My Return to d20 Modern, and Why I Shouldn't Have

The old high school gang is kinda-sorta getting back together this summer for some gaming. I say "kinda-sorta" because right now the posse consists of me, one of the four members of my original crew, her husband(!), and one of the members of the group I played with my last year of high school. There's some possibility that my brother and another member of that senior-year group will join next week, though I'm not sure how much of one. This is mostly cool, since I haven't seen most of these people much lately and I could use the excuse to get out of the house. But it also means saying "hello" to another old friend I haven't seen in a while: d20 Modern.

I've all but sworn off 3rd Edition and anything related to it, and this game, I suspect, is going to be a series of all-too-immediate lessons on why I really should continue that policy. I don't mean to harsh on anyone's buzz here; I know lots of people have all kinds of fun playing d20 and its derivatives. I've been one of them, and someday I might be again. But man, do I ever doubt that right now.

d20 Modern encourages me to focus on aspects of gaming I don't enjoy focusing on. Case in point: I'm putting together a Tough hero who specializing in surviving helicopter crashes. (Because she causes them.) I consider the Concentration skill. This seems like something my character should have. Flying helicopters is tricky; she's probably going to do it while being shot at and taking damage. And yet, in the back of my mind, I know -- we never used Concentration checks back in the day. So do I take the thing that the system says I should have, or should I bet that the GM isn't going to call me on it if I don't take it, and spend those points on something I can almost guarantee will come up? Intimidation, for instance -- I know I'll be able to create that situation. Likewise, I picked up the feat Aircraft Operation, and I probably shouldn't have, because all it does is eliminate a penalty to flying helicopters (anything besides ordinary planes, basically) that I'm pretty sure won't come up anyway. If I don't mention it, the GM's definitely not going to remember that exception.

This kind of thing pulls me away from in-game contemplation of "What can my character do?" to the meta-game judgement of "How is my GM going to handle this one particular rule?" Not to mention all the time I spend just manipulating the rules themselves. Point-buy is a major culprit here; I'm sitting there calculating the relative values of the various ability scores, thinking about the cost of odd-numbered scores versus even-numbered ones and trying to remember which of my character's abilities reference which scores, rather than, y'know, the character, or what I want to be able to do in the game.

Maybe this is a character flaw. Maybe I'm just easily distractable. But it seems to me that a large point of the joy, such as it is, in a system like this is the meta-game. And at this point in my gaming life, I don't care about the meta-game. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time manipulating the rules. I want the GM to roll some dice and tell me what happens and then get on with the actual game.

So what about game mastering experience?

This is something that kinda came up in the comments to Wednesday's post, but I thought was interesting enough to go after on it's own: Would you rather have a new game master/dungeon master/referee, or someone who's been playing for ages? Are there any advantages to having a new-ish game master, or does experience and expertise always equal better play?

Does it matter to you how long your game master has been running their current system of choice, or is overall refereeing experience really what counts, and pretty much transfer over between games? Is someone who has experience with a lot of different styles better or worse than someone who's pretty much one run one system, or a handful of closely related systems, for their entire gaming career?

And it occurs to me that some of the difference, if there is any, could have as much to do with age as with actual experience. Are there any relatively new game masters out there who aren't in their teens? How do they stack up?

How much experience has your current game master had? How much had the best game master (assuming you keep score that way) had?

How much have you? How much better of a game master do you think you are now than when you first started? Are there any areas where your first game(s) were better than the ones you're running now?

Who Would You Rather Play With? Response & Recap

I got some great responses to Wednesday's question about whether you'd rather play with brand new or experienced gamers. My own preference fits pretty well with what several of you said, in particular: I like to get new players, so they can pick on my obnoxious habits without anyone else's to get in the way. I also like to get a mix of old and new, when possible; knowledge plus fresh enthusiasm brings out the best of both types, I think. I've had some . . . not bad experiences, exactly, but less than optimal ones with people who came into my games with a lot of pre-conceptions about how gaming "should" work, has made me kind of prejudiced towards new players. On the other hand, the most fun I've had has been in a game with people who had a lot more experience than I did, which means I need to try to keep an open mind.

Will and Mr. Gone each brought up a different side of an extremely important angle on this that I hadn't considered. With new people, there's the opportunity to teach, which is one of those things that's just fun. Likewise, learning can be a lot of fun on it's own. And when you're playing with gamers who have more experience than you, or simply a lot of different experience, you can get the opportunity to see people who know what they're doing and what kind of gaming they really enjoy to perform, in a way that you maybe aren't up to on your own, or didn't realize before could be done.

Of course, my favorite comment came from Yoo-Hoo Tom:

I'm actually running the Encounters season at a book store, even though there is a game store across the street. All of the players (minus an occasional ringer) are complete newbs. I find their enthusiasm very refreshing. I tell people that I am recruiting my next gaming group. To be honest, I was quite tired of some of the gamers I was playing with. Some of which were only playing so they could "break" the newest edition.

All I can say to that is -- rock on! This is absolutely the kind of thing I was hoping to hear come out of D&D Encounters.

(Of course, this was not the smoothest comment. That distinction, as always, goes to Doc Rotwang. But c'mon! New players!)

So yeah, pretty happy with how this turned out. I'm probably going to do something like that again; I've gotten to the point with this blogging business where I've got some really fantastic commentors, and I want to take advantage of that.

Who Would You Rather Play With?

So, I'm curious. If you had the option, would you rather play with people who you introduced to gaming, or would you rather play with folks who had been around the dungeon a time or two before you met them? Or a mix of both? Does it matter what kind of experience they've had?

When you think back to the people you've most enjoyed playing with, where they people who had already played a bit before you met them, or were they newbies before you met them? If they were brand new, were they your first group, or part of your first group? (That is, when you were new too?)

This is a less important question, but what about the people you've least enjoyed playing with?

(A somewhat tangential additional question: If you'd rather play with new folks than old hands, do you like playing with new people just for that new kid enthusiasm? Or do you like new people, but like them even better after they've played with you for a while?)

The Next Game

So it's coming up on a year since I last ran a campaign, even a short one. And I'm pretty happy with that, honestly. Playing 2-3 times a week continues to be pretty rad. Being a player is just fun, and it's given me a lot to think about in terms of how I'm going to run the next game. I'm also enjoying the opportunity to get some time to really think about what I'm going to run next, and for whom.

I still really, really want to run my own chat game. The format really clicks with me, as a player, and I'm not going to master it until I run my own game. I've got the player base. And I've got some ideas and inclinations that wouldn't really work except in chat. I know that if I were to run a tabletop game, I'd spend at least some of my time thinking, "Man, if this were chat, then we could..."

And yet, I've got this gentle, persistent nudging that my next game should not be the intimate, 1-3 player online chat that I'm really digging right now, but open, anyone-who-shows-up tabletop. Some kind of crazed LL/S&W/LotfP WFRPG/"you want to play a centaur? sure!" megadungeon sandboxy thing, just to get that all out of my system. The game itself wouldn't be quite as good, not quite what I'm grooving on at the moment, but the game isn't everything.

