Lawful Indifferent

There can be only one (mechanic)

2012-01-26T22:31:00.003-05:00

I know he's not a highlander but he's got a sword. That's almost good enough, right?

I'm torn between two systems: Either d10 against a static modifier, or d10 against the GM's d10, with opportunities to roll again or whatever. All other things being equal, which would you prefer?

The first one is the way it's been done for ages. There are a bunch of tables saying how difficult a thing is, and you look at it, and then you roll and try to roll better than it. It's kind of mechanical, and actually requires nearly as much GM fiat as the dude making it up on the spot. It's just better hidden. It's easy to understand, and lets you play percentage games when you want to.

The second way is what I'm trying to do in The Odds Are Against You, because I'm using cards and you can play your high card when it's an important moment and your low one when you want to save your high cards for later. You, basically, get to choose your own odds. If you want to be sure to win, play a 10. If you'd like relative certainty, play a 7 (you have a 70% chance of winning the card flip.) It reverses the roles a little, which is kind of what I'm after.

But which do you think would be more fun?

D&D Next: Some mini spoilers

2012-01-26T18:35:00.000-05:00

If you haven't heard about 5th edition, go google it right now. I'll wait. We on the same page? Cool.

D&D Next is, basically, some playtesting that the developers of 5e are going through in order to figure out what we, as a playerbase, actually want. Leaving aside the obvious fact that the playerbase both hates and loves everything depending on who you ask, we've managed to get leaked some good information from sources unknown. The one I'll be talking about here is found at this link: http://trollishdelver.blogspot.com/2012/01/what-we-learnt-from-first-d-next.html

It's got a couple of interesting points that I'd like to chew over with you guys. I'll borrow the Trollish Delver's format, because it works as well as any.

Iconic monsters will remain threats at higher levels
Levelling won't be all about big bonuses
Flexibility will be key to gameplay
More advice will be given to DM's on how to run games
Old-school randomness will make a comeback
Characters will feel like individuals
The art will be harken back to the good old days

1- Iconic Monsters Will Remain A Threat At Higher Levels

This seems good to me, but we'll have to wait and see. One of the benefits of playing a game like Labyrinth Lord or Swords and Wizardry is that the attack bonii, damage, and health were all tied to Hit Dice. It's elegant and easy. If you wanted a new monster, you just changed the Hit Dice and gave it some special abilities. Done and done. I understand that's not even remotely the way it's done now, but it's good to see they're getting back to that by offering a "quintessential orc creature that easily scales." Why they ever moved from that, I'll never know.

2- Levelling Won't Be All About Big Bonuses

From the sounds of it, levelling will give you more breadth instead of depth. I.E. as you level, you'll learn to do new things more than you learn to do the things you already do better. Sounds good to me, I guess. Maybe this'll help get rid of the fact that characters over, say, 6th level are already superhuman in their abilities by scaling that back some. Would be nice.

3- Flexibility Wil Be Key To Gameplay

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean and I can't even guess. Check the Trollish Delver article for what they had to say. Sounds like marketing bullshit to me, but we'll just have to wait and see.

4- More DM Advice

I don't know how to feel about this. More DM advice is good, but why bother to mention this? I feel like I'm missing part of the conversation

5- Old School Randomness

Again, I don't know how to take this. Random tables aren't hard to make yourself, but I guess it's nice that they seem to be moving away from the point-buy as a default. At least, from the tone of this. They might just be talking about giving you random monster encounters again. Hard to tell.

6- Characters That Feel Like Individuals

Taking away the copy-and-paste mentality from 4e where everything is ruthlessly balanced can only be a good thing. Looking at 4e powers made my eyes bleed. From what Monte Cook is saying, it sounds like substituting default abilities will be the main way to change up your character, which is cool. It was one of the things that I was sorry to see not be used in 3e prestige classes at all.

7- Old School Art

If there's no more Wayne Reynolds, I'll be a happy camper. It seems like D&D has some of the most uneven art in terms of quality, with a few gems here and there amidst a background of awful art. If this changes, it can only be for the better.

My verdict: Based on just this fairly insightful article, I'm quietly hopeful for something good to happen. I won't get too excited, because I've seen what WotC can do to dreams, but I'll keep my eyes open and ready for something decent.

TOAAY: Senea

2012-01-24T21:50:00.003-05:00

Senea is the name of the setting that I'm going to use for The Odds Are Against You.

Imagine, if you would, an independent space colony, thousands of years old, on a wrecked world. The days are short, the sun is weak and ineffective, and what little civilization remains is due to a small, bizarre implant that harvests the mental energy of its wearer and converts it to usable power.

The remaining population (several million, a far cry from the nearly billion that once existed) either accept the laws of the Lord Ancestor and live in a guarded settlement underground, or attempt to eke out an existence amongst or alongside the half-feral Surfacers.

Underground's not a bad place to live- it's slightly warmer, and there are a few manufactories working on reclaiming scrap from the surface ruins and converting it into life's necessities- weaponry, walls, tools, and the ever-necessary lifesuits that every Caver wears on the surface. Their lives are longer, if not slightly more cramped and controlled, and there's even a burgeoning middle class. Mercenaries are the most common link to the outside world for most citizens, and that's fine by them- Surfacer raids are not uncommon and that's more than enough of a sight for most Cavers.

Living aboveground is for the hardy, insane, or ambitious. Outside of the watchful eye of the Lord Ancestor, tyrannical autocrat for underground society, Surfacers are actually free. Armed with a combination of salvaged Ancient gear from the times of the meteor strike cataclysm or even the age of the Progenitus, and barbarically crude zip-guns, hand weapons, and explosives, Surfacers frequently loot the surface world's ruins, the Caver outposts, and each other for what they need.

I dunno, I know my writing needs work (what else is new), but I think it could work. As a matter of fact, I think it will work.

No, this doesn't conflict with what I posted yesterday, it's an expansion of the same idea.

The Odds Are Against You: Dystopian Edition

2012-01-24T06:22:00.001-05:00

I think this is the setting I want for The Odds Are Against You.

I think that a nice near-future dystopian setting would be a lot of fun to be an action hero, especially if you happen to be the kind of guy who thinks that jumping into the middle of a group of heavily armed soldiers wearing nothing but a ponytail, some kneepads, and a sweet bandana is a good idea.

The whole gist of The Odds Are Against You, of course, is that you're the kind of guy who's a bad enough dude to get away with it. You win against this situation because you've got explicit plot armor, these guys are faceless mooks, and you've got an awesome, awesome idea of exactly how you're going to get away with it.

If you don't remember, The Odds Are Against You is the game of action roleplaying, where you're dealt a hand of cards and you play them out every time your character isn't a Bad Enough Dude to get it done automatically. It's not a bad system in my oh-so-humble opinion, although it hasn't been playtested for shit yet. I aim to change that soon. But I digress.

The point is that I've been working on it for months and I just now realized where I want to go with it. And I'm going to release it, and soon. But not now. It needs work. You see:

Since the game is neutral when it comes to awesome versus mundane, you're encouraged to pick the awesome because it's awesome. However, there's no real explicit reason to do so, meaning some people might miss the point. Maybe some sort of "awesome incentive" is required?
The rules for injury don't cause enough injuries. Maybe some sort of penalty to maximum hand size would be better, or maybe even a penalty to the result shown on the card face. Injuries should mean something.
The mechanics for getting more cards are, basically, that you do something risky or jeopardize your goals. I'm thinking that riskiness should tie into your first card flip, where failure means you almost screw it up, you get hurt, and you can get a free flip. Succeeding on the second one means no more injuries and you win by the skin of your teeth, and failure means you're hurt further.
Jeopardizing one's own goals is a risky proposition, and it needs to hurt to be effective. It should be HAMMERED home to the GM that he needs to make each card gained this way really, really suck. It shouldn't be an off-hand thing. It should be a "I really need this." And even then, it might not work the way I want it to.
I think that at the end of each scene the players should regain a number of cards if they've ran below it. Heroes often just need a breather to go back at it again, harder, and the heroes of this game should reflect the fiction.
It needs a pre-made adventure and I'm not good at modern. Sorry, but it's true. There's a lot of variables for it.

I think it's time for a nap, my brain feels fuzzy again.

Mall of the Dead

2012-01-23T22:47:00.001-05:00

Honestly, I'm tired of having this in the back of my head, bothering me- so I'm putting it out for everybody to see.

It's a system built around AIM FOR THE HEAD, but I'm not picky and it's pretty system neutral. Since it's one page, you're treated to, basically, a couple of set pieces with a lot of room for improvisation. If you haven't figured it out by now, that's pretty much all I need to get a game going, and that should be enough for you.

The basic flow goes like this (and this is going to end up being longer than the pdf itself, if I'm not careful):
1) The players' survivors are in a department store where they've been hiding out- the zombie apocalypse happened while they were shopping, and naturally nobody bothers to tell the people at the mall, so they're stuck. The players can hear a helicopter going overhead at roughly the same time each day. Might as well try that, there's shit else to do.
2)The players emerge and the mall's nearest entrance has been smashed to shit by somebody driving a truck through the mall. Near the smashed wall is a horde of zombies, who are prevented from rushing in by the wreckage. Bad idea to try and go through, but if the players can swing it somehow, their car could be out there.
3) The only safe option is through the mall. There are lots of little stores which could have something, but they could also be time-wasters with nothing but zombies and gore. Its up to the players.
4) The players get to the food court, where it's open enough that there are way too many zombies. Zombies eventually fall from the enormous skylight, raising one hell of a racket. That's bad.
5) The players are left with a choice- try and go out to the other parking lot and escape via car, or try and hail the helicopter. Up to them, really.
6a) If they try the helicopter, there are still more zombies up here, as well as a firearm. If the players brought something to get the helicopter's attention, the chopper can rescue them if they're not being eaten alive. The pilots aren't going to fire their weapons, in case they crash somewhere horrible, they're going to need the ammo. The players might escape at this point.
6b) The players go to the parking lot. There are a whole lot of zombies out here, as well as zombies in cars and a pileup. The players' cars might be wrecked up, but if they aren't, they can escape- provided the roads are clear.

And that's the Mall of the Dead. It feels like it's missing something, but honestly, I could care less because I think that's all you need to get your creative juices flowing at the table. I'll probably go back and add more later, but don't count on it ;)

Here's the link, my friends.

GURPS sucks, and stop talking about it.

2012-01-20T16:30:00.001-05:00

If you play GURPS, I hate you. I just want to get this out of the way.

Why, I ask?

Because you're as fucking bad as those Apple fanboys. "Oh guys, hey, did you see my new iPhone? It does everything your 3 year old flip phone does except it costs $400 and it has a touch screen."

Yeah, fuck you GURPS.

Your game isn't good for every system, no matter how many rules you shovel out for it. Your game doesn't even do anything well. I remember one time I downloaded GURPS lite because it always gets mentioned when somebody asks what system to run an idea in (I'll get to that later), and because I'm not interested in downloading generic basic rules and then a sourcebook or five to actually run a game, I checked out GURPS Lite. HOLY FUCK IS IT BAD. Like seriously, seriously bad. I don't know who would bother with this game.

There is a fucking enormous stack of character options. Like giant fuckstacks. There is nothing but options. Even the Lite rules are practically eternal because they can't just let you have an advantage. Everything your character is or does or has is bought or sold with points on your character sheet. Your character is part of an organization? 5 points per rank. Your character doesn't bathe regularly? 5 points. Vaguely unattractive? 5 points. Poor? Minus more points.

You spend these points to become a fire-breathing cyborg or a mighty sorcerer or some shit. I dunno, I just have the Lite rules, and these are bad enough, thanks. I mean, seriously, this entire 30 page "lite" rules are just fucking COMBAT RULES AND CHARACTER GENERATION. There's like a 3 page section for GMs, which leads me to believe that this game is roll-playing at its goofiest.

There is literally nowhere in this game that your actions aren't rigidly defined by the system. Talking, movement, the speed of your thoughts, what you can do while fighting, everything is defined even in the Lite rules. Where's the game at?

That's the big question to me.

Where is GURPS a game? Where is the part where you put down the dice? Is there any part of it?

Anywhere?

So fuck GURPS. General and universal my ass. GURPS is good if you're running a game where having a billion skills and extensive, exhaustive combat rules is a plus, which (as I recall now) is right around 0% of fiction and 0% of reality.

Outstanding. What a brilliant game. I can see why people would recommend that I run my wuxia game in GURPS seeing as how the system is so free-flowing and open and dramatic, or GURPS Zombies because it handles psychological stress and the inevitability of death and makes zombies an implacable foe worthy of actual fear, or GURPS Fantasy because it lets magic be mysterious and has a free-flowing combat system and gets out of the way so I can play.

Oh wait, it's the opposite of all that.

Fuck that game.

Paranoia: The IRCing

2012-01-20T16:07:00.000-05:00

I'm actually going to run a game of Paranoia via IRC with some random guys I met via /tg/. If you've never played Paranoia, you really should. The setting is a pop-culture mockery of both modern society, of the doom and gloom post apocalyptic future some people think we're going to be in, and of the hopeful, automated society the rest of us imagine. It's a commentary on human nature and our own stupidity and capitalism and communism and secrecy and also itself.

It's also got lots of room for GM fiat, intra-player squabbling, cheap and easy death, and fate points.

It's like it was made to be played with random people.

So yeah, it's gonna be fun.

I'm thinking about making the characters in advance, one for each person that's supposed to show up, and then handing them beforehand. It's not like I expect anybody to cheat, but it feels right, somehow, to not even intentionally generate your own character. Thrust into the world of Alpha Complex, if you will.

What does this mean for Aim for the Head and Black Shield? It means that they might take a little longer. I kind of knew that anyways. The basic rules are done, sure, but you can get a link from mediafire yourself if you really wanted to. The difficult part was always going to be making it into an actual dungeon-crawl game, like a HeroQuest+, or a WarhammerQuest-, if you will. Extensible but with all of the simple rules still in place because, unbeknownst even to the HQ designers, they accidentally made really simple resolution systems for everything. But I digress.

Black Shield, the HeroQuest pseudo-clone

2012-01-17T06:42:00.000-05:00

Welp, I've got some good news and some bad news. Which do you want to hear first?

Who am I even talking to?

As it turns out, porting the HeroQuest rules took me a little under one page, as long as we're talking about the stuff that you just need to play: how to move this guy, how to move that guy, what spells do, you know, the basics. The sort of thing that's covered in the "basic rules" section of the thing. It was easy. The spells are on self-explaining cards and so are the weapons and armor and potions and stuff, so that's even less to go on the actual "rules" page. I'll probably make this into a multiple-page PDF instead of a strictly one-page project (because I'm having so much fun, this is a trip down memory lane), which includes the need to find a great, iconic image or some sort of graphics wizard to whip one up for me. It's almost done. It's so close, you could run something right now (like, right now right now), but I'm going to wait to do the items and the magic for a little later. Because that's how I roll.

That was supposed to be the good news, but it ended up also being the bad news. In case that wasn't enough bad news for you, here's some more: It's gonna take longer than a day. But that's good news if you didn't know that I was on such a tight self-imposed schedule.

The more you know!

If you've got any suggestions to HeroQuest, let me know here. I'll also be scouring some of the HeroQuest messageboards and seeing what people come up with. I'm probably going to avoid most of it, embrace some of it, and marvel at the insanity of some people for a very tiny amount of the cases.

Anyways, I've been up for almost 18 hours now and it's probably getting close to nappy time. I'll probably see how much work I can continue dredging out of this brain of mine before I call it a night. Probably, I can at least write the cards into a text form, or find a copy of Zargon's screen and transform it into text-only before the night is up.

EXCELSIOR!

Martin Luther King Day

2012-01-16T23:06:00.000-05:00

One of the most influential people in the last 100 years.

I'd be remiss not to note his day.

HeroQuest: the Clone

2012-01-16T17:11:00.000-05:00

I want to write a game like HeroQuest, except suited to long-term roleplaying endeavors, or even quickplay style games. I don't know if I want to keep the grid combat (although I probably will because I have like a shit-load of Descent tiles hanging around and I've got to find some way to use them, other that Descent), which means that it'll still have charming rules like how long weapons can attack adjacentways.

And the players will be pre-written like in Descent, except I'll make it per-class instead of per-character, but the difference is really minimal since you're still just choosing an instance of a guy to play as for this next adventure- whether you're Gluthorm or Thornspell Mage is minimal if they both do an extra point of damage with Earth spells.

I've even got a copy of the Heroquest rules, and I think I'm going to skim over them and make a couple of changes, couple of additions, and a couple of tweaks to suit my preferred style of gaming. It'll be like a HeroQuest retroclone, if you will, but with the serial numbers filed off and hopefully enough stuff changed that nobody's going to get grumpy at me for doing it.

I think it'll be great fun, even if I can't get it to the one-page ideal that I've been striving towards!

Mall of the Living Dead

2012-01-16T03:15:00.002-05:00

Continuing my enjoyment of not only zombie games but of writing things for them, I'm writing up a one-page "module" for AIM FOR THE HEAD, my zombie roleplaying game, wherein I intend to subject my players to the delights of a mall full of zombies.

I know, right? It's a cliche for a reason. In a world where you're one of a handful of survivors in a sea of grey shambling flesh (talk about special snowflakes!), there's a certain appeal to mowing down the inane, mindless hordes of consumers like you always fantasize doing on the rare occasions you're forced to go inside of a mall. It's a beautiful thing, and it even does a couple of things for a module design that I think are really nifty.

1) It lets you confine the area very naturally. Malls are built like ye olde castle, in that you're designed to stay in. It's absolutely intentional- they're supposed to be nearly self sufficient, easy to get in, and difficult to get out. For all of the spacious courtyards and high ceilings, there are naturally a tiny number of semi-hidden, chokepoint-styled exits. When the living dead are all around you, chokepoints are a horrible thing, meaning that once you get in a mall, you're going to need another way out. This very naturally creates drama, because
2) For all of the junk inside of a mall, very little of it is useful in guaranteeing your survival. This means that your players aren't finding rocket launchers or chainsaws (well, maybe chainsaws, but there's not really any gas to power them), which would ruin the feeling of "holy shit, zombie apocalypse." More pertinently, the players aren't going to find much in the way of food or water, except in the Food Court, and the great majority of that is going to spoil very, very quickly and probably be entirely uncooked. Mall food is pretty unpalatable even when cooked fresh, and a couple of days with no power and no new shipments of food is going to leave a horrible place.
3) A mall is a place you visit, not a place you stay. This ties into 2, but in a totally different way. In daily life, you don't stay because you have a home to go to, the crowds are tiring, and the security guards will yell at you when you try to sleep there anyways. In a zombie apocalypse, you can't stay because there's nothing to eat, there's almost no real defense, and there are a hell of a lot of zombies around already, between the people that died there, the other people that thought it'd be a good idea to hide there, and the zombies that wander inside periodically and can't get out again.
4) It ties into the Dawn of the Dead-styled "zombies as consumerist allegory." The less said about that, the better, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not a philosophy blog and I'm certain you expect only those philosophies here which pertain to gaming.
5) It makes sense to get caught there. It almost feels like you're stuck there on a normal day, so getting caught there when everything is zombies? Totally plausible. Furthermore, it's very diverse. Pretty much anybody can be at a mall, meaning that characters can be literally anybody- a vacationing family man, a down on his luck homeless man, a security guard, a trucker just there on a pickup, a UPS guy, anybody.

All of these things are pretty easy to get across, I think, although in a one-page design I'm a bit more brief.

Watch this space- it's on its way soon.

AIM FOR THE HEAD

2012-01-13T21:51:00.000-05:00

I'm releasing it here first for feedback from the five or so people who read and comment here.

It's a one-page zombie RPG. I actually had space to devote to setting, because the core mechanic is so damn simple and after that, it's all about setting anyways.

Zombie games are the ideal in designing a short roleplaying game, because so little can (and should) be expressed via rules. There shouldn't be hard and fast rules for what you find, what survivors are like, or what zombies can do. It's not important, and it shifts the game from "oh shit, what'll happen next" to "oh, whatever, that zombie has six movement and does 1d6 damage, that's not even a threat."

It's why fighting a zombie in D&D isn't scary, but it can be in Aim For The Head. One zombie can kill you if you get a bad roll in AFTH. Trying to run away can kill you. The only way to be safe is to not roll, which means playing carefully, keeping quiet, and avoiding attracting attention. In other words, the only time you're rolling in AFTH is when you're potentially screwed, and that's exactly the kind of on-edge feeling that a game should provide. I haven't playtested it yet, unfortunately, so there are likely some rough patches out of the bat.

The only thing I can think of off the top of my head that I'll likely change is that the Fight roll doesn't explicitly limit how many zombies you take down (I was thinking one zombie per 6), but intentionally left it blank for the moment.

Let me know if Aim For The Head provides that. I'll be taking all criticism into account, and changing the document to suit it.

Here's the rapidshare link, and here's the mediafire one.

Brevity is Golden

2012-01-12T00:21:00.000-05:00

The more I play around with creating systems and settings and modules for my own use, the more I realize that I'm really bad at padding things out.

I'm really bad at writing these 200+ page odes to a setting, or coming up with 90 classes and twelve thousand spells and fifty six magical items. As a matter of fact, it was one of the reasons I had such a goddamn hard time writing modules for my short-lived "one month module" series- I'd write the gist of it, the important bits, and still be on page two. I'd write more but it feels like overload. It makes the module lose its focus and makes me feel like I'm telling people what to do and how to play.

