The Inner Lives of Player Characters

Trollsmyth has a really excellent piece up today about personality inventories, or "stress-testing the character concept." This is something that I've seen a lot of in his games; the solo game in particular almost entirely revolves around exploring these kinds of changes and personal re-evaluations now, and they're becoming ever more important in the group sessions. I haven't seen so much of it outside of those campaigns, though. I had one player in high school who really got into this kind of thing, but for the most part our campaigns were too short for it to ever come up.

Thus, this kind of character change is intimately connected with another thing that sets Trollsmyth's campaigns apart from the ones I've played in before: I spend a lot of time outside the game thinking about my character. The exact amount varies from week to week and month to month, depending on what's going on in the game and what else is going on in my life, but it's a lot more than any game I've played in before. I'm used to having my mind a lot on the game I'm running, but as a player, that kind of outside-the-session involvement is a new experience.

It can take a lot of time to work through the problems that these kinds of transformations and pressures present to my characters. Particularly since I'm building the cultures that they come from at the same time, and often in response to what's going on in-game, so that her actions and experiences create interesting conflicts with her backstories. And while a lot of times these personality conflicts come up naturally in-game, often in ways that (delightfully!) I don't expect in my between-session musings, I also try -- sometimes without success -- to come up with ways to express the ideas while I've had away from the table (or the keyboard, as the case may be) while I'm at it.

I'm being vague here because this process of character examination and consideration is one of the big reasons I haven't been writing much here lately. When I'm thinking about a game as a DM, I'm thinking a lot about technique. Not only is a lot of it much easier to abstract away from the particulars of the game into the realm of process, it's -- well, it's a lot less personal. I get deeply involved with some of my NPCs on occasion, but even when I do, there's always more going on to a game than just the inner lives of the characters. And I can write about that.

When most of my mental game-time goes into one or two individuals over a long period of time, there's a lot less I can talk about. And a lot less that I want to talk about, particularly on the internet. There are a lot of reasons for that. Some of it, in fact, is actively secret--the character in the group game in particular is a bit of a schemer, and the rest of the group still doesn't know what she's up to, relationship and otherwise. I don't want to tip her hand to the other players early, before I've had the opportunity to set up the reveals. This isn't as big of an issue in the solo game, but there are at least a few things about that character that I don't plan to discuss with Trollsmyth outside of game until they come up within it.

Still. Blog posts or no, the way my characters have changed and the time that I spend considering and shaping that change is one of my favorite things about these games, and one major reason why I'm even more interested now than when the first one started a year and a half ago. Situations that encourage character change, and allow the opportunity to explore it, is now the bar for what I expect from a campaign. And it's one of the major things I'm going to have my eye on the next time I run my own game.

Magic & Metaphysics

I've been doing some thinking about what I want out of a magic system for the system I'm working on, and it's looking more and more like what I need to do is write a new set of spells. I'd been trying to avoid that option on account of the work, but I've also spent the past couple days working over the metaphysics underlying magic in the setting I'm building, and in doing that, I kept thinking to myself, "Okay, sorcerers are going to need to be able to manipulate X in this way, and that way . . . oh, and obviously it makes sense for them to do Y." A few minutes of that, and I realized I had the beginnings of a spell list.

Given the metaphysical framework, it hasn't been too hard to fill out those lists, either. Add in the basic D&D assumptions about what magic-users ought to be able to do, and what I get are a bunch of questions: "What part of their soul would sorcerers use to do damage? How would that work?" "Should I have a spell like light? What's the game function of that spell? Is there another way to get the same effect that makes more sense in the metaphysics?" And I've been giving some thought to what would be useful in a social game that's not already in D&D, and what's in D&D that would be too useful in a social game. I've broken charm, for instance, into several spells, depending on what parts of people's souls they manipulate, and exactly what kind of effect they produce.

All this means, though, that the magic system is going to be very setting specific. It's possible that you could use it with a different setting, but I'm not sure that you'll be able to use it without the very specific approach to souls and other such things that I have in the setting I'm using. I'm not sure yet just how hard it would be, but there are going to be at least a couple of spells that just won't make any sense unless you know, for instance, certain things about the way that the magic metaphysics interacts with gender.

Which I worried about, until I realized that, hey, this is D&D. People can just take out the spells they like and forget the ones they don't. Or ignore the magic system entirely, and just borrow the other subsystems. If I was doing something really new and interesting with the mechanics of the magic system, I'd be more concerned with making it setting-independent. As it is, I'm considering stealing Arcana Evolved's "readied spells" concept, and perhaps even combining it with a "roll to cast" option, but nothing truly revolutionary. And it doesn't need to be.

A Neo-Classical Social RPG

It occurs to me that I haven't posted yet about this odd little social RPG I've been hinting that I'm working on, and since it is basically in a semi-playable form at this point there's not much danger anymore of my writing about what I'm going to do and then never doing it. It's not in a form that anyone else could run at the moment, and there are still some pretty serious holes than need to be patched and various areas that still need to be tweaked, but the shape of the thing is there.