In short: My social life revolves around gaming. A lot of this is just because people I have other things in common with tend to be gaming-curious; partly it's because I make a conscious effort to be "out" about my gaming, and to bring my non-gaming friends into the fold. The overall effect is that, since seventh grade, about 90% of the people I voluntarily interact with on a regular basis (as opposed to classmates and such) have been people who I'm actively gaming with, or people who I'd gamed with in the past but for various reasons wasn't at the moment. Which means that, at the moment, a great deal of my social life is online.

I should probably be more worried about that than I am, but I'm actually pretty happy with that right now. Skype is an awesome thing, I'm weird enough that "mostly online" means "fits my strange niche interests," and a lot of it is that I'm using the 'net to keep in touch with the people I hang out with at college, now that we're scattered across the state.

However, what mostly gaming online does mean is that I don't have a whole lot of influence on my local social scene, and that's going to be even more true once I get back to college. I'd like for there to be a little more communication between the different groups of gamers I'm in touch with at school. I'd like for there to be a reliable group of people around for me to hang out with, who understand how to socialize without getting as drunk as they possibly can, as quickly as they can. I worry about some of my friends who, when I'm busy with my online gaming, often end up hanging out with people who drink more than said friends are really comfortable with. Running a game isn't necessarily going to have the effect that I want, and it's obviously not the only way to create that kind of environment, but it's a tool that I'm comfortable with, and fairly good at using.

So there's that. Plus, like I mentioned before, the kind of "anyone can show up!" old school exploration game I've been curious about running for a while is going to be a lot easier to wrangle while I'm still at college, and have a handful of people bugging me about running some variety of old school D&D already, than it will be once I graduate and have to start over cold in a social environment. I'm not quite convinced that's the kind of game I want to run, but it's enough that I've started (once again) scribbling down notes and maps for something of the kind.

Other Options for the Language Problem

"Over the next day or two." Yes. Right then.

I've got a number of ideas about ways to deal with the language problem, most of which aren't exclusive; in fact, I think a lot of these would work better if you used them together in some kind of combination. Most of them have to do with campaign design and group interaction, rather than in-game and setting issues, so they're going to be of limited utility in a lot of cases. (I tend to do most of my real campaign building while the players are making their characters, because I'm lazy and procrastinate.) I'm not entirely sure what'll happen with most of these if they're actually tried at the table, so I'd love to hear about it if you do try one, or come up with something along similar lines.

• Everyone speaks elvish? Great! We'll start in the Elven Homelands. Basically, just take the language that the PCs all speak and find a place in the setting where that language is, effectively, "common." This does require that you to be familiar with a fair amount of your setting at the start of the game; it'd be a particularly good option if you're running a published setting, especially if you're not sure where in the setting that you want to set the game, since the players basically pick for you. It also doesn't help much if the characters end up wandering far afield from their starting location, but for some campaign concepts that won't be an issue.
• We only buy things from Gnomes. If the "common language" that all the PCs speak is a trade language of some kind, you can solve a lot of the problem just by running the kind of game where the characters mostly talk to merchants; put most of the action in the dungeon, say, and only require them to deal with aboveground NPCs when they need to sell loot or buy equipment. Then, as long as you have the right kind of players, it doesn't matter what the main local language is, as long as there's a gnome caravan (or whatever) around.
• The Foreign Quarter. If the language that everyone shares is one that's only spoken widely in places that would be sort of weird to set a campaign in (goblin, for instance), then you might set up the campaign so that the dominant language is something else, but the PCs for the most part don't deal with the dominant culture. Instead, they interact mainly with some subcommunity that shares their language; the foreign quarter, or the goblin underclass that runs the city's utilities (and criminal underworld). Ideally, I think, you'd pair this option with rules that made learning new languages possible, if not exactly easy; when the PCs did start to have to deal with the area's upper class on a regular basis, they could then pick up the necessary languages.
• Blue-booking. If the campaign is set up in such a way that most of the vital, everyday interactions use the language everyone shares, but it's still possible to talk to NPCs who not everyone understands, you can handle those interactions outside of the regular game time with the players who are interested.
• Online play. Online play of various kinds can make blue-booking easier; in some kinds of PBP games, it's practically not even a separate activity from the main game. Chat games also have the advantage that players can "get up from the table" without distracting the rest of the group. If the group decides to have a short chat with someone who one or two people can't talk to, the people who aren't involved in that conversation can do something else for a bit. If this started to happen a lot in a given game, I'd look for another solution, but depending on the players, as long as it stays an occasional, temporary event, in chat this isn't much of an issue.
• Babelfish. In the Doom & Tea Parties game, my character interacts with a number of characters on a regular basis who don't all speak the same language as her, but we're getting around it with some semi-permanent magic and a bit of DM handwave. Giving the PCs access to some kind of universal translation magic or technology isn't always the most interesting way to deal with this issue, but it's very simple and effective, and a good way to go if your main problem with a common language is that it wouldn't make any sense for world-building purposes.
• Flavors of Speak Language. On the other hand, universal translation nullifies the possibilities of language as a logistical issue. That's not something that you're never going to want to deal with on a regular basis, but the right group might find it fun to have to solve "the language problem" when they travel to a new place. One option there is to make speak language, or something like it, either permanent or long-term but also very specific. You do have to keep track of who speaks what language, but that information is mainly necessary so you can find the right spell.

Overall, I think "common" is definitely the best way to go if you're just not all that interested in language, which is going to be true of a lot of groups. On the other hand, if you do think language is fun to play with at the table, some of these options might help you make it gameably interesting and avoid the usual frustrations.

No Common Language

I'm intrigued by an idea from the World of Alidor blog, which today asks if anyone runs a campaign with no common language. I haven't done that yet, but I might someday, or even soon. The trick to it would be that just because there's no common language in the campaign doesn't mean there doesn't have to be one at the table.

So the DM says, "There's no 'Common' in this game, but you all have to share at least one language so you can communicate with each other. Pick one." In some games, where you automatically start out with some kind of native tongue, and then add languages at-will after that, this would be relatively simple. Everyone just picks a second language to all share. True, this would put limits on certain character concepts; you could only have one "ignorant barbarian who only speaks his native tongue," or at least, only one kind of ignorant barbarian, but in the right kind of game, with flexible characters, that wouldn't be much of a hassle.

For another option, that I think is somewhat more interesting: consider 3e D&D. Each of the races comes with a list of bonus languages; the languages that they're capable of learning, usually for reasons of cultural contact. Certain classes get a few additional bonus languages. Here, finding a common tongue would be a matter of matching the characters' lists against each other in order to find one that everyone shared, and then all taking that language. If there wasn't one that everyone shared, you'd have to find the one that the most characters did, and then negotiate with the DM some kind of background excuse for the remainder to be able to learn that language.