I don't want to tell anybody how to play, really. I want to tell people how I play, and telling somebody how I play is about the shortest thing ever: "Prepare absolutely nothing but memorize the book. Create a believable fiction from a combination of things you've been thinking about during the day and the game fiction as it's presented in the book." Bam, done. That's the essence of playing games the Lawful Indifferent way.

That's what I want more of. The essence of a game. To that end, I've been strongly thinking about creating 1 page games, settings, dungeons, you name it. I've got an idea where a game is a collection of pages tailored to whatever you're doing- kind of like GURPS, if you will, except much lighter. I'm thinking like a one-page game that is complete in and of itself, with maybe additional one-pagers that add extra little setting bits or additional classes or whatever it is that needs to be added. It'd be really fun, I think.

To my mind, the interesting design space isn't in the massive rulebooks or the kitchen-sink approach to everything, or in the rules-heavy combat-oriented fantasy gaming. We already have a lot of that, and we've had a lot of that practically since the hobby started. What we need is something that emphasizes what the play is supposed to be in a transparent matter, and I think a one page rpg could be just what the doctor ordered.

So 5th edition, huh?

2012-01-09T12:15:00.001-05:00

So 5th edition D&D is coming out apparently soon, because if there's one thing that Wizards of the Coast has found out, it's that inventing a miniatures wargame with the D&D brandname is a fucking fantastic way to get people to blow a hundred bucks on buying the rules to Warhammer Fantasy Lite, so why not make a new and totally incompatible version every couple of years?

The more I'm watching this unfold, the more I realize what level of marketing genius they truly have over at Wizards. "Forcing" players to upgrade or be left behind every couple of years, they can probably rely on peoples' enthusiasm for endless sets of rules and miniatures combat to get people to upgrade over and over and over again before they catch on.

I mean, it's been what Games Workshop has been basing their entire business on for over a decade now, the constant cycling of rules and miniatures. Frequent overhauls and revamps are their lifeblood. After all, if GW sells you a new core rulebook and your chosen race's codex and then $200 worth of miniatures, they'd be insane not to want to sell you all of that again by changing the rules, the codexes, and making your old minis obsolete.

I need to get in on that or something.

But enough criticism. I think that 5th edition could be Wizards' chance to make things right again, as evinced by the fact that apparently letting Mike Mearls back on board. I don't give a damn what anybody said, he obviously understands what this game is best as- he designed Iron Heroes for fuck's sake. And then Monte Cook, designer of the bizarre and brilliant Ptolus campaign setting and some of the coolest and most creative tweaks I'd seen given to the (rather kind of crappy) 3.x edition system.

Yeah, I'm optimistic. Maybe we'll get away from the "combat is the only real important part" of 4e and back into a system that's not just congealed combat rules.

The Odds Are Against You

2012-01-06T23:41:00.002-05:00

Tired of hearing about my action movie-styled roleplaying game yet?

SUCKS TO BE YOU.

I'm almost done with the .PDF and all it needs now is some playtesting. In a couple of days (once I finish some work I've been putting off, heh heh, this client is a damn saint) I'm going to post the preliminary rules and try to get some gaming done. If I can't get my real-life group to throw me a bone, I'll get an online group to do it over IRC or Skype or something with a quick one-shot. Everything will be tested pretty much at once- the legibility of the PDF, my writing style, my sample adventure, the system, EVERYTHING.

It's like a crash course playtest.

When that playtest is done, I'll do it again. And then again. Three playtests is probably fine.

It's designed to be made of one-shots anyways, so it's not like I have to have people playing it multiple times over a series of years to make sure that it's got an enduring thing going on. It's the sort of system where I can be like "dudes, I'm bored, play this game with me" and we'll be able to blow an hour or two talking about stuff and pretending to have imaginary people shoot other imaginary people in the skull while jumping off buildings and then piloting helicopters directly into buildings SHIT YEAH.

My sample mission is going to be stopping a Russian arms dealer from giving pro-Communist South American rebels a massive upgrade in firepower. If you can't tell, it's sort of set in a "what if the Cold War never really ended and instead the proxy wars in third world countries kept on a-going" metasetting that's not really meant to be a setting per se as much as an excuse to use all of recent history's best "bad guys" in a sweet bad guy mashup.

If you can't tell, I'm excited about my project and am very much having a good time thinking about it. It's one-half of the reason I haven't really been writing much on this very fantasy-oriented blog. The other half being real-life time constraints, which have a certain way of slamming us into submission and crushing our writing wills. Or is that just me?

Stuck on Setting

2011-12-27T15:14:00.000-05:00

So I've written a pretty decent game about action heroes that's about halfway done when I wanted to put in a setting. I've got two ideas: one where the cold war basically decimated South American society and created an unstable breeding ground for terrorism and drug running, and one where the players are the special forces for the New World Order and assist in black ops against the kinds of people who resist the New World Order, in kind of a shadowy spy vs spy sort of way.

But see, the problem is that my game is explicitly designed for one-shot adventures, and I'm finding that the more time I spend creating an interesting and detailed setting, the more it feels like the game should be more episodic and long-term. The more the setting is treated like a character in its own right, the more you'll naturally want to see players interact with it and make things happen, which means that the players are going to be involved in a long-term game where they make the world a different place.

So I'm stuck between basically creating a game with no setting and creating a setting with a game that doesn't support it, and either way I feel like I'm about going crazy.

Ham Fisted: A Game of Action Heroes

2011-12-25T21:37:00.000-05:00

I wrote a quick game after I wrote about that "Spades as Conflict Resolution" thing, and it's almost done. I'm just trying to figure out what in the holy hell I'm missing, which is frustrating, because it's got a bit about Task Resolution, a bit about weapons and items in general, and then some stuff about being injured. Then I have a section about the little wrinkles players can use to their advantage (since they are action heroes, for crying out loud), and then stuff about how to make their characters.

It's all of four pages, and is currently the shortest RPG I've written yet, but I think that's probably ok. I like short systems better than long ones, and if you presented the real basics of D&D you end up with all of four pages too (as the Microlite games show), so maybe I'm spot-on.

I'll snag a couple of public domain shots to spice up the game, pop out a PDF, and then make it happen up in here. Hoping to get some good feedback on the 1KM1KT free rpgs site, they seem like good people with a smallish community, which is pretty much what I'm looking for.

Happy Holidays

2011-12-25T16:45:00.002-05:00

Happy Holidays, everybody.

Although I'm not exactly a christian, neither is Christmas anymore, so it's all good. I like presents, trees, mistletoes, fat jolly men in absurd suits, the whole nine yards.

Hope you're having as good a holiday as I am!

Bound to Happen: I Got A Virus

2011-12-20T19:11:00.002-05:00

And it happened, ironically, years after I stopped using peer-to-peer services and had almost stopped using torrents entirely.

Luckily, I know my way around a boot disc and I'd had my hard-to-find-again files already backed up on my external, so little of value was lost. I think all I lost were some Pathfinder PDFs, but I don't know why I had them in the first place.

So, that's that. If you own a computer, you owe it yourself to either get a Live CD of something easy like Ubuntu, or a boot recovery disk so that if you ever get a virus, you can save your files and reinstall your OS instead. Not that you should always reinstall your OS when you get a virus, but I digress.

Spartacus!

2011-12-18T10:57:00.001-05:00

My girlfriend is back down from Great Lakes for the holidays, and that means I finally get to watch the prequel series Gods of the Arena.

Clearly, I am a happy clam.

If you've never watched Spartacus, it's basically a sword-and-sandal soap opera. Quintus Batiatus and his wife Lucretia are two plotting owners of a ludus, basically a training ground for gladiators. You watch as they maneuver and plot their way around society while the gladiators deal with the consequences of a life without choice and doing what must be done. They know their place in the world is not high, and their rivalries and brotherhoods is interesting to watch.

Oh, and there's a lot of gore and/or sex, often in the same scene. The world of Spartacus is a dirty, grimy world. You won't find bronzed gods of gladiators here, with squeaky clean love lifes and noble aspirations. They're forever talking about their own penises, or of women and wine, or of killing. Their ludus is often covered in dust and filth, the city is crumbling and shitty. Look at that picture below- the people there are dirty, the arena is cracked and makeshift. You can believe in the world of Spartacus. Exquisite care has been taken to make sure that this world of ancient Rome looks like ancient Rome would, in a world without spray cleaners and germ theory.

Honestly, I don't care if it's not high literature, or destined to be a classic, or what. It's just plain good. The plots are thick, the dialogue is quick and snappy while still being in what is recognizeably a foreign dialect, and the action is presented in such a way that while you know it's not real, you can't help but squint every time somebody gets decapitated or beaten up somehow.

It's fantastic, and I love it.

Spades as Conflict Resolution

2011-12-11T12:40:00.001-05:00

Something I've been thinking about just now, like a bolt of insanity and inspiration. What about SPADES as a conflict resolution thing?

See, it'd work like this: You're walking about, when suddenly! GUNFIGHT! You and your opponent (probably the GM) deal out a quick hand of standard playing cards. Say, five of them. You both pick out a card, slide it onto the table, and WHAM. Flip 'em. High card wins.

You've got a couple of cards, permanent style that you hold in your hands. Think of 'em like your luck. You get them for doing cool stuff, or acting in character, or for saying something really badass that everybody around you likes. You keep them separate from all your other cards, because they're kind of important. You can use them whenever you want, and even switch out one of the cards you've already played with one of your Luck Cards, because that's kind of what luck is for. If you play out too high of a card, you can swap it out for one of your lower ones, and if you play too low of a card, you can swap it out for a lower one.

What's on your character sheet? I'm thinking about making this game a game about high-stakes modern-day action- picture Die Hard and stuff, where the heroes have plenty of luck until the going gets rough and shit starts getting real, real nasty. So your character sheet's got your character's goal, two of his vices, and three things he's really good at. Maybe some posessions, but since you're playing like an action movie thing, that'll probably boil down to a very few things you've got on your back. At the very most, I could see having a backpack or some sort of duffelbag, but the point of the game isn't the items or whatever, it's the fact that we're playing ACTION MOVIE: THE GAME.

This was a snippet of thought I kept track of about a week ago. I wrote about half of a mini-roleplaying game based on it, so I figured I'd let this caged beast go.

Gelston, city of Wanderers

2011-12-11T12:09:00.001-05:00

There is a city that stands in the shadow of mountains, made of tents and broken down wagons. It was once no more than a temporary stopping place for a band of vagabonds, but one day they stopped. Nobody really knows why. Some say it was the wealth of the travelling merchants that compelled them to settle down and make a living. Some say it was the fact that the leader of the travellers grew great with child and, when she gave birth, was too sick to move. She lingered for years, and when she finally died, her people lost the will to wander and settled forevermore. Some even say it was the result of a curse a wizard put on the whole group, punishment for theft and mockery.

Whatever the reason, Gelston remains a ramshackle city built by a people with nearly no knowledge of building. Houses are little more than long-standing tents, large wagons with their wheels removed, or earthen mounds. Low, crooked fences mark the delineation between neighbors, and fires burn randomly. There is but one temple- a broken, dead tree, blasted by lightning, surrounded by a circle of low, round greystone. The villagefolk call Heledis' Grove, after one of the goddesses of their nearly-forgotten homeland. Though they are not a religious people, they have been known to pray for her mercy and make offerings in her honor.

Masks of Death

2011-12-10T16:15:00.001-05:00

I've liked the idea of masked assassins for a long time. So long, in fact, that I almost put them into a campaign setting I was working on (Me'dia), even though they didn't really fit in the highly-elemental world they were being designed for. See, these guys were a religious order of assassins who would always kill their targets while wearing a white mask over their face. Why? So that their victims can't see them, and hopefully won't be able to recognize them, and possibly haunt them. It also means that, if they should meet in the afterlife, they won't recognize their murderer. I thought it was a fun idea.

Firstly, it means that hauntings are a thing that happens. If these guys are afraid of being haunted, does that mean that the spirit of somebody that the PCs kill could possibly come back and make their lives miserable? What exactly does a ghost do when it's haunting people? Can it harm the person it's haunting, or does it just make noise and act creepy?

Secondly, it means that there's a little bit of cat-and-mousery going on. Since the assassins' habits are known, it means that anybody who sees somebody they don't know wearing a white mask is highly suspect, and they're going to run, so the assassins aren't going to wear their masks until they have to (leaving aside the fact that it's vision-obscuring and probably uncomfortable). But if they wait too long, they might have to pass up an opportunity to strike in favor of wearing their mask, or worse, run the risk of having the perfect time arrive and not be wearing their mask!

They were given a pass for Me'dia, but in Rodiel, the IRC campaign I'm working on, I think they'll fit beautifully. Why the change?

Well, Me'dia, like I may have mentioned, was a highly elemental world. Everybody was blatantly made of elements, everybody knew about the elemental planes that leaked to the mid-world, wizards and clerics alike had mostly elemental and anti-elemental worlds, and the Masked Assassins never really fit in. They kind of have a theme, but the problem is their religion. In a Forgotten Realms-esque world where the gods have been seen stomping around and clerics really do have powers that wizards can't access, disbelief is just ridiculous. Similarly, with the way that elementalism and the inherent symbolism that Me'dia had pervading every aspect of the world, an order of temple assassins who don't believe in the Elemental Gods was sort of jarring. It'd have given them an aspect that I really wasn't interested in pursuing.

So the Masked Assassins will probably be given a cooler name, and then stuck somewhere into Rodiel. If you're playing in the game, look out for them- they may not be everywhere, but they might be exactly where you'd wish they weren't.

Microlite74 via IRC- LOOKING FOR MORE

2011-12-10T10:42:00.001-05:00

Hey everybody.

I'm looking for more people to play Microlite74 over IRC with me and some others. I've already got a couple of people, but, as they say, the more, the merrier. I'm looking to have enough people to have two smaller-sized groups moving simultaneously through the campaign world- wait, what's that? Sounds like the West Marches campaign?

Goodness, you're perecptive.

YES, I'm trying to run something along those lines, and yes, it's gonna be nutso insano. It's set in the boomtown of Rodiel, a wild-west town on the edge of an old, fallen empire. It's set directly after the dust clears from a massive war. Even though one side lost, the winning side (your side) hasn't managed to do anything about it yet. Both sides took massive losses, and both sides are unable to do much of anything about this massive expanse of open land between them. So your side, the winning side, has started sending settlers, colonists, and explorers out to check out this new-to-you land.

If you're thinking "I bet there are some sweet ruins to plunder," you're in-character already. Yes, there are dozens of broken-down castles, and yes, there are abandoned wizards' towers, ancient and forgotten glens of mystical might, dukes' treasuries, dusty and hidden dwarf lord tombs, and more. There are ogres invading hamlets, trolls wandering around and causing problems, gold rushes towards half-depleted mines, and more.

In short, it's the perfect time to be an adventurer. All we need now is you.

So leave a comment, shoot an email, let me know what times you're available, and we'll see if we can't have some sort of Obsidan Portal-esque thing set up and ready to roll quick.

Some quick player information:

We're planning on using the Microlite74 rules, because I like them, they're free, and they're system-agnostic and easy to expand.

We're planning on playing through IRC, because it has an integrated dice roller and I always thought it'd be cool. It's on #Rodiel, on sorcery.net. If you let me know when you're available, we can try and meet up. Bring some friends with you, the more the merrier! Since I'm looking for this to be largely player-scheduled, really, any time you want to game we can go. Let me know if you're interested!

Magic in Skeleton Puncher

2011-12-06T10:46:00.001-05:00

I've been over magic before, and there's no real reason for me to reiterate what I've already gone over. So let me get a little more specific on how magic is going to work in Skeleton Puncher, for all zero people who've cared. If you're new here, hi, I use this blog as a personal journal so that I don't waste massive amounts of paper. Now that we've got that out of the way, here goes nothing.

Magic in Skeleton Puncher is going to be a little more down-to-earth. See, it's moved a fair bit away from the initially zany sort of deal, where you're all basically comic-book versions of regular heroes smashing some dudes in the face because, as I found out when I was writing it, I don't really play my games like that. It's not the kind of games I'm used to running, so the writing felt forced and the rules, overly lenient here and overly restrictive there. It didn't have a theme, for lack of a better word. It didn't have a purpose. It didn't do anything that I wanted it to do. It was a problem, and part of it was the magic.

See, I run a pretty low-magic, high-realism kind of setting. I'm very much into Gygaxian naturalism, which means that there isn't just a dragon, there's a reason for it. Which means, as a corollary, that when there's magic, there should be a reason. It should be tied directly into the campaign world, and that not just the PCs should be using it. We've all seen the massive, convoluted threads that happen when somebody sets down to try and "break" a campaign setting in 3e and 3.5e. All that means is that the setting isn't supported by the magic in any way, shape, or form, or the setting would already reflect that. When you have a 5th level wizard who can change the world in ways that don't even make sense, you have a real problem.

So I'm doing my best to prevent that up front. I'm setting it up so that, if you've ever played Vampire:The Masquerade/Requiem, it'll be somewhat familiar. You'll have separate ratings in each type of magic, such as telepathy or summoning, and each one has a little list of things you can do with it, and how hard it'll be. And that's pretty much it. You can have Clairvoyance I and Curses II, and that's pretty much the extent of your magical ability.

In other words, you can mostly do things that real-life witches and sorcerers thought they could do, with a little bit of the stereotypical flashy fantasy magic thrown in there for good measure so that your average "lolfireball" type guy has something to play around with, and then you're done. But get this- flashy battle magic is in the distinct minority. With eight or so different magical talents you can have, maybe one of them is something you'd use while the brawny swordsmen are doing their thing. The rest is the sort of thing that'd make your everyday life better- a guy with Clairvoyance can scout out the terrain ahead of you, the guy with Precognition is just handy in general, a summoning guy has a lot of utility (and even a little bit of battle stuff), and each magical talent has something that you can do in battle, no matter how difficult. Like the Clairvoyance guy, maybe he can close that person's third eye and now they're a little worse at things that have to do with seeing. He's missing more in combat, and, perhaps more importantly, he's not as effective of a guard. You can sneak right past him, because he's finding himself with a headache right behind his eyeballs instead of being attentive and alert. The guy with weather control, sure he can summon lightning bolts, but more important is the fact that he can turn a clear night into a cloudy one, or make a little rain to cover your tracks. He may not be useful in a dungeon, but he sure is handy when you're travelling around isn't he?

The other big thing is that, since it's a point-buy system where you can choose what talents you have, you're not going to have sorcerers who are master magicians and then totally non-magical guys. There's a system in place so that you can have your war wizards, or your thief who was born with a touch of magic in his veins, or a barbarian shaman who's a masterful warrior while also communing with the spirits of his homeland. It's class-based with flexibility, if you will.

This is the sort of magic I want in my game, and it's the sort of magic I'm going to put in. It's not the sort that means that wizards rule the world, and it doesn't mean that at higher levels, magicians are able to do anything they want while the rest of the party watches. It's magic that does its own thing, makes life a little easier, and you want with you, when you can get it.

Hopefully, it turns out well.

EDIT: I've boiled it down to seven, but I feel like I'm missing something important.

Battle Magic: Stereotypical fireballs and lightning bolts
Clairvoyance: Remote seeing and hearing
Curses: Evil eyes, effigies, etc. (This one is the hardest for me to design for, by far.)
Illusions: Manipulation of senses
Shapeshifting: Quintessential magic
Spiritualism: Conduct with spirits (also spirits of the dead, depending)
Telepathy: Reading minds

As you can see, there's a lot that screams "magic" without a lot that says "stereotypical fantasy magic." I don't mean for that to sound demeaning, as the reason it's a stereotype is that it's a lot of fun. But still. I want to go a slightly different way.

In addition, I'm thinking about adding a "Sorcery" talent, that basically controls magic and metamagic, so that you could do things like detect ley lines and identify magic and all the other basic stuff that feels wizardly. I might tie that in to just having a magical talent, like "if you have at least one magical talent, you can sense ley lines and determine if magic has recently been cast in an area," and so on. It really depends, I suppose.

Fantasy Warriors (Wargame)

2011-12-05T12:04:00.001-05:00

Has anybody played this? I found the PDF rules online, and it looks to be fairly decent. My girlfriend will be coming down in a week or so (she's about half a country away), and I think it might be fun to play a little game with her.

She's a lot of fun to play with- she's extremely competitive and hates to lose, so I'm always sure to get a great game out of her. She does suffer a bit from being impulsive and angry when she starts losing, whereas yours truly is more of a patient mastermind type- I'll lose one unit here to put you in a bad position, so I can flank you here and smash this into this...

But yeah. I thought maybe this would be a little better than Warhammer, since I really don't want to buy any of the new books, or have to buy $100 worth of minis and a $30 book to be able to play a force that's anywhere near the rules Games Workshop presents. I want to use what I have, and what I have are little squads of Dwarfs, Lizardmen, Ogres, Goblins, Orcs, and Humans. I want to be able to use them all together, decide why they're working together, and then call it a day as we crack some heads. If Fantasy Warriors can bring me this, I'm a happy clam.

