On Shields

There's been a bit of discussion in the ol' blog-o-sphere lately on shields, and how to make them more effective. This is all well and good, and I might be trying a few of the suggestions myself, in addition to the ever-awesome Shields Shall Be Splintered houserule from Trollsmyth. Unfortunately, though, unless I get really weird with it, shields are pretty much always going to be inferior to two-handed or two-weapon fighting in D&D, outside of specific, controlled situations.

The best thing a player can do, survival-wise, is to stay out of fights. The second best thing is to make those fights short. Defensive power doesn't really help with either of those goals, unless it's absolutely overwhelming. Offensive power helps with both. It doesn't matter how good your AC, or how much DR you have, if the monster gets a chance to pull something screwy, so generally you're going to be better off figuring out how to deal as much damage as you can in as short a period as you can. Hence: Two-weapon fighting, two-handed weapons.

Play Style and "Fun"

A good while back, I ran into this post on Levi's Amagi Games: the What-I-Like Glossary. At the time, I read it, shrugged, thought to myself, "Well, that was interesting," and then went right on my way. About the same thing happened when I discovered Brain Hex. Thought about it for a bit, decided it might lead to some interesting ideas, and then moved on to other things.

I've been thinking about them both lately, because I've been trying to figure out what I mean by "play style." When I use that word, people start throwing around terms like "gamist" and "narrativist" soon after. These aren't useful words for me. The big issue is that I always feel like there's some much more precise definition for them than I actually understand; I've read the articles in question on the Forge, but can't make precise sense of them. All I really have to go on is the way that I see people use them, and there I find concepts that aren't particularly compelling.

Though perhaps that's not quite the right word. Compelling they are, yes. Dividing up RPGs into three distinct, semi-exclusive categories is, for whatever reason, attractive. I've found myself drawn in that direction myself, on occasion. And since I'll readily admit that I don't have a strong grasp on the overall theory that they live within, they may very well be good terms for describing the kinds of things they're designed for. But in common use, they tend to trample over a lot of what I find interesting about play style.

For instance: "Gamism" tends to be used to mean "games like 4e D&D," where the players are expected to spend a lot of time manipulating the mechanics of their characters in various ways, towards the end of overcoming various obstacles. But when I look carefully at the people I know who enjoy playing this way, the idea that this is style of play functions as some kind of self-contained unit breaks down. Many of them enjoy extremely rules light play, so long as there are obstacles to overcome and problems to solve--they get just as much thrill out of figuring out how to use a ten-foot-pole to deal with pit traps as they do finding that perfect character combo. And all of them are drawn to D&D for reasons beyond simply manipulating the ruleset and overcoming challenges, whether it's the funny voices that their DM makes or the continuing story that their character is involved with.

So while I've borrowed a lot of ideas from the framework behind those terms, I try to avoid using them because they don't get at a lot of distinctions I'm interested in. Instead, here's what I think is important about play style:

• Different people have different ideas about what's fun and what isn't fun. This'd be one of those "borrowed ideas," though I doubt it's original to GNS theory or whatever it is that it's called. Furthermore, I suspect that a lot of problem play comes down to people disagreeing about what's fun and not realizing that they disagree. If I'm reading Ron Edwards right, this idea is what's behind a lot of his talk about "incoherent play," but I don't take it quite so far myself, for reasons I'll get to in a bit.
• "Play style" doesn't live on the Island of RPGs. The stuff I like in roleplaying games tends to be similar to what I like in other games, or in other kinds of storytelling. Where it isn't the same, it interacts directly with my roleplaying game preferences; that is to say, there are certain things that I don't like in roleplaying games specifically because I think some other kind of game does them better. Particularly on a practical level of figuring out what makes your group tick, it's important to look at what people like about what other games they play, and why they're playing RPGs rather than those other games.
• "Play style" is made of a bunch of little interlocking pieces. This is where Brain Hex and the What-I-Like Glossary come in; they're both basically ways of breaking down and looking at those pieces individually. You'll note that they have a number of styles of play in common, as well as the overarching idea that everyone enjoys more than one, but there's usually one or two that someone will like the best. Neither is perfect; the Brain Hex model is specifically geared towards video games, and Amagi Games has failed to provide the internet with a snappy Greek term for the thrill of finding stuff out. But the basic idea there is attractive to me, being based on at least an attempt to model what's actually going in people's heads when they talk about "fun." Though I mostly like it because it lets me talk about how . . .
• Some kinds of fun go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Or, I should say, chocolate and something that's not terrible. Using the Amagi Games terminology, what I mean is, if you're into ludus and kinesis then you're crazy if you're not playing a game that's got tactical miniatures combat, because those two kinds of fun can really complement each other. Likewise, if you're currently deep into kenosis, you'll find it pretty easy to add expression and kairosis to your game, if you also enjoy those kinds of play.
• Others kinds of fun are more like steak and ice cream. The main thing I'm thinking of here is something that Levi notes directly in his list: kenosis is easy to mess up if you've got something else going on in your game that breaks people "out of the groove." Another good example using the same terms is that alea can (but doesn't always) conflict with fiero. There's a certain kind of gamer who wants to win because he came up with a great plan, not because he got lucky. The basic idea here is that there are certain kinds of fun that you have to prioritize, because you can't have all of them.
• Some players who like different kinds of play will get along great. Others . . . won't. If their favorite kinds of play don't conflict, or complement each other, you won't have a problem. That kind of group may even be preferable to one where everyone's play style is in perfect accordance; it can be fun to be a spectator to a different style of play than the one you're normally engaged in, or to be pushed out of your specific comfort zone every once and a while, and it's good to have players with a variety of different ways of approaching in-game situations and problems. On the other hand, if two players strongly prioritize styles of play that interfere with each other, you're going to have problems, especially if they don't realize that it's a play style clash and assume the other person is just being obnoxious. But playstyle isn't some immutable iron thing, either--if both parties are aware of the different kinds of fun they're interested in, and each explain to the other person what it is that's cramping their style, they're likely to be able to hash out a compromise that keeps them both fairly happy.
  

