barge of a world-plundering Autarch who would descend on unsuspecting populations and unleash the hordes dwelling upon his sphere. It is said he met his fate when he fell madly in love with Tiamat. While wooing the Mother of Wyrms, she rubbed him down with honey-garlic glaze, slow-roasted him, and devoured all of him save his heart, which she still keeps as a trophy in a jar of translucent alabaster.

Population Centers

There are two inhabited port cities on the Sphere, at the poles of the sphere. Both have a large dock facility that sticks out at right-angles from the sphere. To those docking at such ports, ships “on the other side of the sea” appear to be upside down, their keels pointing towards the heavens. Stepping off the docks and onto the sphere reorients “down” as towards the center of the sphere.

AXIS
The larger of the Sphere’s two port cities, Axis is metropolitan by ancient standards with a population of roughly 18,000 individuals. Due to the necessities of the port facility, the buildings at the center of Axis, mostly warehouses and sailors’ dives, are low and long buildings, while the taller towers and spires are out along the edge of the city. It serves as a port and refuge for those sailing the Seas of Fate. The gambling dens and vice halls of Axis are comprehensive in their offerings, but can be expensive, especially if a stranger appears to be wealthy or willing to spend coin freely. The Moon-Beasts have a compound near the port as well, and their agents occasionally roam the streets, scooping up drunks and others who have partied a bit too heartily for employ in their black galleys.

It’s also seen as neutral ground for gods and their minions. Axis doesn’t have temples so much as embassies from untold numbers of gods and godlings, and it’s said that some of its streets don’t actually exist on the Sphere itself, but penetrated the multiverse in various dimensions. Thus, it’s not entirely unheard of for people to stumble into Axis from other worlds without realizing what’s happened.

Finally, Axis houses a massive library. The Library of Axis is fashioned from marble and roofed with gleaming red orichalcum. The sphinx who guards and keeps the library is not very welcome of random visitors, however, and just earning access to the labyrinthine stacks can be a trial in itself.

The sewers of Axis are said to open to the ancient catacombs of Axis, where the heroes of the Autarch’s plunderers were laid to rest. Hundreds of would-be heroes descend into the sewers every year, and most are devoured by baby dragon turtles. More discerning treasure-hunters seek their fortune in the nearby Ziggurat of Ravens, assuming they can find a way in.

ANTIPODES
On the opposite side of the sphere from Axis is the port village Antipodes. The village is always shrouded in thick mists, no matter which side of the water line any particular street happens to be on. It has a third of Axis’ population and is generally considered much less urban and refined than Axis. Its tentpole industries are harvesting cabbages and raising spidergoats in the surrounding hillsides. More adventurous souls use Antipodes as a base of operations for exploring the nearby Snake Museum, an ancient ruin currently overrun by white apes.

Other Spots of Interest

FUNGOID JUNGLES
At various spots along the Sphere’s equator are thick jungles of towering mushrooms, thick drifts of moss and mildew, and pools of bubbling smuts. While it’s believed that these places of devoid of traditional treasures, the sorcerers of Axis will sometimes pay adventurers to journey into them to retrieve certain spores or caps for their experiments.

THE PLEASURE DOMES
The Sphere sports three of these: the Alabaster Pleasure Dome a few days journey from Axis, the Jade Pleasure Dome opposite the Snake Museum from Antipodes, and the Onyx Pleasure Dome hidden in one of the fungoid jungles. None have any obvious entrances. It’s rumored that underground passages must allow access from beneath, and that each is crammed to brimming with the Autarch’s ancient spoils.

THE AUTARCH’S WINTER PALACE
Shrouded in crystal snow, the Winter Palace is carved from green ice. Just beneath the surface of the ice can be seen all manner of bizarre and terrifying creatures, frozen in various positions of lurking or pouncing menace. While the upper levels were plundered long ago, in a few spots the ice is clear enough that lower levels can be seen. None have yet found a way to descend to the palace’s dungeons yet.

UPDATE

Joceyln the cabbage-growing peasant has had a VISION. The slitherous ST. SERPENTOR has come to her IN A DREAM and told her to GO FORTH! and retake THE SNAKE MUSEUM from the fiendish WHITE APES that therein dwell, so that it may be consecrated as a monastery in HIS name. She seeks fearless companions to aid her in this worthy quest, and to share in the TREASURE!

The expedition will take place on ~~Saturday~~ Friday 7pm Eastern / 23:00 UTC on Google Plus. The game is run under the FLAILSNAILS conventions. Jocelyn is a 1st level Labyrinth Lord character built with Stuart Robertson's Paladin subclass. I'll be running a bastard version of Moldvay/LL, with Shields Shall be Splintered, some variation on the Table of Death & Dismemberment, and whatever tickles my fancy at the time. Characters above 3rd level will be handicapped.