What is it? Basically, it's my stripping off a lot of things off of D&D and then tacking new things back on, to transform it from a game about exploration where you don't roll Search checks to a game about talking to people where you don't roll Diplomacy checks. (When I say "D&D" in this post, and generally, I almost always have in mind something between Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord, specifically. But for the most part I think of all the pre-3e editions and retroclones as "D&D with different hats on.") A lot of it is riffing off of Trollsmyth's ideas about building a neo-classical RPG about social interactions. (And, since he's run a game like this and I've mostly just played in one, we've been chatting a bit on Wave about the various different elements of the system. Wave is really handy for that sort of thing.) Some of it is also built around the setting that I've been working on at the same time, though if I ever create a publishable version of the thing I'm likely to adjust certain elements to make it more generic. But it helps to have a clear vision of the kind of game I want to run with it.

Combat is lifted straight from D&D. The only changes to it are actually changes to the class system: your attack and hit dice don't go up as you level. Right now all the numbers are pegged at what would be about level four in Labyrinth Lord; I may adjust those up or down once I see it in action. Hit points do change as you go up in level, since you re-roll them and keep the new score if it's higher. But mostly, since combat isn't intended to be a big deal, I'd rather keep everyone at "the sweet spot" through the life of the campaign.

Ability scores are generated on 3d6 and generate bonuses (+2 to -2, at the moment, though that may change) like they do in D&D, but there's a whole different set of six, (Shadow, Flair, Identity, Breath, Will, and Heart) based on a very badly mangled version of ancient Egyptian metaphysics. I swear. Blame Trollsmyth. I may fall back on the D&D system because I know it works, but Trollsmyth has pointed out that changing the focus of the game suggests dividing up the conceptual space occupied by ability scores in a different way. I'm trying not to make ability scores too big of a deal anyway; they matter in combat and the other hard-coded subsystems, and I do want them to differentiate the characters a bit, but I don't have a skill system or an ability check system. So we'll see how it works when I actually start running the game.

I haven't completely decided what I'm doing with magic, partly because I haven't nailed down what I'm doing with priests in the setting. I may ditch the arcane/divine distinction entirely and just divide up spells along the same lines as the ability scores. But it's definitely going to be Vancian based, if not pure Vancian magic, and I'm probably going to borrow either the Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord spell list, at least at first, to minimize start-up time. (My plan is to get whoever plays the magic-user in that first campaign to at least some of the work in the "filling out the spell list" area, honestly. I do have a few ideas already, but I won't really know what magic a social game needs until they start throwing parties.)

Classes right now are Artist, Athlete, Merchant, Noble, Officer, Priest, Scoundrel, Sorcerer and Templar. Most of those are what they sound like. Priests might be a placeholder class; once I have a better handle on the setting I'll have a better idea what I want to do with them, but I at least have a possible implementation now. Templars are basically Jedi. I may change the name; they're pretty setting specific, so the setting may suggest a better name for them. I'm also considering some kind of Courtesan-type class, but I haven't come up with a system to handle them with that I'm happy with and wouldn't turn into too much of a solo mini-game. The Artist and Noble are already have a bit of that problem.

The big thing that makes the game different from D&D is a set of new sub-systems: Reputation, Warfare, Events, and Politics. Most of the classes interface with one of those systems in some way or another; Officers are basically "the Warfare class," for instance, and the Athlete's schtick is pulling dumb stunts to impress people at Events. (It's really impressive if they get themselves killed. Unfortunately, they can only do that once.) I won't go into much detail now, but the goal with all of these is more to provide a backdrop to the main activities of talking to people and getting into trouble than to be interesting to manipulate in their own right. The Events system in particular is basically intended to answer the question "Who shows up at our party?" and otherwise make the DM's life easier if the players are doing a lot of that kind of thing.

Mostly I'm just glad to be finally doing something like this. I always kind of wanted to do a big homebrew project back in high school, but never had any particular reason to, and even if I did, I would have abandoned it in favor of the next project in fairly short order. But I've been wondering if it would be possible to do something along these general lines for a while now, and Trollsmyth has handily been pestering me about finishing it. Even if it doesn't end up running the way I want in play, putting it together has been a useful exercise, and seeing how it ticks will be even more so.

Doom & Tea Parties: Death!

Remember a couple months ago when I was all "oh, man, Trollsmyth's game is really scary even though no one's died yet?"

Yeah.

Wednesday's session of the group game saw five rolls on the ever-hilarious Table of Death and Dismemberment. Which works out to one arm broken, one arm ripped off entirely, and one instant death. Luckily, the arm that got ripped off and the arm that was broken were the same arm, and belonged to the PC who no one likes anyway, and it was a hireling who got her head eaten by slaadi. But still, we're talking about a very brutal session here.

Something like this was going to happen sooner or later, and it could have been a lot worse. The fight in question ended up involving two slaadi, an ancient sshian vampire, and a werewolf, and it easily could have turned into a TPK if we'd rolled badly. Or worse. As it is, we lost a fighter, the rest of the party is pretty torn up, and the sun's going down with the vampire and the slaadi still on the loose. But if I've learned one thing from Trollsmyth's game, it's that things can always get worse.

