Into Devilmount!

Last night I had a couple friends over, they ran 2 characters each, and the understrength party took on the challenges of Devilmount.

After being sealed for 200 years, the doors to Devilmount just… drifted open. The government is worried. They posted soldiers “on maneuvers” to cover the entrance, and scooped up some local riff raff who is expendable to map the thing for them so when they get some real adventurers they can focus their efforts.

The party was a fighter, a martial artist, a gray man, and a wizard. They headed down, cautiously poked around, and mapped quite a bit. They clashed with a few  blackened skeletons, defeated a pack of big rats, and dispatched a number of hog men. They mapped, a new activity for one of the players, but he was delighted when his map matched what I portrayed on the white board.

They got out while they could, and decided after a rest and some healing to focus on one quadrant, guessing the level was divided into quarters. This time they got some more exploring done, but they got cocky when they faced off with more hogmen–especially when even more reinforced them during the fight.

They tried to run, but when not everyone could get away they stuck it out to save their friends–until three of them fell and the fighter was the only one to make it out.

Last night was the first live test of my new Crumbling Epoch system. I like how it went. One of my players would try it again, the other prefers systems with more options for building and growing characters than what the simplicity of Crumbling Epoch offers.

I think it would go better with a stronger party. Ironically, as a corner game at my game table it is unlikely to GET a big group going in. I will likely need to continue testing it on my own. Still, a great test and experience.

One player said it reintroduced fear of monsters in dungeons, something that fades when you have tough characters from level one. So that’s something! =)

Awesome Point Abuse

I continue work on my Breathing World book. Here is an essay I added to the section on Awesome Points.

According to the rules as written, a character could get to very high level in a week by trying to climb a wall over and over all day. The character could test Brawn of -2, consistently fail, and consistently boost the roll with Awesome Points. If the other players thought that was awesome, and the points kept coming in, by the end of the week the character could be legendary.

That is not awesome. That is a boring abuse of the Awesome Point system to grab power by gaming the system. Is the system broken because this is possible? Yes and no.

There is a balance built in to prevent abuse. If the players find another player’s power gaming tactics annoying, they can stop giving that player Awesome Points. Without Awesome Points it does not work. In a similar way, if the DM is annoyed at power gaming tactics from the players, the DM can slow down the flow of Awesome Points to the Bowl. Then the players will find they are running low when they need Awesome Points, so they can choose between advancing by using cagy maneuvers, or stockpiling Awesome Points for real challenges.

The balancing mechanism is beside the point. Awesome Points are designed to be a way to express mutual appreciation, reward entertaining play, and celebrate each other. Spending Awesome Points is designed to relieve the tyranny of low-rolling dice sometimes, and to allow your character to do awesome things. When players squeeze maximum power and advancement from this system, they are focusing on what the rules require instead of what the rules allow.

The Awesome Point system allows Fictive Hack to be much more rules-light. If an ambiguous case arises, you can throw some Awesome Points at it to bend the rules or improvise, without altering the basic assumptions of the rules. A power gamer can approach the Awesome Point system and other elements of the Fictive Hack system and gleefully accrue broken levels of power by cherry-picking the most advantageous elements and building a real monster character (sometimes literally, using the inhuman templates.)

Power gaming is only wrong if it leads to bad feelings in the game. If everyone is having fun and loves that one player’s character is a juggernaut of destruction, then that’s fine; the game is designed to accommodate a wide variety of styles. However, if one person (or a group’s) quest for power is souring the play experience for everyone else, then there is a question that the group must answer.

Should the rules reign in the power gamer, or should the game group? The wildly diverse templates and talents of the system sprawl over lots of rules territory, and every effort has been made to bring a level of balance while preserving the power and fun of each ability. The system could be reigned in and powered down, scrutinized to make sure that no synergies and weak spots allow characters to be hugely overpowered. Or, game groups could agree that the breathing space and freedom of the game inspire them to work within its intent and listen to the feedback of other players if something gets unbalanced.