Verisimilitude: It Doesn’t Work That Way

2012-03-23T00:38:00.001-05:00

I’m willing to go along with some of what Rick Moran says about the trouble with selling a Barsoom movie to an audience, but not this:

Besides, everyone today knows that there is no life on Mars, could never be life on Mars, thus destroying the premise of the movie from the outset. And since most of the potential movie-going audience had no preconceived notions of the source material, and had no treasured memories of being swept up by the narrative, most of the audience ended up at sea — caught between wanting to suspend belief and their own realistic assumptions about Mars. In the end, how could you ignore what your own eyes have shown you about the Red Planet? We’ve had rovers exploring the surface of Mars for more than a decade.

Uh-huh. And James Bond movies flop because submersible undersea bases make no sense. Star Wars was a flop because we know explosions make no sound in space, and spaceships don’t swoop around like aircraft. How many times have we seen the facade at Petra used in a movie? And how many people have walked out of a theater because they knew that was tourist attraction in Jordan, and not where the movie-makers were trying to say it was, or what it was? I’ll bet you could count ‘em all on one hand.

But that’s the way verisimilitude works. It says, “Ok, we’re going to do this one crazy thing that we both know ain’t real. Just go with it, and we’ll have fun.” Really good fantasy and sci-fi then goes with that one change and follows through on the rational consequences: Han Solo can tell the difference in the sound of lazer blasts from asteroid collisions, James Bond needs a car that can transform into a submarine, and John Carter enjoys incredible strength and the ability to leap over tall tharks in a single bound while on Mars.

People watching Heroes had no trouble with accepting the idea of ordinary people being imbued with super powers. Those who enjoyed Lost didn’t nit-pick over all the insane crazy things that happened on the island, even when no explanation was quickly offered. Heck, that was almost certainly one of the big draws for the viewership (ditto X-Files). Modern audiences are well acquainted with the bargain of verisimilitude. You can tell when it’s being used poorly (Avatar - link NSFW) and even then lots of folks will give it a pass.

Photo by Arian Zweger.

GURPS: Coming to a D&D Game Near You!

2012-03-20T00:47:00.000-05:00

I keep running across articles and comments written by folks who seem utterly perplexed by what the 5e team is saying about D&D Next. How can you have one-hour games that finish even one combat and 4e-style grid maneuvers? How can the game appease both folks who want OSR-style fantasy fucking Vietnam and precious-snowflakes who will never die to mooks and random chance?

C’mon, folks, they haven’t exactly been cagey about this. They’re going to build a bare spine of a game and then give you modules to build your own personal campaign from. Want race-as-class? Great, here are some dwarf, elf, and halfling classes to slot into your campaign. Your neighbor wants race and class to be separate? Great, here’s some race modules they can slot in instead.

But what, then, goes up the cry, will be the default game? I can’t say for certain, but if they’re going to do everything they claim to be setting out to do, I imagine it’ll be so bare-bones as to be neigh unplayable. It’ll be stats, BABs, saves, and that might be all of it. Every class, race, spell, etc would be part of a module. Every campaign will be unique, nobody will use all of it, and everyone will be talking in bizarre shorthand about how their campaign works (“D&D w/Core4 cls, no hlf or gnm, hrdcr dmg.”)

Assuming they plan to take it to this extreme, the really interesting question will be how they plan to publish supplements and adventure materials that would cover every available style. Perhaps they don’t? Maybe they’ll just focus on core books and settings that provide more slottable rules modules?

All their surveys certainly seem to point to this idea. The more diverse (or fractured, take your pick) the community reveals itself to be, the more this option looks like the logical next step. Though this doesn't address comments that a 1e-sytle fighter and a 4e-style fighter can play at the same table. That just sounds like a recipe for disaster. So I’m willing to entertain the notion that I’m completely wrong here; my track record with predictions for 5e has been notoriously bad so far. ;)

Moebius Ended

2012-03-11T00:31:00.000-06:00

Art by Loopydave.

Hex Mapping Part 20: The Politics of Hex Crawling

2012-03-06T14:32:00.000-06:00

So, the PCs are all eager to head into the wilderness. You've got it mapped out, you have your random tables at hand, and you're ready to rock-and-roll.

What next?

Traditionally, the most defining feature of a hex-crawl is resource management. The further the PCs get from civilization, the better the rewards and the cooler the encounters. But the further they also have to go to replace consumed supplies, destroyed equipment, and lost mounts and hirelings. There's an obvious solution to this problem: the PCs can get their supplies from the monsters.

Sure, they can pillage and plunder their way across the landscape, but that only works so long as they encounter groups that are relatively easy to defeat in battle. And that's not what I'm talking about here.