Either way, this system would tell you right at character creation some interesting things about the world and the party. If the language was picked entirely by the players, with no "ignorant barbarian" or "bonus language"-type in-character restrictions, you'd have a very good idea of what they thought was important and who else they wanted to be able to interact with. You've also created a minor reason for the characters to stick together, particularly if they're in hostile territory, or if the language they all speak is unusual for some reason. (This goes double for any group based around all speaking the same language as some barbarian wahoo. Bonus points if the character in question would otherwise be a "lone wolf" type: now you know why Hrathgar the Unruly puts up with this particular bunch of civilized weaklings.)

The "bonus languages" system, on the other hand, tells the players a lot about the world, and how they fit into it. Take a look at the way the 3e languages are set up with the common races. Odds are decent your party is going to end up all speaking Orc, Goblin, or Gnome, which tells you something about how those races fit into the world. A DM could probably get even more mileage out of this if they designed these lists themselves with this purpose in mind. What's a good way to show that a race is everywhere and trades with everyone? Make their language a common bonus language. What's a good way to show that two races don't interact much? Set it up so they don't share a language, and the players have to create some kind of unusual situation to explain why they can talk to each other. Want to make it clear that two races don't trust each other? Write the lists so that they share a language, but it's the language of a mutual enemy. "Of course you can't trust those guys -- the only language they understand is Orc!"

You could even, in a more complex setting, compile lists based on factors beyond race. Because I'm weird, I'm really tempted now to run a game where everyone comes from a different culture but shares a common religious language. Between race, culture, class, and religion, you could end up with a fairly complex set of possible languages. You'd need players who were interested enough in the kinds of things this lets you do to be willing to puzzle out a common language out of all those disparate powers, and willing to tweak their culture or religion in order to get everything to fit together, but I know some players who really enjoy that kind of thing, and others who don't care as long as someone else does the work of figuring it all out.

This doesn't solve the other problem that "common" handles pretty neatly, that of the possibility that one or more party members won't speak the language that most NPCs use. Language confusion can cause a lot of problems at the table, especially if it's a regular thing. But I think that problem is largely resolvable, and I'm going to give some thought over the next day or two to some possible ways to handle it.

NEVER FORGET 4/20/1979

In honor of the anniversary of Jimmy Carter's vicious mauling at the hands (teeth?) of a crazed swamp rabbit, I give you:



What worries me is that I had forgotten about this until my friends reminded me by posting about it on Facebook, in their Gtalk statuses, and so on.

7th Sea: The Last Report

So the 7th Sea game ended a couple of weeks ago. Though it wasn't without its frustrations, overall I'm pretty happy to have been involved with it. A couple of observations:

• Play-by-post isn't quite my speed. While I love text play, chat is really what fits my style. I like regular weekly sessions; with PBP, the required time commitment is kind of hard to gauge, since the amount I can and should post varies a lot based on what's going on in-game. And it's hard to get really immersed in the scenario, which is a big deal for me. I suspect I could really get into a PBP solo game, since it would always be absolutely clear whose turn it was, but that might be kind of dangerous.
• I have a really weird play-style, and it's all Trollsmyth's fault.
• I need to play more male characters. They're fun, and educational. "Oh. That's what it feels like when a girl laughs at you."
• Low wisdom characters are fantastic. But I knew that already.
• I need to remember to encourage players to build connections between their characters to begin with, because the results are so great for my style of play. This is something that happens pretty naturally in a tabletop game, at least the way I run them: I'll put aside a session for character creation, and the players will talk story and background while one or two people fiddle with the book. But it does need a little extra push online, where everything seems so formal, and people don't necessarily all know each other.
• I'm going to miss Alasdair. Which is new and exciting sensation: I've never played a campaign long enough, or had a character interesting enough, to really be sad when I stopped being able to play him anymore. But Alasdair still had so much excellent drama to angst about and be stupid over.
• God, Alasdair was dumb.

ITGW 2010

So on Saturday night I ran my ITGW event for boytoy, a couple players from the Traveller game, and a "D&D-curious" friend who'd been making noise about playing sometime for a while, and one of the Traveller players friends who had apparently played a bit of 3.5 and a bit of 4e before. ("I prefer 4e to 3.5," she says. "Which I know makes me unusual." Talking to people who aren't hooked into the online scene can be very odd.) I thought it went pretty well, for a wacked out little dungeoncrawl that ended with the entire party being eaten by trolls. Everyone had fun, died glorious deaths, etc.

More people showed up than I was expecting, too--five total, and that was minus the people who said they really wanted to show up but had either a LARP or something else going on that night. The ones who couldn't show want me to run something similar another time, and some of the ones who did were talking at the end of the night about doing this as a regular campaign. Which I really, really don't have time for now, on account of the two other weekly games I'm currently playing and the third I'm planning to run myself, but I am intrigued by the idea--as is boytoy, who's considering running a similar kind of game himself. Only with "no rules." Not sure how that's going to work out, but we'll see.

This enthusiasm persisted despite the fact that the TPK the game ended with mainly killed second characters--three people had already lost their first and rolled up new ones at the table. (We introduced the new ones with Ye Olde "you run across goblins sacrificing other adventurers!") But the worlds "Bonesaw has fallen in glorious battle!" go a long way towards keeping the table energy up even Bonesaw's face has just been gnawed off by an angry troll or whatever, and everyone was pretty much treating it as a goof-off kind of thing anyway. At some point I'd love to run a more "serious" dungeoncrawl, but considering that it was a one-shot and a gang of new folks, goofy, high-energy, and high-casualty seemed like the way to go.

Tip: Players are perfectly happy for their characters to die if they die in ridiculous ways. (And they know going into it what to expect.)

Because they weren't taking it seriously, though, they did a lot of dumb things, even once it was clear that they were dumb things to do. I'm hoping that they'd tighten up a bit in a more serious game; I'd hate to think that they were doing this stuff because they thought that was how old school D&D was "supposed to be played." But with any luck, they've learned that:

• Sleeping in the dungeon is a terrible idea. And worse the second time.
  
• Monsters that are immune to sleep are scary.
• If the rats aren't attacking you, don't pester them.
  
• Making as much noise as you possibly can while opening doors attracts monsters.
• Running means you can't map. Deciding specifically to push on in a different direction from the one that you think leads back to the surface means you will get horribly lost.
• Having a spell saved is no good if you're dead.

They did learn, I know, that sleep is a much better spell than magic missile at that level. Several of the players pushed one of the magic-users to prep the latter spell, ("It's magic missile!") and boytoy's first character ("The Mighty Wizard Butterburr," and the character responsible for naming the place "Butterland Hollow.") did indeed enter the dungeon with that bit of magic, but they quickly learned that guaranteed damage on a single target is in no way equivalent to the ability to neutralize a horde of monsters at once.

I was pretty pleased with what I came up with to run the dungeon itself. I never did sit down to make notes for the dang thing; I had a map, my copies of Fight On! a few minutes while the players were making characters to scribble down a few ideas. So I made a deck of cards with different room descriptions on them, some from my old megadungeon, some from Fight On! and some made up on the spot or based on player speculations. When they got to a new room, I'd roll a few dice to decide whether to draw a card, roll a wandering monster, or leave it blank, and note down the details on the map.