The table, despite its name, does a lot to increase the survivability of the characters while still allowing for a lot of tension during combat, but you do only get that tension of the table bites you every once in a while. I know this session has me very glad that the group in the solo game is as safe as it is, for now. I'd liked the character who died last night, but I hadn't known her as well as I do a lot of the ones in the solo game.

Partly because of that, I'm fairly happy with how things went last night. Yes, we had our characters utterly dragged through the mud, but that's where good roleplaying comes from. (And by "good" I don't mean "well done" or "high quality" or anything else like that. I just mean, well, good. Entertaining and satisfying. The kind of thing you want a one-syllable Germanic word for.) Figuring out how my character's going to deal with her decisions getting people killed, how she's going to react to discovering that the other PC, who she's never liked that much to begin with, is a werewolf, and just plain dealing with the nightmare that is going to be the next few days in-game is all going to be fun. (Not to mention that the party wizard had been dating said now-armless werewolf. "Hey, don't lick that!") Not so much for the characters, but it will be for me.

But it's still the first death of the game. And if I'm remembering correctly, it's the first death in any continuing campaign I've played in. (Not counting the one where rocks fell and everyone died at the end.) I've lost a character or two in one-shots, and I've killed a handful of PCs while DMing myself, but I haven't played in many long campaigns, and those I have played in have tended to be things like Star Wars, high level 3e D&D, and similarly death-proof milieus.

So that's going to be interesting. Wondering "What's the right way to deal with the death of an imaginary person?" is interesting, if a bit odd. Between that and getting the refresher on just how dangerous low level D&D can be, I'm looking forward even more than usual to the next session of that game.

Doom & Tea Parties: Small, Focused Games

I think Trollsmyth has mentioned that the solo game didn't start out that way. Originally we had four players, then lost two, then the third, added another who only lasted one session, and so on, until the group finally settled down into me, and some NPCs who I pretty much treated as members of the party. Whether it was just schedule problems, or a side-effect of chat gaming, or Trollsmyth's peculiar campaign style I couldn't say, but lately the group game has been having similar trouble. We're down to just me and the boytoy, from a group of four players, and while there was an extended attempt to add a third player it doesn't look like the schedule is going to work out for a while.

Which, honestly, may be okay. I liked the other characters when they were around, and that potential third player would have been a lot of fun, but having just few players has some advantages. He and I have built a rapport, our characters don't get along in all kinds of fun ways, and it means the NPCs in the party get a lot more screen time. Since they interest me (and boytoy has amused himself by finding various ways to make their lives miserable) that's been working out well.

As a general rule, I'm coming to prefer solo and small-group gaming. One, two, and three people means the game can be more character driven, more interaction-focused, and more responsive to the specific things that I like, with fewer player agendas to juggle.

Which is a bit different than the freewheeling, "whoever shows up can play," megadungeon and wilderness crawl kind of play that I think of as quintessentially "old school." I suspect that those kinds of sprawling campaigns played a significant role in creating and anchoring communities of gamers, and I would like to run or play in such a campaign at some point, but mostly for the novelty of it, and to better understand how such things function. My real interest lies in smaller, more focused games.

Neo-Classical Mechanics: Leveling Slower Than A Gelatinous Cube

So in yesterday's post I mostly talked a bit about why I like long term play and the effect that it has on a game, and in the process I mentioned this idea that such play is a cornerstone of old school and neo-classical gaming. I don't mean that it's not possible to have an neo-classical one-shot, but long term play supports a couple of features that make those kinds of play styles really different from more modern styles.

The main thing I want to focus on for now is that it allows the campaign's style to coalesce, in a really natural way, around player interests. You have time to explore things and try out different ideas; the story can develop from random chance, player decisions, and spur-of-the-moment DM inspiration rather than being pre-planned. And, in particular, this style of incremental campaign design allows players to discover what they like as they play. They don't have to understand their own preferences well enough to be able to explain them to the DM as she's planning the campaign.

None of this is unique to neo-classical modes of play, but that kind of organic, improvisational development is a key feature of the kinds of games I'd describe in that way.

Now, part of my reason for saying that is that OD&D and Basic D&D are very clearly built for long-term play. The XP/level system assumes you're going to be playing for at least a half-a-dozen or so levels. It takes a long time to get to those levels. So to a certain degree I'm working backwards here and trying to figure out why those features are in the game in the first place, but I've also seen the effects of assuming long term play for long enough now to know a few reasons why building a system this way would be a good idea.

But those mechanical features are important, and they bring me to the point I'm trying to make in all of this: The ability to support long term play is an important feature of a lot of what I'd call "neo-classical," and it has some pretty serious mechanical underpinnings. The entire XP system of OD&D, the part of the game that makes it tick, is built around this assumption of campaign length. The rate of leveling. The number of levels. The way the power level changes as a character gains XP.

Not all systems support long term, open ended play. If it has a level cap that your players are geared to hit within a year or two, that's not going to work. OD&D does have level caps, true, but at a normal rate of treasure gathering its going to take your characters three, four, or more years to start hitting those levels.