Thoughts on Campaign Complexity

I tend to have a hard time describing my campaigns to non-participants. You'll note, for instance, that my "recaps" here tend to focus on a few key issues, often mostly out-of-game or otherwise technical in nature, with very little discussion of any events outside of the specific problem I'm having. If I did more than that, it would quickly turn into pages of material.

The Traveller game has already gotten to the point where it would take several paragraphs just to fully discuss their current mission, and explain why everyone's going along with it, how they got it in the first place, and where they're going from there. A complete explanation of all the different goals they have bubbling on various burners would take weeks.

It's ridiculous. But it's not unusual, for one of my campaigns or for roleplaying campaigns generally. This one doesn't even involve all that much history; it wasn't unusual in Is This Fair for a complete update of the campaigns current status to require repeated references to events that happened in two distinct time periods, one thousands of years prior to the start of the campaign, and the other around four hundred years previous.

I'm sure that there are some campaigns which don't develop such labyrinthine complexity, but it strikes me as a general tendency of such things, if only because there's half a dozen people all contributing their input to the thing that will someday resemble a plot. The basic challenge of integrating four or five separate backstories and character motivations into a coherent whole, which a campaign does by default (though a good referee will guide it towards a stable state that doesn't shortchange any one character or group of characters in favor of another) accounts for a great deal of complexity all on its own.

But a lot of it comes directly from the game master's side of the screen. This has been particularly true in my current campaign, but it's true in a general way of most roleplaying campaigns: I generate a lot more material than I will ever reasonably use, most of it in the form of offhand references, minor NPCs, and hooks the players don't bite. This is just a normal part of negotiating the divide between player and game master; I don't know exactly what they'll be interested in, so I make more than I need, and they'll be more interested in some things than others, so they'll notice less than I make.

Sooner or later, though, some of that material that doesn't immediately get used will come up again. Either the players will remember what I'd intended as a one-off incident and attach some significance to it, or I'll reason that something that happened a couple of sessions ago has a neat connection to what they're doing now. There's a continual process, negotiated between me and the players, of generating material, reacting to it, creating a story to explain it, and then generating more material based on that story.

Core Activites: D&D, the Third and One Half Edition

I'm skipping around a bit, since I thought I'd tackle the two editions of D&D that I've played before I risk the rest of the versions that I'm familiar with mostly by hearsay. More importantly, there are more differences, and more significant differences, between 3rd edition (and its identical for our purposes revision) and its predecessors than between any of the older games. Best to get the broad strokes laid out before diving into minutiae.

Not that the differences between the game I started with and the older versions I'm just now discovering are staggering. It's still got the same basic core activity of every edition of D&D -- kill things, take their stuff, level up. How you get XP is a little different, loot is a little different, and what you get when you level up is quite different, but the outlines remain the same.

The experience system suffers mostly stylistic changes. I'm not well versed enough in the lore of AD&D to know if the business about "overcoming challenges rather than killing monsters" is unique to 3rd Edition, but even if so there's not as big of a difference as you might think. The book does suggest "XP for achieving story goals" and "XP by fiat" as options, and there's some talk in the challenge rating system about adjusting those ratings to take into account the difficulty of the circumstances, but CRs, and the accompanying XP, remain mainly attached to monsters.

Loot -- particularly of the magic variety -- contains some more significant differences. The CR system assumes that the PCs have a certain amount of magical equipment at each level, and magic items can, in a normal campaign, be purchased freely. There's no mention of XP for treasure since gold is now it's own reward, effectively becoming a point buy character generation system tacked on to the existing level based one.