Unless you're running the sort of game where monsters are the physical manifestations of an ambient and utterly evil malevolence, they'll have functioning communities and economies. These might be really small communities and extremely basic economies; I'm thinking my goblin tribes are 200 to 600 individuals with fairly advanced neolithic tech. But they sell the PCs arrows, mounts, and food, while the tribe's shamans can provide extremely basic (ie levels 1-3) magical services.

Once your players have made that leap, things can get really interesting. Clearly, there's conflict between the various monster groups on the island I've mapped out. In the east, we have goblins vs. lizardfolk vs. orcs vs. bullywugs. But there's no reason you can't make it more granular. Maybe the individual goblin tribes don't always get along well. As the old saying goes: me against my brother; my brother and me against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the stranger.

A variation on Zak's Connections Between NPCs Diagram from Vornheim is great for this sort of thing. You can scale it up for allied nations of villages, or down to cliques among the females in a single village.

Generally, you want to move from the micro to the macro in this. In the first village the players attempt to deal with, maybe they'll get involved in a fight over the chieftainship of the village. After that, they could improve their relations with the new powers-that-be by championing that village against another. And then help cement an alliance of goblin villages to thwart raids by lizardfolk slavers...

For your part, don't be think more than one or two opportunities ahead. Scatter a few opportunities before your players and let 'em play with the ones that interest them. It's usually not worth it to try to guess what the players will do; they'll frequently surprise you. Look at what happened, who benefited and who got a bloody nose, and build the next set of opportunities on that.

And always keep an eye on the horizon. Who are the monsters the players are dealing with dealing with in turn? How can you draw the attention of the players out towards the next line of hills, across the next river? You're weaving an interconnected world here, not telling a village-of-the-week story. Always be tossing out links to the big picture, or having macro concerns affecting micro challenges.

Art by Arthur Rackham.

Helium Triumphant!

2012-02-29T23:12:00.001-06:00

“John Carter,” the Princess of Mars movie, is fun!

Purists are gonna hate it; it's actually a conflation of A Princess of Mars and The Gods of Mars. Kinda... There are lots of liberties taken with both stories.

But oh, there is so much here. John Carter is a fighting man from Virginia, and he fights through the whole movie. By the time we are finished with his introductory scenes, I knew I was going to enjoy this flick.

Did you know the people who made “John Carter” are Pixar folks? The Director, Andrew Stanton, also directed “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E” and has writing credits on all three “Toy Story” movies and “Finding Nemo.” And it shows in “John Carter” because so many things that shouldn't work, work. John Carter's speeches work. The tharks work. Woola works.

There's a scene that must have looked cringeworthy on paper, that combines action, melodramatic flashbacks, and comedy. And it works.

Tars Tarkas is an ass, but you like him. The Heliumites are bold and noble without being wooden and dry. Deja is a warrior-scholar-princess without coming across as an overachieving “tiger baby” ice queen.

The trailers looked a bit rough, felt a bit flat. The movie does not. If “The Avengers” and “The Hobbit” were not coming out this year, I'd risk suggesting that it would be the most fun you'd have in a theater this year. If it had come out last year, I know it would have been the most fun I'd had in theater in 2011.

Racial Disharmony

2012-02-05T13:34:00.001-06:00

Over at WotC’s “DnD Next” page, Monte Cook has written a second article kinda circling around how to handle PC races. Basically, Mr. Cook is wrangling with the question of how much mechanical impact your choice of race should have. Since I can’t seem to figure out how to post over there, and since I don’t have time to write something brief and pithy, blog post!

If you’re going to separate race and class (and we know they are for 5e) and class is going to dictate the lion’s share of your character’s abilities, what does that leave for race? Traditionally, race has offered a few small tweaks to your character sheet: a few bonuses or penalties to stats (which vanished in importance fairly quickly in every iteration of the game) and a handful of special abilities and bonuses (which also often got swamped out by escalating bonuses and abilities as the characters approached mid-level). In 1e, the big bonus you got from choosing a non-human was the opportunity to multi-class, and it was fairly similar across the races.

If you’re going to bother having character race be a choice, what do you want to accomplish with it? Or, rather, as is the case for 5e’s design team, if you’re stuck with including elves, dwarves, halflings, etc. in your game, what opportunities do they give you?

What pops foremost in my mind is the chance to create a new experience while playing a familiar class. The basic mechanics of the class might still be the same (still rolling a d20 to hit with your weapon or still picking spells in advance via a Vancian system), but the race should offer a wrinkle that fundamentally changes how you play that class. That means more than a simple +1 when using certain weapons or the like.