Furthermore, if the power level changes really dramatically over the course of a few months or a year, then the DM either has to accept that the threats she assembles have a strictly limited shelf life, or that she needs to be willing to make things the party doesn't explore immediately level up along with them, which can create more work and damage verisimilitude. There's not quite so much room to wander around and explore different options, because if you don't handle something fairly quickly once you become powerful enough for it, it quickly becomes irrelevant.

And in a really good, long term, neo-classical kind of game, the players are eventually going to find something they like to do better than leveling. A huge part of the kind of campaign I'm describing is that eventually the players are going to find something to do that basically ignores the rules, and at that point, leveling becomes a distraction. Even, perhaps, a nuisance. You can use this to your advantage ("Do you go for the gold and level, or work towards a less-lucrative but more personally fulfilling goal? Dilemma!") but I have a strong suspicion that the reason leveling in OD&D is so hellaciously slow (besides just making it "mean more" when you do finally level, and the general old school philosophy of driving the players crazy) is so you can use it as a motivator in the early stage of the game, and then ignore it most of the time after that.

If that's where the game goes. Which is, when you get down to it, what this kind of play is about.

Doom & Tea Parties: Regular, Long Term Play

So the Doom & Tea Parties solo hit the one year mark this month. Sixty sessions, as of last night. If I'm counting right. Which I'm probably not--I suspect there's a duplicate log or two in there somewhere. But anyhows!

One year. My previous record for campaign length was about six months. Twenty-three sessions. And that was as a DM. (The group game is right around that mark itself now, and shows no signs of slowing down.) I don't have as good records on my time as a player, but I do know that the record there was rather less than that.

Appropriately, I'd been grumbling about this lack of campaign length around the time that Trollsmyth talked me into joining the game in the first place, which he did partly on account of my professed interest in the longer form.

It hasn't disappointed, for reasons that James Maliszewski articulated back when he started his Dwimmermount campaign (right around the same time as the solo game, in fact) and that his own campaign has since confirmed:

One of my growing beliefs is that, for old school gaming to work, you need to play not only consistently but also regularly. I'd venture to guess that one of the big reasons why old school play isn't as popular as it once was is because gamers meet a lot less often than they used to and because they don't stick with a single campaign -- or game! -- long enough to let it find its feet and properly establish itself.

Regular, long term play. I cannot possibly stress how much of a difference this makes to a campaign.

The difference between this game and my previous campaigns isn't simply length. Those other games started out with the understanding that they would be short; either someone else was planning a game that would need a turn within a few months, or the players simply wouldn't be available once summer ended. Doom & Tea Parties, in contrast, is open-ended. It will end, someday. The characters will die, or find another natural conclusion to their stories, and eventually Trollsmyth and I will have other ideas that we want to explore. But when it ends, it will end on its own terms. No external force demands its conclusion.

Again, I can't stress enough the difference this makes: the idea that the campaign can be as long as it needs to be. We've spent the last four months just setting things up, playing through two weeks of my character adjusting to a new environemtn while she anticipates Major Happenings (both social and quest-related) but without any particular pressure to get to those higher tension scenes, because we both know that they would always be there. We can take our time, and linger on the quieter moments that allowed us to lay some serious groundwork that will make those events, when we do finally get to them, really sing.

Furthermore, Trollsmyth and I have both noted that a few months ago the campaign started moving in a slightly peculiar, very social direction. (It's gotten even more peculiar since then. When I got into this hobby I never could have expected that one of my all-time favorite gaming moments would be a ten-minute conversation about what to do with NPC's hair, but there you go.) And I've mentioned that the time we spent in the dungeon was a big part of why that social, soap-opera-y style has worked so well.

But it wasn't just that we were mucking about in a dungeon. It was because we were mucking about in a dungeon and had no particular time limit, other than the amount of time we could devote to the game each week. There wasn't any particular need to clear the place within a given time, no particular pressure to hit any goals or milestones or even to "move the plot along." I had time to explore, wander into brief digressions about elven society, and really enjoy each particular moment of the campaign. As long as I was having fun with each individual session, I could fool around and figure out what I really liked doing. No time limits. No schedule.

And when my characters friends were kidnapped and she and another went to go rescue them, there was absolutely nothing to derail when I decided that, instead of immediately get back to work and move on to the next bit of the "action," what I really wanted to do was play through my character waiting for news. To have, in fact, the kinds of conversations that one has at the beginning of a relationship -- granted, a relationship between "a dwarf who'd been transformed into a nixie and a human cleric," but that's what made it D&D.

Which is the kind of thing that I'd been thinking about doing for at least a few weeks then. I liked several of the various NPCs that populated the game, and knew just enough about them to want to find out more, but I'd never done anything quite in that vein, so it took some time to find the appropriate opportunity to just slow the game down and talk. If I had been paying more attention to those constant distractions of keeping the action moving and gaining XP -- if I hadn't been sure that we'd be able to (or attempt to, anyway) rescue those friends and then move on to explore the results if I took too much time up with other pursuits -- I might never have tried it at all.