The changes to treasure only foreshadow the really big innovation of third edition: powers. I don't use that word in the 4e sense (though that is where they end up) but rather just as a general term for all the mechanical stuff that PCs in third edition get. Spells, feats, class abilities, skills -- not to mention all the strange new subsystems introduced in books like Magic of Incarnum, Book of Nine Swords, and the Psionics Handbook (and its Expanded descendant).

In many ways, the proliferation of powers is a good fit for the core activity of D&D. It's an addition that most of the video games based on the game have made, and it grows naturally out of spells, and special ability based classes like the monk. It adds a new angle to play -- the character build -- that provides a good "away from the table" activity for players. But mostly it just means that everyone gets a decision or two when they level up, strengthening that particular motivation, and the core activity as a whole.

But it does tend to shift the focus. The proliferation of powers, and associated uniqueness of each character and difficulty in creating new ones, naturally leads to a greater focus on the characters and away from the campaign that contains them. (I suspect that the changes to third edition reflected a pre-existing shift in play style rather than forcing a new one on everyone, but it does have an effect on new players picking up the game.)

Even a dungeon crawl--heck, even if you're using the same dungeon--in third edition will differ significantly from a dungeon crawl in OD&D, due to the changes in the kill/loot/XP/level cycle and to all the little peripheral adjustments in third edition. One game will be about conquering, or being conquered by, the dungeon, and the other will be about the characters doing the conquering. Just because systems share a core activity doesn't mean the games you run with that system will be the same.

Core Activities: D&D, the Editionless Edition

Often known as OD&D, but on the tin it's just D&D, no number, no "Advanced," no hint of any other game that was or will be. This isn't a game I've played, and indeed my knowledge of it is based mostly on Swords & Wizardry and hearsay. But even that gives me enough to know that this game is different in many ways from its descendants, and it has its own variation on the basic D&D core activity.

In OD&D, there's none of this "you get XP for challenges" nonsense. You can get it from killing monsters, though they're usually not worth the trouble, even if your DM includes bonus XP for special powers instead of basing it exclusively off hit dice. Instead, the main source of XP is treasure.

Thus, the dungeon. Even 4th Edition gives a few nods to that classic adventure location, since it provides a convenient source of clearly defined areas full of interesting terrain, but OD&D lives it. If the standard set up is to get XP for "overcoming challenges," or even just fighting monsters, there are plenty of other places to get it. But the dungeon, as traditionally defined, is just about the best place anywhere to find a lot of treasure. (Unless you're running an Ocean's Eleven style palace heist game, which could be fun. Make it a single race party and call it "Ocean's Elves" for maximum player irritation.)

Leveling also provides a slightly different reward than in the more recent versions of the game. True, wizards and clerics get spells, but not as many or as often, and fighters don't get any powers except from magic items, which are in turn much less common. (Monty Haul campaigns notwithstanding.) In the style the game is intended to be played, player cleverness does what modern games do with skills and feats, and the game tends to stay more down to earth. What leveling up does provide is a measure of survivability. A few more hit points, a slightly better chance to hit, and now your character can stand toe to toe with a goblin for more than a round.

But even without getting a whole lot in the way of neat powers, OD&D is still fun. It spawned a hobby, and is still played to this day. This is largely because the activities involved with gathering XP -- outwitting traps, solving puzzles, fighting monsters -- are fun in and of themselves. Later editions shifted XP a little more away from "scorecard" and a little more towards "currency for cool things," but even they depend on the fact that getting that XP is fun.

Core Activities: D&D

Core activities, like many things in RPG, are about motivation. What do players want, and how do they get it? A good core activity helps a GM harness what players want to create situations that are interesting in play.

Dungeons & Dragons has a very good core activity. Players, like a lot of people, like power. They like being able to do cool things and have control over their world, or in this case, the game world. D&D has power in spades, in discrete, easy to use packages -- spells, class abilities, magic items, and in later editions feats -- and a direct, simple path to it. Collect XP, level up.

It gives the PCs a reason to go out and do things. Whether its rumors of a dungeon filled with peril or a glimpse of some guy getting mugged in an alleyway, XP gives extra bite to any plot hook. It also makes it easier for PCs with very different motivations to get along. The guy who's out for revenge against his father's killer and the guy who mostly just wants to get rich are both willing to go along with the do-gooder's latest crusade, because there'll at least be a level in it for them, and maybe a neat magic item. Whether leveling up is an end in itself or something that will help them achieve other goals, XP gives everyone something in common.