What you’d look for are frequently used but seldom modified sub-systems that can be adjusted by your choice of race. One of my favorites is inventory management. The dwarf’s extra carrying capacity in LotFP’s encumbrance rules or my own pixie’s equipment costing half as much as normal are examples of this sort of thing. A race that received extra benefit from clerical spells would play very differently than norm for just about every class, as would one who was highly resistant (or even nearly immune, even to beneficial clerical magic). A race that reacted very differently to dropping to nearly, or below, zero hit points might also offer some interesting differences (assuming the PCs in your game did that frequently enough). So might a race that couldn’t wear armor but offered alternative options for adjusting AC.

That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are enough interesting sub-systems in 5e that they could come up with a fun and interesting tweak for every race that would alter how you play nearly every class enough to make playing a fighter of one race very different from playing a fighter of another. Keeping it all balanced would be a headache, but as I’m a “combat as war” kinda guy, I’ll admit to not being terribly interested in that aspect of it.

Playing with Doom & Tea Parties

2012-02-01T15:45:00.002-06:00

This post is an attempt to round up all the house-rules and background details I use in my Doom & Tea Parties Labyrinth Lord hack game. It's been running for just over 2 years now and I'm quite happy with it.

This is primarily intended as a resource for my players. I also have little random tables and the like I use on my side of the GM screen. Many of these have been posted on this blog, and I'll probably pull them together in a post like this sometime soon. Maybe.

It'll also serve as a one-stop spot for new players entering the campaign. We play online, via MapTool, so it's common to have players I've never met face-to-face before.

Introduction to the Campaign

Character Creation - I ended up using the equipment lists from 2e's Al-Qadim. Say what you will about 2e, but it had the best equipment lists. Plus a few additional goodies.

Languages

CLASSES

Gnomes

Half-ogres

Nixies

Pixies

Rogues

Witches

For clerics: The Gods

For magic-users (usually called sorcerers IC): Residual and Secondary Powers From Prepared Spells

COMBAT
Weapons, Initiative, and Damage

Shields Shall be Splintered!

The Table of Death & Dismemberment - I do not use the Constitution bonus when rolling on this table.

Example Combat

THINGS TO BUY (not found in 2e's Al-Qadim Supplement)

Drugs & Herbs

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5kepticism and Intrigue

2012-01-27T11:23:00.001-06:00

DDXP opened yesterday, and the first reports are coming back in. It’s the first public playtests of 5e, plus seminars and whatnot, with bits and pieces being dribbled out. Unlike with 4e, there seems to be more of an effort to explain the core experience, but, as you’d expect, there’s not much in the way of details.

Geek’s Dream Girl is clearly a fan already, so we probably need to take what she says with a grain of salt (unless you happen to know that her tastes mirror yours). She’s posted a rundown of Thursday’s 5e seminar entitled “Charting the Course: an Edition for All Editions.” (You can see a much rougher “transcript” cobbled together from various sources at ENWorld, too.)

You may recall, way back a few years ago, Ryan Dancey talking about his dream RPG. One of his central themes was modularity; each group would basically build their own rules from a list of options, kinda-sorta the way GURPS works in practice, but with a more up-front, compartmentalized collection of building blocks. It looks very much like that’s what the 5e team has in mind here.

That would seem to be a big enough challenge to me, but then they go on to explain how you can have PCs built using different modules (that’s blocks of rules, not adventures, for you grognards who might become confused by their use of the term) playing at the same table. That is, someone playing a bare-bones kinda-sorta 1e style fighter could play at the same table as a push-slide-pull 4e fighter, and they’d both be balanced enough to play together without one overshadowing the other.

That more than raises an eyebrow with me. The issues involved in picking your rules are not just how many pages you want your character sheet to run. 1e combats are fast, simple things, in and out and then dealing with the consequences. 4e fights are long, detailed, involved things. The guy who wants to play a 1e fighter isn’t just saying that he doesn’t want to deal with 5 foot steps, Attacks of Opportunity, and push-and-slide combat maneuvers. He’s also saying things about how important he wants combat to be in his games, how long he wants it to last, and what combat means for the games he’s playing in. I really don’t see how you can mix a 1e-style fighter with a 4e-style fighter and not end up with somebody bored and/or frustrated.

Geeks Dream Girl follows up with some brief comments about getting to play in a 5e game run by Monte Cook. She says some promising things there:

There was a LOT of talk at the table. In character at times! I’ve never been at a D&D table where players were more invested in figuring out their next move.

On that topic, your next move isn’t on your character sheet. You don’t go paging through all your stuff thinking, “Well, I could Bluff this guy.” Nope. We were doing what we thought our characters should do, even if that involved our very NOT charismatic half-orc fighter trying to be a charismatic leader of a band of skeptical savage orcs. Multiple times. In other games, it’s “Okay, who has the highest Charisma? You? Okay, you go talk to those orcs and get them to help us.”