The link to the free PDF of the rules follows: http://www.mirliton.it/fantasy-warriors-rules.php

Old Testament Gaming

2011-11-30T09:58:00.001-05:00

This would have been completely accurate if it was something old school instead of Pathfinder, where you're almost as coddled and babied as in 4e. "Remember to get your equal CR encounters for the day!"

No, fuck that.

How about there's a dungeon that you have to go through, because you're dirt broke and if you don't scratch up some money you're going to starve to death on the streets while arisocrats trample your corpse with their carriage. How about if you don't get the gold the minotaur's guarding, than hangover you got from blowing last week's dungeon haul on booze and women is going to be the least of your problems, because you borrowed money from the wrong guys and they're going to come kill you if you don't pay up. Did I mention that the minotaur will kill you in three hits? Because it will.

Your players have feasted on Pathfinder's generous optimization options and roll-to-win skills and feats. And they have grown fat. It's all loaves and fishes.

Not in here. This book is floods. And plagues. And motherfucking pillars of salt.

Complete and Utterly Accurate Roleplaying Games Chart

2011-11-29T20:32:00.001-05:00

Was browsing /tg/, one of the few acceptable boards of 4chan (c'mon, you know what that is), when I saw this image.

I had to save it.

Nurah, Guard Captain of Ipit-Apora

2011-11-29T17:01:00.001-05:00

I left the aristocracy and power centers out of my short description of Ipit-Apora out for a reason. It's a pretty good one, if you ask me: I'm not done with it. Seriously! I haven't the foggiest who rules over it.

But I've got a pretty good idea who a fairly important person in the city is. Nurah here is the captain of the guards of Ipit-Apora, and she's pretty unusual. She's quite a popular figure in the city's politics, to the point where some people are clamoring for her to use the city guard to overthrow the Council, who the populace claims are corrupt and turn a blind eye to the city's problems. They look at Nurah's stands against smugglers, thieves' dens, and the other scum of society, and look at the Council's dithering, weak talk of "appropriate force", and wonder.

Nurah, for her own part, steadfastly ignores both her supporters and her political opponents, choosing instead to do her job the best way she sees fit. But when the Council realizes that the city guard is loyal to her person instead of her position and that they cannot control the defenders of their own city, what will they do?

Nurah
Guard-Captain
Rank: 4

Traits:
Weaponmaster IV (Parrying)
Iron Will III (Stubborn)
Endurance II (Fitness Regimen)
Swift I (Fleet-Footed)

Weapon: Scimitar
Armor: Light

Health: 5
Wounds: 10

Skeleton Punching Ipit-Apora

2011-11-29T00:10:00.001-05:00

Ipit-Apora is a city-state set in the sandy wastes of an enormous desert. It is a port city, and a fairly major trade hub of the world. All foreigners are welcome to the bustling city as long as they don't cause any trouble and their coin is good.

Ipit-Aporans tend to be defined along loose socio-economic lines, with the richest having the most privileges and freedoms, and the poorest having very little room to move, often sleeping dozens to a cheap flophouse on the outskirts of town. The local food tastes run towards well-cooked meat simmered in vegetable oils, often giant lizard, snake, and bird, often served with a vegetable paste on flat bread. The drinks are usually a cooling, crisp wine made from a small prune-like fruit and a burning spiced liquor called kellim.

It is a fairly secular- the population worships the local gods Purifying Fire and the Breath of Life, as well as the Three Gods of Death. Ipit-Aporan temples are loud affairs, clamoring for worshipers off the streets to come and view the holy miracles of the churches, often incorporating street oratory. Newcomers may think that they are ministering to the street, but the real attraction is inside. Each temple has a relic of some sort that the faithful come to say prayers over, and to be blessed. This can range from the Coal-Heart of Great Blazing Uzzum, to perhaps the dagger that slew Garshaps the Unholy. Exiting is subject to a small fee, ostensibly a "donation", though priests are quick to follow, harangue, and occasionally threaten with divine doom non-paying worshipers, so most carry small coinage to give the priests.

On a more exciting note, the desert surrounding Ipit-Apora has a higher than natural rate of horrible monsters. The reasons for this are debated amongst the local scholars, but the fact remains that the City Guard tend to be very grizzled, very quick. The Guard are respected and highly competent, professional, and proud. They typically ride enormous, four-legged lizards that can skim across the surface of the sands and require little to no water.

Player characters from Ipit-Apora are:

Haughty and a bit arrogant. The greatness of their city reflects the greatness of the people within.
Religiously tolerant. Though they worship their gods (which naturally, are the best and strongest gods), they understand that others may not share in their worship.
Lovers of haggling. Barter is an essential component of Ipit-Aporan trade. This may lead them to come off as a bit cheap, or argumentative.
Quick to anger, quick to forget. Ipit-Aporans' anger is like a flash-fire; hot and over fast.
Very formal to strangers. Polite forms of address are more common than informal ones, and an Ipit-Aporan may scoff at the "uncouth" attitudes of others.

Lamp Golems

2011-11-27T21:04:00.001-05:00

Just saw a really cool idea. For some reason, the idea of interesting golems is floating around the netosphere, and it's not bad. Really, there's no reason for all golems to be giant clay bodyguards. If you can animate a being to follow your basic directions and also make it out of pretty much anything, why would you just make one whose entire job is to beat people up? How often does your average wizard spend fending off intruders, anyways?

See: These Lamp Golems. They'd follow you around, or stand where you directed them to, bringing your light with you so you'd have both hands free to carry whatever you're carrying. You could read a book while walking and still have light to read by.

I'm thinking of a Brazier Golem, or a Cauldron Golem, something that you could direct to walk over to you so you could dump in your ingredients and then direct it back over the fire, so you wouldn't have to get all sweaty standing over a fire, and you wouldn't have to worry about it tipping over or anything. It'd have four or six legs, arranged around it circularly, looking a bit like a xorn except made of cauldron instead of elemental.

You could have a little winged Helper Golem, to sort and organize your inventory and make things happen. You could be like "Helper Golem, pour the essence of nightshade into the phial of brimstone, close the stopper, and shake until it turns red. Then hand it to me." And then you're brewing your own things, having him make your red solution you need to mix. Handy little guys, really, a wizard's best friend. You can get them to organize your library and bring you books, or clean up the place.

You could also have a pretty useful Pedestal Golem, although I'm not sure how often you really need to have your Pedestal move around with you. Usually it's not too much work to just stand in one place while you've got your book with you. You could just hold it with one hand.

If you want to go all Sorcerer's Apprentice, you could have little Broom Golems, although I imagine it'd be easier just to enchant a broom for a little while and have it go to town. Then again, making a golem out of bits you already have lying around could be pretty useful. There's no real rules reason why it has to be made out of clay or meat or iron or whatever other than that's what the myths are made out of. Still, Houseworking Golems would give you the benefits of having a couple of servants without having to worry about them getting paid, eating, or leaving your service because you make them work fifteen hours without a break. Uppity servants, so hard to find good help these days.

Probably the coolest kind of golem would be a Riding Golem- basically an armored mecha type thing your wizard could ride around inside/on top of. It might be a little too "non-standard fantasy" to have your average wizard being carried around by a Gundam made of rocks, even if they don't have the lasers or energy swords or whatever. Your mileage may vary, but there's no way it's not acceptable to have a golem carry your wizard around, especially since it's not fighting while it's carrying you around unless you manage to jury-rig some sort of workaround. Which, again, some people might not appreciate.

Little Bottle Golems could be nice, especially if you have some sort of potion/mixture that can be applied to the ground, or if you give them a little valve to shoot out of their head. You could essentially make either little bomb-ombs or acid-spraying squirt bottles. They wouldn't be too terribly dangerous if your enemies knew what was going on, but their first instinct when they see little walking bottle isn't going to be "SHIT KILL IT", it'll probably be a very bizarre confusion. Until the first one explodes in a shower of fire or acid. OH SHIT SON.

If you've got any awesome ideas for golems, please, do not hesitate to let me know.

Magic Subsystem: Elemental Chakras

2011-11-27T05:17:00.001-05:00

Part of the thing I'm trying to do with Skeleton Puncher is keep the traditional fantasy theme going strong, while streamlining and simplifying a lot of the mechanical side of things. A lot of the complexity that's come out of these systems is due to trying to "keep the same system but add more stuff" that gets us bloated rules messes like 3e and 4e, instead of actually serving some sort of purpose to the system.

This is relevant, because one of the messiest systems in any game is the magic. It's important to keep it a little complex, to allow for cool emergent gameplay and solutions you didn't think of, as well as to keep the feeling of magic being a little overwhelming for your characters. If there's this many moving parts and it's just a game to you, it feels a little more dangerous and mysterious than just using "Magic Points" to cast "Fire Blast 1".

So anyways, I was thinking about using a magic system for Skeleton Puncher where you bind the four classical elements to your chakras. For the uninitiated, I plan on using a very basic form of my understanding of the chakra theories, where there are 7 chakras, that open in order from lowest to highest, and each one has a different location on the body (that I'm going to more or less ignore, except for vague location types), and a different potency. That is, you have to open them in order, so opening your top-most chakra (the "crown chakra") is the epitome of a very enlightened person.

And this is what I want. As a spellcaster, you open your chakras as you advance in Rank. This gives you a small benefit related to the nature of the chakra (such as wizard's eye upon opening your 6th, or "brow" chakra, typically symbolising the third eye), as well as allows you another place to "bind" your elements.

Each bound element lets you access the next "tier" of the elemental magic you can access, and also allows you to mix and match elements, sort of. For example, if you have two fire and one air chakra, you can cast 2nd tier fire spells and 1st tier air spells, as well as maybe some sort of fire+air spell (although I'm not sure what that'd even be, I'd have to think about it more).

Really, I'm just throwing ideas out there. I don't think I'll go with this one.

Skeleton Punching Bards

2011-11-26T18:42:00.001-05:00

Today, we're going to talk about the role of bards in Skeleton Puncher, mostly because one of my friends rather enjoys "songing" at people, and it's kind of an interesting role. Wandering minstrels, singers, and street performers are a pretty dynamic and cool part of any setting, because they really did exist and they were kind of weird guys. They were like homeless rock stars, until they got to be part of a king's court. Then they lived a life of luxurious, dandified foppery.

Bards are one of the better character concepts because it's not innately tied to combat or conflict. Bards exist to play music, to be vaguely vagabond-y, and to beg for money. That's it. Having a bard around with you is probably a massive hindrance in a fight since he's more concerned with his mandolin's safety than fighting, and because they're generally the kind of hedonists that consider armed conflict brutish and bad for one's health. If they do carry a weapon, it's likely to be some sort of dagger or other light poking thing, because they're not generally good with weapons.

This is only really a problem in games where combat is a major part, if not the actual focus, of the game. Since they're not naturally combative, they often have to have some sort of minor magical powers, or maybe a basic proficiency with weapons, and that doesn't really fit with the bardic image. After all, the definition of a bard is a performer, often wandering. If they're good with swords, they can do that on their own time. Magic? Not an inherent part of the class any more than it would be for a soldier, or a thief. It has no real business being part of the bard's class.

So what do bards do, then? Well, bards are fantastically good with people, generally speaking. Being able to work a crowd means that bards quickly must learn what makes people work, what people like, and the prevailing trends. They have a lot of friends and enemies. It also means that they're generally in touch with the current gossip, and might be one of the first people in the party to know what's going on and why.

Bards also generally have a bit of a connection with the underworld, if they're so inclined. Spending a lot of time on the streets, performing and wandering and getting into trouble means that they see a good number of thieves, pickpockets, beggars, the homeless, and other street folks around. Since they see these people regularly, they're often on friendly terms with each other. After all, they're practically co-workers.

Let me give an example of a bardic character I've had rolling around in my head, then I'm done here. I'll give him in Skeleton Puncher styled stats, because that's part of the reason I'm writing this at all. (Not that there are tiny dragony kobolds in Skeleton Puncher, but that's totally irrelevant.)

Tch'kliss
Kobold Bard
Rank:2

Traits:
Minstrel III (Dragon-song), Swift I (Runs on all Fours), Endurance II (Scaled Skin) , Tenacious I (Annoyingly Persistent), Sorcery I (Kobold Cantrips)

Weapon: Hunting Bow
Armor: None

Health: 6
Wounds: 6

Tch'kliss is a locally-renowned bard, despite living in a human town. Kobolds cannot speak human tongues and most humans cannot speak kobold tongues- but the people of Grave Hill have long since been on friendly terms with the little dragon-men.

He is a sprightly, cheerful little chap who has mastered the art of pose and gesture when telling stories to those who cannot speak his language, or entertaining with a sort of mewling harmonic growl. His specialty, however, is in his Dragon Song. Sounding a bit like Mongolian throat-singing mixed with a dragon's roar, Tch'kliss is one of the very few masters of the art although you wouldn't know it by talking to him. He's very down-to-earth, and mostly enjoys his singing for the sake of singing.

Skeleton Punching Orcs

2011-11-25T17:39:00.001-05:00

Orcish rangers, keeping lookout over a contested pass.

One of the things I'm trying to do in Skeleton Puncher is create an interesting setting for people who want to game "The Wright Way", the way that Greyhawk and D&D combined together seamlessly and let you game the Gygaxian way (or the way Blackmoor and Arnesonian D&D mesh) One of the biggest differences between the way I game and standard Gygaxio-Tolkien way is that very few things are "Evil" with a capital E in my world. Where Gygax and Tolkien saw no problems having beings dedicated to destroying pretty much everything and being happy with scorching the earth and living in the ashes, I'm not for that. Where others see the classic "good versus evil" arc, I see a story of propaganda told from one side. Much like how the Japanese were vilified during World War Two by the US, both sides had their own things going on. Both sides feared the other. And both sides had an interesting story to tell.

The first people that came to mind when I started writing this were orcs.

I've had a soft spot in my heart for orcs ever since my first experience with the Rankin-Bass Hobbit cartoon when I was a wee little sprat. My dad has had a passion for the Lord of the Rings books, and so watch them we did. It was great. Watching those bass-singing, giant-mouthed orcs and goblins ride wolves and capture the dwarves was fantastic, and it's always stuck with me how interesting that orc king was. He recognized the foul, orc-slaying swords that Thorin & Co. were carrying, and that's how the seed stuck for all this time. To Dwarves, they were heroic blades forged for their destiny, but to the goblins? Terrible, hateful blades created to slay their brothers and put their way of life to the sword.

I've always had a thing for underdogs.

But I digress. When I'm a DM, I always have my Orc-styled humanoids a little more mellow and easy to get along with than standard bloodthirsty, cannon-fodder pig faced orcs. They're not stupid, they're not murderous, and they're not innately hostile. They're simply a different race with a different culture. Where it gets difficult is defining exactly how different they are from humans, and that's where you get a little fantasy anthropology going.

An orc captain, directing siege equipment

Your average orc is a soldier, that much I've taken from standard orc portrayals. Orcs are fantastic raiders, excellent warriors, and tend towards violence. They see nothing wrong with theft, and your average orc in a non-human land makes his living as a thief, mercenary, or bodyguard. They are as loyal and trustworthy as humans, once you understand their mindset. And understanding an orc requires understanding their childhood.

Orcs do not believe in marriage, handfasting, or any sort of permanent, legal bond between a male and a female. Males and females bond for as long as they enjoy each other, and then when they have no further interest in each other, will "break up" and be single or find another mate, as they see fit. Since there is no formal relationship agreement, few orcs are sure who their fathers are. Heriditary positions, such as princehoods or dukes, are thus passed through the female line. This is not to say that females are unable to hold positions- they are often found holding positions of power themselves. Orc society does not distinguish between men and women and, indeed, it is difficult for non-orcs to tell the two apart. Female orcs generally only appear female in the anthropomorphic sense when they are pregnant or nursing- otherwise, they are virtually indistinguishable from the men.

Since any given orc people are involved in violent conflict with those around them more often than not, many orc children are raised by those unable to fight in the wars, or those who are back from a conflict. Much of an orc's childhood is spent hearing epic tales of bravery, selflessness, and nobility from his elders, and in free-formed play with those around him. It's not uncommon, when visiting an orc village, to see a small horde of children run screaming around in circles, tumbling and having small play battles and wars.

Orcs in their youth typically find an occupation by following their interests, as well as being chosen by older orcs. Apprenticeship takes as long as it takes, to borrow a phrase. Apprentices in more difficult professions, such as weaponsmithing, may find themselves apprentices for years, while apprentice cobblers might find themselves as equal partners to their former masters before they know it. Regardless of their profession, orcs have a firm eye towards conflict.

Why does war feature so heavily in the orcish consciousness?It all boils down to their early times. You see, orcs have a shorter lifespan and gestation period than humans, and reach sexual maturity and full adult height much quicker than a human does. Orc populations quickly explode and expand, creating incredible population pressure that, naturally, seeks to expand. There are only two ways to expand. If the orcs expand into an unpopulated area, there is no conflict- their explorers find new lands, villages and farms pop up, and life continues apace. If the orcs expand into an already populated area, though, there's going to be trouble. Since orcs are quite aware that they need more land and more food, the hostilities inevitably start. And with superior numbers and a cultural history of excellence in warfare, the orcs usually win.

So there you have it, the medium-length summary of Skeleton Puncher's orcs. Since it doesn't quite fit into the SP theme, I'll probably release it as some sort of supplement, like a Campaign Guide to Relthys or something. We'll see.

Punching Index Cards

2011-11-24T00:45:00.001-05:00

Vertical index cards, my white whale

I'm the kind of guy who, when he wants to get down to some really good thinkin', has to pull out a pen and paper instead of typing it on a computer. I've lost track of the number of half-filled notebooks that've been blackened by the ravages of my chewed up ball-point pens. And I've lost track of the number of times I've picked up some ancient notebook, only to be appaled by the horrible, juvenile, blatantly unoriginal scribbles I've found within for projects abandoned years ago. You just can't keep writing in a notebook that's that embarassing. You just can't.

So I find myself doodling on index cards, instead. They're just about the right size to get some really good ideas down, you can re-order them however you want, and (maybe most importantly) you can toss them out without having to rip pages out of anything. Index cards are the best.

I remember finally taking index cards from the preparation phase to making them a part of one of the two only 4e games I've actually run, when I would write quests on them, or give important items out as an index card. The response was phenomenal. It wasn't a line in some backpack somewhere, it was an index card that had to be taken care of, managed, and looked at. You got to be a little posessive. When you had a +2 fire staff, you're not letting the guy next to you take it, you're letting him look at it, and that's how the players acted. If you let him look at the card, you're letting him take your item- and they can see it just fine without touching it, thank you very much. The quests cards were about as useful. They saw the quest to discover the origin of the weird sacrificial dagger they'd found, right next to the "exterminate goblins" quest and the "help the caravan get out of here" quests. It was a sweet feedback loop, too. The players would be interested in something in passing, and then suddenly, I'm flipping them a quest card across the table. Now, they're getting experience for being interested in things, they're being rewarded for engaging with the game world, and they've got a very convenient reminder in case they get bored or overwhelmed.

I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that index cards have improved my game since the first time I tried them.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I plan on having index cards feature prominently in Skeleton Puncher. My motto is "If I can't fit it on an index card, it's getting thrown out." Character sheets can fit comfortably on an index card. Backpacks can hold ten regular-sized items- or the number of lines on an index card that's been cut in half. The game's resolution system? Again, could be written on an index card.

I've heard it said that there could (and possibly should) be hundreds of small retroclone games, each one an ideal as expressed by a DM. I hope the rest of the world thinks the same way, because if Skeleton Puncher keeps going on like it has, it's going to be so idiosyncratic that you and I will practically be best friends if you read the book.

Pathfinder MMO?

2011-11-22T18:18:00.001-05:00

According to EnWorld, Paizo's entered into an agreement with Goblinworks to create and produce an MMO, ostensibly based on their flagship product, the Pathfinder roleplaying game. You know what that is, I'm not going to explain it.

Now, look. I've read the official announcement, and I'm very good at translating hype and excited designer-speak into English, and these guys apparently have been either living under a rock or they're seriously overestimating both the MMO market and their own abilities.

Designing an MMO is difficult work. It's one of the most complex types of games you could possibly design, because you've got to have so many people on at once, and you've got to have things for them to do. And you've got to have things for people to do on their own when they can't find anybody to do things with them.

I'm not going to say they can't do it, because Dungeons and Dragons Online exists, and it's doing fairly well. But it's run by a company that's been doing MMOs, and it would have failed had it not essentially reinvented the free-to-play market. If Paizo wants their money back, they either need to make a spectacular pay-to-play game that people will leave World of Warcraft for (not likely) or they need to make a free to play game with a cash shop. Not even the Dungeons and Dragons name brand saved it from that fate, and I don't think that Pathfinder will fare any better.

That said, I'm at least interested to see where they go. I have a very vested interest in them not disappointing me- I'll have a new game to play!

Skeleton Puncher Cover-In-Progress

2011-11-19T16:20:00.001-05:00

I didn't feel like doing anything productive, so I screwed around in Inkscape a little.

I ended up with this bit that I'm going to use for cover art until I can either steal a picture of a skeleton doing something, or until I can con somebody into doodling up a better cover for me.

Or, until I decide just to take some public-domain art and deface it with my name or something. It's happened before.

Look how simple that is.