This worked really well for the freewheeling kind of game we were playing, and would have only been a bit harder if they'd been doing basic things like listening at doors. Truly thorough investigations would have required a more involved note-taking scheme, but since this group was more interested in making as much noise as possible than careful searching and scouting, I was able to get away with a few scribbled notes.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this game went. It's got me thinking again about running some kind of regular, serious dungeoncrawl, but there's no way I'm going to have time for that kind of thing any time soon.

Doom & Tea Parties: Calendars

I've been playing in Trollsmyth's Labyrinth Lord game for over a year now, and only recently got around to keeping reliable notes. Partly this is because it's a chat game: there are logs. So long as I keep track of how to spell people's names, I can just search the folder I keep all my logs in and get whatever I need out of them. Still, at a certain point, there's no real substitute for notes: tracking expeditions, recording treasure, and remembering what happened on what day all require pulling stuff out of those logs and putting them somewhere else.

Which I did only haphazardly for a long time because I wasn't clear on what information I needed. I wrote down a lot more than I needed to, which meant I was mostly ignoring my notes, which meant I stopped keeping them.

But then the solo game got complicated enough that I really needed some way to start keeping track of time; we had a couple of upcoming events that my character needed to keep on her radar, and a lot of stuff happening in the mean time. At this point I'd been playing for long enough that I had a pretty good idea of what kind of information I wanted to be able to refer back to--I'd thought "I wish I'd written [that specific thing] down" often enough to know what I needed.

So I made a calendar. This was made easier by the fact that the months in Doom & Tea Parties game are all exactly 28 days long, so I could put together one template and then just copy it. That turned out to be a fairly efficient way to keep track of how my character was spending her days, so I made one for the group game, too.



(The fact that Trollsmyth appeared to be keeping track of dates on post-it notes scattered all over his office had nothing to do with it, I swear. And sorry this is so horrifyingly blurry. Clicking on it should link you to a version you can actually read.)

This is actually a bit different from the calendar for the solo game. Each campaign has different information I need to track, and the format reflects that. My character is pretty much in one place all the time, so there's no "location" tab, but I do break out her days into "day" and "night." The main thing I need the calendar to manage in the group game is expeditions out into the wilderness, and the location tab lets me know at a glance how long each one has taken. The solo game doesn't have that requirement, but we play through more, so each day needs to be recorded in more detail. The last few in-game days for the solo game each covered four, five, or six sessions, so the "this happened to my character two days ago and me three months ago" problem is much more extreme.

It took me a ridiculously long time to figure out the best way to track this information, because I'm horrifically bad at figuring out what information I need to track (and what information I don't) but now that I have, I'm pretty happy with it. I'm probably going to use the spreadsheet calendar system a lot in the future, though of course I'll tweak it a bit to fit the needs of the particular campaign. That's really, I think, the most important thing to remember about note-taking and information tracking like this: as with many things, each campaign is different. Paying careful attention to the particular needs of the game, and letting it take its own shape, is important.

Fiend Folio: Achaieri

All I can really say about the Achaieri is this: It's a bird. Why does it need four legs?

Okay, no, there are many more things I can say:

Why is it round? Why is the picture in the 3e MM even less menacing than the one in the Fiend Folio? I mean, it's kinda menacing. I could see how this thing could be scary. And then I think, "Round bird with four legs what?"

It gives off toxic black smoke when injured. That's actually kinda cool.

I've never used this thing in a game, and never had it inflicted on me in a game. It's in 3e D&D core, so obviously it's out there and around in people's headspace, but I suspect I'm not alone in looking at the picture and going "round bird four legs what?"

Which makes me think, hey, maybe I should use it in a game sometime. It's creepy and otheworldly and evil, it doesn't get much play, and the name is actually kind a cool.

This would all hinge on DM description, naturally. If I just went and introduced it with, "it's a large, round bird, with four legs each ending in wicked claws," well... basically I'd need some other way to describe it than "large, round bird." Even my players would laugh at me, and they're used to every monster description ending with "and it has great, terrible claws!"

Things to start with in describing the Achaierai besides "large, round bird":

1. Its stilted, unearthly gate.
2. Its four metallic, scaly legs, each ending in a wickedly sharp claw.
3. Its long, hooked beak.
4. Its terrible, clanging squawk, that seems to echo through the black depths of your very mind.
5. Its blood-red, filthy, matted feathers.
6. Its roving yellow eyes.

(And funny, I thought this was going to be my first FF post to revolve around some variation of "this is the most ridiculous monster I've ever heard of!" but apparently that fine distinction shall go to another critter. I really do think that this thing is kind of cool, in a deranged sort of way, now that I've given it some thought. And "deranged" is the best way to be cool, if you ask me.)

D&D Should Be Dangerous

The other day, TARGA asked for feedback on the recent OSR kerfuffle. My response to that is a bit sideways to the actual issues they raise, because it's hit on something that I've been thinking about lately, since Grognardia posted the TSR Code of Ethics, and Trollsmyth pointed out why the whole endeavor was ridiculous. In short: I don't want D&D to be Disneyland.

Disneyland is "family friendly." Kids love it. Their parents at least tolerate it, and a lot of them even enjoy it; the point is something that the whole family can enjoy together. It's fun, it's exciting, it's safe.

Teenagers hate it.

Dungeons & Dragons, on the other hand, has always been that weird, slightly dangerous game that your older brother played. In reality, it isn't actually any more dangerous than Disneyworld--a good deal less so, I'd say, when you start looking at what it teaches kids and the kinds of skills and attitudes it encourages--but man, do parents ever love to flip out about it. Even if yours didn't (Mine loved it; even with no more than a vague idea of how it all worked, they could see that it involved math, imagination, and social interaction, so they were all for their shut-in daughter getting involved with the hobby.) there was always that possibility that some do-gooder adult would try to make a fuss over it, which would have been the absolute height of teenage glory.

Even more important than that, I think that Grognardia is right when it suggests that D&D has always done best when it's been branded as an "adult" game, even if the true audience is somewhat younger than that which the box describes. That was certainly the impression I had of the hobby before and as I entered it. All the other D&D players I ran into around that period were adults, friends of my parents or parents of my friends, people who played D&D now or had back in college.

Which isn't to say that everything the OSR publishes should be Carcosa. Whether it's described as "for adults" or not, the vast majority of the material that any fantasy adventure game produces will, and should be, perfectly fine for kids--the weird, smart ones who'd be interested in such things, anyhow. But having Carcosa, a succubus illustration or two in the Monster Manual, and even the occasional porn star as a part of the scene can't, I think, hurt, in giving D&D that bit of an edge that it needs to be really successful as that adolescent entertainment that it's always been.

Maybe, in the long term, D&D is destined to be Disneyland. I've certainly heard tell myself of more than a few guys playing D&D with their kids. But personally, I can't see that as a long term central focus of the hobby. Thirteen years old is just too good an entry point, for a whole host of reasons. And thirteen year olds, by and large, aren't too interested in Disneyworld, in playing games with their parents, in safe. Their parents don't want them involved in anything that's actually dangerous, naturally, but that's the real genius of D&D. You're hanging around in your parents basement, eating chips, and learning a bit about reading, acting, and statistics, but overhear a few stories about The Book of Vile Darkness in your FLGS and you imagine that you're doing something edgy.