That raises some eyebrows as well, but of interest rather than skepticism. That sounds like a game of D&D I’d enjoy playing.

UPDATE:

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

- Harry Emerson Fosdick

Be sure to read through the comments.

What if Star Wars Sequels Were Made by Italians?

2012-01-25T15:42:00.000-06:00

No need to guess. Dark Resurrection is on the intrawebs.

I just finished watching "Vol. 0." The writing is ok, the acting is decent, the fight choreography needs some work (maybe they should get some help from these guys) but the effects, props and costuming are excellent. The style is very European; you can be forgiven for not realizing it's the Star Wars universe until the lightsabers come out. (And yes, they continue the notion that Force-users = lightsabers.)

Two thoughts:

- from now on, padawan should refer to their mentors as "Maestro" rather than "Master."

- Hollywood has a lot more to fear from Blender than they do from file sharing.

Hex Mapping Part 19: There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills!

2012-01-24T13:39:00.000-06:00

We’ve got a map, we’ve got our random tables, and we’ve got a team of players ready to tackle our wilderness hex map. Taking a peek at the view from the players’ side of the DM’s screen, the obvious question for them is: why go?

Dungeons are great for players. They know exactly where the monsters are likely to come from, they are full of treasure, and they are relatively easy to map. In the wilderness, there’s much less treasure per square mile, the monsters are not easily categorized in terms of toughness by your depth beneath the earth, and they can pounce you from nearly any direction.

So why should they go out there?

Seven Cities of Gold: There’s some insanely fabulous treasure out there. If the PCs find it, it’ll easily kick them to the next level, maybe higher since it’ll probably take multiple trips to bring it all back to civilization. It’s brimming with magic in the form of lost spells, swords fabled in the annals of history, and holy relics. If the PCs find it, they can buy their own private island and retire as kings!

If I was going this route with my current map, the big haul would, of course, be in the sheltered valley at the center of the map. But the entire island would be scattered with clues as to its whereabouts, and maybe bits of related treasure would be seen in other hauls. If the campaign begins with some dungeon runs, they’d find hints about the treasure to whet their appetites in those dungeons first.

Of course, if you’ve got seven cities of gold to hunt down, maybe the PCs uncover the smaller ones before working their way to the capital.

The Legolas & Gimli Expedition: Powerful (or, at least, wealthy) interests back in civilization want the wilderness mapped and they’re willing to pay to have it done. Usually, there’s a flat fee for every hex mapped (60 gp or so, depending on the size of the party), which encourages both caution and speed to earn relatively easy money. Bonuses will be awarded for securing resources that are of interest to the PCs’ patron. Maybe they want logging or mining rights, or negotiated trade settlements with the natives. Or, in the case of the classic Keep on the Borderlands, the lords of a newly settled castle need the surrounding territory explored and cleared of monsters, so the bonus is on monster heads.

Missing Persons: There’s somebody out there the PCs want to find: lost family members, kidnapped princesses, or hated enemies the PCs want to track down and slay. Be careful about dragging this one out too much; there’s only so much “your princess is in another castle” most players will put up with.

Lost: I’m a big fan of shipwrecks, defeated armies, or other variations on the theme of being stranded out in the wilderness as a way to start off a campaign. The caveat with these is that, once the PCs find their way back home, they might have little incentive to return to the wilderness.

There’s no reason, of course, you can’t mix-and-match these. In fact, you probably should. “Yes, we know you just escaped from the goblin-infested jungles of the eastern coast after being shipwrecked, but you now know that territory better than anyone, and we’re certain the fabled Tower of the Stars is out there somewhere. Here are the clues we have to its location...”

Don’t fret too much about keeping the PCs out in the wilderness after they’ve spent some time exploring, making friends and enemies, and learning the lay of the land. These are all just baits for the hook of a persistent world that reacts to their presence in it. We’ll talk more about that next time.

1e Back in Print?!?

2012-01-19T13:44:00.001-06:00

Jeff's got the skinny and some excellent analysis. Not sure I need 'em (my original 1e PHB is still in decent shape) but as I and those books get older, I can't help but think that having some "stunt copies" for actual use is a good idea.

If you don't own a copy of the 1e DMG, and you play any sort of fantasy RPG at all, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy. It's got a huge range of useful-at-the table info, like the reputed magical properties of various gems (pp. 26-27), the cubic volume of rock miners of various races can excavate (p 106), the healing properties of herbs and spices (pp. 220-221), and those wonderful 1e artifact-level magic items. Plus, some of the best art of the era.