Hirelings, the Sandbox, and You

This latest discussion of sandboxes (to which Monsters and Manuals has also chimed in) has gotten me thinking that one really spiffy way to facilitate player choice and player driven adventuring is through choice of henchmen. By which I mean: having hirelings come with plots attached, or with interests and abilities that affect how the party goes about picking and handling problems, are both a lot of fun, and giving players enough information about those plots and abilities when choosing hirelings gives them another way to affect the style of the game -- as well as a way to signal to the DM the kinds of activities that they're interested in.

The "skills and interests" thing is one that's come up a lot in the Doom & Tea Parties solo, partly because most of the adventuring party is NPCs so they get a lot of involvement during the planning stages. Usually my character asking them questions, but still, the interests they have colors their information.

I picked out the party's sorceress specifically because I was interested in at some point going to Fire and she had been to and knows about Fire, so that's an obvious one. More interesting, though, is the effect that having two clerics of Uban in the party has had on the campaign. That had been my initial thought for my PC, before I decided I'd do something I'd never done before and run a dwarf, so that was the first NPC I hired, and then shortly thereafter we rescued another from goblins.

Uban being the god of knowledge, what this basically means is that I had one guy happy to explain elven iconography to me, and another who knew useful things about adventuring, and accordingly made fun of the first. Which for someone whose ideal game is basically a mix of fantasy anthropology, dungeoneering, and social hijinks was pretty much awesome.

That particular configuration mostly fell into place on its own, but party management in general -- both picking who to take with me in-game, and talking with the DM about how I find most interesting out of it -- has been a pretty powerful tool for me to control the game's direction and style. Which is really what a sandbox game is all about: giving the player's control over the game's direction without sitting down and talking with them about what they want. The latter is all well and good, but I'm increasingly of a mind that letting people figure out what they want out of the game as they're playing it has its own perks.

Old School: The Feeling is Fear!

Toth of the Emergence Campaign Weblog posted a really interesting analysis of combat in RPGs, with an eye towards addressing the question of how complicated your combat system needs to be. The quote that caught my eye:

The most boring fights are the ones where you know the outcome already, or where you’re almost sure to win – but you have to grind through it anyway. For them, you want a quick-and-simple combat system. The truly satisfying part of fights like this lies in the characters having worked hard to find a way to turn a potentially-deadly fight into a near-certain victory. Doing it for them – the “Balanced Encounter” philosophy – will quickly get boring. Phony risks are only exciting for so long.

Obviously this ignores the fact that, for some people, the simple acts of optimizing a character and making decisions in a tactical, rules-bounded environment are fun, much like spending a couple hours chatting with a cleric and a rakshasa about boys is fun for me. But I think it's an interesting point that a game that does have a big focus on both tactical combat and character continuity is going to have to deal with the fact that at least some of the game's danger is artificial danger. More importantly, he lays out a pretty thorough case for a combat system that does get the heck out of the way, for those of us who either aren't interested in tactical experiences or get them from other kinds of games.

And Zachary the First had some over-lapping thoughts yesterday, on The Lost Art of Running Away. He covers a lot of ground in a short post, pointing out that part of the reason running away is "lost" is that a game with too much running will get really obnoxious in short order, and that for a certain kind of game running away defeats the point, but I have to agree when he writes:

But if you’re playing in a sandbox/exploration/dungeon crawl, the goal isn’t to bravely die on the 4th level of a dungeon fighting bugbears who will eat your corpse as soon as you drop. It’s to survive, become more powerful, and get out with what loot you can while avoiding any more potentially lethal situations than are strictly necessary.

After all, I've said similar things myself, in talking about why the sense that death is always just around the corner can make a game awesome.

What this all sets me to thinking is that focusing on the outcomes of fights rather than the experience of playing through them and being afraid enough of those outcomes to occasionally run away are largely a result of the way a rule-set handles combat. Make combat into a big fun deal and the players won't run away from fights, because fights are what they're there for. And running away -- making the decision that a particular foe is too tough for you to handle right now, and backing off to prepare, bring allies, or find another way to your goal -- is fundamental to any game that I'd call "old school" or "neo-classical." That label isn't entirely a mechanical one, but it has some pretty significant mechanical requirements.

Experience Systems: The Foundation of the Game

The issue of experience, and reward systems in general, has been rattling around in my head for a while now. So I figure I should strike while it's the hot new thing, what with Jeff Rients XP-for-Exploration idea making the rounds, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess having sounded off about it (declaring that XP-for-gold is the only true way, naturally), so you know it's a big deal.

My basic opinion is, "whatever works for your game." XP-for-gold is what I use in my games, for most of the reasons that Raggi has already enumerated. I'm more open to the XP-for-Exploration idea than he claims to be, but I agree with his opinions on pretty much all the other systems he discusses, and I actually think he's missed a point against XP-for-roleplaying, in that it can create messes, socially, for me as the DM to be grading my players like that. (Or I should say, has created messes, socially, for me.) All the systems he's discussed, and really all XP systems, are to some degree arbitrary; at the very least, the DM creates the environment that the experience is being awarded in. But I like having the illusion of impartiality, and having something other than "Well . . . because I said so," when I get asked why Player X got more experience than Player Y.