Now I just need something to put in the corner so that it doesn't look so empty. Maybe I'll stick it up in the other corner, and have the Skeleton Puncher logo be more rounded, like it's following the spiral, and then in the corner it's actually at, I'll be like "PLAY A GAME OF PUNCHING AND VIOLENCE" and then it'll be done.

I was actually thinking about changing the name to Dragon Puncher, because there are good pictures of dragons. Most of the pictures of skeletons are shitty, because they're crappy enemies and nobody cares about them. It's always either zombies or like, skeleton wizards or something.

Vaakia

2011-11-19T02:56:00.001-05:00

As much as I know that this is basic artistic shorthand, what with orange and blue being common complementary colors (having a girlfriend who dabbles heavily in art is a fantastic thing), it still works.

I'm on the lookout for interesting characters with good backstories to transmute into SKELETON PUNCHER characters. I'm thinking about making a Reddit post or something to try and cull some good responses.

See, cause the way I see it, a system doesn't have to be able to accept just any character, and it might even be stronger if it doesn't. When 4e was coming out, one of its supporters said that you can make nearly any character you could make in 3e with it. One jackwagon responded by, basically, putting the class features in prose form, and then challenged the guy to show him how to do it.

No, 4e probably can't make a divine spellcaster who worships nature and can also have an animal companion and eventually learn to shapeshift into animal, giant animal, and elemental forms while both healing and assisting his allies because what the hell? That's not a character, that's a set of abilities. That's not what he's saying, and you're twisting meanings by implying he is.

What he's saying is that you can make any type of character. And that's what SKELETON PUNCHER has to do. When you mix and match the right abilities, you have to be able to get an acceptable version of Conan. Or Aragorn. Or Gandalf. Or Elric. Or the other Elric, if you want. Or Drizzt, maybe, kind of. The point is, people should be able to turn an idea (I want to play a gladiator type guy, who was enslaved and forced into the pits and he's really tough and strong but kind of twitchy, I guess) into a character with enough stats to make sense.

SKELETON PUNCHER is like, 75% of the way there. I just need some more examples of awesome characters that people want to make, and then I can add a little more crunch, write up a DM's Guide thing, and then call it a day. Wham, bam, boom, lookie here, then it's time to test.

I'm a Monk/Rogue

2011-11-17T21:24:00.001-05:00

I Am A: Lawful Neutral Human Monk/Rogue (2nd/2nd Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-12
Dexterity-15
Constitution-17
Intelligence-15
Wisdom-16
Charisma-14

Alignment:
Lawful Neutral A lawful neutral character acts as law, tradition, or a personal code directs him. Order and organization are paramount to him. He may believe in personal order and live by a code or standard, or he may believe in order for all and favor a strong, organized government. Lawful neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you are reliable and honorable without being a zealot. However, lawful neutral can be a dangerous alignment when it seeks to eliminate all freedom, choice, and diversity in society.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Primary Class:
Monks are versatile warriors skilled at fighting without weapons or armor. Good-aligned monks serve as protectors of the people, while evil monks make ideal spies and assassins. Though they don't cast spells, monks channel a subtle energy, called ki. This energy allows them to perform amazing feats, such as healing themselves, catching arrows in flight, and dodging blows with lightning speed. Their mundane and ki-based abilities grow with experience, granting them more power over themselves and their environment. Monks suffer unique penalties to their abilities if they wear armor, as doing so violates their rigid oath. A monk wearing armor loses their Wisdom and level based armor class bonuses, their movement speed, and their additional unarmed attacks per round.

Secondary Class:
Rogues have little in common with each other. While some - maybe even the majority - are stealthy thieves, many serve as scouts, spies, investigators, diplomats, and simple thugs. Rogues are versatile, adaptable, and skilled at getting what others don't want them to get. While not equal to a fighter in combat, a rogue knows how to hit where it hurts, and a sneak attack can dish out a lot of damage. Rogues also seem to have a sixth sense when it comes to avoiding danger. Experienced rogues develop nearly magical powers and skills as they master the arts of stealth, evasion, and sneak attacks. In addition, while not capable of casting spells on their own, a rogue can sometimes 'fake it' well enough to cast spells from scrolls, activate wands, and use just about any other magic item.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

According to the test, I'm a ninja. Sweet.

Also, why does it bother describing humans? I know what humans are. Everybody reading this is innately familiar with humans.

Thank God for Conspiracy Theories

2011-11-17T17:34:00.001-05:00

My brother, who's interested in conspiracy theories in a purely intellectual way, showed me this site. I read a couple articles (about such fascinating things as contrails secretly being chemical baths to kill us all, or the fact that dowsing apparently works and isn't at all wishful thinking or fraud) and was hit by a stunning realization.

These things would be excellent in a game of Mage: The Ascension. It would be pretty sweet in any other game about conspiracies, or paranoia, or even just in a modern-day setting, but M:tA is the one game I have like that, so it's going to fit.

I can just imagine: Young apprentice Mages go out on their first blow against dose gat-damn Technocrats, only to find that they're not only monitoring people, but spraying mind-controlling drugs out of planes! They have to be stopped! But the conspiracy goes a little deeper than they'd thought...

Or they go to what they think is a safe nexus-place, where they can rest and recuperate, only to find it the gathering-house of some new-age nuts who think that prayer groups and talking about their "psychic powers" is the way to stop the government from destroying the world.

Or they're travelling through and meet a man who's been in between the fight between the Mages and Technocrats before, tin foil hat and all. He's so happy to see them, he recognized them immediately, and would they mind helping him with his enormous quartz crystal he's been "programming" to defuse the microwave tracking the government put on him, and what should he do about the reptilians tracking him through the 4th dimension?

Good stuff, good stuff.

What is the Rogue for, anyways?

2011-11-16T07:58:00.001-05:00

Cast Knock just ONE MORE TIME

Here's a little something that I thought was interesting.

In the EnWorld.org thread entitled "I know the spell to solve the problem!" there's a rather telling post about the strength and, well, utility of the utility magic presented to classes. And I quote:

It starts with paladin's detecting evil, ruining careful disguises, to much stronger divination magics. Clerics asking the dead body who get the name of the murderer.
"Knock" spells that open any door faster than the thief can draw his lockpicks.
Charms that makes lies and bluff unnecessary (both as skill and roleplay). Creation spells that ruin any commerce system.

And then asks, essentially, what do you think? Is it a feature or a bug? Can you use it to enhance your game, or does it ruin the game?

If you ask me, this is really two questions in disguise. The original poster is asking "Is it ok for characters to have useful non-combat magic?", and also "Is role protection valuable?" But even that's not what he's really asking. The problem is that magic can be (and often is) a substitute for 3e and 4e's skill system, such that magical characters are able to bypass the skill system by casting a spell or two.

One of the most-cited examples in the thread is that a wizard, at very low levels, gains access to the spell Knock, allowing him to "take away" one of the Rogue's oh-so-valuable niches. This niche happens to be represented by a single die roll that the Rogue's player makes. This apparently totally de-values the Rogue class, which has been spending its skill ranks level after level to have a chance of doing what a wizard can do with a nod of his head and a shake of his staff. Apparently, it's ok for the Rogue to have the ability to make die rolls endlessly to unlock things, but it's not ok for the Wizard to spend one of his extremely valuable spell slots to do the same thing.

The reason? Apparently, this steals the Rogue's time to shine. This is what kills me. If there are honestly groups out there who gather in a big circle and get all excited when the guy who chose to play the Rogue gets to unlock a door, then I apologize, but what the fuck are you all so excited about? You roll a d20. Once. Maybe twice, if the GM lets you roll until you succeed, and then you're just waiting for the right number to come up. You might as well hand-wave it and say "Rogues can open all locked doors, eventually." Honestly, if I was the Rogue, I wouldn't give two shits who unlocks the door, as long as there's treasure or a dragon or something on the other side. It doesn't matter who opens it. The roll is not the interesting part of the game, and acting like it is sounds extremely derogatory. Oh, wow, Rogue, you rolled such a good number! Now step aside and let the big boys fight the orcs, hmm?

This reminds me: The 3e Rogue is damn useless. No, please don't argue. It's a class that specializes in gaining skill ranks in a system where skill ranks are grossly undervalued, while simultaneously getting the ability to backstab things really, really hard. Outside of combat, the Rogue gets to do things nobody else does (which results in the rest of the party sitting around), in exchange for having one actual action that he gets to undertake in combat. He gets to poke people's spines or do nearly no damage. How exciting!

It's past time to unlink the backstabbing and the sneaking from the guy who does the lockpicking and trap disabling gruntwork. More than that, it's time to either make lockpicking and trap disabling an actual activity, or it's time to quit pretending that having a lot of skills is somehow a class feature. It needs to stop. Skill ranks aren't a real class fature. If you gave the 3e Fighter 10 class skills, he'd still be an awful class. It doesn't help anything to pretend that the Rogue is somehow a vital part of the party when you have to explicitly design parts of adventures with locked doors and traps just so the poor sap who picked the only class (other than a wizard, apparently) can deal with it.

This has been one of the things I've been trying to do in my own games. There needs to be a total de-linkage of in-combat roles and out-of-combat roles, such that you can have a wizard with mechanical knowledge, or a charismatic warrior, or an assassin with a knowledge of medieval history. This is how people in real life work.Why shouldn't it be the same with characters in a game?

All us assassins pretty much like the same things: stabby knives, long cloaks, puppies...

I think it's about time that the Rogue got an actual out-of-combat niche, something that isn't comprised of die rolls for things that don't add drama or interest to the game. After all, his predecessor (the Thief of oD&D through 2nd edition) had a pretty good niche. Anybody could scale walls, but he could scale sheer ones. Anybody could see a trap, but he had a psuedo-supernatural 6th sense about danger. All this in a game with 6 classes instead of 60, and maybe one unique mechanic per class. There were a tiny handful of differences between classes besides the hit dice and combat advancement, and still each class does something interesting.

As to role protection, well, I've talked about that to death already, but if you're new here, let me put it this way: Role protection has no place outside of combat. In combat, each player should have something interesting to do, an enemy that is easier for them to fight than other classes, and a weakness that other party members must fill. They should also have something interesting or useful to do when they cannot attack directly. This is because when the group is fighting, everybody's fighting. Everybody's focused on the same thing.

Outside of combat, there's no reason that the guy playing the warrior should be bored, and one class should be doing everything. There's no excuse for it. Every player should be able to contribute (somewhat) equally inside and outside of combat, and it's not for some sort of "game balance" thing. It's so people aren't sitting with their thumbs up their butts, waiting for somebody to make six d20 rolls so that they can get to something that isn't boring. It's not about character balance. It's about Player Balance. Having entire segments of the game where a player's character has nothing to do is Bad Game Design. There's no two ways about it.

The Steam Lands

2011-11-15T22:16:00.001-05:00

A dusty, arid place, this is the capital city of the Steam Lands. It echoes with a tomb-like silence. Though it is aligned with both water and air, it is always dry. The only liquid to be found are pools of colorless acid, or from the greedy, dark clouds that always hover overhead, obscuring what weak sunlight the world uses to mark the day.

The peak is the home of the king of the demons, a grim husk whose only thoughts are towards domination and suffering. Power is the ability to make those below you miserable, and the Steam King is powerful indeed. Those who serve him constantly vie and writhe, backstabbing one another, but it never seems to disturb their king. Their petty squabbles are, and always will be, beneath his notice.

This was another one of the places in my Median campaign that never actually ran. Although this picture is new, the idea is not. As I've mentioned in the Horror of the Deeps post, water is evil and fire, good. Similarly, Earth is law and Air is chaos, so the home of the chaotic evil is a place of water and air- of acid and steam. In this place, water is not smothering or mysterious, but unattainable, and the air is thin of oxygen. The demons themselves ration their water, slaying each other to possess what little water their foes have within them. It is a place of cannibalism, privation, and pain.

It is a very dangerous hell.

Why The Occupy Wall Street Kids are Better Than Spartans

2011-11-14T22:31:00.001-05:00

This is a link post, but to a very good article that does three things extremely well.

One, it has a lot of good historical information about why the Spartans, far from being the shining crusaders of 300 were kind of giant douchebags, and the role of the rest of the Greek states in the battle of Thermopylae. Also a lot of good stuff about Greek culture in general which, even though my Menos project is on the backburner, is a pretty interesting read on its own.

Two, it talks about how Frank Miller is, apparently, a raging douchebag of his own who thinks that people who are dissatisfied with the economic imbalances in society are whiny kids, rapists, and thieves with no real grudge and that apparently they should be concerned with some shadowy "enemy" that hasn't made a move against us since, well, 9-11. Although I'm not sure that "Islamicism" is behind the attacks as much as some fairly vindictive terriorist groups are.

Three, he mentions that maybe the OWS guys should "join the military." This is near and dear to my heart for obvious reasons, not the least of which is the fact that this illustrator makes somewhere in the realm of "fucking way more" than even an officer, who themselves make two to three times as much as the enlisted guys that are actually doing the hard work. I'm pretty sure most of the people in the military (myself included) have a soft spot for the OWS guys, since we're the kind of guys who look at the military's core values (brotherhood, fairness, personal responsibility) and wonder why the rest of the world doesn't seem to get it.

But enough of my babbling, here's the link. Go read it, it's fantastic.

Magic and You: Campaign Settings

2011-11-14T18:37:00.001-05:00

I talk about magic way too much, and it remains a thorn in my side. In large part, it's because I can't just "let it go" and wave away all the complications that magic brings- I'm really too much of a Gygaxian naturalist to let something as potentially interesting as the actual effects that magic would have on a society to do what 3e (and probably other editions) did when they had a world full of magic users, and yet there are still castles and catapults and other things that would be rendered obsolete by even a single 5th level wizard.

Let me explain.

There are a couple of "axes" you can measure this sort of thing on. It's a lot like alignment. There are settings where magic is common, and settings where magic is rare. There are settings where magic is powerful, and settings where magic is kind of weak. There are also settings where magic is reliable versus unreliable, but I've chosen to roll that into the powerful vs weak axis, because honestly, I'm not at all interested in trying to mentally map out a chart in three dimensions.

In games where magic is Common, everybody knows about magic. Society tends to move along a relatively sophisticated axis, and many things are dealt with exclusively by magic. The effect it has on society generally depends on the size of the difference between powerful and weak magic users, and the strength of magic itself. In settings where there is a great size difference, you may have a merit-based oligarchy, where the strongest magicians "naturally" rule the less magically talented, or you may have a rigid caste-based system revolving around how much magic a certain individual has, with magical aptitude flowing through families- a a sort of "Divine Right" magically realized. In settings with a smaller difference, society generally continues apace although, again, it depends on how strong the magic is.

In games where magic is Rare, many people might not even believe in magic, since they're unlikely to see it. Wizards and witches are either objects of fear and veneration (if magic is Strong), or folklore heroes like any other (if magic is Weak). Magic users are generally avoided due to superstitions or fear of their (likely greatly exaggerated) powers. In settings where magic is rare, wizards are unlikely to be seen in society in any great capacity, generally choosing to remain in seclusion. The scholar archetype is seen here in abundance, and player characters are unlikely to be able to select a magic using profession as their own. In settings where they can, the player is then able to wield a great amount of power, generally speaking.

Including the power to enforce the Necromancer's Dress Code

In games where magic is both Common and Strong, look to Eberron as an example of a fantastically realized setting. Magical power is the currency of the world, and wizards have generally invented a higher standard of living than is found in most other societies. Warfare is extremely modern in settings where wizards have access to artillery-style settings. Massed formations are useless where a single fireball or lightning bolt will kill dozens. Conflict tends to take the form of espionage, sudden shifts in alliances, and backstabbing. For another great example, check out the 3rd edition DMGs. For all their inconsistent tone, they very often have surprising insights on what society looks like when there's a wizard around every corner... except when they pretend that it's medieval fantasy again.

In games where magic is Common and Weak, consider reading the Diskworld novels. There, magic is generally regarded lightly by the populace, if at all. More than likely, there are still powerful wizards and weak ones, but the difference is a linear one, instead of an exponential one- that is, a powerful wizard might be twice as mighty as an apprentice, but hardly ten times as powerful, or one hundred times so. It might be even more powerful, such as in the Xanth novels, where every single person has a minor magical power they can use for entertainment or for completing chores. Or every townsperson could know a handful of charms for cleaning, or keeping away sprites and goblins, or for keeping a fire lit. In this case, look up our own Real World! Whether it's people praying for minor miracles, or folk rituals, people in real life have traditionally tried to change the world with magic, with generally very minor results.

Where magic is Rare and Strong, you have a cold war situation. Wizards are easily the strongest humans around (if not some of the strongest beings), and they are easily capable of either forging their own kingdom or usurping one that exists. When magic users are frequently walking missile silos, or can raise armies of the dead to fight for them, or summon giants, they make the rules. They decide what goes on. If it doesn't happen in the game fiction, the game's default setting is deeply flawed. This sort of world is reflected in the Amber Diceless Roleplaying, or so I've heard, and it's also somewhat in effect in Ars Magica. There, wizards rule the world in name or in fact. In this sort of world, players are almost required to be wizards, as the world is subsequently divided into the haves (magical folks) and the have-nots (nonmagical folks.) Alternately, magic could be so rare that perhaps one man in a million will possess its secrets, meaning that the rare wizard that does manage to crop up is a major world-shaking event suitable only for non-player characters or perhaps a party that doesn't mind essentially being spectators to one man's rise to power.

Where magic is Rare and Weak, you have settings like that of Conan's Hyboria. Subtle wizards use their craft more than their magic, using misdirection and fear to enhance their powers. They are feared due to the legends they helped craft about their prowess. In such a world, players are not likely to be wizards any more than they are likely to be bakers- it isn't a particularly rewarding path until its pinnacle, and there, again, most of the wizard's power comes from subterfuge instead of magical might. It's got a very pulp-fantasy feel, where a group might team up to stop a particularly vicious wizard from recovering an mighty artifact. This is also the way magic in Warhammer Fantasy works, sort of- magic in Warhammer isn't weak, it's merely unreliable and unhelpful in most situations. A Warhammer wizard is a deadly force in a fight, when he has to be, but otherwise is generally unhelpful. You'll notice Warhammer also evokes a particularly pulpy feel, where the heroes are often anti-heroes and life is dirty and rough.

...this post was supposed to be a warmup, but it kind of took on a life of its own.

Reinventing the Dragon

2011-11-09T17:11:00.002-05:00

Dragons are an interesting, iconic monster that's remained popular outside of our favorite hobby. There's just something about dragons that makes people want to get tattoos of them on their bodies, or wear weird silky shirts with a repeating dragon motif, or put oddly-shaped purplish dragons on their cars. Dragons are "cool."

Normally this is where I'd put something that reeks vaguely of counter-culturalism, but whoa. Dragons really are cool. At least, the well-drawn ones are. There's something about a swift-winged engine of destruction that stirs the imagination, and you just can't help it. You can't help but like dragons.

And since I had fun re-imagining the "Tarrasque" the other day, I'm going to have a bit of fun reinventing the classic, iconic D&D Dragon. And it needs it.

I'll admit, I don't have the original D&D rules for Dragons, but I do have the Swords and Wizardry rules pdf here in front of me, and it does do something pretty cool- it makes dragons' health and attack rolls almost the same across age categories. The only things that change are the physical size, the health, and the damage of their breath weapons, which is pretty cool. Unfortunately for my tastes, it still has color-coded dragons while still making the colors of dragons very similar. It doesn't conflate type with personality, though, which is awesome. I never quite understood why every red dragon should be fiendishly intelligent and also act exactly the same as every other red dragon, for example.

Dragons in the Rules Cyclopedia, however (that is to say, basic D&D), are split into three age categories (small, large, and huge), and divided by color. As far I can tell, the dragons are all pretty much the same except for their alignments and exactly what they spit, but I'll be damned if I'm going to do anything more than skim over the unwieldy, three-page-long rules for Dragons. It also goes into rules for Crystal Dragons, which apparently are so named for their ability to breathe total nonsense at people in addition to breathing regular dragony things like fire or lightning bolts or whatever.

In 3rd edition, of course, everything goes crazy and each individual type of dragon has separate stat blocks detailing its every statistic for each of 12 sizes and if I'm not going to read the Rules Cyclopedia, I'm sure as shit not reading any of those monstrosities.

For my approach, I'm not going to do any of that. I couldn't care less about color-coded dragons. To me, a Dragon is an enormous lizard of any color (but usually reddish) that breathes fire. They might be intelligent, and they might not. Some Dragons are burninating assholes, and some are wise demigods. The difference is in their personalities, because Dragons are intelligent and know that they can get away with terrorizing you and your livestock because they're much bigger and more powerful and as long as they're careful you'll never find them outside of their almost inaccessible lair- or that because they're bigger and more powerful, you really should accept them as a demigod, bring them offerings of food and maybe some gold, and then go away before he torches your head.

To this end, I'm thinking of maybe three types of Dragons.

First is the Searing Dragon. Although all dragons breathe fire, Searing Dragons are named for their favorite pastime of burning things with extreme prejudice. Where other dragons can be found tearing into opponents or possibly casting spells, Searing Dragons spend most of their time as a sort of artillery piece, using their wings to get in position to scorch their attackers with gouts of flame. Searing Dragons are unique in that they make such a study of their own abilities to breathe fire that they're able to direct and control their own fire-breathing in ways that other Dragons are unable to match.