If I could own only 1 RPG book, well, ok, I'd probably go with the 1e PHB. But for running a game, designing campaigns and adventures, or just pure inspirational reading, I've not seen anything yet that can touch the 1e DMG.

UPDATE: Here's a link to the actual product description at WotC's page.

Marketing 5trategery

2012-01-10T13:33:00.000-06:00

Not much to say about 5e yet, but a few of the marketing decisions WotC has made have caught my attention.

First, we had the Big Media Blitz: articles in the NYT, Forbes, and CNN as well as more industry-focused outlets like The Escapist. The nameplates are enough to make it clear that this is "serious news." But the content of the articles is very interesting. They're mostly written in a first-person editorial style. Even the NYT article, probably the most traditional in tone, completely lacks the usual corp-speak infested press release we've come to expect from this sort of thing.

Mingled with the Big News folks were bloggers like Dave Chalker enlisted to spread the word on the 'nets. Phase Two begins at the D&D Experience convention where Dave and the Chatty DM will apparently be running demo adventures for the new edition. Follow up comes through using the weekly Encounters program to get the new rules out there for folks to playtest.

So it's a one-two-three punch combination: Big News media outlets, the D&D blogging community, and the FLGS network. It's very corp-light, very friendly, and at least feels very interactive. It includes people many of us already have relationships with (if only as regular readers and shoppers). And WotC's out-of-pocket costs are primarily made up of flying people out to Seattle and putting them up in a hotel.

Even the apparent fumble of a lack of an announcement on the front of the official D&D web page makes this feel like a friendly, come-around-the-back-door invitation, rather than a proclamation from on high.

Making WotC seem friendly and approachable would seem a Herculean task. Doing it on a shoestring budget smacks of genius.

Somebody involved in this project clearly knows what they are doing.

Confu5ion

2012-01-10T07:00:00.003-06:00

So, 5e is now officially in the works and has, as others have surmised, already had early bits playtested. This means pretty much every single one of my predictions for 5e was absolutely wrong. ;D

I gotta admit, I have no idea what the plan is here. Hiring Monte Cook looks kinda-sorta like an appeal to the 3e crowd, but that would be insane. Those folks are quite happy with Paizo and I know more than a few still feel burned by how 4e was marketed and designed. Does talk about making the game "as simple or complex as you please" mean a bifurcation of the game into D&D and AD&D again? And what are we to make of promises to keep the game's "action focused on combat, intrigue, and exploration as you desire"? One of the themes of this blog is how that sort of choice ought to be echoed in just about every design decision that follows.

Keeping in mind my awesome track record on predictions, here are mine for 5e:

Class-based, with Levels, Hit Points, d20s, and AC
I doubt that's even up for debate. These are considered the most basic attributes of D&D and I doubt the brand is so hurting that they'll touch any of these low-hanging sacred cows.

There Will be Boxed Sets
And there will be a "Basic" intro box sold in stores like Target or WalMart. There will also be coffee-table quality hard backs as well, though how strongly the two are linked remains to be seen.

There Will be a Strong Focus on Tactical Combat
Most folks think that's what D&D is. There will be lots of effort put into balancing combats, combat options, and giving everyone lots of choices in every round. This will continue to make the goal of faster combat elusive.

And hey, since it's my blog, I'm predicting Shields Shall be Splintered will be central to the new design! ;)

There Will be Some Flavor of Social Combat Mechanic
It will be much more rigorous and involved than 4e's lackluster skill challenges. There will likely be class-specific abilities for it as well, and every class will be able to bring something to the "fight," even Fighters. Like tactical combat, it will eat hours like they were potato chips.

Less Hardback, More Monthly
I'm still thinking we'll see something along the lines of Paizo's monthly Pathfinder adventures. It may even been a resurrected version of either DRAGON or DUNGEON magazines. I also think the plan, at first, will be to limit the number of hardbacks published to one or two a year after the original three come out.

This is Only the Beginning
Let the LOLs begin!

Best of luck to Mearls, Cook, and the rest of the team. I suspect they're gonna need it.

Hex Mapping Part 5 Addendum: Moral Landscapes

2012-01-09T12:33:00.000-06:00

Getting back into the swing of blogging, I've been going back through my posts about hex-mapping. Part 5, where I discuss placing the terrain features that exist between mountains and coastline, brought to mind a conversation I had with a friend about alternatives to pseudo-realistic geography.

The guidelines I gave will tend to generate a landscape that is reasonably realistic. This should give you a map suitable for a campaign built around the assumptions that under-gird the stories of Conan, Elric, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, or Odysseus. In short, it's designed to fit very well with what most of us consider the default assumptions of the early versions of D&D.

