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.