You can alter talents for your game table. You can make your own talents and templates. You can customize, select, restrict, and house rule this game. If something doesn’t work for your game table, you are free to adapt, restrict, revise, and expand to fit your style. If, in play, you don’t see how an inherent ability or talent is balanced and it’s ruining the fun—change it. If the player protests (and this is likely), smooth the situation over by offering the opportunity to take a different talent instead, or offer a big handful of Awesome Points.

If you find yourself feeling defensive, and thinking “But the rules say I can do this, so there” a lot, you may be pushing the bounds of how this is all supposed to hold together. Keep an eye to the fun, the possibilities, and the enjoyment of the whole group and you can’t go wrong.

The relative roles of conflict and violence.

A while back, I made peace with a fundamental departure from my previous understanding of what was needed in a role playing game session. I decided that while combat was traditionally the centerpiece of the hobby, I was going to reduce its assumed prominence to one tool in a toolbox.

This reflected a change in my gaming that had happened anyway. However, I would feel anxious if I did not provide my player characters with enough fights. I felt that I was playing outside the norm by focusing on conflict rather than violence. Combat remained something player characters could initiate, but I usually worked in an alternate solution as well. My players instinctively realized this, and as combat is dangerous (and time-consuming at the table) they frequently took the non-combat route.

This idea is not brand new. White Wolf had a lot of story gaming focusing on conflicts besides violence, and any good game with lasting appeal has conflicts on several levels beyond combat ability.  While it is true that I have not come up with a new thing here, it is also true that I needed to give myself permission to change my style without feeling self-conscious about it.

I grew up in the 80s. All the toys I played with that portrayed a fictional setting were violent. I was heavy into G.I. Joe and Star Wars toys, supplemented with some TMNT and He Man and Star Com. I played with toy guns, toy swords, toy shields. I had LaserTag and longed for paintball. I read fairy tales and absorbed all the fantasy material I could. My young mind was steeped in battle, equating adventure with combat. When I was playing, I was fighting.

As I grew up and became a writer, I was faintly bemused to hear one reviewer describe my work as “hyper-violent.” I realized that the reason for that was I was using the same level of violence from my comic books and movies, but I was imposing realistic consequences on those actions. Wolverine didn’t just “battle” with his claws, but he cut through bone and muscle and people dropped with a hoarse scream, clutching at their now-useless arm as it unleashed an arterial spray. Someone who is strong and ruthless, armed with blades that can cut through nearly anything, vulnerable to red rages… you won’t just “lose hit points” to an assault like that.

If we are going to revel in violence, let’s not sanitize it. I find it shocking that the difference between PG and R ratings in movies that are violent is blood. If you have one character battering another character and there is blood, it is R, but if there is no blood, PG. So, it is better for our children to witness fighting with no consequences rather than understand that it is not playful, but damaging.

Skilled martial artists are less likely to get in brawls because they know what they can do to an opponent. Some jerk with a chip on his shoulder may have something to prove, but someone skilled in hand to hand knows that there are consequences to fighting that may not rest easy on the conscience and will likely have permanent repercussions for one or more people in the fight. For another example, consider the “glory of war” from the perspective of new recruits and experienced veterans.

As a writer I aimed to lure people in with the flashy violence, then have them fall in love with the characters. In a strange reversal, the combat that lured readers in became undesirable because their beloved characters could face permanent consequences.

In a way, that same philosophy carries over into my role playing games. Only people who have played with me for years have learned that they can relax and make characters that don’t focus on violence. In my World  Between game, I have a noble woman and a thief with no more than average fighting ability, who have found many other ways to navigate the conflicts and exert their own kind of power in the setting without stabbing people in the face.

If violence downgrades in prominence in the game, then conflict must be centered elsewhere. I like running mysteries. I like running horror games where the characters can’t improve their situation with violence alone.