Good 'ol Appendix N has a lot more going on in it than just those stories. Consider the landscape of the Arthurian romances, for instance: trackless forests peppered with magical castles, enchanted pools, and bridges fashioned from giant swords. The lands of Narnia and Oz are like unto it. All of them share a moral component in their landscapes. The moral character of the land's rulers and inhabitants actively shapes the landscape.

In Part 5 of this series, geography informs the location of populations within it. A more Arthurian geography turns that on its head. The twisted and wicked troll king does not choose to live in lands of tangled brambles and sulfurous hot springs. Rather, whatever land the troll king chooses to dwell in will eventually become tangled with thorny brambles and dotted with sulfurous hot springs. Likewise, the lands around Camelot are not rich and fertile due to geography so much as the virtuous nature of the King and his court ("The land and the king are one.") Should that virtue be compromised, the land's fertility will suffer and fair weather will turn foul.

If that's more the feel you're going for, you should place your terrain features after you've decided who lives where. Kingdoms will tend to be small (most seemed to have but one large city, if that many, and it was centered around the capital castle) and there will be little trade between them. It wouldn't be unusual at all to come across some land or castle nobody from back home had ever heard of before. You might even easily cross between worlds without realizing it, a la the Mabinogian.

It doesn't need to be an either-or thing, of course. Tolkien's Middle Earth seems to borrow a bit from column A and a bit from column B here, where the geography itself is anthropomorphized enough to create its own moral atmosphere. Ancient tragedies create modern terrain hazards, but most of the world appears to operate under the forces of geology and meteorology well known to most of us. In such a world, the features of the troll king's kingdom have a certain chicken-or-the-egg mystery about them; does he live there because he chooses, does the landscape follow him, or does he create it somehow?

Cartography Turned Up to 11

2012-01-04T19:45:00.000-06:00

One of the really invigorating aspects of gaming today is how so many people seem eager to take what's been done a hundred times before and do it again but better. We've seen this from industry giants (the index of Ptolus leaps to mind) as well as relative newcomers to publishing.

Here's an example from real-world cartography:

Post-computer editing decisions are frequently outsourced—sometimes to India, where teams of cheap workers will hunt for obvious errors and messy label overlaps. The overall goal is often a quick and dirty turnaround, with cost and speed trumping excellence and elegance.

By contrast, David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It’s the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.

What follows are a few choice examples of how Mr. Imus put more info into his map than most have and made it more legible. Definitely lessons for our hobby here, I'm certain.

Ow...

2012-01-02T23:02:00.001-06:00

Yeah, so this is when I'm supposed to review last year's resolutions and look ahead to this year with some new ones.

Ouch.

I think I managed to achieve just two of my resolutions for 2011. Oddysey did run some Pathfinder for me, and I did do more book reviews.

Everything else?

Ouch.

To say 2011 was not a banner year for this blog is an understatement. It wasn't a banner year for pretty much any aspect of my life. It wasn't the worst year (far from it!) but I can't say I'll look back on it very fondly, beyond a few bright spots here and there, mostly to be found in the first half.

So, back to it! More writing, but most of it won't be at this blog. My goal is once a week here. Why so little? Because I've got a lot of catching up to do. I've got some writing that needs finishing up for Raggi (which should be a fun treat for those of you who have enjoyed what you've read here) plus damn near everything I mentioned last year.

And yes, I will be retuning to the my series on hex-mapping. There's still a lot to say there, including some reflections on earlier bits in the series.

The good news is that it's all fun. I'd love to be finished with it, sure, but I'm looking forward to spending time on it all as well.

Wish me luck!

Pathfinder Does a Beginner Box

2011-10-15T13:04:00.001-05:00

Urgh...

Ok, so a project that was supposed to be due sometime in mid-November is now due by November 1st, which means blogging will be spotty until next month. Even my regular gaming has been thrown off schedule. This is what I get for boasting about how we play nearly every week. For those of you to whom I owe writing, yeah, might be a little late because of this. Basically, work is sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

Paizo's decided they wanted to get in on the box action, and they're launching their beginner box this month. It includes a 64 page player's book (nice traditional page-count there) that will get you all the way through 5th level. The pre-gen character sheets are done up to explain how to use the stuff on the sheet to minimize running back to the book. There's also a DM's book that's twice as long that includes an intro adventure that introduces different aspects one-per-room (the first room involves a skill check, the next room has a combat, etc.). It also includes 100+ monsters with a much more strealined statblock (still not old-school simple, but surprisingly sleek for 3.x game) and advice on building your own adventures. Plus other goodies:

Frankly, the neatest parts to me are the character sheets for the pre-gens that give you the basics right on the sheet. For a game as complex as 3.x, that seems pretty vital to me. I'm also intrigued by the implication made towards solo play out of the box (though no details, so possibly I misunderstood that part).