SEARING DRAGON

Anywhere from 8 to 12 feet long, these agile, aggressive Dragons use their breath weapons at every opportunity. Though they are hardly slim, they are by far the most lithe and agile of the dragons. They possess sharp claws, but they do not favor close-in attacks. They instead prefer to fly out of reach of their enemies and breathe their fire at a distance.

Hit Dice: 9+20 (avg 56 health)
Initiative: +5
Speed: 90' (240' flying)
Armor Class: 1 (19)
Attacks: 1 breath attack or 2 claws
Damage: 8d8 (see below) or 2d6/2d6
Save: F8
Morale:9
Hoard Class: XV
XP: TBA

The Searing Dragon may choose to breathe one of three forms of fire: The Line, the Blast, and the Cone.
The Line is a direct line 80' long, 5' wide, and 5' tall that the dragon directs with his mouth.
The Cone is a funnel 40' forwards. It is as wide and as high as it is long.
The Blast is a lobbed fireball that the Searing Dragon can launch up to 100'. The fireblast explodes with pinpoint accuracy on the target selected by the Searing Dragon where it detonates, affecting everything within 20' in each direction, in a sphere.

After the Searing Dragon breathes, it must work its internal forges for a short time before breathing again. For each turn since the last time it has breathed its fire, its next blast deals 2d8 fire damage, to a maximum of 8d8 fire damage.

Secondly, we have Brawling Dragons. These guys are the biggest, meanest, and most aggressive dragons around. While Searing Dragons might set fire to your village, eat your livestock, and then leave you with burning buildings, a Brawling Dragon will land right in the middle of a castle, knock the whole thing to the ground, and feast on the nice, toasty humans in the middle. Of all the dragon types, these guys are the least likely to have a nice, civil conversation with anybody.

BRAWLER DRAGON
Stocky and cruel, Brawling Dragons aren't afraid to get right in their enemy's face and make them suffer. Frequently more than 15 feet long and roughly 10 feet tall, these dragons are bad-tempered and territorial. They're just smart enough to know that they can probably kill you before they even break a sweat.

Brawling Dragons favor a mixed-method approach, often using their breath on grouped enemies before landing in the middle of a fray and attempting to crush their enemies with their bulk. Any enemies that are not crushed are then savaged with the dragon's massive claws while his breath replenishes itself.

Hit Dice: 12+30 (avg 78 health)

Initiative: +8
Speed: 90' (240' flying)

Armor Class: -1 (21)

Attacks: 2 claws or 1 breath weapon

Damage: 4d8/4d8 or 6d6 fire

Save: F8
Morale:9
Hoard Class: XV
XP: TBA

Brawling Dragons' breath can either be a line or a cone. Line breath weapons are 60' long, 5' wide, and 5' tall. Cone breath weapons are 30' long, 30' wide, and 30' tall.

After a Brawling Dragon breathes, it must wait for its internal fire to replenish. For each turn since the last breath attack, his next attack will deal 1d6 damage, to a maximum of 6d6.

And last but not least, we have the Dragon Mages.

I'll go into Dragon Mages another time, because frankly, this is a lot longer than it should be, and they kind of deserve their own post with a lot of detail. The subject of spell-casting dragons is kind of an odd one, and hard to deal with without either glossing over their magic or going the 3e route and giving them so many spells that they might as well not even have any spells because nobody can remember all their special abilities and also 20-odd spells they need to cast.

Masterwork Weapons

2011-11-07T21:15:00.000-05:00

I've been playing around with an idea in my head- what if, instead of having a "plus" level and (maybe) a unique power to magical items, what if you did away with the plus altogether?

What if the big draw was the fact that it was magical, instead?

I haven't playtested it, but I can't imagine that there'd be any real problems simply porting it into a game. You could shift the bonuses to attack and damage on to the fighters' base values (so that a fighter who's "supposed" to have a +1 sword and armor could have an innate bonus to attack, damage, and armor class instead), and then have the occasional monster reduce damage if it was struck by a non-magical weapon. Something like how (as I understand it) certain monsters in OD&D simply couldn't be hurt by anything but magical weapons.

So there'd be value in a "boring" magical sword, for example- it'd still have the properties of a "magical" item (being constantly razor-sharp, resistant to breakage, resistant to magical destruction)... but you could have a normal smith create it. Hello, masterwork weapons. Nice to see you again. Why don't you take a seat.

You'd have to modify store-bought adventures and settings a little, sure, but it wouldn't be hard. Just take the boring swords and axes that don't get any cool powers and make them masterwork weapons. Now they're well-forged weapons with a certain value, but it makes sense that there's stacks of them lying around instead of being kept in a box while the enemy warriors are running around with mundane weapons.

In this scheme, there would be two categories of magical weapons and armor: the "regular" masterwork type that's a cut above regular weapons without contributing to power creep, and then "unique" items that are sentient, or return when thrown, or whatever it is they do. And here's the real benefit: The items are important for what they do, instead of what stats they boost.

It's something to think about, anyways.

Horror of the Deeps

2011-11-06T09:12:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite ideas that never quite went through was for a world I was designing with my brother via wiki. I don't think I ever settled on a name, but the basic idea was that alignments are tied to elements, and that the combination of alignments meant that people had a certain combination of elements. Humans, being basically neutral, had a healthy mix of each (unless they went through some extreme rituals), but extraplanar beasts had some serious differences.

In this scheme, I wanted to go with Fire for good, evoking the common images of cleanliness, purity, and warmth- I was heavily inspired by the Zoroastrian tradition (as explained by Wikipedia), wherein they would have simplistic rituals involving fire.

This leaves Evil with Water, naturally enough. What, life-giving water is given a bad rap? Yes, absolutely. And here's why.

With fire, you know what you're getting. It's clear-cut and simple. With water, its flat surface hides great depths, with foreign monsters in a bizarre world. It's dark down there, hostile to life itself. It's Lovecraftian, where the shores are mistrusted due to the fishmen coming up from the depths to hunt humans for food. Fishermen and sailors are the bravest folk of all.

In this scheme, the Elemental Plane of Water is a place of great evil, of treachery, and of demons. In this world, the Horror of the Deeps is a lord amongst demons, a king of the great fishy hordes.

Redesigning the Tarrasque

2011-11-05T22:36:00.000-04:00

I was in the process of writing about why I don't particularly like the way that large monsters are handled in stock-standard D&D when I realized that it had gone from a semi-sane discussion of how the current rules aren't all that into full-blown complaining asshole mode.

So I scrapped the whole thing and now I'm going to talk about how I'd go about redesigning the Tarrasque.

If you've ever played 3rd edition D&D, or have ever been on a forum where it's mentioned, somebody will always mention the Tarrasque. If you've never heard of it, it's basically a nigh-unkillable giant mook monster, with good defenses, excellent attacks, and an enormous pile of hit points. It's really not very interesting, sadly, and that's my main point about it- for being an enormous, indestructible fighting machine, it doesn't really do anything. Amping everything up to eleven does not, sadly, make for an interesting monster. We know that it's not killable with regular means- did you really have to make it have 48 hit dice? Did you have to include special rules for rays and magic missiles? Was it necessary to state that it's immune to fire and poison and disease and energy drain? Did you have to list each of the totally mundane and boring skills it has? The Tarrasque is the crowning achievement of the kitchen sink design that so many detested about 3e D&D.

So, let me try and make it a little better. Couple of things going into this: This is remaking the Tarrasque so it's an interesting encounter. It's for retroclones and older systems, but you could probably port it into whatever you want. That's kind of the point, right?

The first thing that stands out to me, going from the SRD link that I've got handy, is that its health is at an absurd level. 48 hit dice is hardly necessary- even a more modest 24 is still well out of reach of any but the most dedicated party. So that's the first thing to go.

Secondly, it has an absurd array of attacks. It's able to attack with each horn independantly, as well as both claws, and a bite. This is supposed to be taking place in a fairly short combat round. It's simply undignified to have this thing thrashing around with its claws and horns and mouth all apparently attacking different things. Let's simplify, using a little math. It's got 6 attacks, with an average die damage of 11 and an average bonus damage of 10.5 per attack. So let's simplify, and say that he gets one attack per round, rolling (4d6+11)x6. The multiplication is in there because otherwise, we'd be rolling 24d6+66, and I don't know about you, but I don't have that many dice and if I did, I wouldn't roll that every round. This attack can be anything- a bite, a stomp, a massive claw, a deadly charge, whatever.

Thirdly, its immunities. It's immune to practically everything, so let's just make it official. The Tarrasque is immune to magic. There, look, done. It's almost immune to magic as it is, and at least this way, it makes it interesting- finding a way to puncture the beasts' magic immunity is now a quest-worthy goal, and makes beating it down with a lightning bolt or whatever much more interesting. This is a good place to mention its Armor Class- 30 is absurdly high. I don't care what the character optimization guys for 3e have to say- if you're going to make somethings' armor be so high that you can't hit it, just say that. Don't bother including stats for things you can't do. If you don't want the Tarrasque to be able to be killed by normal weapons, just say it. They have terminology for that- it's called damage resistance, and it's what we're going to use. Something this huge isn't hard to hit, it's hard to hurt. We'll give it damage resistance 20/magic weapons, so that either you're bringing magic weapons or you aren't hurting it, and lower its armor class to 20 (or 0, if you're using descending scale).

We'll keep its regeneration- 40 points now means something, since it doesn't have 800 hit points any more. 40 health out of 200 every round is seriously meaningful, and it puts it out of the reach of all but the most hard-hitting. It's still almost healing faster than you can hurt it. On a similar note, I'm dropping all the custom resistances and just giving it awesome saving throws. Now it can be poisoned... if it rolls higher than a 3. And then, what's it supposed to do, again?

I'm going to ignore the section on feats, because I don't remember what they mean but they're probably almost entirely irrelevant. I guarantee you they can be reworded as special abilities, were any of them to be interesting enough to warrant it.

And that's almost it. I'm just going to add a bit about how the Tarrasque's attacks all have the ability to either also knock you around, or stick you in his mouth and devour you instantly.

What you're left with is a creature like this:

TARRASQUE

The Tarrasque is a creature brought into existence to begin the end of the world. Where it treads, it brings earthquakes. Where it fights, the ground runs red with gore. Entire cities have fled to avoid being in its path. Nobody knows what intelligence, if any, guides it to the destruction it inevitably causes- it doesn't take kindly to questions.
Hit Dice: 24d10 (240 avg. health)
Initiative: +7
Speed: 120'
Armor Class: 0
Attacks: 1
Damage: (4d6+11)x6 or 24d6+66
Save: F19
Morale: 12
Hoard Class: N/A
XP: TBA

An enormous, bloodthirsty beast nearly forty feet high and seventy five feet long. Its stocky body is covered with a thick, grey hide, and its back is armored by an impossibly tough, thick carapace. It arms reach almost to the ground, and end in four thick talons. Its head is dominated by a massive mouth, two forward-facing horns, and beady, red eyes. Its roar is loud enough to deafen those nearby, and its growls can be heard for miles.

The Terrasque is immune to magic, and regenerates 40 hit points every turn. It reduces any damage dealt to it by non-magic weapons by 20 points. Every time the Terrasque attacks or moves, those nearby must make a saving throw (you be the judge) or be knocked several feet away from the Terrasque.

Those slain by the Terrasque are immediately devoured, providing 20 additional points of regeneration that round.

And there, look. An enormous, difficult to kill monster that has the same flavor as the original Terrasque (impossible to kill with weapons, impossible to kill with magic, rampages around and wrecks stuff) without being absurdly powerful or unstoppable.

Tombstone: The Best D&D Movie Ever Made

2011-11-04T15:40:00.002-04:00

It isn't hyperbole. Tombstone perfectly embodies what I consider to be a fantastic D&D campaign.

Let me break it down a little. You have four travelers coming to Tombstone, each with a different story and closely connected to each other through bonds that simply will not break. One, Wyatt Earp, is a former marshal and a lawman. One, Doc Holiday, was a gambler, dentist, gunman, and part-time outlaw. This is the quintessential party- they have a shared goal (move into Tombstone, live a quiet life), they trust each other implicitly, and they are willing to fight for what they believe in.

The city itself, while ostensibly guarded by a foppish mayor and an ancient sheriff, are really in the hands of the wild, red-sashed Cowboy gang. The delicate balance between the clearly despised but powerful and reckless Cowboy gang and the townspeople means that it's just waiting for a strong group to come by and make some trouble.

If you rewrote the entire plot of Tombstone to be a D&D campaign, and renamed the Cowboys to the Red Sashes or anything else, and gave the marshal a title (Lord Marshal), make the sheriff a nobleman, and gave everybody swords and crossbows, nobody would even notice. It'd just be another day. "Oh god, not another boring mining town controlled by a local gang," your players would say, "how many times do we have to save these fuckers?"

And yet, Tombstone is more than the sum of its parts, as every D&D campaign is. I'd go so far as to say that Tombstone is a better D&D movie than Conan the Barbarian is, or the Lord of the Rings is. Especially Lord of the Rings, matter of fact.

Tombstone is abound with player agency. In other words, it feels like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday can do whatever they like. It's a wide-open world, and they have choices. For example, Virgil chooses to become the new town sheriff when the old one gets killed. He feels a personal need to bring vengeance back to the Cowboys who've gotten away with the bullshit for far too long.

His friends, his brothers, do not. There's no real reason to fight the Cowboys, or for that matter, not to fight them. The decision is a more personal one- should I risk my life to stop these people from doing things I don't like? Is it worth getting involved, possibly lethally, in a fight that's really none of my concern?

Wyatt Earp doesn't change his mind until it's almost too late.

That's D&D to me. You have to make decisions, and it's not as easy as "Throw this trinket in a volcano or the world will end." It's about "You have to do what you think is best." Tombstone is a movie about the choices of brave men, and of consequence. Everything they do has a consequence, from when Wyatt drives out that bearded fat guy from the first saloon he sets his foot into, or when Virgil and Morgan make themselves targets of assassins by letting the world know exactly where they stand.

So I'll stand by it again- Tombstone is the best D&D movie ever made.

Vitality in Games

2011-11-01T18:34:00.002-04:00

No, I'm not talking about in-game vitality (although I could, now that you mention it, and maybe I will again). I'm talking about the vitality of the game itself, as a system.I'm talking about the way the system feels alive, where you'll do things like the guy above this- where you'll stick your sword in the dragon's belly and spill out its guts, and your character is happy, and you as a player are happy, and for a second you're standing around in that post-massacre bliss, tense and happy to be alive.

But don't make a mistake- I'm not talking about a game that has realistic combat, because that can be overly boring and stupid, too. I'm also not talking about a game that even deals primarily with combat, because that tends to be boring. The only reason I'm singling combat out as much as I am is because it's one of the very few things that cannot be fairly adjucated without an element of chance- mostly because we can pretend to do everything else (and very few of us seriously consider LARPing with our tabletop gaming). And I'm not talking about the sort of game where everything has a stat and there are rules for the structural stability of ditches next to the part about cutting out dragon spleens.

No, what I'm talking about is a system that gets you caught up in it, the sort of system that makes everybody stand up and high-five each other because that was totally awesome and dude, fuck yeah! The sort of game that makes you remember that you're playing a game, instead of some detailed-ass simulation of some scrubby douchebags in armor. This, by the way, is one of the reasons that I don't inherently like the way combat in most role-playing games are done; instead of being a series of high-stakes, back and forth duels, it ends up feeling like an accounting session where the first guy to run out of Resource X loses. That's not what I'm looking for. And I know that it's only natural that, in a game where the duration of torches and the number of iron rations are absolutely essential and you might kick yourself for buying two less pitons than you need, that combat should end up like that. It's fine- but it's not what it should be. What it should be is, basically, a fantasy-themed version of craps. And I think that could work.

In this case, we'd take each player's actions first and foremost and the DM's actions mostly as responses to what the players describe. It'd replicate the feeling of "us vs him", first of all, and secondly, set up a risk vs reward sort of deal. You could try and do a flying leap over towards the dragon, but it's risky and you could get killed... or you could try and sneak in, with the only real penalty being that you got caught. Obviously, your DM should be a bit of a hardass about it, because that's kind of the point. For you to get what you really want, you need to be so uncomfortable that you're squirming a little bit. You need to think "aw shit, I dunno...", or else you need to step down a little bit and maybe try for something easier.

And then, when the DM is satisfied and the player is satisfied, and everybody's figured out what they're going to do, we get some dice a-rollin. And this is where the dice math gets complex- there needs to be a way to take into account everybody's favorite part of a roleplaying game (fuckin' Attributes and stuff), but also tie it into a "roll this and you win" and "roll this and you lose" such that it scales naturally with both the difficulty and the risk. Something like how your attribute determines how difficult of an action you can "bet", and how every action that goes a couple of "steps" down is easier... but even that has too much of a taste of the sort of book-skimming rigidity that can really kill a stressful moment. It might even be easier just to have sort of roll-modifiers to certain things (like if you're playing a Barbarian, you can reroll a failed roll if it would result in your death, and you can nudge a die in some way when it comes to smiting bitches with your sword). A Fudge-esque system, if you will, where your character is assumed to be more or less average in everything that isn't mentioned.

I think it's the skeleton of an extremely vital game, even though I have no idea how to play craps. But I think it could work. At the very least, it could be an interesting way to waste an afternoon!

Guild Wars 2 (Again): Combat

2011-10-30T18:05:00.000-04:00

http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/combat/part-two/

If you don't want to read the post, that's fine. I'm going to summarize it anyways. The article is discussing combat in an upcoming computer roleplaying game, a sequel to the highly popular Guild Wars, and it aims to take combat in a pretty interesting place.

I'll let you read the article if you want, but what really concerns me is the treatment of weapons and the skills that accompany it. Weapons, in my mind, are a really difficult thing to get right. The choice of a character's weapon should define, in a large part, their fighting style, which determines the way they fight, the places they want to fight, and a lot about their personality. In most games, though, the weapon you're wielding has about as much impact on how you fight as the color of your beard. It applies its damage bonus, and then maybe an accidental benefit or two through critical damage tables or bypassing a gimmicky resistance idea. This is not good.

If you watch any two people fighting in real life, even with just their hands, what they do results directly from minute factors. I'm talking about how their style interacts with their enemy's, their footings, and their ever-changing stances. And, sure, there's a certain element that you can't quite express with a system that revolves mostly around rolling dice. But there should be a little bit more to it.

That's why it was so cool seeing the Guild Wars 2 post about it. Basically, it gives you a handful of abilities you can use. Roughly half of them are due to the weapon you wield, meaning that your choice of weapon is a huge factor in how you fight and how others fight you. If you have a sword, your basic moves are nothing like if you're wielding a greataxe, or a bow. And you can port that over to D&D style, combat, if you want.

Naturally, there's a bit of a slippery slope when rewriting combat rules. You have to decide how much "realism" you want and how much "game," and how much of either you want in creating character builds. I think that if you didn't mind a rather healthy amount of game, you could port this almost directly over. It could be a pain to describe and detail the abilities, but I almost think it would be worth it.

Something to think about, at least.

Guild Wars Environmental Postcards

2011-10-29T14:27:00.000-04:00

Guild Wars is on my short list of MMOs that I wouldn't change anything about. Or, well, hardly anything. The character creation and customization is pretty robust, the combat is quick and lively, and the environments are superb. There's probably a pretty good storyline, too, but I always skip the cutscenes and neglet to read the quest text. Hey, I'm trying to play a game, not read a book. When I feel like reading books, I'll crack open a book thank you very much, give me some more gigantic animated plants to slay.

One of the very best things, in my opinion, is the art of Guild Wars. It has a very specific style, and a very epic feel. Recently, the developerts of Guild Wars (ArenaNet) released some concept art of environments that, to my knowledge, never got used. It's safe to say they wouldn't appreciate it being used in a commercial product, but there's no reason you still can't admire a little art for the sake of art.

Changing Classes

2011-10-26T15:16:00.000-04:00

I told one of my buddies that I was going to write about Fantasy General, an outstanding fantasy wargame, but I decided not to. You heard me!

Instead, I'm going to write a little about classes and how they shape the default setting of our campaign world by explicitly expressing what is and is not possible to player characters and why.

As a quick example, we all know about the Magic User of OD&D, or basic D&D. He has a finite list of spells that he can perform, and that is the extent of his magic. He can shoot lightning bolts across a room but cannot generate an electrostatic charge. He can put a man to sleep but cannot awaken him again. He can turn a man to stone but cannot simply encase him in stone. The Magic User is a man of no subtlety, a man who wields the forces of magic with all the grace and finesse of a sledgehammer. And this sets the tone for your campaign.

One of your player characters (or maybe more) has this small set of incredibly destructive magic and, as they say, when you've only got a hammer, everything looks like nails. Suddenly every encounter is a chance to scour the earth with flame and explosions, every diplomatic encounter is a chance to command another's mind. And you wonder why the players always fight to the death!

It's really not just limited to magic. The class features are the number one game-defining decision. If you have a game where you choose one of four classes, you have a game of specialists with role protection. If you have a class-building system, or a "buy what you like" system, then you have a game of generalists where the idea of "role protection" is a little laughable.