Vampire Doppelganger Monk Follow-Up

So I talked a bit about one of the games I ran in high school yesterday, in the pre-amble to the recently re-discovered write-up of my vampire doppelganger monk. (Which I still think was a pretty rad character.) Kept it short in that post, since the point was to share the madness that was me at sixteen, but today I've got a few notes on the subject that I want to run through real quick:

• This was a game I ran every day at lunch for . . . maybe three months? From March until about June. We met outside of school at various people's houses at least a few times, and I ran it for at least a few sessions over the summer, but the main bulk of the game happened at school, fifty minutes at a time.
• The vast majority of that consisted of a dungeon made out of a flowchart with monsters and treasure written on it, the "tower" that the vampire doppelganger monk notes refer to a couple of times. So a typical lunch-time session would go "kick in the door, fight a monster, pick a door to kick in next time." Sometimes it would get more complicated than that--I got into the habit of putting little sigils on the door, so they'd have something interesting to base the decision on--but the group was mostly fourteen-year-old guys, and that kept them pretty happy.
• The yak folk sorcerer started out as a regular ol' evil sorcerer. Everything about him being a yak folk, and why he was out in the desert in a tower full of monsters, came later. Like I said, simple.
• I say "simple," but there was also some reasonably complicated stuff going on in the background--different monsters were in the process of moving in or out of "the deep desert" with the seasons, things like that. The werewolves had some internal politics that also intersected with I think it was ogres? as well as the "sand monkeys" I was slowly building up as a plague upon civilized folks.
• The game actually started out with an entirely different setting and set up. Halfway through the first session, I got bored with it, attacked the party with ghouls and an airship, and zapped them to a different part of the campaign world entirely. I jotted down a few notes on the new setting over the next few days and ran from there.
• I really regret not seeing where this campaign could have gone. Looking back on it, it was clearly in the process of becoming one of those games really spiffy campaigns that start from a dungeon and a sketched wilderness and grow into an epic fantasy adventure with a detailed setting, but it got cut short due to social problems. I didn't even intend to go anywhere really complicated with it. I just wanted to run some D&D, and I noted things down as ideas struck me.

Vampire Doppelganger Monk

So basically what I learned today is yes, I was an idiot at sixteen, but gloriously so. I was going through some old files on the desktop I used in high school, and chanced upon some old plans I'd devised for a villain in a campaign I ran during that period. I never made much use of the plans, since the campaign itself ended (due to social fireworks) shortly after I wrote them up, so while I clearly remembered the villain himself, I'd forgotten the bizarre back-story I'd cooked up to explain all the bizarre incidents I'd made up as I went along and only later sat down to justify.

Anyway. I could ramble on for a while about why this is what it is, what came of it, and what didn't, but for now I'm just going to inflict it on the world and be done:

Vampire Doppleganger Monk

This villain is driven by wanderlust. He wants to be able to go where he wants, when he wants, and has a somewhat skewed way of going about with that. He was created to provoke confusion and fear in the players.

This villain is (obviously) a doppelganger, and as such has a certain amount of natural aversion to being stuck in one place for too long. Adding to that, the vampire who originally spawned him imprisoned him for a long time, letting him out of his fortress only occasionally when he had some task he wanted done. This may have lasted a hundred years or so until he was able to kill his progenitor, and the experience probably damaged his psyche permanently.

Not intended as a primary villain, but a pretty major one. Probably threatens most of the desert (eventually) and maybe the area to the north, too, because the only way to really guarantee that he can go anywhere is to control everything.

His eventual plan is to take control of as much of the surrounding area as possible. His immediate goal is to get the windheart, a stone with a variety of magical powers primarily related to movement and useful to him as a monk.

There are a number of obstacles standing between him and the windheart. The first is just finding the thing. It’s hidden, and has been for millennia. The second is defeating the guardians that defend it; the texts he’s working from aren’t terribly specific on this point, but they at least make it clear that there will be some very serious opposition to anyone who tries to take it.

The villain is a manipulator. He is perfectly capable in combat, but his main talents lie in deception and subterfuge. He can take just about any (humanoid) form he wants, and perhaps more importantly, he knows how to use his dominate power to good effect, hiding his involvement behind even more layers of obfuscation than the usual doppelganger.

His resources include the following:

• Abilities of a 6th level monk
• Doppelganger shape change ability
• Any vampires he might spawn
• Insane sneakiness
• Supernatural and skill-based manipulation abilities, including disguise, bluff, detect thoughts, and dominate
• Current minions, mostly the sorcerer (and his minions)
• Tentative/possible alliance with the yak folk
  

He’s already completed part of his plan. Years and years ago, he struck a deal with the yak folk sorcerer currently in control of “His Doomificience.” (This particular yak folk had been exiled from his own city, and desperately wanted to reclaim the kind of power and luxury enjoyed by most of his kind. He also doesn’t realize what that the villain is a vampire or a doppelganger, just thinks he’s a helpful sneaky sort of person who wants in on the action.) The found the Tomb of Glass Lore, the place the “sorcerer” (before he was possessed) was sent by the air weird to find, and figured out what it meant—that it led to something that would give them power, and that they should really keep other people from finding out about it. So they built the tower, and the doppelganger convinced various people to come to the town they built, and they sealed off the air weird to keep others from finding out what they had.

What they found was instructions for making the Storm Hand. This is a powerful magical device that allows its creator to control and create powerful dust storms, but it has a second, more hidden purpose. It’s intended as a sort of guidepost to the windheart, and shows the location of that artifact once activated. (The sorcerer doesn’t know this, incidentally. The villain discovered this on his own, while the sorcerer was busy with other things. The sorcerer just thinks they’re going to wreak havoc with it, conquering stuff.) They’ve almost got the Storm Hand; the werewolves should be returning with the final piece any day now. (Which they will do very dramatically, since everyone thinks the sorcerer is running this show, and the sorcerer likes things done dramatically.)

Once they have the Storm Hand, stage two will commence, with the finding and looting of wherever it is that the windheart is kept.

Fiend Folio: Aarakocra

I was recently reminded that I had completely forgotten to mention an item of crucial importance: I've got a copy of the AD&D Fiend Folio. (Someone very nice--but still evil!--figured out that I like collecting the old AD&D hardbacks. Thank you. ;) ) Which, incidentally, is currently the sole 20th century monster compendium I own. Which, as we all know, is pretty much a recipe for gaming awesomeness.

Flipping through the book, I noticed that some of them I've never seen before (the al-mi'raj? What the heck?!), others I'm familiar with through the 3e Monster Manual (the grimlock is there as classic cannon-fodder for illithids), or one-off 3e supplements (the aleax happily resides in the Book of Exalted Deeds), a few have come up in Trollsmyths game (the aarakocra), and there are a few I know because, well, how can you not have heard about the flumph?