Anyway. The thing about XP-for-gold is that it tends to break down if the players decide they want to ditch the dungeon for a soap opera, or otherwise find a way to take the game in a new direction. And while I'm moving into hypotheticals here, based on my experience, observation, and general sense of how the game ought to be run, in a long-running old school kind of game, the players are going to eventually figure out a way to take the game in some kind of new direction, away from "pure" dungeon-crawling. They're going to find something that they like better than gathering treasure. Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, this is going to be something that's still largely compatible with XP-for-gold. Sometimes, though, it won't be. (Of course, as Raggi points out, this can be a great thing; having the players choose between level advancement and some other goals can be interesting, at least on an occasional basis.)

If you won't to know what to do at that point, talk to Trollsmyth. I still don't think he's told me yet what he's doing with the XP in our now heavily soap-opera-ified solo game. My character hasn't gotten any treasure in about twenty sessions. She doesn't care, and neither do I, but not every player is as nonchalant as I am about leveling, even if they are having crazy amounts of fun gossiping about boys with rakshasa and clerics or what have you.

I can, however, comment that the process itself is a very excellent thing to happen in a campaign, even if it does cause a few problems if things go too far afield: the campaign becomes uniquely yours. This is certainly achievable by talking things out with your players ahead of time and designing such a personalized campaign from the get-go, but that requires that you and your players both know what you want before the campaign starts. The beauty of a letting a game evolve like this is that you don't have to know. You just have to be paying attention.

If you've been following Grognardia's Dwimmermount posts you'll have an excellent idea of what I'm talking about--and at least an inkling of what all this has to do with XP-for-gold. His campaign hasn't suffered as extreme a drift as the Labyrinth Lord solo, which makes it a better example; I suspect its evolution is more typical for such games. But the basic pattern remains the same: it started out as a a game exclusively about Dwimmermount, guided by the rhythms of dungeon exploration. In the past few months, the characters have started to deal with potentially treacherous NPCs, uncover the schemes of ancient cults, lead their cities in response to undead hordes, and even delve a bit into some fantasy theology. It's still largely compatible with the dungeon delve, and by extension, XP-for-gold, but it's become a distinctly different game from the one the one Maliszewski started about a year ago.

And XP-for-gold was one reason why it, along with the solo game, was able to shift in such a way. XP-for-gold supports a player-driven game. It's not the only system to do so, and it's not required to run a player-driven game, but it does help: it helps the players answer that eternal question, "What do you do?" This is especially true early in the game before they've figured out their characters, established their own motives, and gotten involved in the larger schemes of the milieu. It's provides a way to run a foundation for a player-driven game before the players, and the DM, know what really interests them.

Allowing the players to drive at least the direction of the action is crucial to this kind of evolution, particularly if you want to start out simple and get more sophisticated like this. The players need to have the freedom to say, "Ooh, that looks fun, let's go do more of that." But giving players freedom can be a great way to get some very confused players, so sometimes, just to help them get their feet on the ground, you want a big blinking neon sign that says "Adventure Here!" XP-for-gold puts that neon sign right on top of any place that has a little treasure in it.

I keep using XP-for-gold as my example here, but it's not the only system that provides that effect. Pretty anything that makes it obvious to the players what they need to do in-game to get that XP will do--which means that XP-for-roleplaying and XP-for-quests won't. Whatever their other charms, such systems either don't significantly guide in-game decisions (which in other contexts may in fact be one of the main advantages for XP-for-roleplaying and similar systems, but here it defeats the entire point), or they make it very difficult to define the rewards involved ahead of time without pre-framing the decisions the players can make. Sure, a good XP-for-quest-type system will allow the player to negotiate with the DM to define what they want the quests to be, but that doesn't give them much help in answering that question. Which is great once the campaign has gotten up and running and they have some ideas already, but it doesn't do a great job as a neon sign for the early game.

There are, however, other systems that do have the right set of features, XP-for-monsters and XP-for-exploration being the most well-known at the moment. They're not quite as flexible as XP-for-gold, suggesting a more specific range of activities, so they tend to be supplemental rather than comprehensive systems, but that's perfectly fine. In fact, I consider the D&D XP system's ability to accommodate expansions of various kinds one of its strengths.

(As an aside--while I tend to agree with Raggi that monsters really ought to be obstacles to XP-collection rather than an avenue for it, in a world where most monsters are unique (or if you could only get XP for a kind of monster the first time you killed it) XP-for-monsters could form the foundation of a really interesting game that revolved around researching, tracking down, and defeating various beasts.)

Eventually, killing those monsters or exploring those locations will lead to the PCs stumbling across some larger mystery, or they'll cross paths with the wrong people during their pursuit of gold, or they'll just run into some other activity that catches their interest. And that's all to the good, because the point of this kind of experience system isn't to define the game but to provide a foundation for it. It gives the PCs something to do and a reason to get involved in the world while you're figuring out what you want to do with a campaign.

What's Old School Good For?