Let me give a quick example, and then I'm out of your hair:

Imagine you're playing D&D, except that your DM hands you a little handbook and says, "I'm trying something new. Instead of the classes you're used to, we're going to use these classes." Inside the handbook, it explains that the Fighter is now a graceful Dervish, who is quick-footed and nimble. The Cleric is now a Blood Priest, who has no grasp of holy magic but heals and harms through an understanding of the magic of blood. The Magic User is now a Runemaster, who casts no magic but utilizes the power of Runes, which consist of enchantments laid on objects and people.

Your game has changed enormously, obviously. You no longer have anybody wearing heavy armor. You don't have access to light spells (since it would normally come from the Cleric, who is now limited strictly to healing and damage spells. Your Magic User has no gross magical powers- instead, he creates use-limited magical objects that he can hand to others.

And as obvious as it is that the game has changed, it makes me wonder that more people don't inspect the impact of the default player classes in their games. If I had a dollar for every time that something in a default class simply smashed the default assumptions inherent in any game world, I'd be a very, very rich man.

Wyrms of the Desert

2011-10-23T18:06:00.002-04:00

It's not just the fact that I am an insatiable Dune fanatic, I promise (although it is a major point of the setting that enormous sandworms roam the barren landscape, I'll admit)- there's something evocative about the deep desert in all its foreignness.

I've got a better post in the back of my brain, but I just got done with an all-day process, so I'm a little drained. This pic should tide you guys over and give you something awesome to look at in the same stroke.

Lolth: Spider Bitch of the Abyss

2011-10-20T14:15:00.001-04:00

Today, looking at my statistics, I realized that the most searched-for term that lands visitors here is none other than Lolth. Lolth? Why her?

Lolth the babe

Well, as anybody who's been following this for a while knows about my love-hate relationship with Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits. It's a brilliant piece of module-writing that is in a really weird place. On one side, it captures extremely well the early conglomeration of what we know today as fantasy and sci-fi, and it features several portals to other realities without telling you once what you should be doing in them or what their significance is. It's both kind of a short module and an extremely massive one, with leads that could find your party travelling to a multitude of places, and dealing with the strange and varied inhabitants. But on the other hand, it hides the gold inside the dross of somewhat gimmicky puzzles that need to be solved without leading themselves to an actual solution, weird encounters with a variety of extremely mundane creatures, and a couple of encounters that don't seem to have a purpose.

And behind all of this madness is a very killable Lolth, with a number of hit points that makes anybody familiar with new-school roleplaying games positively shudder. It really is extremely old-school, and that's both its primary attraction and its primary downfall.

But more to the point: It's Lolth. I'm quite aware that there's a fairly long fantasy series about Dark Elves and their problems revolving around their capricious goddess, or just about Dark Elves in general, and it's honestly pretty fertile ground. Ignoring the adolescent bondage fantasies and the intentional inversion of only the most shallow societal elements (women rule instead of men, everybody lives in upside down houses, idolizes betrayal instead of loyalty, etc), it's actually pretty cool stuff. You have a demon goddess who's alternately a babe and actually pretty hideous, who overlooks these scheming subterranean elves with a religion that doesn't seem to care much if she's around except at the very top.

Lolth the monster

So here's to Lolth, one of the most interesting goddesses around. Everybody knows that the villians are infinitely more interesting than the heroes, and Lolth is hardly an exception. I'd go so far as to say that she's one of the most interesting villains out there.

"When Mourning Goes Viral"

2011-10-16T14:26:00.001-04:00

http://life.salon.com/2011/10/07/digital_mourning/singleton/

Without a doubt, the dumbest editorial I've read in a while. It's no secret that the news media loves stories that are easy to digest and they love making grandiose statements that mean nothing, but this kind of takes the cake.

I have no idea how Twitter and other social media has changed the way we mourn, but apparently it changes it because that's what we do. It's essentially an article about nothing, a profoundly meaningless article like this one I'm writing now describing for you the pointlessly self-serving article that somehow ties itself into Steve Jobs' death like so many other articles.

Of course, I'm having more fun with mine, which is both significantly shorter while being 10% less pretentious.

The Legend of Zelda

2011-10-15T13:21:00.000-04:00

This awesome post takes inspiration from the Game Boy game "Link's Awakening" and turns it into some seriously awesome art.

Take a peek: http://sceneryvilla.com/?p=145

It's the sort of thing that makes you realize that D&D isn't dead, and neither is old-school dungeon crawling. It's just not called that any more. These pictures could be in any fantasy roleplaying supplement released today, and nobody would even bat an eyelash.

Dragon Eruption: The Cult of Dragda

2011-10-08T21:30:00.002-04:00

I think that this is going to be Dragda, the Great Wyrm's picture. At least, in my head. See, in my Meros pseudo-campaign setting, Dragda is the center of an extended cult of sorcerers and seers, who both commune with him in an effort to learn the ageless secrets that he contains in his dreams, and feeds upon his great magical powers in an effort to learn the eldritch ways.

The cult of Dragda is one of my favorite Orders, and I'll tell you exactly why: It's a mystery cult. It's a fascinating blend of "What if religions had actual proof?" combined with the very real-to-life corruption of good intentions. What Dragda actually said, nobody knows, but he's clearly right there, so the cultists do their best to maintain what he said, and do good according to his intentions.

Also, he's a badass dragon. Not a regular dragon, like, some half-intelligent scaly thing, but he's a god-level draconic intelligence with very powerful magic. The dude changed the world before he fell into his millennia long-sleep, and that makes the campaign setting more interesting in a couple of ways, I think. One) He's a dynamic character, two) What the fuck happens when he wakes up?, and three) He's a dragon with a cult. C'mon.

The Cult of Dragda- making an appearance in a campaign setting near you!

Meros

2011-10-04T22:46:00.001-04:00

"Meros" is the placeholder name I've chosen based on the world's quickest internet search for the Greek word for "place."

Why Greek? Well, that's a post for another day. Long story short: Imagine Herodotus viewed through the lens of the Epic of Gilgamesh, with some Norse mythology, Gygaxian naturalism, and a healthy heaping of D&Disms. Dusty plains with feuding city-states in dedicating monuments to gods, with the occasional dragon riding through, that sort of deal.

So whose skull was that, again?

The basic idea is that the Greek city-state model is, basically, overripe for a game setting. It's practially embedded deep inside the original D&D patina; larger than life personas raid and massacre each other long enough to get the loot and get out, and the population hails them for their efforts. If you transcribe "Goblins" to mean, say "Trojans", and "humans" to equal Spartans, you essentially have the default setting for D&D, where the Goblins raid and bother the humans and the humans raid and bother the goblins until somebody seriously crosses the line, and even then you're still not interested in wholesale slaughter or enslavement or removal, you just want their fat loot.

Plus, look at that picture up there. That is some seriously swanky clothes. I'd wear that on the town if I could either grow a beard like guys one or two, or could be androgynously handsome in a fetching blue chain-mail/skirt combo.

Orders and Advanced Classes

2011-10-03T19:45:00.003-04:00

I'm still messing around a bit with the format, but I think that the Advanced Classes are going to work like this:

Accomplish something unusual. This could be a lot of things, and I plan on making an easy-to-use index at the back, so when you do something weird you can look over the Advanced Classes thing and see where that fits in.
Join an Order. Orders are always looking for Heroes (after the Greek tradition, don't worry- no knights in shining armor connotations here. That's why I make sure to capitalize it, actually), and you can probably join. Orders are the big movers and shakers of the world and are ideal for adventurers because they're generally not interested in the status quo the same way kingdoms and baronies are, and they're generally pretty lenient as far as dues/attendance goes.
Train under a Mentor and gain an advanced class,depending on what you've done.
Do something else extraordinary, and get further advanced classes as you level.

One of my biggest personal pet peeves is where 'adventurers' fit into a campaign world, and exactly how scuzzy that adventurers really are. I mean, you give these guys a bunch of hit dice and armor and stuff, and then thrust them into a campaign world full of kings and dragons and stuff and either a) expect them to go find something, or b) straight up tell them what to do.

I know, I know, that sounds like a campaign world problem, but hear me out. The problem is that during character creation, you're relying on the whimsical ethers of the players' minds to decide what sort of organizations are out there, and that can be rough when the players don't know what to pick. Orders give a little bit of structure to it, and are kind of like a GM Guarantee that not only is that archetype totally permitted and you should go for it.

But more importantly, it lets you have a very firm tie into the game world. You're not just a first level Fighter, you're a first level Armsman of the Freeriders of Xalt. You're a third level Ascendant-Brother of the Sons of Dragda. You're a fifth level Priest-Militant of the Order of the Silver Spear. You have a place in the world, as rigid or as flexible as you want it. You can even choose to be totally unaligned, if you like, and rock it old-school; but the default assumption for your characters shouldn't be footloose vagabonds. That's not really how the world works, you know?

Of course, it's important to leave the option in there for people who really don't want to have that connection, because that's a valid place in the world, too.

Advanced Classes

2011-10-01T15:11:00.003-04:00

As the more astute of you has probably guessed already, this is going to be about, essentially, prestige classes. Oh, don't roll your eyes at me like that, I'm not going there. I promise. The last thing anybody wants is to bring back the insane flurry of acronyms and slashes that marked 3e- because holy fucking god, please, no. Just say no to multiclassing.

If you ask me, multiclassing has no place whatsoever in class-based games. All it does is point out the inherent inflexibility in the system, and makes classes more of a "pick-and-choose-abilities" affair instead of a simultaneous role-restriction and role-definition. And that's just wrong. It doesn't feel right. It feels blatantly artificial... but it's the only way we can customize our characters, right?

Well, no. It's the only way you can customize your characters in generic D&D, but it doesn't have to be that way. Like I said, all it does it point out the inherent inflexibility in the system. But what if the system was more flexible?

I'm currently thinking about RuneQuest or OpenQuest. I don't have the PDF with me, but if I remember correctly, the game totally eschewed the idea of "class", instead preferring to let you learn whatever it was that your little heart desired. The problem with RuneQuest/OpenQuest is, of course, that character generation takes a while. What you gain in flexibility, you lose in creation time, simplicity, and roles. Every character can do a little bit of everything, and while it's certainly pretty cool, you quickly lose that "special feeling" you get. There's nothing like being the best in your group at something, when you're the toughest and strongest or the smartest and most magical.

It's one of the things that 4e got right (which I'm aware is a bit of a naughty phrase round these parts.) The "protection" of class roles is a fantastic feature, even if they really messed up by making it sound as goofy and strictly combat-related as they did. The idea is solid, but the execution left a lot to be desired.

So what am I getting at? Well, I've been percolating for quite a while on the idea of "Advanced Classes" that takes a little bit of everything from everywhere and melds it into something that isn't terrible. As a quick rundown:

From basic D&D it takes attribute generation (3d6 in order), it takes the "feel" of the classes, and it takes the starting point of strength.
From AD&D it takes the "character kit" idea, where you pick a kit and that's what your character can do. Expanded out, but still somewhat recognizable.
From 3e, it takes the idea that you have to "qualify for" these advanced classes, but in ways that are not in the least related to your skill points or whatever. I'm thinking in-game feats, because all prestige classes would be (or are) in-game organizations. Think The Order of the Burning Brand instead of "Crusader" for example.
From 4e, the idea that character roles are as much as part of a character as the starting class. When you pick up a prestige class, you don't fundamentally change your role. Instead, you become better at one specific role, paralleling the way humans work- you start as a generalist, and continue to specialize down the line until you are a master at your chosen field.

And that's the idea. As a quick example, let's take this guy and see where he ends up, under the Advanced Classes scheme:

Let's say he started out as a 1st level Figher. Realizing that he revels in bloodshed, let's say that at 5th level he joins a cult to the God of Massacre and becomes a Reaver. Now he gains a bonus to damage with two-handed weapons, and he gains a little bit of health back when he kills somebody in melee combat. Becoming a true Reaver means defeating a powerful warrior in one-on-one combat and then feasting on his eyes. Our Fighter does so, and he is accepted into the Reavers.

But maybe that's not enough. At 9th level, he becomes more dedicated to bloodshed and massacre, and petitions to join the upper ranks of the Reavers. This is about as easy as it sounds- to climb higher, to become a Blood-Letter, he must accomplish an unparalleled feat of carnage. Our fighter decides to destroy a small village, slay all the inhabitants, build a sacrificial pyre to his god of Carnage out of the wood of the buildings, and leave the bodies for the wolves. He has accomplished his goal, and is accepted into the Blood-Letters with open arms. He gains a contingent of Reavers of his own, and learns some of the darker secrets of the Blood-Letters; he learns charms to make a man burn with fury from a single word, a spell to make the freshly dead rise up and fight for him, and he gains a charm such that he will not feel pain until after the battle.

You know, just as an example off the top of my head. Basically, the point is that as you level, you get a nifty trick or two that nobody else probably has. These tricks are tied to belonging in an organization much of the time, although there's usually a way to get nifty tricks without applying to an organization, depending on your class, the game world, and how much your DM is willing to believe that you can totally figure out how to run like the wind/shoot a bulls-eye at 300 yards/track dragons/shapeshift/summon demons without somebody to help you out in exchange for your loyalty.

I don't know if I'll ever write an actual document about it, but it's certainly worth thinking about.

Gigantic Sci-Fi and Fantasy Book Flowchart, from NPR

2011-09-27T13:00:00.000-04:00

I hadn't seen this until today, so I apologize if I'm late: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/09/flowchart-for-navigating-nprs-top-100-sff-books/

It is, essentially, the NPR's listeners' list of the top 100 science fiction and fantasy books, laid out with silly commentary in a massively-branching flowchart form. It is fantastic, and it's scary when I realize I've read a great deal of the books. Now I've just got to read a couple more, and maybe I can have the whole series finished... except I'm not going to read the Sword of Shannara any more than I already have, nor any Robert Jordan. Thanks, though.

Books Are Cool

2011-09-26T12:51:00.001-04:00

What's that? You like having images reposted instead of having substantial content? Well, why didn't you say so?

For what it's worth, it's still cooler being well-read. We all know people who "don't read," have hard time understanding differences in opinion, or that fact that somebody else might know more than you, but I can only hope that they're a dying breed.

The Mushroom Kingdom

2011-09-24T14:23:00.005-04:00

This is going to be a place. It's going to happen, because it is awesome.

I don't want to ruin it with my clumsy attempts at writing.

Like a ping-pong ball in a washing machine.

2011-09-23T17:12:00.001-04:00

I jump around a lot.

When I try to explain my mind to people, I always use the train metaphor. It goes like this:

"You know the phrase train of thought, right? Well imagine it really is a train. It goes in a straight line, usually, and it twists and turns and has little signs and there's some scenery and whatever.

Now imagine you have two train tracks. They've got two trains moving at different speeds, and their tracks cross sometimes, or sometimes a train jumps from one track to the other and they're both moving the same way, or opposite ways on collison courses, or sometimes a train derails and it's still scraping along. And that's what it's like to be in my head."

I don't know if it's especially useful, honestly, but that's the way it is.

So when I keep announcing projects and then working on something else and then back to my progress, please try to imagine what it's like to be a conductor for two trains who won't stay on their damn tracks for more than ten minutes.

Have a nice day. =)

The Last Ringbearer

2011-09-20T18:01:00.001-04:00

Let me just quote straight from the site:

More than 15 years ago Russian scientist Kirill Yeskov tried to settle certain geographical problems in Tolkien's fantasy world. One thing led to another, and he tackled a bigger project - what would happen if we assumed that it's no less real than our world? His conclusion was that in such a case, the story of the Ring of Power is most likely a much-altered heroic retelling of a major war - but what was that war really about?

The result of this re-appraisal was the publication in 1999 of "The Last Ring-bearer" - a re-thinking of Tolkien's story in real-world terms. Dr. Yeskov, a professional paleontologist whose job is reconstructing long-extinct organisms and their way of life from fossil remnants, performs essentially the same feat in "The Last Ring-bearer", reconstructing the real world of Tolkien's Arda from the heroic tales of the Free Men of the West written in that world. We have a pretty good idea how well heroic tales map to reality from our own world..."

Essentially, the Last Ringbearer is a post-Lord of the Rings story written from the perspective of the "bad guys", an idea I've always thought was interesting. After all, nobody ever thinks they're doing "evil". Even guys who are doing some not-very-nice things have good intentions. I haven't read the book yet, but it's next on my list after I finish the Odyssey and my re-read of American Gods.

What is up with "Balance?"

2011-09-19T02:26:00.004-04:00

For some reason, it seems that the idea of more player freedom will totally unbalance a 2e D&D game. One example: From the Complete Book of Dwarves: " So long as the majority of remain lawful good, strongholds of chaotic, neutral, or evil dwarves will not unbalance a campaign and will give it more flavor and variety."

Ever since I've been peeking through the Complete series of Books, I keep finding more and more exhortations against seemingly small things that "could unbalance your game world," like allowing Gnome Paladins. Apparently, if you let one person play a Gnome Paladin, then everybody could play Gnome Paladins. Obviously Paladins are a human-only concept, and allowing for Gnome Paladins would seriously upset the entire game world! Therefore, it is IMPERATIVE that you not allow Gnome Paladins!

I'm not kidding, that's a passage from the Dungeon Master's Guide. Either I'm missing something, or changing the flavor in a game creates a very serious imbalance that could topple your entire campaign. Or something. This must be what people quote when they claim that Gygax was a tyrant, because it really makes the author (whoever he is) seem extremely petty. Who gives a shit about Gnome Paladins? If somebody asked me if they could play a chaotic evil Hill Dwarf Ranger, man, I don't give a damn. Play whatever.

Expanded Dune sucks

2011-09-17T20:11:00.003-04:00

I'm not going to try to review Dune, because a) I'm not in the mood, and b) I don't think I'm smart enough. Or good enough of a writer. Dune is the sort of book that the Lord of the Rings wishes it could be- an expansive fantasy epic with interlocking plots within plots, a baroque and utterly foreign culture, and magnificent writing. Everything is vaguely familiar while still being absolutely, brain-shatteringly different.

But enough of that, this still isn't a review.

The copies of Dune I have in my possession came rather third-handly by way of my brother- his high school chemistry teacher apparently didn't want them or any of the other rather sizeable stack of old science fiction books that had been given to her by the principal, so she asked if anybody wanted them. Nobody said anything- so my brother took the whole stack. Fuck yeah, right?

There was some Arthur C. Clarke and some other old science fiction guy (hey, I don't remember, give me a break), but mainly, I liked reading Dune. My family noticed the speed at which I devoured the books, and the fact that I read them two or three times in a row and got me both the rest of the original series and some of the expanded series.

So I read the entire original series. Almost couldn't put them down.

I cracked open and started reading the Expanded series, a collection of books based off of Herbert's notes and written by his son and some random other guy. Apparently, they're very popular and I wouldn't be surprised if they're more popular than the original series.

I say that because they suck.

No, they really do. The new books are really crappy. It takes away the ancient/modern mystique with it's complex and convoluted characters and intricate storylines and sense of overwhelming mystery and in its place, you get a fairly dry and boring account of (for example) a no-ship's random flight into space that goes nowhere and doesn't say anything. There's nothing. It's so poorly written that it honestly makes me upset. I'm like 200 pages into this thing and I'm still waiting to care. It feels phoned in.

But apparently, people eat that shit up, and I can believe it. Who wants to think when they read a book anyways? Cmon, that's so last century.

So, in summary, don't get the Expanded Dune books. Stick with the original series- you won't regret it.

The Good Old Days

2011-09-16T19:58:00.001-04:00

...were rarely good.

Yeah, that's all the post you get today. =)

Effin' Dragons, Man

2011-09-15T10:54:00.001-04:00

Dragons are in a weird spot for your theoretical fantasy lover.

On one side, there's the obvious awesomeness of them. They're giant firebreathing dinosaurs, and that completes the "totally rad childhood" sort of deal, where all you ask is that the things be as ridiculous as possible and that's ok. On a more intellectual side, it's really interesting to contemplate a non-humanoid intelligence, especially one that lasts for centuries and has as much of a difference in perspective as it's possible to have. Lizards are strangely fascinating, giant intelligent lizards doubly so. I can't imagine that our two species would have much of anything in common- we're land based, they fly; we're warm-blooded where they are cold-blooded; we have soft fleshy skin and theirs is hard and tough; we require tools to master our environment where they do it naturally, and so on.

But on the other side, there's the Spencer's and Hot Topic esque dragons, the silly pseudo-badass motif that people who love wearing silk shirts and having awkward facial hair love. The kind of guy that you look at from across the room and go, "That guy is not very bright." The kind of guy who can solve differential equations but cannot figure out how to talk to a girl without getting slapped. You know the guy I'm talking about because our hobby attracts a lot of that kind of guy. And it's really annoying. Look, go google "dragon" real quick, like I had to in order to get that picture of a black dragon up there. You see those godawful dragon tattoos and the gay sparkly fairy-dragons and the overly compensating hypermasculine dragon and the vaguely 70s wizard/dragon combo? Yeah, that's why dragons are also the lamest thing ever.

(I'm not going to mention people that have sexual fantasies about dragons or half-dragon hybrid people or whatever, except in this paragraph, because it's not relevant. Although it is kind of weird. As far as I'm concerned, these people can do as they will.)

So it's an uncomfortable situation. They're awesome, and also douche-magnets.

