I am hungry and don’t know how I’ll pay rent this month or next, so who wants character/monster portraits in black and white ink?
This scenario is built for use with a Lasers & Feelings hack called Tricks & Treats, created by Octava Oculta (Reddit username u/shardsofcrystal). It's an ultra-lite system fit for all ages or experience levels, and is great as a nostalgic little novelty adventure. Just follow that link, make a copy of the folder and its contents, and use the materials within to play a fun session of spooky adventure.
Here's the pitch: play as middle schoolers on a field trip to a pumpkin patch on the morning of Halloween, encounter a big horrifying monster that the grown-ups are helpless to stop, use your noggin to save the day. This is especially good if used as a sequel to the last adventure because all the students have aged a year and you can build on previous events and relationships. That said, most of my own players created new characters for this year, so do what you feel like.
Not sure when part 3 will come out, but one of my players suggested we also do some spooky adventures during tax season, the other Halloween. If anyone runs either of these adventures, I'd love to hear about it and how it goes.
-Dwiz
I mean, for one thing, we can start optimistically. There's lots of great fantasy fiction that's humans-only! A Song of Ice and Fire, Conan the Barbarian and most other Sword & Sorcery, Arthurian Mythology, most other real-world mythologies, most fairy tales and fairy tale-inspired fiction (e.g. Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan and whatnot), most gothic fantasy/horror (e.g. Dracula), most pirate-y fiction, and so on. And others are human-centric to the point that things which may be called "dwarves" or "goblins" or whatever else are either clearly not societies or they're so peripheral to the action that "playing as one" wouldn't make much sense at all. Hellboy, Dark Souls, Darkest Dungeon, et cetera.
So if anything, it's really the default option, right? Elves and dwarves are the exception. Everyone should be asked to justify why they are including non-human player options, rather than me being asked why I'm not.
But here I am. I need to explain myself and it's going to be messy. If you're getting used to hearing arguments about orcs and dark elves a lot lately, this post is about that. I've been sitting on this post for a while now. This is going to take me a while to explain my line of thinking but please bear with me. There is a reason for each section in this post.
If you work in any form of engineering then this is probably a familiar idea. I just want to talk about how valuable I find it to be when it comes to RPG design. I've always really liked that the standard in RPGs is to have new "editions", rather than straight-up sequels. And because it is, to greatly generalize, a fairly scrappy and accessible hobby, we get to do lots of communal collaboration. We build on each others' work. We actively encourage the theft of good ideas (within the bounds of intellectual property rights). Most RPGs list their "Rule 0" as being something along the lines of "the GM can and should ignore or change any part of the game they want to if they judge it best for their group." It's like you have a game designer at every table.
The problem is that a lot of folks are pretty amateur as game designers. The single biggest failing, I think, comes from this very gap: not enough would-be designers are engaging with iterative design.
You look at what's come before and you use it as a basis for what you'll create anew. You examine the previous version to understand its design, paying attention to the context which created it and asking yourself whether or not those same factors remain relevant. And at the very least, the common corollary to that rule 0 is this: "a good GM will first make an effort to understand the original rule's purpose before deciding to change it." All-too-often ignored wisdom.
I especially find this to be common in two cases: 1) people complaining about design they don't understand, and 2) people making poorly thought-out houserules. Let's talk about some examples.
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| This was easily the funniest picture I found for "Edition Wars" |
I have two types of enemies that I fall back on if I don't have something interesting or appropriate prepared:
A. Powerful but dumb
B. Weak but cunning
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| Art Credit: Dan Scott Side story: so I was just gunna use some generic art of "an adventuring party" here but then I thought to share this piece, which was the first D&D art I ever remembering firing up my imagination. I stared at this picture for hours when I was introduced to 4E D&D back in 6th grade. I especially love that wizard-y dude in the front. |
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| Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee |
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| Art credit: Tony DiTerlizzi |
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| Art credit: William O'Connor |
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| Art credit: Hal Foster |
Introduction
In every edition of D&D, you can gain the ability to cast spells of powerful magic. Nowadays, most classes are spellcasters. Back in ye olden times, there was "the Magic-User" class. They have always carried three assumptions:
But the system I'm using does not agree with those three basic assumptions. There's about a billion and a half ways to do magic systems in fantasy fiction gaming. One of my favorites in the system found in Ben Milton's Knave, which is one of many reasons it forms the basis of my own game. And out of all stuff I'm changing, this is one of the few things I want kept the same. I'll summarize:
How do you mechanically create options for "improving" at spellcasting or somehow allow for a PC to "invest" in the magic system without breaking the current assumptions in place?