The box comes out in late October and retails for $35. That's probably still in the impulse-buy range for people with jobs and comfortably below the price of a new computer or console game. The challenge for Paizo will be getting it in front of potential new players; their strength has always been in catering to the existing 3.x community, and I doubt they're going to have penetration into WalMart or Target.

Hex Mapping Part 18: In the Hot Seat

2011-10-05T09:33:00.001-05:00

On the subject of random tables, someone recently asked me, "how much is enough?" That really depends on you and your skills as a DM.

The dungeon isn't just easier for players. It's also noticeably easier for GM's. Each room is usually a unique experience. You almost never see dungeons consisting of the same type of room over and over again. Why would you do that to your players? It's boring.

Now let's take a look at our wilderness map. It's got a lot of the same sort of hexes right next to each other. To the west, we have lots and lots of savanna. In the east, it's lots and lots of jungle. In terms of geography this looks right. In terms of running a D&D adventure this looks like a nightmare. How in the world are you going to prevent this hex crawl from devolving into an endless repetition of "another two hexes of jungle"?

If you happen to be one of these amazingly creative types who can come up with interesting stuff on the spur of the moment, you've got no problem. This map plus some wandering monster tables should give you all you need to create interesting terrain and situations for your players to deal with. If that's not you, however, you might want more help. And you can give yourself all the help you need with more random tables!

Keep in mind, however, that were still talking about a fairly gross scale for all of this. So the sort of things we want to be talking about are probably going to be those things that you almost assuredly can't miss if you enter one of our 6 mile hexes. So most of the interesting features we should be talking about need to be at least a mile long, tall enough to be seen from miles away, or extremely flashy.

Any day (but not night) where a random monster isn't encountered, or some other interesting terrain feature (like a village or river) isn't encountered, roll a d12 and consult the following table for the jungle:

1: Nothing.

2: More nothing.

3: Even more nothing.

4: Short cliff of obsidian, measuring 3d4 feet high and 1d4 miles long.

5: Elven ruins built around a circle of massive crystal menhirs. Any magic-user spells cast while standing inside the circle are treated as being cast by a magic-user or elf of 150% their level (round down). If the moon is full, then treat the spell as being cast by someone with twice the level of the caster.

6: Empty monster lair. Roll on the wandering monster to table to see the type of monster, then roll for its treasure as per normal. 1d6 x 10% of the rolled treasure is here. If the monster rolled is sentient, there may be traps.

7: Quicksand! Double movement penalties through one hex.

8: Ancient Goblin Burial Ground. If players search this area, they can collect 2d100 copper pieces, 1d100 silver pieces, and 10d100 gold pieces worth of jewelry every hour, for 1d4 hours. However, for every hour that they actually find something, there is a 1-in-4 chance that they will be assaulted by 1d100 goblin skeletons the following night.

9: PCs stumble across the corpse of a dead adventurer. The human died of disease and/or infected wounds. The corpse will have fairly standard adventuring gear, plus one random potion. There's a 1-in-6 chance the corpse was carrying a map of the area and that this map hasn't been completely destroyed by moisture. It will reveal 1d4 hexes in each direction from the current location (roll separately
for each direction).

10: Ancient Shrine. Roll randomly to determine the alignment of the deities the shrine was dedicated to. Clerics of compatible alignments who meditate or pray at this shrine will be able to cast an additional 1st level spell the next day. Clerics of the opposite alignment will have the next spell they cast with a random component behave as if the lowest possible number was rolled.

11: An especially monstrous tree. If the PCs scale the tree to its top (this will eat 3 hours for up and down) they can map out every surrounding hex.

12: PCs stumble across the entrance to a dungeon!

What You May Have Missed: Romancing the Clone

2011-10-01T13:28:00.000-05:00

Yes, I'm still alive! Just busy as all get-out. New text-mapping posts should be showing up next week.

In the meantime, unless you are a fan of 3.x gaming you may have missed what Paizo's been up to lately. Of particular interest to me have been attempts to add rules for romance into the game. As you'd likely expect, they seem heavily influenced by computer RPG tropes. We don't see the actual rules here, but we do see that there is a romance score, preferred gifts, and hated insults. At a guess, you ply your character's object of affection with gifts and services to, in effect, "buy" their romantic interest.

An interesting twist on this idea is the inclusion of a devotion boon. This is the mechanical bonus your character gets when they have earned enough of the NPC's affection. There's also an enmity boon that I assume you acquire if the score goes too far in the opposite direction. It's a neat idea, and I would be shocked if the notion isn't picked up by outfits like BioWare.

In other news, Paizo has also optimized their online rules resource document for viewing via phones and tablets. I imagine this will be a huge boon for their players of their game in the coming years.