This is a problem because in the idea I had late last night, the Dragons are the first intelligent race, and also a primary source of magic. There are dragon cults that cling to the dragons, protecting them in their relatively vulnerable slumber in exchange for awesome powers, that guard their secrets, and generally wait for their Dragons to wake up and cause some havok. It's like a modern-day religion (in that the words are passed down through generations with slight alterations through time, like misspellings and mistranslations, without the original writers being around), except all the proof you need is in the slowly-breathing mountain of fire that's sitting right there.

And also being the source of your magic. Whatever.

The point is, having a campaign world largely feature dragons makes me feel both pretty awesome and a bit like a hack. It feels like dragons are the scapegoat for a lot of things, and the plot point of a lot of novels. Maybe if I read TVTropes I'll feel a little better about myself. But maybe not. After all, Our Dragons Are Different is itself a trope...

Moonshrimp

2011-09-14T10:50:00.002-04:00

If you weren't aware, there is currently a Flat Earth Society in America, today. I'm not kidding. No, seriously. Look it up. They're bio-luminescent crustaceans that make the Moon glow because it's certainly not a sphere illuminated by the reflected light of the sun, no way! That's absurd, because the universe revolves around the Earth, the Earth is a flat disk ringed by enormous ice walls, and the Sun is a flat, glowing disk illuminated by, I presume, Sun Shrimp.

I actually sat down and wrote some setting material for a D&D-styled world of broken shit and forests with a lot of elements from the Flat Earth society, specifically the sillier ones because the difference between silliness and high fantasy is in presentation. If I told you that orcs sprung up from the mud because a crazy wizard needed an army post-haste and so he magicked one out of the ground and then armed them in, essentially, sharp boomerangs with hooks, you'd either be rolling your eyes or realizing that I just paraphrased the Lord of the Rings. Again.

I think this next module (which is probably going to be longer than one month, unless I make this month's product a supplement of some sort and totally cheat) is going to be set in the world I'm inventing, because I'm nothing if not inconsistent.

I have a cat.

2011-09-13T23:38:00.001-04:00

My cat's name is Mary. She's black and has big yellow eyes and some sort of dangly belly hair that makes me think she has ringworms or something except she's from the Humane Society and I'm pretty sure they take better care of cats than that. For like $80, they'd better take good care of my future cat.

The reason I'm talking about my cat is because this is her:

It feels like my day revolves around my cat.

When I get up in the morning, she notices. She goes from wherever she was (sleeping in the closet, sleeping on my pillow, standing in the bath tub, charging towards and away from my socks, in my dresser drawers) to my bed, and then, to my face. She puts her face next to mine and sniffs it. I don't know why she does it, because it makes it hard to breathe and she knows what my face smells like. Protip: It smells the same way it did every single day before today, for the last two years.

Then, if I stay up, she starts meowing. Just like in the picture. Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow. The entire time I'm getting up, brushing my teeth, filling my cup full of water, looking for pants that aren't pajama pants, she's either meowing or following me around. Because she loves me, and desperately needs my attention now that I'm finally not sleeping.

I love my cat. Sometimes, I don't quite know why.

The Insanity Workout

2011-09-13T10:25:00.001-04:00

I am sweaty and tired. My shirt is sticking to me with the sheer force of the sweat I've accumulated for the past half an hour (or was it 45 minutes?). My calves ache, and I walk with an old man hobble.

Now, look. I'm not your typical RPG gamer, or your typical gamer in general. I'm not overweight. I'm not hideously underweight. I'm skinny, yeah, but not to the point where people poke fun of me, or make jokes on how skinny I am; at least, not anymore.

But I've been slacking off on keeping myself fit. Honestly, it feels nice to work out again. I'm more alert in the mornings, I'm sleeping better, I breathe easier, I eat more, and I feel better about myself. Plus, my girlfriend is excited that I'm going to have a "nice body" (her phrase, not mine) again. Honestly, it's pretty sweet.

I know, these last couple of posts haven't been RPG related. Eat me. I don't feel like writing about that right now.

Good God, it's been a minute

2011-09-12T20:46:00.000-04:00

As I type these words, the taste of Green Onion potato chips lingers in my mouth. The crumbs are still on my pants. (What, you think I'm gonna let that crud get in my keyboard?) It's a bizarre taste, but one that isn't all that horrible.

I haven't made any progress on my module this month, but I expect that to change. I've started a workout regimen, changed my sleep schedule, and started to freelance write with more dedication. I've been busy trying to cocoon it up so that when I start feeling better, it'll be awesome.

Life goes in those little up and down cycles, although sometimes I suspect that mine are higher and lower than they have any right to be.

Anyways, expect some cool things coming from here. My mind's been percolating. Keep an eye on this space...

Squonk

2011-09-04T19:48:00.001-04:00

The squonk is a real-life "monster" that apparently is so ugly that it spends most of its time hiding and crying. If you catch one, it can turn into a puddle of tears and bubbles and evade capture. It apparently exists in the forests of Pennsylvania, although it's hard to imagine a creature with such existential angst would make it very far in the world.

Regardless, I think that squonks will feature in the next thing I write. There's something about these warthog-like doofus things that's got a lot of pathos.

September Module: Adderhold

2011-09-02T11:58:00.000-04:00

This month's module is going to be a little more traditional, but still with a twist or two in there.

It's going to feature a physically enormous warlord (think Xerxes in 300) who has plans of not just ruling the kingdom, but of being acknowledged as a god. He's decimating his foes and nigh-unstoppable in battle.

He looks like this guy.

So what do the currently ruling powers (who very much would like to continue to be the current ruling powers) do? They hire the PCs to infiltrate the dude's place and learn what they can. They need to figure out how he knows their battle plans, if he has a sorcerer on his side, who he really is and where he came from. They want the PCs to poison his castle's well, and to break open his wine barrels, make as much of a problem as humanly possible without getting caught.

Of course, the PCs can get violent, too, if they want, but that'll be significantly more difficult than sneaking around and being subtle. It's all in how the PCs want it, I suppose.

Samore's Daughter's Permissions

2011-09-01T15:57:00.002-04:00

I set the mini-module to be public. Sorry about that! Google Docs defaults to private, and I'd forgotten to change it.

Let me know if there are any further problems with the download, but it should be working as intended.

One Month Module #1: Samore's Daughter

2011-09-01T11:43:00.002-04:00

So the module's about as finished as it'll ever be. To be honest, it feels like it's not enough, like I aimed too low for the first one. It was interesting, though, writing something with such a definite and inflexible deadline.

I think it turned out ok. It is what it is- a small scenario that you can plunk down in the middle of anywhere. It's not especially violent, it's not especially creative. It's a situation that calls for subtlety and creativity, that allows a lot of DM interpretation.

Honestly, I'm not particularly happy with it. I know there are holes in it. For example, there's no art, not even clip art. There's not a map, although I don't think a map would help very much. There's no list of things you can buy at the city, there's no mention of wizards or dragons or magic. If you play through it right, there probably won't even be any fighting.

Honestly, Samore's Daughter is more of a teaser than an actual module. It's the sort of thing I'd run when nobody's really sure what everybody's supposed to be doing, to get a little bit of action and intrigue going, where the players have to decide whose side they're on and what they're going to do about it, and then you can have a couple of loose end tying sessions and then there you are. Like my other modules, it is extremely short. This one clocks in at around three pages of actual content. But it's not pretentious, and it might even be long for what it is. It makes me think of Dune and a Game of Thrones, in that it's essentially about people moving around, although the way that the module is expressed perhaps doesn't make that clear.

Samore's Daughter isn't without its flaws, but I think it's at the very least a C. It's passable, it's different, and it might even be runnable. Who knows?

Pick up the PDF here.

No Idea Where to Go

2011-08-24T12:36:00.001-04:00

The Monthly Module project is a little rough, seeing as how what I've managed to put together so far doesn't have any momentum. I mean that in the most neutral sense possible- it's like a vignette of a world, a quick sense of a place and time that the players can stumble across.

It's certainly not a "Tomb of Horrors" sort of deal- it's more of a "Isle of Dread" sort of deal. The people are laid out, the situation is there, so what do you do? There's no real prodding in one direction as opposed to the other, and rather a lot is left up to individual DMs- by necessity as well as design, as the module is no more than 5 pages long, including the title page. It's a short, quick, and dirty introduction to a scene that could serve as a springboard for other adventures, considering that it's populated with intelligent, ambitious men who need either be stopped or joined. And there's really no bias one way or the other, unless you personally like one side better and try and sway the PCs over to your side subtly.

But I guess that's what I'm after anyways with this sort of thing.

Has this been a really long month for anybody else?

Samurai Jack as a Setting

2011-08-22T10:53:00.001-04:00

Thinking about watching the series and making a quick Labyrinth Lord / Swords and Wizardry / whatever other retroclone writeup about the world and the people and places.

It's a pretty evocative work of fiction, and I think that it could make for a pretty compelling gameworld. It's got a lot of similarities to the Cantina scene in Star Wars, except extrapolated to the whole planet and run by a shapeshifting master of evil. What's not to like about that?

Of course, it'd be a lot of "work" (can you really call watching the entire run of Samurai Jack work?), and would take a lot of effort, but it'd probably be worth it.

How to be a good DM

2011-08-21T21:53:00.000-04:00

I keep seeing this sort of thing crop up, so lemme give you a couple of quick pointers on how you, too, can be a good DM, Lawful Indifferent style.

1) Do what your players want. Don't take it out of context. It means that you should do what your players want, because otherwise, they're not going to be happy. Unhappiness breeds discord, and nobody has to play in a game that they like. Does this mean that you have to give them everything they want in a game? No, that's not what I said. I said you should do what your players want. If they want to run a differently themed game than what you want, then run it. If they want to have a high-combat game, then run it. If they want to have a game where everybody's frogmen and they spend their time hopping around and converting people to the High Hopper, do it.
2) Make your players work for what they want. Doesn't that sound contradictory? It's not. Make them work for what they want, and they'll thank you for it later. Imagine that you spent all day working outside in the heat, getting a sunburn and blistered hands and scratched up knees, and finally, your backyard looks great. You earned it, and you probably love it. You earned it! Great job. Imagine that instead of doing it yourself, you got your kids to do it, or hired somebody to do it for you. It might look even better, but you know that it wasn't you, and there's nothing to be proud of. All games are the same way. If you win without hardly having to try, it's unsatisfying. If you win by the skin of your teeth, it's awesome.
3) Run something different. "But my setting IS different! My dwarves don't have beards!" Shut it, you hack. Do something different, really. Don't rely on standard fantasy tropes unless you're doing something really cool somewhere else, like playing a new system. Or maybe you really do love the standard fantasy elves and stuff- but you decide to make it like Ancient Babylon, and everybody has conical hats and wears pleated leather skirts and sandals and the world is a disk surrounded by a literal firmament and sometimes it cracks and causes monsoons and stuff. Be original.
4) Do what you love. This isn't contradicting any of the other ones either. If you're having a great time, even if you're out of your comfort zone because it's not what your players want, your players will notice. You're the biggest dictator of mood and theme in the game. It's a weighty responsibility, but that's the way it is. If you don't love what you're doing, you're killing your game. Don't be the grumpy DM that's constantly killing people out of some sort of grudge. Love whatever you're playing, even if it's not what you personally wanted to play (see step 1).
5) Don't plan anything. Ever heard the phrase "No plan survives contact with the enemy?" It's always been true, and always will be. Whatever you had planned, throw it out the window. Run a game by the seat of your pants, with maybe (maybe) half a sheet of regular lined paper in front of you for names. The best ideas I've ever come up with were roughly 15 minutes before game time. I wrote some names down, had a basic idea of what was going on (in this case, we were playing Dark Heresy and the players were investigating an apocalypse-world that had been overrun by, essentially, dinosaurs), and then we went from there. Everybody had a blast.
6) Do your own thing. Don't let anybody tell you how to run your game (including me), and take every bit of advice with a grain of salt (including this, if that isn't enough of a paradox for you). If you love running one kind of game and won't budge, cool. If you just want to run a bunch of combat and everybody on the internet is telling you to roleplay till it hurts, whatever. If you get chills down your spine at the thought of handing out +30 Greatswords and slaying Dragon Gods and every dungeon is a Monty Haul, that's sweet. Remember how I said that if you're happy, the game's going to run well? I wasn't kidding. Do what you like, and good gaming will follow.

DotA 2, Part 2

2011-08-21T15:51:00.002-04:00

Let me explain.

DotA is oD&D. It's the original, it has some warts, but they're charming warts that add to the gameplay.

Let's say Demigod is, I dunno, The Fantasy Trip. It's silly, it's bizarre, and you get the sense that the creators maybe didn't play the original the same way the original designers did. But it's not bad. It has its fans, and probably always will.

League of Legends is, let's say, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. It's its own thing, it plays differently, and you either love it or hate it. I've yet to meet somebody who has a totally neutral opinion of it.

HoN is like Basic D&D, or the Rules Cyclopedia. It was supposed to just be a better chassis to play roughly the same game, but it ended up being its own thing. By the end of its lifespan (Immortals rules, anyone?) it ended up being so much of its own thing that comparing it to what it started out as didn't even really make sense. It could also be Advanced D&D, the comparison is close enough for me. The point is, they're comparable games that don't quite play the same way, but have the same basic concepts.

DotA 2 is oD&D. Again. Without changing anything. It's not even Swords and Wizardry. It's not a "Here's the game again, but with clearer rules and a couple of nifty changes I think you'll like that only affect the game in minor ways!" No, it's like they went and re-released oD&D while pretending it was something new, and wanted some money for it.

And everybody's hailing it like it's the greatest thing ever. Like it's some messiah to save us from the other games.

Let me link you some videos, real quick, and you can see what I mean.

First DotA:

Now DotA 2:

Thanks, Valve. Why is everybody getting so excited again?

DotA 2

2011-08-21T15:42:00.001-04:00

Even if you don't play MOBA games (and I imagine most of the people who regularly read this don't), there's still a little bit that should interest you here.

Allow me to skim the history of MOBA games. It started in the Starcraft modding community as a game called Aeon of Strife, and when the next game from Blizzard, Warcraft III, came out, the game jumped over there. A lot of imitators and innovators came to the scene, naturally, but most people just played Defense of the Ancients, hereby abbreviated to DotA. It was wildly successful, for a couple of reasons.

See, unlike traditional real-time strategy games, you control only one unit. The same level of tactical movement, positioning, and teamwork is present as is in traditional real-time strategy games, but there's less micromanagement. As such, it's more accessible to casual gamers and lets you focus on making the single most optimal move possible. And for whatever reason, it just caught on more than any other mod did. I don't know why- it may have been a "right place at the right time" sort of deal.

At the time, the Warcraft III community was vast. It was one of the most popular real-time strategy games ever, especially because of the custom games. I'll even go out on a limb and say that it's the entire reason it was as popular as it was, since it was essentially 100+ games in one box.

So you have the most popular custom game mode in one of the most popular games of the decade, and you have a recipe for success.

But as we all know, the most sincere form of flattery is imitation, so we have a spate of games that are all trying for a piece of the DotA pie.

You have Demigod, a game that was panned for its rough launch but essentially was a fairly good game- you had enormous dudes fighting it out over something or another. It was also the first mass-market DotA-styled game, so people complained about the lack of a singleplayer or story mode. To put it in other terms, it's like complaining that your car doesn't have scuba gear- it's totally irrelevant. The whole core of DotA-style games is the multiplayer mayhem. Nobody's trying to play Demigod for the enthralling campaign, because the nature of the gameplay itself doesn't lend to epic storylines.

I haven't played it, but I always wanted to. It looked pretty cool, even if people like to misunderstand it and complain about it. Like I said, it was the first widely accessible game of its kind, so reviewers and customers who open the box are naturally going to have a hard time understanding what it's even about. If it was released today, it would undoubtedly get a better chance, what with LoL and HoN having such wide audiences.

Next, you have League of Legends. League of Legends decided to simplify the famous and award-winning formula, taking out several gameplay elements, replacing others, and generally making a more accessible game. It was also free-to-play with microtransactions, meaning that you can try the game out and if you like it, you can buy stuff for it (like custom avatars, that sort of thing.)

It was (and is) wildly successful, based almost entirely on its accessibility. When anybody can play it, anybody can pay money for it, meaning that the company can grow and grow and grow. That's how I found it- it was free, so I gave it a shot. I liked what I saw, so I kept playing.

That's not to say that LoL doesn't have its shortcomings. It's frequently criticized for its passive gameplay and relatively shallow mechanics, which is probably true. When you can pick up any champion and figure out how to at least perform on a mediocre level with no real effort, the game is pretty casual. It has a fierce competitive scene, nonetheless.

Lastly, you have HoN. HoN ported the classic DotA gameplay (and most of its items and heroes) to a more stable platform, giving elements such as ingrained stat-tracking and persistent profiles that the aging Warcraft III engine wasn't designed to do, and then made balance changes and added new heroes as it saw fit. It's more complex and frantic than HoN, and the players tend to be "tryhards" instead of easy-going normal people.

The champions are complex, the strategies are difficult, the team-fights are short, technical, and brutal. It's for the kind of gamer that doesn't mind losing horribly for a while, because it really does require a lot of practice and a lot of study time.

But (and this is the important bit) it's evolved from a straight port into its own game. It has things going on in it that aren't part of any other game, despite its beginnings. The strategies are different. The champions are different. It's its own thing, as much as Demigod or League of Legends.

And then you have DotA 2. I'm not even going to find an image for it, because I don't care. Honestly, I don't. It's just DotA, but in a new system. They have one of the creators on the team, and they're just making the game again. Really? You're not going to do anything different? There's nothing you would rather do this time as opposed to last time?

It's lazy, it's shallow, and worst of all, it's trying to cash in on a famous name by a third-rate designer.

If you read the next post, I'll tell you why this applies to roleplaying games as well. Stay tuned!

Why is it a Bad Thing to Optimise?

2011-08-17T14:57:00.002-04:00

One of the things I really like discussing, when I get the chance, is not the mechanical parts of roleplaying games or some sort of circle-jerkery with people who already agree with me via platitudes that most people will agree with me about, but actually considering questions that are actually questions.

Like this link from EnWorld.org. If you don't want to read it, it essentially asks:

"Why can't I optimise my character? I like doing it and make sure to make interesting characters and I'm not trying to intentionally break the game, so why do people look at me funny?"

Since he's talkind about 4e, I can't comment to that edition. My knowledge persists of a single game played roughly a year ago, but honestly, I kind of thought that was the whole point of the edition. If you give somebody multiple repeated choices, who's going to intentionally pick the awful ones? Yeah, I'd love to be a Wizard with Plate Mail and a Greataxe! No, why would I mind that I'm not actually good at anything?

It seems a bit to me like calling the kettle black- since character building is as involved of a process as it is in 4e, everybody's optimising their characters by default. You're going to penalize a guy because he spends more time on it, or does it better than you? You're really going to say that because he picked a better selection of abilities from a group you also had access to that somehow that makes him a worse roleplayer?

The best way is to look at it like a disease and its symptoms, if you'll excuse the expression. The reason that this guy is getting called a munchkin or whatever it is they call people now is that acknowledging that you're optimising your character is one of the warning signs of being a douchebag who's just trying to kill as many things as possible. Spending hours on a character building program thing making characters that are optimised is another. People are going to hear what you're doing and assume that you're another one of those boring guys who think that the idea of a good roleplaying time is to kill everything they come across, antagonize other players, whine when they're not allowed to look "cool" via their characters, and everything else that's pretty awful about having the types of players who think the words "optimising characters" isn't some sort of bizarre doublespeak.

The other answer is that optimising so that your character is the best possible in combat feels a lot like playing to win. You don't play to win in a roleplaying game, at least not in those terms- there's nothing wrong with playing your best to accomplish your goals, obviously. But there's a subtle and extremely strong difference in being character-goal-based and being player-goal-based.

Character goal based means that you're doing what your character would want to do. Plumbing dungeons because you need the money, saving towns because you're a nice guy (and could use the money), exploring the wilderness, becoming a king; these are goals that shift and change as your character changes. They're goals that make the game more interesting. Who's playing roleplaying games to sit around and do nothing?

Player based goals, on the other hand, are pseudo-meta-game constructs like trying to be the best at combat, or getting the most gold. They're essentially elements of competitiveness, and if you've ever had somebody be competitive of you when they're supposed to be on your team, you know what this is about. It's the sort of "I swear to god if he doesn't stop showboating I'm going to let this effing otyugh eat his ass and then I'm going home." The key element in competition is that somebody has to "win", and if there aren't any built-in metrics of scoring, than people will make them up and lord them over you. "Yeah, you did great but I did more damage!" or "I totally out-healed you, punk!"

Not that there's anything wrong with friendly jabbing or a little playful competition, mind you, but it has to be mutual, and if it's competitiveness to the point where it overshadows actually playing, then it's not mutual and it's now a problem. And that's the sort of message that intentionally optimising your character in a group of non-optimisers sends.

How undignified!

2011-08-16T16:32:00.001-04:00

Here's a picture of ol' baby Josh getting peeped at by some old creepy people, a cow, some sort of goat/wolf, and somebody who's probably a pedophile since he's hiding halfway behind something (a door to a very narrow room? a curtain for an enormous window? A secret passage built into a mural?) and has what might be the world's creepiest grin.

Little dude doesn't look too comfortable- they really oughta get him some pants before he freezes His divine little toes off. What kind of divine savior only has eight or nine toes?