I had a point that I'm not sure I communicated very well in yesterday's post, partly because, when I wrote it, I was still figuring out exactly what that was myself. Reduced to it's essence, the point is this:

The OSR is getting new people into the hobby. It's positioned very well to continue doing it, and expand those efforts, because many of its major participants are focused on figuring out why the games work the way they do, and sharing their love of those games with anyone who will listen. The games themselves are simple, fun, and appeal to a lot of people who have experience with newer games but don't find they quite fit.

"Old school," obviously, is about the past. But it's just as much about the future. Introducing new people to the old ways, and going new places you can't go with more mainstream games. That's what it's about for me, and I don't think I'm alone.

Old School is New to Me

Here's a secret:

About four, maybe five years ago, one of my friends showed up to our Friday night session with a big stack of rule books and a bunch of boxes full of miniatures. His neighbor had given him a couple boxes full of old 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D gear, and he was talking about starting up a game with some guys he knew from school. (We were engaged in another campaign at the time.)

I flipped through the books and started making fun of them. Class-as-race? Ridiculous. Individual XP charts for each class? Laughable. That weird system of saves? Archaic. The organization was impenetrable, the prose awful, the art hideous-to-non-existent. 3e, I knew from reading forums on the internet, was a great improvement.

That was back when I didn't know any better. Heck, even my friend didn't know any better. Based on, if I remember correctly, some vague knowledge of the Outdoor Survival Map, he explained to us how OD&D had been "a board game," where you moved your pieces around on hexes. What we didn't know about the games we filled in with crazy rumors and misinformation from other new-edition-playing twerps like us.

Then I started getting into RPG blogging. I started reading Jeff's Gameblog, and from there found Trollsmyth, Grognardia, and a bunch of other guys who knew what the heck they were talking about when it came to the older stuff. Not that any of them were, or are, gurus, but they knew that the older editions were fun, that 3e wasn't intrisincally superior to any of them, and they were interested in figuring out exactly what it was that made those old games tick. Luckily, that mix of enthusiasm and curiosity was enough to get through my idiot ideas on the subject, and I ended up coming along for the ride.

Now, I collect those old hardbacks, play in two Labyrinth Lord games, built my own Swords & Wizardry megadungeon, and have pretty much sworn off running 3e, at least for the next few years. I've taught people to play Swords & Wizardry who have never played an edition of D&D before in their lives. It's some of the best gaming I've done in my life.

A few final words, from Trent Foster:

Yeah, there are some "old guys" in our midst who actually were around back in 197x playing D&D in this style, watched the game/hobby move away from them, and are refreshed to see a new crowd pick up on what they liked about the game in the first place. But more of us are people who started playing the game later, after this style of play was already in decline, or had even disappeared altogether from the mainstream/commercial rpg scene, and are so interested in this style and approach to play now in large part because we didn't get to experience it then.

Get Out of Jail Free Cards

One of the things I like about Trollsmyth's Labyrinth Lord game is that it feels very deadly. That threat of death has a number of benefits to the game, not least that it keeps me focused and involved with the game.

But in objective terms, it's not deadly at all. We've been playing for half a year now, and no one's died. Honestly, it wouldn't be all that much fun if it death were a regular thing; beyond the usual fuss of coming up with a new character and re-integrating her into the ongoing campaign, one of the things I enjoy most about the game is learning about and interacting with the NPCs, and there wouldn't be much point to that if they were getting eaten or poisoned or whatever all the time.

Still, even despite that, the game feels ridiculously dangerous. Partly, this is just me as a player: I worry about stuff, even if it's not that huge of a risk. But more important is the fact that the main reason no one's died yet is what Trollsmyth calls "get of jail free" cards.

We've got a number of them in this game. Shields Shall Be Splintered is one; if I'm remembering correctly, the party's lost two shields so far, both times to nasty, horrible critters that probably would have killed us otherwise. The Table of Death and Dismemberment is another, and it's simultaneously comforting (having rolled on the table a few times myself, I know the odds of insta-death are actually pretty low) and terrifying (since Labyrinth Lord would otherwise be a dismemberment-free ruleset.) And, of course, there's more specific (and weirder) ones, like the potion that restores all hit points, neutralizes most poisons, cures most diseases. Then it changes your sex.

What all of these have in common is that they say, "next time you won't be so lucky." You won't have that shield, or that potion, or you won't roll as well on the table. The table in particular creates a moment of tension, as I wait for the DM to roll his dice -- and then another, one one of my allies hits the floor and I don't know yet whether he's just unconscious or completely dead.

And then, there's the fact that both the shield and the potion create decisions, which are to my mind the lifeblood of a good game. In the one case, deciding what weapon to wield gets a lot more interesting. In the other . . . as I discovered when it got used on Sunday, as if "death or sex change?" wasn't decision enough, since there is only the one, is "the first person to nearly die" really the criteria we should use to decide who gets it? Talk about roleplaying. I'm still kinda buzzed from that session.

A Sense of Novelty, and Giving Players Control of the Plot

Things have been pretty quiet around here lately, mostly on account of a lack of momentum -- I let myself get out of the habit of posting regularly, and it's a tricky one to pick back up. So there may be some more rambly-type posts like this one, as I try to catch my footing again.