Actually, I take it back about the aarakocra. The first time I ran into them was in a book I read in-game during my brief experience with Neverwinter Nights, which I assume mean they featured in a similar way in the Forgotten Realms: one of the mysterious lost elder races that have since ceded domination of the world to humans and dwarves and so on. This is basically how they've come up in Trollsmyth's game, too; the sorcerer the PCs in the group game hired gave us a short lecture about how they used to fight the evil elder menace that built the dungeon we were exploring, but they haven't been a major force, or even seen much at all, in ages.

And there's nothing about this in the aarakocra write up in the Fiend Folio. It's pretty easy to read it into the mountain dwelling tribes that get up to some spiffy weaving and will occasionally give you information that are in the write up, but it doesn't specifically mention anything about the grand past that I've always seen them associated with in later presentations.

What is in here is an adventure. Well, okay. Not a full adventure. You'd still have to have a reason to go into the mountains and get where you could mess with them. But there enough neat cultural details that, if I was putting together some crazy game happenings in the mountains somewhere, I'd throw in a few tribes of bird-men just to give the players something to play with.

Things to do with aarakocra:

1. Put a few territorial banners and pendants up somewhere the PCs are heading for a different reason, and watch them puzzle out what they mean. If and when they mess with them, they get attacked by angry bird-creatures.
2. Have a villain bribe a tribe with shiny objects to guard a place or raid villages. Make sure to throw in a few giant eagle and wind elemental allies for good measure.
3. Next time the PCs are looking around town for rumors, throw in one about terrifying bird-creatures stealing livestock from the surrounding farms. If the PCs want to make it a big deal, let them.
4. The PCs need to find something up in the mountains. The best option might be to hire an aarakocra scout.
5. Some crazy noble gets really into aarakocra weaving. They might just have it up on their walls when the PCs go to visit them (if your players are the kinds of people who ask questions about the scenery, and enjoy a good story to go with it) or they might be specifically interested in hiring the party to collect some good examples.
6. Some crazy noble got really into aarakocra weaving a while back, and wiped out an entire tribe to get the territorial pendant markers. Now either the other tribes nearby figure out what happened, or the PCs stumble across it in the course of another adventure. Hilarity ensues.

A Discussion of Probability

I was flipping through my copy of the 1e DMG today and realized that it's the only place I've ever seen a discussion of probability in a game book. (This may be because I haven't been reading the right RPGs.) This is how Gygax decided to open his Dungeon Master's Guide, and it makes a lot of sense: a thorough discussion of the tools of the trade. But as with a lot of what I've noticed about the DMG, there's a very specific attitude embedded here, and one that's really different from the one I associate with the later editions of the game that I got into the hobby with.

What I find interesting here is that Gygax assumes that you're going to be building your own random tables, or using the dice to adjudicate results on-the-fly. You've got to know how your dice work, so you can get them to give you the randomization or oracular input you need. Instead of a series of universal mechanics that, in theory, cover everything, you get some basic principles that help you make the decisions you need to make as they come up.

What opening the DMG with a discussion on probability says to me is: Sooner or later, you're going to need the dice to help you resolve something that the rules don't cover, or to give you some ideas to handle some wacky thing that your players just did. Which is just about exactly what I want the beginning of a guide to running a game to say.

In A Wicked Age: "When being chased by a virgin-eating forest god, throw bees."

Our game of In A Wicked Age on Skype went well, despite boytoy's unfortunate absence on account of thesis. Any game that leaves me in fits of laughter because my character, the mysterious, virgin-eating god of the forest, has been thwacked in the face and engulfed in a horde of bees is a success in my book. Your mileage may vary, but I had fun.

Skype worked out fairly well, and was both less and more weird than I'd worried it would be. Everyone playing cross gender actually wasn't that big of a deal; that may have been because, being voice chat, it took on the quality of a spoken story, or a book being read aloud, but whatever the reason, I got used to it and it didn't throw me off.

A bigger problem was that I realized just before the game started that it had been over a year since the last time I played (rather than DMed) in person. Between that, my usual pre-game nervousness, and the fact that I was playing with new people, the immediacy of Skype brought on a mild attack of shyness. Early in the game I did that obnoxious "sit in the corner and don't do anything" thing that drives me crazy when my players get it into their heads, and there were a number of "umm... I dunno..." moments when Tim had to put me on the spot, as I slowly forced myself to actually play. By the end of the game I'd gotten into things more, which is how it always goes.

We kept Wave open to track character sheets and the Owe list, and the combination of Skype for play and Wave for reference worked quite well. Wave is a good way to approximate what you can do with an actual piece of paper at the table--write notes down on it and pass it around--and can even be superior for some applications, if everyone needs to have access to it continuously, since there's no actual passing involved. And using Wave strictly for reference purposes, rather than both conversation and record, cuts down on a lot of the confusion that can develop in a well-traveled Wave. (Not to mention the fact that needing to keep Wave open for game references cut down on a lot of the idle web-surfing I might otherwise have been tempted to do with my laptop in front of me.) If I play over voice chat again, I'll definitely look in to using Wave for note sharing.

Still, this is one game that I think is best played at the table, and while I wouldn't rule out another session on Skype sometime (time permitting; between school, my other games, and that pesky social life I'm pretty busy at the moment) I'm looking forward to getting a chance to play it with my old high school crew, as well as when I hit GenCon this summer. But Skype gaming itself ain't bad, either, and it's an option I'm glad now to have in my back pocket for when I want to play a game online for some reason that doesn't work well over text, or if I want to play long distance with one of those strange folks who don't find chat games to their taste. Neither it nor In A Wicked Age is going to replace my weekly Labyrinth Lord text sessions, but I'm never going to complain about having a little more flexibility in my gaming.

In A Wicked Age: Table Energy, and the Trouble with Wave

On Thursday night Tim Jensen succeeded in his long-running attempt to get me to play some kind of hippy indie game with a session of In A Wicked Age on Wave. Also in attendance were Trollsmyth, boytoy, and Willow. It was originally going to be a one-shot, but we took over two hours making characters and setting up the situation, so we've scheduled a second session to wrap things up proper. (More on that in a bit.)

Overall I'm pretty please with what I've seen of the game so far. It won't replace Labyrinth Lord, or that style of gaming, but it should fill a spot I've been missing in my game repertoire for a while: the no-prep pick-up game. I can get pretty close with Swords & Wizardry and a pre-made megadungeon, but In A Wicked Age is just that much better for the kind of spontaneous, at the table craziness kind of gaming my high school friends and I would like to be able to do when we get together on breaks.

I don't think that Wave is really the best format for this kind of thing, though. For one thing, I think this kind of game really benefits from the constant creative feedback you get at the table; there's no need to specifically comment on whether or not something is "cool," because everyone can tell, from posture and tone of voice and that kind of thing. Wave also has some specific issues, too. It's easy to create a very convoluted, hard to keep track of Wave with a lot of people working on it, or to bury vital information somewhere that it's not easily accessible. And because of the way In A Wicked Age uses interruption and retroactive modification, the log can become a source of confusion rather than clarification. In table play, there wouldn't be that gap between "what happened in-game" and "what happened at the table," because what happens at the table disappears.