I design game systems that have robust ways of dealing with competition, uncertainty, and conflict that allow characters to excel in those areas. Intimidation, investigation, persuasion, seduction; if all your character sheet says you can do is fight, and you make up the rest, then you will be focusing all your character advancement on what happens on the character sheet.

Give the players ways to reflect social power, detective skill, and cunning on their character sheets, they are more likely to develop along other lines.

I’m not saying combat is gone. I am saying it is less assumed, less prominent. And when it does come, it can be scary, because something bad may happen to you. I don’t want to get rid of the violence. I do, however, want to show it with all the blood and pain and loss that go with it. Along with that, I can offer the players another way, most of the time. And most of the time, they take it.

This is not a bug. It is a FEATURE.

The Mystery of the De Morcey House in the World Between

We had the first foray into the mystery of the De Morcey house in the World Between last Friday night. Here is the play report.

I did not use my terror, horror, and madness rules; I’m not sure why, I think because I was focusing on the changes and making sure all that worked smoothly. Also, I foolishly built the scenario around my wife as the key player, but didn’t put together that we would not have babysitting, so–what are we going to do with our little kids between 7:00 and bed time? (Which is 8:00 for the boy and whenever for the baby.) Also, I goofed up my scheduling, and posted we’d start at 6 instead of 7–half my players showed at the earlier time. So, I was full of logistical suck for Friday’s session.

Fortunately, one of my players helped out with the babysitting so my wife could focus, (and I gave her character 6 SPENT Awesome Points as a reward.) And those who showed early were patient and sociable until the rest of the group showed.

We played for almost 4 hours, and got deep into the mystery. The group experienced rising tension, a picture of the mysteries of the house with distressingly increasing clarity, and dealt with one of the mysteries in the only fight in the scenario so far.

My group had a great time in spite of my logistical problems, and they are excited about returning next time to wrap this thing up.

Sandbox Reflections

Robert Conley shared “Blackmarsh” with the online community–a great sandbox setting that I’ve looked over and thought about adapting. Good stuff!

Anyway, I was reading in the “Adventuring Advice” section, and ran across this:

After each session of the campaign, review what the players did. Look at your original timeline of events, see what impact their actions had, and make the needed changes. Sometimes the players’ actions will lead to a new and unexpected chain of events.

The creativity of the referee comes by not forcing his players to follow a predetermined story, but to develop new and interesting consequences based on the players’ actions. Use the NPC’s motivations and personalities to decide which consequences are the most likely and pick the most interesting.

The result is a campaign where the players feel they are forging their character’s destiny within a living, breathing world. It will not only be fun and adventurous, but also filed with surprises. Consequences will accumulate and spin the campaign into unexpected directions.

I agree with all this, absolutely. My caveat: this is only fun if your players can handle it. The unexpected consequences can trigger pouting and resentment.

Sometimes players use a sandbox like a catbox then complain of the smell.

Creativity and Condensation

At some point, all creative projects go from being passionate fun to being work. Accept this, or face that all your projects will reach a certain point and then be abandoned.

There is pain in this process. I think of it as condensation. When you put a cold drink out on a hot day, all the moisture in the air is drawn to bead up on the side of the glass; you go from filmy misty possibilities to dense liquid drops of the final product. When that happens, all the possibilities that are NOT chosen are lost, but what IS chosen is accessible and tangible in a new way.

There is cause to mourn this. You had a hundred ways your story/setting/adventure/etc. could go, but this is the one you ended up with. So yes, you could have done a lot of other things–but then you wouldn’t have done the one you now have in front of you. This is one reason creators are hard on their work; those who see the finished product have a much more limited vision of what could have been done. They don’t feel the loss of all the things that were excluded by the decisions to include what is in the finished product. So, they judge it on its own merits, without as many ghosts of “could have been” wafting around.