A lot of early art is extremely creepy, especially right around the time when Christianity came into vogue (so to speak). See, look at that. We have a bizarre, emaciated-looking Jesus baby being presented to some sort of bearded man, perhaps a king, with a bunch of people once again peeping the naked baby. What is up with that? Did people honestly a) go around showing people their naked newborns and b) did they really not bother to put pants on him? C'mon now, that's the Son of God who is Also Still God and a Holy Ghost (or something, the Trinity stuff always gave me a bit of a headache when you try to reason it out), and you're holding him like he's some sort of doll and handing him off to some lazy-eyed bearded guy?

If I saw something like that, I'd probably call Child Protective Services and let them figure it out. For real, creepy stuff.

Keeping Focused

2011-08-14T16:10:00.001-04:00

I can't believe I'm still focused. It feels like this module is putting itself together. There are only a couple of finishing touches- a map (significantly), a cover (so very insignificant that I might decide not to have one at all, since I don't have any art for the module anyways), and maybe a couple of "where do we go from here" touches that I personally like so much.

I mean, a module should be a little burst of creativity- if you're using one, you're probably either starting a campaign or trying something new, a breath of fresh air from somebody else's minds. So that means that maybe you'd like to do it yourself after you're done doing it somebody elses' way and besides, the world isn't static. After you slay the nefarious Ulahwe and save the poor denizens from its torments, what next? That can't possibly be it- and it shouldn't be.

How exactly one would digress on a post explicitly meant to be a quick status update is beyond me.

Stumbling Block

2011-08-14T00:21:00.000-04:00

The module I was writing has stumbled a bit while I got inspired in a totally random direction by my brother. I think it might take all of my focus to finish what I've already started, even if I don't like it as much as the other one I could design.

The thing that's really cool about trying to do a 1-month module is that it really limits the sorts of things you can do. You can't get all grandiose and spend weeks planning and plotting, and days drawing out the perfect map, and then let it percolate. It's 30 days, start to finish, from vague idea to poorly written descriptions of places to (with any luck) a halfway decent module that's about something that isn't stupid.

This first module is going to be absolute rubbish. It feels like the more I think about it, the more I realize that it's not the direction I want to be going. But that's part of the challenge too, I think- I'm halfway through the month. That's not enough time to start over, even with what little I've already done. Plus, I don't want to waste my really cool idea on a half-month project when I could just finish this kidnapping module thing and then give the full month of love to the other idea.

So I've got to really figure out what I want from this module, and that's a good feeling. Get it right, turn an ok idea into an awesome one, and then we're golden.

2011-08-12T14:10:00.000-04:00

I want to link this post by Commodore Rients, because it made me have a thought that I think deserves a half-coherent answer.

It hit me right around the end, where he said,"The new Conan movie will probably be crap, too. And I'll probably hate the 3D technology. But judging by the trailer this flick certainly seems to be firing on all cylinders in the sex and violence departments, which is a hell of a lot more important to me than whether Howard was properly aped."

I couldn't possibly agree more, and wouldn't hesitate to expand it to a lot of spheres. When a group stops creating new material and instead starts aping people under the vague impression that it's more important to be "true to the source material" than make something that's totally fucking awesome, you've got a serious problem.

So what if the new Conan movie is a blasphemy against Howard? Why should I care? I love Conan and all, but what's wrong with a Conan-inspired movie about a muscular guy slaying things with a giant sword? I'd watch that thing.

Snippet: Techpriests and Inhumanity

2011-08-07T12:56:00.001-04:00

I think the reason that techpriests are so evocative is that they're such an uncanny combination. They're both devout priests, extremely intelligent, and ultimately inscrutable. They're mechanical genuises who have managed to calcify knowledge about the world into a somewhat freewheeling religion whose tenets include replacing their human parts with machine parts.

They're deeply inhuman in appearance, and so very human in nature. I think they hold a strange attraction, even as we're repulsed; there really is something appealing about having mechanical arms, improved eyes, and the like. It's just human nature to want to be better than we were before. But, beyond the philosophical question of whether "natural" is "good", is it desireable to have improved body parts that no longer allow you to pass for human?

In gaming news today, I'm going to attempt to play some Microlite 74 and see how it works. Wish me luck! I've more or less abandoned my idea for pre-creating magical items, and replacing it with magical items I'm going to make up as the players decide they want something of the category. Or maybe I'll make some up real quick, write them on index cards, and then go from there. Who knows? I sure don't!

The Monthly Module

2011-08-05T12:58:00.000-04:00

I think I mentioned it in another post, but I've decided to start attempting to write (if not release in some marginal fashion, i.e. here) a small adventure module once a month. I've got a couple of reasons for it.

1) The best way to improve is practice
2) The best way to make sure you improve is to tell everybody you know that you're going to improve
3) The best way to get feedback is to let everybody see it
4) The best way to let everybody see it when you're broke (i.e. me) is to put it online in public places and maybe enough passers-by will be interested enough in it to take a look, and maybe out of that tiny percentage, something like 1% will actually try to give me feedback. (THANKS GUYS)

So that's that. My first module's already been through a few permutations, but I've decided it's a blackmail-and-random scheme by some bandits whose motives might not be as simplistic as it seems. The main goal will be to recover the hostage and deal with the bandits, but they're not marauding good time bandits- these guys are people, too, and maybe the PCs have more sympathy with them than with the Duke...

Originally, it was going to feature Cyclops, but then I decided that Cyclops fit into a module about blackmail like the proverbial Cyclops in a module about blackmail. Why would they even bother, what difference does it make, that sort of deal. It doesn't make any sense to have a Cyclops hanging around some, essentially, political dissidents, because Cyclopses probably don't care about politics and having a one-eyed giant around attracts more attention than it probably should to somebody with a legitimate goal. Like you're planning on using more force than is necessary for pretty much anything. I mean, can you imagine? Somebody wants something done, so they bring a giant. How uncouth.

Anyways. You can look forwards to that, monthly. One new adventure. Per month. It'll be fun, it'll get the creative juices flowing again, and, most importantly, gives me a time limit each and every month so that I don't get lazy or lose the flow and say "well, I'll do it later, I guess." That's happened roughly five times in recent memory, and it's getting old. I want to be the kind of guy that has produced something of value, where people would think about using my shit in a world ensconced in shit. I'm not finding a picture for that, sorry.

Happy Birthday!

2011-08-04T15:37:00.000-04:00

Today is your author Nick Wright's birthday, Happy birthday man!

Tonight we will celebrate over beer and pretzels with a few friends over a good game.

His birthday is bringing back memories of the first time we ever played an RRG together. He found this old Basic edition book that we no doubt mangled to death (BECMI 2 I'm told), but it didn't matter because we were young and we were having fun. That one chance discovery turned into a huge part of our lives. I wonder how different our lives would be had we never found this tome. We eventually branched out and began to play other games, began to understand the system, and began to have even more fun.

So I thank him for all the great years of roleplaying, and for being the best brother and Dungeon Master in the world.

I love you, man. Here's to many more years!

Location, location, location

2011-08-03T11:32:00.000-04:00

One of the things I've really been having fun with while writing little mini-adventures is the locations. A good characterization is always fun, mind, and making up interesting creatures is like scratching a particularly insistent itch, but there's always something about the place itself.

I think different kinds of people like different kinds of adventures- or maybe fans of different genres like different adventures. There's something different between me, a location-based lover, and somebody who really wants to run a game of political intrigue, or wander through faceless dungeons, or scour a city, or solve a murder mystery. It's not that I don't want to run those sorts of things, naturally, but I always find myself being drawn back to writing and playing games where the really interesting thing isn't what you're fighting or who you're talking with, but where it's all taking place.

Maybe I've read too much fiction like that, where the world is as large of a character as any of the supposed protagonists and antagonists (Asimov's Foundation series, for one, possibly the Theives' World line as well, although that's cheating a little), but it really only seems natural to me.

I guess it's the sort of toolbox I'd prefer as well- don't give me seven new monsters and an enormous city and twenty interlocking characters with unique motivations I have to sort through or else the adventure won't play properly- give me an awesome, interesting, vivid location so that I can strip out what you put in there and put something appropriate to what I'm playing in there. Because you're not me, and you don't game with me. You don't know that I prefer nomadic assassin-mage goblins to the traditional warrior-clan goblins, or that my dwarves live in Petra, ride camels instead of mules, and wear robes and turbans instead of horned hats and plate mail.

If I take away all of the things I'm not going to use, don't want to use, or can't use, and I'm left with a boring place to go visit, I'm not going to play. It's one of the reasons, I think, that I like Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits more than most people: I don't care that there's not really a reason to go, cause I'll make one up. I don't care that the monsters are kind of oddly chosen, because I'll make those up too when I get there, based on what I'm feeling like and if I'm bored at the moment. But the idea that we're walking along on enormous, slightly vibrating strands of web cris-crossing each other to find and fight the Spider Goddess, now that I like. We can work with that.

Procrastination's a Bitch

2011-07-30T20:16:00.001-04:00

I looked at my old posts, and realized that I haven't created anything, game material or otherwise, since this time last year!

Oh time, where have you gone?

On the plus side, nothing makes you more eager to release something than the brutal reminder that you haven't actually released anything in an insanely long time, so I guess I'll get to work on something to show you guys.

This picture is unrelated but sufficiently silly.

I'd really like to be able to start writing up short location-modules and release a little blitz of them, and maybe I will. It's the locations that interest me, after all- the monsters and treasures and reasons to be somewhere are really something that you should be making up yourself, you lazy people.

Demi-Human Level Limits

2011-07-26T12:23:00.003-04:00

This is such an old subject that I'm sure that nothing I have to say will be new in the least.

But still, I forge on!

If you haven't heard, I plan on using Microlite 74 to run Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits the next time my buddies are up (whenever that is), and I'm actually kind of excited. I love the fact that Microlite 74's rules are maybe five sheets of paper, folded in half, including the monster and spell listing. I love the fact that there aren't specific saving throws, and that the optional rules contained in it are genius. Its brevity is compelling, its concision is great.

But it has demi-human level limits in it.

This is a problem.

The module I plan on running is for characters from levels 10-14, which is fine because Microlite 74's recommended max levels are 12-14. Cool, looks like we're about evening it out and besides, how much more powerful can you get than invading a god's homeworld and attempting to beat her up? Makes sense to me.

Given that, I can only assume that max level for a Dwarf and roughly max level for a Human Fighter should be equivalent. But it doesn't make sense. The Dwarf isn't hitting for as hard and doesn't have as much health, in exchange for the fact that he can detect doors and is resistant to magic. Makes sense to me, honestly-but why on earth will he have half the health of said level 12 Fighter? This game fiction is telling me that both Elves (with a max level of 8) and Humans are tougher than Dwarves. If you'll pardon my french, c'est merde.

What I'm thinking of is giving it a little tweak, by using the very excellent Ancient Auguries and letting Humans (and humans only) choose special abilities from the list given, with such cinematic choices as "dodging", "cleave", and "leadership". I like it a lot, not in the least because it helps fix Dwarves (and Elves too, I guess) right up by giving them a little something.

So my house-rule for Dwarves and Fighters is:
At 3rd and 6th level, a Fighter may choose a Special Ability from the list provided. Each Fighter ability may only be chosen once.
At 6th level, a Dwarf may choose a Special Ability from the list provided. Each Dwarf ability may only be chosen once.

And I'll write up some Dwarf Special Abilities later, or something.

The other course of action I could take would be to change the Experience Base from 20 to perhaps 22 or 24, making the Dwarf naturally level slower than his companions, and then giving the Elf an Experience Base of, say, 24 or 26 to make up for its natural advantages.

I guess that's what really gets me- the Elf gets better powers and gets a higher level, too. Well, no more of that! Equality for Dwarves! Or something!

EDITOR'S NOTE: I guess I looked over the part that said to give Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings an increase to their Experience Base if you don't like hard level limits (which I don't), but I'm still going to give Dwarves a lesser bonus to their fighting stuff. I guess honestly, once you give them a level penalty, they're basically fighters except slower-learning, with a couple of cool abilities, but I'll have to put more thought into it. I kind of like the way I have it, where Dwarves have a lesser experience penalty due to the fact that they only get one bonus special thing, but Elves have a pretty serious penalty (being two classes and all). Halflings seem fine to me, especially when you give them a miniscule penalty to round out their smallish benefits.

Minor Magical Items

2011-07-25T12:40:00.002-04:00

One of the things I'm trying to get away from as I populate my magic item list I mentioned in the last post is something I've talked about before: Boring Magical Items.

For the purpose of this discussion, we're not talking about boring things like Healing Potions or Wands that aren't much but placeholders for having actual wizards and clerics around, or things that just aren't very exciting like the Boat of Folding. We're talking today about the venerable, boring, blank +1 Sword.

"This is a generic magical item," is what Boring Plus One Sword says to you, "I have no backstory and do nothing but give you a bonus on your attack and damage rolls. I am otherwise a normal sword."

The problem, if it wasn't obvious, is that you have the phrase "generic magical item." There shouldn't be a "generic magical item" any more than there should be "stereotypical dwarves" or "boring-ass wizard" in your game. It doesn't mean that every sword that you find has to be a +4 Holy Avenger or a +3 Sentient Flaming Sword. We're talking about making items interesting, not making them "awesome" or "cool" to the point where everybody's running around with high-powered items and you've gone from Boring to Overload.

Let me give you an example I particularly like (if I may be so bold as to post my own work):

Leaf-blade Arrows(Unique):This bundle of ten +1 arrows was crafted by an elvish wizard and aremade entirely of wood, with a leaf-shaped head. They are as hard asiron and will not burn.

And there you go. You now have interesting +1 Arrows. Not super interesting, but there's a couple of things in there that mean that these arrows have a history. They have a purpose. They're magic.

Another example, this time from the basic Labyrinth Lord book:

Sword +1, locate objects: The wielder may locate objects as the magic-user/elf spell one time each day, to a range of 120'.

You have a sword that's still a +1 sword at its core, but now you have a magic item with, again, purpose. The wizard who made this clearly had a spelunking, tomb-raiding accomplice he made it for. Or maybe somebody who kept losing his spellbook? You can picture the guy who made it, you can imagine who he gave it to, and most importantly, it reminds you that this weapon is magical. You can have really sharp, really mundane sword, but how many swords find your car keys for you?

Microlite 74 & Queen of the Demonweb Pits

2011-07-24T19:06:00.001-04:00

I plan on running Queen of the Demonweb Pits using fresh 10-14th levelled characters using the Microlite 74 rules, because I am a silly person and also a glutton for self-inflicted punishment.

See, there's a reason I'm not using Labyrinth Lord or OSRIC or Swords and Wizardry, and that reason is: I hate making high-level characters in those games. I tried, one time, to have our group make high-levelled characters using the Rules Compendium pdf that I had (it's still kicking around somewhere, on a mislabelled folder in an unused and forgotten hard drive, I'm certain), and we crumbled somewhere between trying to figure out henchmen and getting magical items. The rules are notoriously vague concerning higher levelled characters, and it took me way too long to decipher, by which time our enthusiasm had petered out and it was late, besides, so we ended up having a couple of drinks (if I remember correctly) and playing something else.

But my desire still remains. Using what I've learned about myself and my group's (totally understandeable) impatience with character generation, I'm going to take a couple of steps towards making it easier and faster, so we can unravel the mystery of that wierd-ass magical egg thing and also delve deeply in Llolth's quivering demense. (That sounded so dirty!)

You would be surprised at the amount of softcore
spider-woman images you can find.

1) I'm going to use the Microlite rule to get character generation done in absolutely record time, and worry about the minor niggling incompatibilities with the rules in Q1 later. Because I'm a DM and I'm going to make something up when we get to it.
2) I'm going to pre-generate the magical items, make them unique to the game-world, and then go from there. All I need now is some sort of way to determine what the "average" level of magical items would have been for characters that would have gotten there "organically", by playing through them. I might see if I can find the pdfs of the rest of the series, tabulate how many and of what quality the magic items would have been, and then go from there.
3) I'll probably also pre-generate the characters, because it won't take me much longer than it'll take my players, and as long as I leave the items, name, origin, and all of that off the character sheets, it really can be just about anybody and there's not much to it, anyways.
4) I'm gonna make a binder that will house Q1 and also the character sheets and the magical items (which I might put on index cards, because that's one thing about 4e that I thought was totally ballin'), and that way when it comes time to finally run this thing (next month? I dunno), I'm just gonna whip out the binder like KCHYAAAA and there's some ass-kicking right there, look at this shit, it's so fuckin' great.

So couple of questions:
1) How much, and what sort of magic items would you give to a newly-generated level 10-14 guy?
2) Any advice on running it, you sage veterans?
3) What was my third question going to be?

Thanks in advance, guys. O-)

That's a smiling cyclops, if you were curious.

Rant: "Skill Rotations"

2011-07-23T19:25:00.003-04:00

I know that the roleplaying audience skews a little older than the MMO audience, so bear with me while I explain everything to the other side. K?

Let me give you a brief history of where this topic came from: I was looking at my Steam page at the games I'd bought over the past couple of years when I landed on Spiral Knights. Clicked on the news thing (1 million registered users, hey not bad), and then read the article and the read the comments. Got through a dozen or so neutral or negative comments (mostly complaining about the time limit in the form of "energy", which I totally agree with), until I get to one comment that said something I really like.

He said, in short, that the reason he thinks a lot of people don't like Spiral Knights is because it can't be reduced to a spreadsheet, and that it's all about player skill. In most games you just need the correct gear and you win, but not in SK. Which is true, both ways.

One dissenting comment said, in essence, that's not true: it's about skill rotations. Skill rotations. Let me explain by way of picture. By my (admittedly and proudly dated) knowledge of World of Warcraft, I'm here to tell you that this is the skill rotation of an average tank (defensive warrior-type who "grabs" the attention of the enemies by some wierd-ass formula).

To some millions of players, this is all it takes to make a compelling game. This is what skill is, is recognizing the right values on a spreadsheet, to know what skills to cast and in what order while standing two feet from a dragon and pounding it on the snout. This is what "roleplaying games" means to some millions of people.

And, most annoyingly, this is what some people call "skill" in a game. This is not skill. "Rotating" abilities by managing cooldowns is not skill. It isn't difficult. It's why World of Warcraft has so fucking many players. Protip: It's because it's not hard. You're rewarded with shiny loot and new spells and bigger enemies and glowing level-up shinies and more badass things to ride for, essentially, knowing when to press 1 and when to press 2, and pressing 3 when 1 is unavailable due to cooldown and 4 when 2 is on cooldown.

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS.

What kind of bizarro world do I live in, where people honestly think that this is a difficult game? You don't think I know? I've played a lot of MMOs, and it's the reason that I flat-out refuse to play any MMO that has more than two of the following:
a) automatic "tab targetting" (where you hit tab to select the nearest enemy, so that you can hit 1 and run over to him and hit him with something)
b) a focus on PvE (grinding fetch quests until you're mighty)
c) standard fantasy races or classes (please do something new)

That, of course, is totally outside the point, but I don't think it's too much to ask, really.

And I think it's pretty obvious how this applies to roleplaying games, which tend to be pretty good about it (it being the resolution systems, that is). There has been no successful roleplaying game in which the resolution system is uninteresting and cumbersome. There has been no successful roleplaying game in which success can be guaranteed by superior gear and levels to the point where most challenges can be rendered moot (until recently, anyways.)

I guess all I'm saying is keep this post in mind when somebody claims to be "inspired" by MMOs, and feel free to shudder a little or throw up in your mouth. Most modern MMOs are fetishistic rehashes of concepts that have been bastardized, cannibalized, and misunderstood by computer games in a bizarre feedback loop (that I might get to talking about later). There's no reason to bring them into computer games.

Sorry about the post, I've been drinking beer again.

D&D as a Party Game

2011-07-23T18:54:00.001-04:00

If you're wondering, yes, it works swimmingly, and I heartily recommend it to everybody.

This (generally minus the character shuffling, although sometimes with it) is how I've been running games for the past five years or so, and it's worked great every single time.

Seriously, go do it. I didn't even know that it was uncommon until I saw the unusually enthusiastic response Commodore Rients got from it. Good stuff, guys.

I know it's a short post but you have no idea how out of it I feel.

The Magus

2011-07-22T09:12:00.000-04:00

This is kind of cool: http://www.sacred-texts.com/grim/magus/

A link to The Magus (by Francis Barrett) reproduced entirely via hyperlinks and web-pages and all that jazz. Although it's a little late to be applied to the medieval era most of us seem to be playing around in, it's still pretty interesting reading, if you're into esoteric stuff.

Currency

2011-07-17T17:51:00.000-04:00

Good fucking god, if there's anything I hate more than trying to decipher ancient currency systems so that they make sense to my ruthlessly post-modern mindset where the idea of having a unit of coinage that's to be exchanged in the thousands for a chunk of silver that may or may not be actually the weight it's supposed to be, or made of pure silver instead of whatever else, in a non-standard shape, for no appreciable reason...

It's about enough to drive me up a wall. It might not be so damn complex if I was an ancient Chinese guy, but I'm not. I'm used to money that doesn't actually mean anything and is issued by a central bank and people take it just because.

And I guess that's the way I'm going to have to deal with money in ONI PUNCHER. Yeah, I know it's not actual silver, and I know that in real life it was more variable but it doesn't matter, does it? Shut your face up.