We're playing again tonight, and this time on Skype, so we'll see if that clears up any of those issues. Of course, we weren't expecting to play by voice, so that may be an adventure in itself: we're all playing cross-gender. Well, except for me, since I'm not sure that my magical virgin-eating giraffe has a gender.

7th Sea: Those Basic Joys of the Game

I mentioned in my first post about the 7th Sea game that things had been rough. This has continued to be true since then; 7th Sea involves an amount and variety of dice rolling that's more reminiscent of 3e D&D than the old school editions I've gotten into lately, and it's driven home for me that rules light, DM-fiat driven play is really what I'm interested in right now. More importantly, though I'm slowing getting a better idea of the strengths of PBP play, I'm also slowly coming to the conclusion that it's not my preferred format, either, at least for a group this size, between the reduced immediacy and the logistical issues created when the party splits.

And yet, I continue to play, and I have no plans to stop any time soon. Why, you might reasonably ask, when I'm able to detail with tremendous precision, the aspects in which I find it unsatisfactory? To this question, I can provide only one answer:

Because this game is awesome.

I can't entirely explain this opinion, because it's based, in part, on certain details that have yet to be revealed to the rest of the party. But that in itself is something--I enjoy executing those kinds of reveals, and Erin's handed me a few items that should prove particularly intriguing in that capacity, and that let me explore a number of things I've been enjoying about my character. Who is in himself yet another reason; spooling out the various conflicts I set up in my character's background has been a lot of fun, and discovering new ones as he interacts with the rest of the party has been even more so. And then there's that ever-reliable social element--having Trollsmyth as a fellow player, and a game with my (currently ex, on account of Florida) roommate, are enough in themselves to make my frustrations with other aspects of the game relatively minor.

I have a lot of ideas about how games "ought to be played," and what I want out of a system. I've given a lot of thought to exactly what features I like, and why. I'm still figuring all that out, as always, and my opinions are subject to change--but I have them, and fairly extensive ones at that. But those ideas about system and playstyle and rules, while significant, fade when put up against those basic joys of having a character I enjoy, and playing with interesting people. That's the foundation of everything that comes after it.

Ever Used Disease In Your Game?

I've used a disease in my game exactly once. Some kind of plague carried by space rats. This was d20 Modern, and I'm pretty sure the PCs made all their Fort rolls, so it never came up. It was never intended to be a continuing scenario in itself, anyway. Just a hazard of the encounter.

Mostly this is because up until a year or two ago I only ran d20 games regularly, and d20's disease system isn't particularly inspiring. Add in cure disease, and, well, there didn't seem to be all that much point to the adventure. (I'd love, by the way, to be proven wrong about this. Anyone got some awesome 3e/3.5/d20 system disease stories?)

As an aside, this is one thing that I really like about 4e. The disease track is just a whole lot more compelling. More tension, and more opportunity for interesting effects.

Still. You'd think that at some point I'd have jumped on another way to make my players' characters' lives miserable. Or that some enterprising DM would do the same to me. Hasn't happened yet. I've never even had a game where something like this happened to an NPC. I can understand that there might be logistical issues getting in the way of giving PCs certain diseases (some kinds of games would handle it really well, I think, but a really pulp/action/adventure game might seize up a bit) but there are plenty of things I've avoided doing to PCs for the hassle of it (I tend not to have villains capture just part of the party, for one) that I'll happily inflict on an NPC they like.

Boy, do I ever love abusing NPCs. There's all kinds of things you can do to them that would be a huge headache for the PCs, but are pretty much excellent with them. I try not to abuse them as a plot hook too much, but there's a certain kind of player who will get really attached to NPCs and then get really excited when they get a chance to save them from some hideous fate. And I always like to make my players happy.

Anyway, what makes this really weird is that I tend to love weird afflictions of various kinds in other media. Illness and injury come up with a decent amount of frequency in the fiction I write. In a way, even things like werewolves and the Hulk are just really dramatic examples of "disease," and that kind of dramatic, supernatural affliction is category I really dig. But even that has never really come up in one of my games.

The way I'm putting together the setting I'm working on right now, there's a good chance that this'll come up in a big way in the next game I run, so that should be interesting. But considering the issue has gotten me curious. Any of you folks ever used disease in a game? Was it a one-off thing, or is it part of your regular threat routine? How'd you handle it mechanically? Did it work out well, or are you never touching it again?

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.
  

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.

Doom & Tea Parties Solo: Why I'm Not Writing About It

So let's see. I've written about the group game this month, and I'm not going to run out of things to say about it anytime soon. Next month is going to be why Trollsmyth won't kill boytoy's character, I think. Unless she gets eaten by a slaadi or something in the meantime. Which would be good, because then she won't die after I write that post and make me look dumb.

The solo game is a little trickier. While I've written about it a fair amount in the past, I've very deliberately not mentioned a number of key circumstances and events in the game, and I'm going to continue that policy. I've shared some of those circumstances with offline friends, in the course of those "what crazy thing just happened in the games we're in" conversations that I occasionally give in to, but there's a fair amount I haven't told anyone, and won't until the game ends. And maybe not even then.

A lot of what's made that game so interesting and involving, in fact, is that I don't talk about it. I don't have to explain it, or understand it well enough to explain it, or justify it. I can do very odd things and go very odd places, with no audience except the DM, who's mostly busy doing stranger things anyway. It's an experimental space.

Which is a bit odd, since RPGs tend to be very much public affairs. There's that whole "let me tell you about my character," actual play report culture; a lot of my conversations with people I've just found out play roleplaying games tend to turn towards various events from campaigns past. People like talking about their games. And a game, obviously, involves more than one person, usually a fair handful. It's not like reading a novel, or watching a movie--and even those examples point to a general publicity of entertainment, at least in our culture. One of the chief joys of novels and TV and stories in general is in discussing them.

But I don't think my experience with this game has been anything approaching unique. After all, one of the features that so marvelously distinguishes roleplaying from reading or watching is that the experience is so much less public. It's not something that anyone who picks up the book can experience; only I and the few other friends who were there ever can. Which means that it can be a much more private experiences, with all the advantages that go along with that--not least being that it only ever needs to interest and please us, the people participating. And that remains true no matter how many players are in the group. And even when I do give in to the temptation to tell all my friends about a character's latest escapade.

Snowflake the Techno-Plant (This is Boytoy's Valentine's Day Present)

Snowflake the Techno-Plant

Strength: 10

Dexterity: 11

Constitution: 13

Intelligence: 18

Willpower: 14

Charisma: 16

HP: 58

Dermal Poison Slime (7d6 damage, save half)

Epidermal Susceptibility (Fire)

Albinism

Negative Empathy

Quick Mind

Tripping Tendrils

Abnormal Size (1/20th normal)

The upshot: it's about 4" tall, is about as good as it's possible to be at figuring out new technology, and a significant minority of the people it meets immediately try to kill it for no reason.

Poor Snowflake.

In other news, I adore random character generation.