I’ve been thinking about this as I work on the World Between setting. Jack Shear set out an evocative flavor, but if I was a new DM sitting down with the book and getting all excited, it would be hard to find a way in, a place to start, somewhere to begin. There you are, all enthusiastic, but unable to answer basic questions unless you make it up from scratch; and there, you face the sad fact that you’re not the mad genius Jack Shear is, so there is a sense of disconnect and loss as your improvised stuff feels a lot like the rest of your improvised stuff, even as you reach for madcap Gothic fantasy.

So I’m working on a description of areas of the world to help people who are not mad geniuses get tools and locations and situations that they can get their teeth into. The great setting guidance at the end of the Compendium (newly revised with more great stuff) is very helpful, and having cities, areas, history to hang around it would be helpful to someone putting a game together.

I want to bridge the gap between the exciting flavor Jack projects into the DM’s fevered brain, and the experience of the gamers around the table, by providing more infrastructure and tools that project the themes and sensations closer to where the player characters are.

In a way, this is reminiscent of a D&D written for wargamers and rule designers, and a D&D written to be authoritative for kids new to the hobby. Jack knows how to play the style he likes, and he has enough support to give him the tools he needs to pull that off. For people with more slender toolboxes, they might want more help. It’s a shift in audience, in a way.

Of course Jack is still coming out with stuff on the World Between. I’m not psychic enough to really understand the details of how he runs his games, so there will be a disconnect between our versions. Still, he’s cool with having a multi-verse full of versions of his world, so we can have our adjacent sandboxes and it’s good clean fun.

I feel like I’m condensing all the cool possibilities for how each area could be, from a fine mist that’s ephemeral and intangible to droplets of water you can feel and taste more concretely. I do mourn all the possibilities that go away when I do that, but at the same time I think that for me (as someone running the game too) and for others who want in on this awesome world, it’ll be helpful.

Jack came out with four major saints for the Church of the Lady. I’ll need to think about how to fit them in. I think I’ll make each one a patron of a Midian city… That’s easier because I have names, locations, histories, and flavors for them already.

I have a direction.

I do not believe it is necessary to defend the size of my Fictive projects. They are full of good stuff. It is not bloat, it is not splat, it is not crap. Still, I got to thinking.

I will make a version of Fictive Hack that is no more than 50 pages long; that’s 2 pages short of double the original Old School Hack game. But with a LOT more stuff in it. For example, 10 templates for normal humans, then 6 more; 4 for races, and 2 for spellcasters. The additional 6 can be used as-is or used as overlay templates on the others. From 60 templates (plus, if you count World Between and other innovations since “Talents and Templates” came out) down to 16 for the one-shot version.

I will also make a longer version of Fictive Hack with all the rest of the good stuff in it; I’m tentatively naming it “Fictive Hack, Campaign Book, Official TL:DR 2013.”

That should satisfy the one-shot itch, and also have the great resources for those who want more. So maybe I can get more of an audience among those who feel that 26 pages is the perfect length for a game and the rest bloats it up.

As part of that effort, I am working up a monster-builder to include in the one-shot book. I think it will be one of the best gifts I’ve given the Old School Hack community; so I’m clearly excited about it. More to come soon.

OSH Armor Reconfigured

I’ve been wrestling with how I want to handle Armor Class. I don’t like the all or nothing hit, because the point of armor is not to dodge but to deflect injury. I also don’t like the idea that even a little armor can protect you from most attacks. Still, armor is worthwhile, so I didn’t want to nerf it unduly.

How do I get to a place where armor doesn’t make you invulnerable, but does help? I think I finally cracked it as I lay in bed awake one night last week! This one is easier to display on a chart than explain.

So, in effect, the better you roll to hit the more of your target’s armor you ignore. If you just barely get a high enough roll to hit, then you’re trying to hurt them through their armor. If you get a great shot in, you avoid most or all of the armor. The damage reduction scales with the skill of the hit, but it’s a small chart that will easily fit on a reference card or a 2 page rules reference.