Let's discuss.
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| "The Procession to Cavalry" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder |
Back when I used to watch Game of Thrones (when it was still pretty good), a huge chunk of the "non political" parts were plots about characters traveling over land, often through the wilderness. And yet, those plots almost always still involved the characters running into people and factions. Tyrion runs into Catelyn Stark and her retinue, then they run into wildlings or something, then the knights of the Vale, then he leaves and him and Bronn run into some hill folk, etc. Jaime and Brienne traveled in the wilderness and met bands of brigands and mercenaries, employed by lords with agendas. Arya traveled in the wilderness and met the Brotherhood Without Banners, the Hound, Lannister soldiers, some peasantry, a knight errant on a quest (Brienne), etc.
So I would still of course have monster encounters, but I've been thinking more and more about the logic to determine what sorts of people you'd meet and where. Here's what I've got so far:
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| The Free City of Greyhawk Artist credit: Valerie Valusek |
I've spent a lot of time in the last year thinking about adventuring in cities. Part of it's because I really miss going outside and having an active life in an urban area. Part of it's because my D&D group spent the better part of 2020 in a campaign arc involving our party trapped in a hostile city, Escape From New York-style. And even when we broke from that for a few one-offs here and there, many of those involved adventure in the city. Or at least, like, in a town or neighborhood. And I've noticed what's worked and what hasn't and I've done so much darn reading and I want to get this right once and for all. I've run games in this setting with different approaches and sometimes it's good and sometimes it's not. And I've tried to give feedback to my own DMs about how they might want to improve those sessions, and sometimes they take that advice and sometimes they don't. But the worst thing of all is that each of the really solid sessions my group has spent playing in an urban setting have largely relied on the strength of completely unrelated elements, like a fun combat encounter, social encounter, puzzle, or whatever. They always just skirted around the problems of answering those vital questions about city adventures, so even if the session was successful it was at least partially just luck.
Here's a brief table of contents for this post:
If you just want the goodies, you can skip down to the 4th part.
Game design is when you make rules and procedures. It's answering the "how" in how things work. It's the description of how skill checks work, or how combat works.
Level design is when you make content with which to use those rules. It's answering the "what" in what the players are doing. It's the adventure module that tells you which skill checks to roll, and the encounters of monsters and battlefields where combat will be happening.
When Super Mario 64 came out in 1996, it was a smash hit and a breakthrough in gaming. It was the perfect 3D game, seamlessly translating the 2D genre of platforming into a 3D context better than any other attempt to do so. And trust me, the other attempts failed hard. It was an exceptionally tricky and ambitious design goal to tackle, but once they got it right, it blew the doors wide open for the future of 3D gaming. And you know how they did it?
First they designed the mechanics for Mario's movement. That's it. That's the only thing they focused on initially. They created the little minigame of chasing down the rabbit and catching it, so they'd have a way of testing their system. But they worked their asses off to make sure, above all else, that it was fun and easy to control Mario. That merely having to run around and jump on stuff and use your different moves was strong enough on its own. Only after they nailed that down did they begin to design the courses that would be in the final game.
First they nailed game design. Then, when it was so good it could be fun just by itself, then they poured their hearts and souls into making incredible levels. But the point is that these are two separate steps, and two separate goals. So I want to talk about the role that each one plays in tabletop design.
That's right, the points are just like advantage on your check to attack Cthulhu!
People like being rewarded bonus points. Behold below and see the evidence of my claims! And then see my own method of serving this base, vulgar, hubris-laden need.
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| [This post is inspired by this comment] |
Heard joke once: Man goes to RPG forum. Says he's confused. Says rules seem intimidating and contradictory. Says he can justify multiple interpretations of a mechanic in a system that's vague and uncertain. Forum says, "Ruling is simple. Great clown Dungeon Master is in charge. Go and talk to your DM. That should clear it up." Man bursts into tears. Says, "But forum... I am Dungeon Master." Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.
-Dwiz
I am definitely guilty of this, in case anyone wants to call me out.
Look, there are lots of ways in which a game can be made complicated. Rules can play many roles. The devil is in the details. It is genuinely worth it to sometimes take a moment to look under the hood and see what kinds of rules are in the game before dismissing it.