Now, each edition has a slightly different take on how you get XP and exactly what those powers do, and I'm going to work out some of those details in later posts, but that's the idea at the heart of them all. It's a major part of why the game has kept going for so long. And thanks to computer games, it's an idea that will likely outlive D&D itself. Just another debt we owe to 1974.

Core Activities: Introduction

I've been thinking a lot lately about what Mike Mearls calls "core stories," and what Joseph at Greyhawk Grognard has called "campaign tentpoles." Not that they're nearly the same concept, but they both contain the kernel of the same basic concept. Mearls applies it mostly to settings, and Joseph to campaigns -- and a particular kind of campaign at that -- but they both posit that successful game has some kind of repeatable, foundational activity to it, that GMs can vary or diverge from as they please, but that still remains, a touchstone for the campaign no matter how crazy things get.

Although Mearls focuses on the setting elements involved, it's as much mechanical as it is story or setting based, which is why I'm using the term "core activities." D&D's core activities include the "leave civilization, kill things, and take their stuff" elements that he identifies as the core story, but they also include the mechanical tidbits involved in that process -- gaining XP, leveling up, and using new powers and magic items. If you took the core story he identified and ran the game using, say, GURPS, it wouldn't be the same game. While you do gain XP in GURPS, "leveling up" is very different. Such a game could certainly be run, but you'd have to deal with the fact that a GURPS character has much less intrinsic motivation to descend into a dungeon, fight monsters, and find treasure than the average D&D character.

A good core activity makes it much easier to pick up and run a game, and it makes it easier to pick up and run. Pretty much anyone can pick up some D&D books and run a game. Not necessarily a good game, but I know a lot of folks can attest to how much fun even a simple dungeon can be if its new and different from anything they've ever done before. A more experienced DM doesn't need to lean on the core activities as much, if they have some cool new idea they want to try out, but for a long running game its nice to have something fun and familiar for when everyone needs a breather.

Having been inspired by the excellent Storytelling Engines series at Fraggmented, I'm going to take a shot at examining some different core activities, starting with D&D (and its derivitives) and working my way through the rest of the games on my shelf. I'll try to figure out what the major elements of the core activities of each are, what works and what doesn't. In particular, I'm going to try to examine the mechanical aspects of these activities, and how they interact with setting and other social or conventional aspects of play, since that's what got me interested in the topic in the first place.

What am I doing with alignment?

I haven't completely decided what I'm going to do with alignment in my Swords & Wizardry game. (Which could really use a name, but more on that later.) The system, by default, doesn't make any specific requirements about how or whether alignment functions, and though it does have a couple of suggestions the document makes clear that it's up to the particular referee to decide.

I've never done a whole lot with alignment in my games. My long running games both used d20 Modern and Arcana Evolved, neither of which even have alignment in the D&D sense. Even on the occasions I've run straight up 3rd edition D&D, alignment has never been that big a deal. Mostly, I just accepted it as either part of the game or not, and didn't give a whole lot of thought as to how I was going to include it.

With this game, though, it seems to merit a bit of consideration. On the one hand, at some point I would like to "do something" with alignment, make it and deities generally more important in a campaign. I'd really like, at some point, see about taking the Law/Chaos axis as far as it could go, to the point where the Lawful Evil and Lawful Good deities team up against all the chaotic ones.

On the other hand, I don't know if this is really the game for it. I'm trying to go for more of a pulp/weird science vibe with it, and I don't feel like big cosmological conflicts really fit. Feels too high fantasy. From that angle, since there's no mechanics regarding alignment that I have to account for with the system I'm using, I might just drop the whole thing entirely. Because if I'm not going to have a big cosmological set up backing it up, I don't know that it's worth the arguments and hang ups that tend to come along with alignment.

On yet third hand, the hand we use to talk about mutants, there is the whole radiation thing. The Gamma Knights, and their likely radiation and mutation worshiping adversaries, suggest an interesting angle of their own for dealing with "alignment" and similar things. The problem with that is one of terminology. "Pro-radiation" and "anti-radiation" are a bit awkward as entries on a character sheet, and they don't completely encompass the distinction I'm thinking about, since the Gamma Knights use a fair amount of radiation powered technology themselves, they're just careful about it.

And, of course, I'm not really sure what the point would be, in setting up a system more complicated than a detect radiation spell and a few other things of that nature. The fight against those crazy mutants up in the hills, exposing themselves and anyone they can kidnap to radiation, (or, alternatively, those stuck up Gamma Knights who think they know what's best for everyone, and won't let "the common people" in on the ancient secrets) may end up being a big deal within the campaign. But I don't know that I really need to systemize it.

Which would mean, then, that I'm leaning away from using alignment at all. That's very likely what I'll end up doing, but I have this sense of alignment as fairly important for D&D, which is still what I'm trying to play, even if a fairly modified version of it. I don't plan to discard it without some serious thought.