Thoughts on the Manifesto of the Turku School

I'm pretty sure today isn't the first time I'd seen the Manifesto of the Turku School. But it's the first time I'd paid enough attention to it to notice this:

Another way of dividing the different ways of gaming is to group them into gamist, dramatist, simulationist and eläytyjist styles. The gamist players ("munchkins") try to somehow win the game by making their character as powerful as possible - in a way turning the role-playing into strategy-gaming. The dramatist people have no true grasp for the meaning of interaction, as they think the purpose of the game is for the game masters to tell a story using the players as actors - but with no audience to tell the story to! The simulationists try to create a working society or even a world which is simulated through role-playing. The eläytyjist set the goal to becoming the characters, to experiencing everything through the character.

While the division between the mediums of LARP and table-top games does not provide any difference in quality, the second division certainly does - not all of the above styles are as well thought-out as others. As is obvious to most role-players, the dramatist and the gamist styles are inferior to the simulationist and eläytyjist styles.

Setting aside the pretentiousness for a moment, what they've done here is rather fascinating: divided roleplaying styles into four groups based on whether they focus on creating a story, overcoming (largely mechanical) obstacles, creating a world, or immersing yourself in a character, and then grouped the story and achievement styles in one category and the simulation and immersion styles in another.

While their presentation of the idea is somewhat problematic, my thoughts have been running along similar lines for a while now. The summer that 4e D&D came out, there was a lot of talk about how it had incorporated "Forge philosophy" into its design, and while I don't know enough about Forge-style games to comment substantively, what I do know has suggested that there are some definite points of contact between those two sets: they're both using rules to engineer very specific experiences. And in that quality at least they both stand very much apart from the kind of gaming I've been doing a lot of lately, where we'll ditch the rules entirely for months at a time, and don't figure out exactly what want out of a campaign until six months into it.

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.

Oh Ettercaptain, My Ettercaptain

On Thursday I had an unusual experience: I watched another group of gamers in action. Usually, if there's D&D happening, I'm right in the middle of it. Chances are, I'm the one who got the game together in the first place. But that night only one other person had shown up to an English Club meeting, a player from last year's Traveller game, and when it turned out that this other group was meeting to play D&D right next door, one of the players, who had also been in the Traveller game, invited us to come hang out and watch. This was a game I'd been hearing about for a few weeks, since I knew most of the people who were playing in it through various channels, so I was curious.

It turned out to be, well, not enlightening, exactly, but interesting enough that I started taking notes. Much easier to do that when you're not playing or DMing, actually. That, in fact, was interesting enough: the opportunity to really see what was going on in a session, and notice a lot more than I usually do when immersed in it myself.

For reference purposes, the group consisted of the DM, the DM's girlfriend, the DM's brother, the DM's brother's girlfriend, and the ex-Traveller player.

• The DM rolled treasure at the table, in the open, off the DMG charts, adjusting the treasure for monster type. (In this case, an ooze, that had 10% coins.)
• He calculated XP at the table the same way, right after the fight in question, and noted that he hadn't remembered how much work it was. (Which didn't surprise me. Oh, do I ever not miss the CR system.) He also said that it didn't really matter anyway because he was going to up them to 4th level at "the end of the tunnel," but went ahead and calculated XP and handed it out all the same.
• As usual, I showed up just after they fought the gelatinous cube. I am perpetually hearing stories about fighting gelatinous cubes, but have never actually been present for one.
• They had a number of health restoring abilities, one of which I'm guessing was a dragon shaman aura, (I know the party consisted of at least a knight, a duskblade, and what I suspect was a warlock -- whatever she was, she had spider climb at will) and one of which was provided by a magic item ("a jewel") that the DM's girlfriend's character had.
• The DM's girlfriend hadn't played D&D before this campaign, which had only been going on a few sessions. This was pretty obvious; he explained things to her a couple of times, and rolled dice for her at least once. She also didn't speak up much; the other characters were much more active in interacting with things.
• Lots of filthy jokes.
• They'd fought the slime for some ettercaps, in exchange for their freeing a few "human prisoners" (as the Traveller player explained to me) who turned out to be a dwarven cleric and an elven rogue. The dwarven cleric "healed the party," in what was pretty clearly a DM hand wave to get the party back to full health, and then the two of them gave the party 200 gp and a potion of flammable oil.
• The party decided to give the potion to the knight, on account of him being the character who could get the most use out of it.
• The dwarven cleric and elven rogue had just come from the other end of the tunnel, the dungeon that the party had heard had treasure and was trying to get to. As they were leaving to go back the other way, towards the town the party had come from, the Traveller player (finally!) asked if they had any information about said dungeon. They didn't. The DM said a few things about how all they'd seen was the pit they fell into when the ettercaps got them.
• Neither the dwarf nor the elf had names. The DM didn't supply any, and the party didn't ask.
• The next one was a puzzle of some kind. Interacting with it made everything worse: sleep spells, spikes, and then the room filled with lava. They turned it off by rolling a Search check, whereupon the DM told them about the switch that reset everything.
• By the time they'd set of the third or fourth trap, I wondered, "Why don't they just back off and find something else to mess with?" Then I remembered that the whole thing, being a tunnel, was a straight line: they had no where else to go.
• Then they rolled another Search check, and the DM told them what they needed to do to solve the puzzle.
• Accidentally filling a room full of lava is fun. Especially if it's mostly one player's fault and the rest of them can make fun of him for it.
• Arcane spell failure made the spell in question misfire rather than just fizzle.
• No one was quite sure how to calculate a spell DC. I spoke up at that point, but probably shouldn't have; it would have been interesting to see the solution they came to on their own, and how long it took.

Best quote: "Oh Ettercaptain, my Ettercaptain."

I'm going to have to find out if the dungeon they're headed for turns out to be as ridiculously linear as the tunnel was. Which shouldn't be too hard, since boytoy lives with one member of the group, and I have classes with the DM. It made sense considering that it was tunnel, but I still feel very strongly that a dungeon ought not to be linear, and watching this session more or less confirmed that idea.

I'm very, very tempted to write up another dungeon for Swords & Wizardry, taking into account what I learned from the megadungeon about organizing my notes, and invite this crowd, the rest of the players from the Traveller game, and the group that I've heard plays Vampire: the Masquerade for a proper dungeon-crawling experience.

On the other side of the spectrum, I'm not entirely sure why they weren't playing 4e D&D. The DM's brother I know, from previous conversations, has an intense dislike for the system, but I suspect that they would have found the healing surge system useful. (It was fascinating watching the way healing happened in that game; to my eye, it looked like they'd patched together a less elegant solution to the problems that the healing surge system is intended to address.) Moreover, they were mostly playing as a series of encounters strung together with the occasional talky bit, so there wasn't much that 4e would have interfered with. Probably just a matter of familiarity, I suppose. Or due to an issue that didn't come up in this session.

Overall, though, they were clearly having fun. Philosophical objections aside, the DM was entertaining, and good at keeping things moving. And the players were all into it and enjoying the game. Which is really what matters.

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.