Some games have lots of rules but they're fairly intuitive (once you know how spellcasting works in Ars Magica you can start using it quite naturally). Some games have relatively few rules but they are difficult to master (Burning Wheel famously takes at least half a dozen sessions before you even get a grasp on it, they say). Some games have lots of rules but they're all built using the same core ingredients, so once you learn the "Rosetta Stone" mechanic then everything else falls into place (most universal systems rely on this, like Savage Worlds or FATE. I would argue D&D 5E does it pretty well. It's very "rulings over rules" friendly). Some games have a ton of rules that are all disconnected and are each a subsystem that you have to learn separately and it's a pain in the ass (sigh... Fantasy Craft).
However, I want to put the spotlight on very specific types of mechanics that, yes, are all more rules than you would ordinarily need if you were just running something like B/X D&D, but aren't necessarily all equal in how much they truly complicate or restrict the game.
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| Picture is also a link to content |
For anyone reading this who doesn't know, Brave is my personal hack of Ben Milton's Knave, which you can find the latest draft of linked on the sidebar of this blog as well as right here. If that link ever dies, it's because I forgot to return to this blog post to replace it. But the sidebar one should always be up to date.
Here is a link to the latest copy of the Brave: Enchiridion of Fates and Fortunes with some designer notes included. I also thought I might provide a preview below on each of the classes currently included, if you read below:
This will ultimately lead to, at some point in the future, a set of rules I've made based on what I've learned. I'll include those in my RPG Brave when it's released, but whenever I make a first draft I'll probably post it on my blog as a standalone procedure. If you find any other unique takes on mazes in RPGs I'd love to read them, but this isn't meant to be exhaustive.
Once again, I need to credit Gundobad Games for sparking this thought process, albeit in a completely different context from last time. It was many months ago when I was trying to do research on domain-level play and I dug up a bunch of reddit posts about it and read people's game recommendations and blablabla and one of the most fruitful things I found were these blog posts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. I could say a lot about those posts but right now I'm just gunna focus on Part 3, and I'm gunna re-write everything relevant from it here.
So the writer was putting a spotlight on Chris McDowell's Into the Odd, a nifty minimalist old-school RPG, and in particular, on its faction system. He calls them "enterprises" which is a decent name. Here is the full text of Into the Odd's enterprise rules, reproduced here:
Between expeditions, you can try your hand at business, or muster a military force. DETACHMENTS and ENTERPRISES each cost 10 Gold to establish. Detachments demand a further d6 Gold in upkeep each month, or else they revolt.
Income: New ENTERPRISES generate 1d4 Gold of Income each month. They also face a Threat that will cause 1d4 Gold in Losses unless dealt with. If an Enterprise cannot pay its debts, it collapses. Growth: If an ENTERPRISE ends a month with Profit, its income moves up to the next type of die, to a maximum of d12. However, this larger die also applies to losses from Threats.
By the by, a "detachment" is his name for a group of warriors fighting together, which we won't be discussing here. Maybe another day.
Anyway, today I'm gunna talk about the strengths and weaknesses of this system, the more immediate ways in which I've thought to tweak it, and then how I might go about reconciling it with all those other thoughts I vomited up in my last post.
I've been thinking of posting an article about "freeform mechanics" in RPGs, and I still might. But the basic idea is "resolving stuff in the game using your imagination and judgement rather than actual rules or mechanics," but, like, to the extreme. Like, say, maybe you want to run a war between two armies. On one end of the spectrum, you'd have a military simulation board game that defines each of your assets and unit types and whatever kinds of fictional resources you spend like "action points" or something, and it has a list of moves you can take and blablabla. Nothing freeform about it. On the other end of the spectrum, you'd ask the players to describe what they command their army to do. Just, like, from their creative thinking skills. Intimidating, right? But liberating. Exciting.
[EDIT: I was provided the source for this story so I'm re-writing this chunk to be accurate]
I've been reading a truly ridiculous amount of literature on the subject and I want to share this anecdote from Gundobad Games:
My favorite example so far: from Tony Bath's old Hyboria campaign - one player was concerned about a potential rival's construction of a naval fleet, but didn't want to openly provoke hostilities. So he asked Bath whether he could arrange an 'accident' - merchant ships sinking [scuttling!] right at the mouth of the rival's harbor, blocking their port for the near future! Bath agreed, came up with a range of likely results, and then rolled the dice...
I love that. I love the freeform potential of RPGs and I keep finding myself drawn to that direction of design. But it's a double-edged sword. Because of the "tyranny of the blank canvas," many players find freeform gaming to be really unintuitive. When you ask them what they want to do, they don't have an answer. They're more comfortable if you give them options to pick from.
So here's something I've found in the middle that I'm working with and I'd like to share. I'm going to give three examples that illustrative something like what I'm approaching. These are all examples of "freeform but with a little bit of structure, just, like, for help."