And then there's the campaign I'm running. For a while, I felt like I was just going over old ground, which meant there wasn't much for me to write about concerning it. More importantly, that feeling over going over old ground was causing me some vague dissatisfaction with the game. When I game, particularly when I run a game, I like trying new systems, employing new techniques, learning new things. Using a system I'd used ages ago to run a sequel to the same game I'd used it before just wasn't satisfying on that level.

That's better now, I think. For one, I've started doing more with the social aspect of the game. Trollsmyth's tea parties are rubbing off on me, and at least a few of the players are interested in that kind of thing, so now we have things happening like major world-shaking plot points hinging on who's sleeping with who, and who else knows about it. Which is new, and good.

More significantly, some of the things I set up at the beginning of the campaign in an attempt to make it more open-ended have started to pay off. Without delving too deeply into fiddly, campaign-specific details, (and without giving too many of my future plans away) a four-way battle for the throne of the empire the game centers on is stirring on the horizon, as well as at least two separate invasions from foreign powers. Each side is either driven by or heavily depends on the actions of at least one of the PCs, and while I will admit to meddling in favor of chaos, destruction, and general good times, what happens next is largely up to the decision the players make.

This is a pretty major change, for me. Historically, I've avoided railroading on principle, but for a long time I prided myself on being very good at getting players to do what I wanted anyway. Whether it was a kidnapped NPC, a shiny object, an enemy on whom they'd sworn revenge, or simply the stirrings of great drama, it was never hard to exert gentle pressure on the party in the direction of my convenience. I always left the details up to the party, and I was generally happy to accommodate their own plans when they had them, but in my best campaigns I always had a master plot, a final villain, and an ending in mind.

This was always fairly popular with my players, since I had the good sense to leave the details sketchy and to use plots and villains that interested them, but the new approach is much more interesting to me. Before, I always knew how the game was going to end, and it was just a matter of how they'd get there. This time, I'm playing to see how it's all going to turn out.

Guess What's For Sale at Noble Knight Games

Here's a hint: when people ask what you're playing, you get to shout "Death! Frost! Doom!" at them in the most dramatic voice you can muster.

That's why I'm getting it, anyway.

Neo-Classical Is Better For New Players

On Thursday, I'll be running a six or seven person foray into my megadungeon. (Or perhaps another adventure. Not likely, but I haven't ruled it out.) I considered using 4e, because it's been on my mind a lot lately and I've pegged it as a good system for one-shots, due to its consistency. Ultimately, I decided that Swords & Wizardry would handle the group size better, and I've been looking for an opportunity to introduce this gang to neo-classical play for a while anyway.

Another consideration is that we're going to have a brand new player at the table. (The younger sister of the boyfriend of an old regular from my high school group.) I've already sworn off introducing new people to 3.5 D&D. Despite my occasional frustrations with it, I like the system, but I've been playing it on and off for nearly seven years now. I've read all the core books, cover to cover, multiple times.

New players don't have that experience, and trying to introduce them to the idea of roleplaying and actually play the game while also explaining the system to them is an exercise in frustration, even if they are interested in its intricacies. More often, they aren't. The last few times I've tried to run 3.5 with people, it's turned into tedious frustration. Boytoy had decided roleplaying "wasn't his thing" partly because of his lack of interest in dealing with that system, which I'd originally used to introduce him to gaming.

4e isn't quite as convoluted as its predecessor, but it's still a decision heavy, rules-mastery focused system. I'm comfortable running it (and, presumably, playing it) but a large part of that comfort is based on that same experience I have with 3.5, and such systems generally.

For new players, it's just too much hardware. They don't need all that stuff to "get" roleplaying, and if they're not interested in it, it just gets in the way. If I suspected she'd be a rules junky herself, and we were starting up a proper campaign, I might consider it. But for a one-shot, and a player I know basically nothing about? Much better to go with a system that gets out of the players way and puts the heavy lifting on me, rather than the book.

Neoclassical Roleplaying Games

So there's a new term running around, originally coined by Robertson Games, that attempts to describe the retro-clones: Neoclassical roleplaying games. The idea being that since OD&D and Basic are commonly called "Classic" D&D, and games released around that era have also picked up the term, a new, reimagined version would then logically be called "Neoclassical." And, as Trollsmyth points out, it accurately conveys the fact that, though they do draw upon older styles, these are new games, in a new era:

Yes! That is perfect, since most of us aren't exactly playing these games the same way they were back when. It's a reinvention, a new style, based on studying those games, tweaking them, exploring what those structures and styles mean.

Thus, it's a term that I can use without feeling faintly ridiculous. I like "old school," but I tend to avoid using it to describe things I'm doing. (You'll note that I have an "old school" tag, but that's mainly to make sure all my Swords & Wizardry stuff gets binned in "Legacy D&D" on RPGBN.) Neoclassical fits the kinds of games I've been getting into lately much better: I'm drawing on an earlier era for inspiration, without having been part of it myself.