I think this can work for swords and sandals, medieval fantasy, survival horror, modern games, and science fiction. (Here is my clunkier previous effort.)

Two TPK in 3 hours.

Yesterday I shared my rules for Strip D&D 1 and some of my thinking. (One thing I really like is the movement.) Today, it’s time to talk about how it went.

I was not confident I could put together something balanced and groovy for the characters, and I figured doing something published was a good idea anyway to try out the whole conversion idea. I went to Dragonsfoot and picked a scenario. I wanted to avoid anything with orcs and goblins and kobolds; we’ve killed all that at first level before. Monkeys with poisonous stingers? Cool!

Well, let us have a moment of silence for Achmed, Lucas, Gordy, Fabioso, Joachim, Teax, Mr. Clean, Marshall, and Lid. All those characters bit it, two waves in 3 hours.

The first group went down to a handful of 2 HD rats. The second group went down after exploring the exterior of the setting, and in a random encounter with poisonous giant spiders. Is this because of my inexperience working with B/X lethality? In part. Could they have acted differently? It might have mattered, who knows. Is it the fault of the scenario? Not really.

My players were good sports with the first TPK, but after the second, while we were still laughing and having a good time, the level of frustration at the table was really high. I got my test, and we quit while we were not too far behind.

I could break it down more, but there’s no reason. I learned some valuable lessons, and furthermore, I don’t think my players will be eager to try this out again (even tweaked) if they are willing to try again at all.

The  paucity of choice reflected in the combat system (compared to my other games) left them cold, and they don’t have to start so totally low powered in any of our other games. They do not buy into the Old School ethos, and we aren’t going to devote the kind of time we’d need to devote to give them a chance to build canny, cunning characters they are proud of through sheer dint of survival.

So, a great exercise, and something to put in my back pocket to maybe revisit later. Also, the first and only time I’ve ever had 2 TPKs in 3 hours. I guess that’s something.

World Between: Adumbratis by Night play report

We played last night. Gothic fantasy, with humor and horror and violence, all blended together really well. Old School Hack can handle other genres besides silliness just fine, don’t let anyone tell you different.

The play report is here.

A few technical notes:

• Holy Water. I had a pip with this. There was a shrine to the Lady of the White Way, with a statue surrounded by a reflecting pool touching her feet. The priest blessed the water and put it in flasks with the holy symbol on the front and a prayer for the unction of transferred grace through the water etched into the back, to keep the water holy. Using the holy water, I allowed it to be splashed as a light weapon, sprinkled down stairs as a range weapon, and I allowed it to hit multiple guards using the minion rules because it was a sort of area effect. I used the combat rules flexibly for a flexible weapon, and the players got a real kick out of making vampires scream and smoke under holy water.
• Chase. The necromancer got away; I could have allowed a move action every round from one arena to the next, with him always ahead, but that’s awful for game fun. So I allowed everyone in the chase to justify an ability score to add to a d12 roll, and if they beat the necromancer by 3 they could do a range attack, by 5 they could manage a melee attack. And yes, that can be boosted with Awesome Points. So the chase in the wilderness was exciting and abstract, punctuated by attacks; that’s the way it should be.
• Counterspelling. It did just what I wanted it to (though the wizard character would not be thrilled by that, as he got kicked around by the process.) That is all.
• Vampires. Making guards into vampires worked beautifully. They were scary as hell to my poor player characters, but they also went down with satisfying ease and a flurry of attacks. Vulnerability to things like holy water made them feel like unique monsters, and their soak of 1 wound against regular attacks did too. They were a lot of fun to kill, but really scary, and that’s exactly what I wanted.

The session went really well. As soon as we’re done with the dragon hunt, we’ll move over to the World Between for open table.

As a final note, the Compendium came out on April 1. And as of May 4, I’ve got a game going. So that’s pretty cool.