“Game time is of utmost importance. Failure to keep careful track of time expenditure by player characters will result in many anomalies in the game. The stricture of time is what makes recovery of hit points meaningful. Likewise, the time spent adventuring in wilderness areas removes concerned characters from their bases of operations – be they rented chambers or battlemented strongholds. Certainly the most important time strictures pertains to the manufacturing of magic items, for during the period of such activity no adventuring can be done. Time is also considered in gaining levels and learning new languages and more. All of these demands upon game time force choices upon player characters and likewise number their days of game life…YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.”
It is equally well-known that most people utterly fail to adhere to this advice. It is incredibly rare that DMs implement tools like calendars in their game and maintain it carefully. Many DMs advocate and understand the value of doing things to make the consumption of time meaningful and to keep the world alive with ongoing events and other things that reinforce verisimilitude. But, like, it's hard. Bookkeeping sucks.
Hence, the search for something that achieves the function of time passing but without needing to meticulously track it. Most attempts I've seen at something like this involve rolling dice to determine passage of time, and I'll be following that lead. What follows is my first effort stab at this.
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| Art credit: Trina Schart Hyman |
But I have more content to add in. While many gamers prefer "rulings over rules" and don't want the game to tell them how to do every single last tiny activity imaginable, the implication is that they'd rather come up with their own rules for those activities. Maybe on the fly, but their own rules nonetheless. These same people often advocate making sure to use your on-the-spot ruling consistently from then on if possible, meaning that it would best be codified somewhere. Well, while I have shared Brave with the world with the intention of other people using it, it is fundamentally a collection of my houserules for my table. If I played something like 1st Edition AD&D and rejected their rules for an activity, then the substitute I come up with would go in Brave, because Brave is "the rules DwizKhalifa uses in his campaign." I've made a special effort to make the whole thing as modular and hackable as possible, just as most other DIY games do. Just like any good OSR game, nothing will break if you substitute my HP system or my magic rules or how I run wilderness stuff. But on the other hand, I know I'm not the only one tired of buying "incomplete rulesets" because creators are just a little too dedicated to the DIY ethic. In my mind, my own rules wouldn't be worth putting out to the world unless they were comprehensive enough to cover all of my needs. So, yes, it's worth including, say, the rules I use for sailing.
So we have a problem. I want the "core rules" to remain simple and easy to offer up to a player (like how 1st edition AD&D had the Basic counterpart, or how 5E D&D offers free Basic Rules online). But I also want to add more content, and when that sort of content is adopted for your campaign and you find yourself commonly using it, you'll wish it were included in the core rules. I play 5E D&D and ever since Xanathar's Guide to Everything was released, my group has been using the expanded rules and guidelines for toolsets. They're great! But we constantly find ourselves wishing that stuff had just been in the Player's Handbook rather than looking it up in the "miscellaneous other shit we're adding into the game" chapter in a supplement book. I'm sure if 5.5 Edition ever came out, they would relocate that stuff to the PHB. The only reason it wasn't there all along was because those rules didn't exist in 2014.
So how do I package all my content? I have a few ideas, so strap in.
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| Artist credit: Steve Prescott |
So I find myself in a weird place in this hobby. For years I played a regular weekly campaign, over a decade, going from 3.5 to pathfinder to 5e, until life and work got in the way a few years ago. Since then it feels like life keeps opening the possibility for rpgs to re-enter as a major part of my life as new people discover the hobby and new ways to play become viable, but then there’s the other obstacles that have popped up in the last year or so too…
But where I am now is playing 5e occasionally with adventure league players (fun times, but we all know how restricting that is) and introducing people to the game with Knave. This blogs’ main author has brought up the game before, and has even gone so far to introduce his beefed up hack, Brave. Knave has given me a great opportunity, it’s nearly removed the barrier of entry to play. It’s dnd where you can sit down without any understanding of the rules and keep up with everyone else. While other games are similarly simple, knave also has the benefit of feeling more like regular classic dnd than most. People I never thought would be interested in the game finally understand just what us nerds are doing, it’s great.
This leaves me with an interesting situation: I have people who want to play more, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a point to teach them “real” dnd, but I’m noticing the limits of the game. It’s not really built for the campaign. As a Referee it’s the perfect system, but nearly all of my players wanted more toys to play with, they all wanted class features and spells. For a player to really get invested in a long term adventure they’ll want to see their characters grow and improve, they will want to see their stories unfold—and I find that having mechanics to reflect that helps drive a story home helps out new players especially, it’s easier to be reactive than active.
