Slush Pile

All the cool bloggers are into slushposting. I think it was started by Dan over at Throne of Salt? He occasionally does this thing where he takes all the unfinished posts in his drafts folder and just throws them together into a big messy post as a way of cleaning up. Personally, I hate admitting defeat. Some of my most-viewed posts of all time spent 6+ months in my drafts folder, slowly cultivating a rich and nutritious wordcount like a fine cheese.

But my drafts folder has 70+ unfinished posts in it right now and even I have to admit that a lot of this is garbage. So I'm gritting my teeth and dumping some of those un-ripened thoughts here for the curious to read. Think of it as a low-quality follow-up to my Potpourri post. I doubt many people will be interested in this, but maybe it'll give me peace of mind.

Here are five abandoned ideas that I have deemed unworthy of a blog post, but still worth sharing for my true fans. I'm going to mimic the format recently used by Prismatic Wasteland, where I moreso describe the post rather than actually write some brief version of it. Where I have some text worth salvaging, I'll also quote it.

What if Each Pillar Had Its Own Classes?

This post would have opened with me recapping the D&D 5E development process and the three pillars model they arrived at. "The three pillars of D&D gameplay are combat, social interaction, and exploration." You know it.

But the game is still slanted pretty heavily towards combat, and people often think the answer to every problem is "more crunch." And since D&D is a game that's built on a "mix-and-match" format for character creation, I had an idea.

Anyone who's ever played D&D before has answered with that familiar formula of "race + class" when asked about their player character. So I was just thinking... what if the three pillars themselves were the elements you mix and match?

... 

So maybe there should be a handful of combat "classes," a handful of social "classes," and a handful of exploration "classes," and every PC is a combination of one class from each.

My ideas for the "combat classes" would be to just reuse the four PC roles from D&D 4E: Defender, Striker, Leader, Controller. Within each of those, there'd be subclasses for picking, y'know, weapon specializations, special attacks and maneuvers, combat spells, etc.

My ideas for the "social classes" would be different forms of argumentative appeal.

There have been countless attempts to create a social interaction procedure for D&D, such as the one from Burning Wheel, the one in Errant, the one tucked away in the 5E DMG that nobody uses, a sad attempt of my own hidden away at the end of this post, and this weird-but-cool one that Josh came up with a while ago. What all of them have in common are the questions of "what's your approach?" and "what approaches are effective on this NPC?" Thus, the "classes" for this pillar would be four families of argument types.

If you're unfamiliar, these are:

1. Logos: appeal to logic and reason
2. Pathos: appeal to emotion
3. Ethos: appeal to authority

And my thought was that we could split Ethos into two classes: one for "expert authority" (e.g. you listen to the physicist's argument about a physics issue because you trust that they know a lot about physics) and one for "power authority" (e.g. you listen to the military officer's argument because he's in charge and he calls the shots).

My ideas for the exploration classes are somehow even sweatier than that. Part of the problem is that the exploration pillar is broadly defined as "all gameplay that isn't combat or social interaction." So I basically just tried to create four "classes" for different activities that you do in D&D.

Survivalist: prepares for hazards, especially in the wilderness, and knows the tips and tricks to avoid foreseeable complications like getting lost, weathering poor conditions, avoiding ambushes, etc.

Solver: has tools and skills to get past obstacles, like traps, security, contacts, puzzles, and general problem-solving. A survivalist would know how to climb the cliff, but a solver has an alternative method. 

Investigator: learning information and doing research, noticing and following clues, interpretive ability.

Artisan: has or crafts equipment that the party relies on, has a place carved out in the greater economy with a higher income, and has a company/industry resources they can fall back on. 

Then I would have tried theorycrafting a bunch of pop culture characters using this system. So like, Robin Hood would be Striker + Pathos + Survivalist. I had a couple others, but they sucked.

I don't really care for this idea. For starters, it just doesn't do much for me. But there are also more specific issues with it. One is that this system would make every character at least somewhat competent at all areas of play, which... seems wrong to me? Lots of characters are defined in large part by what they can't do. If you want to suck at a whole pillar, like by making someone shy or stoic or someone who can't fight, then that's not an option here. Another problem is the role of magic and spellcasting. Magic is the most flexible game mechanic imaginable. The D&D Wizard would simply be a wildcard in this system, as you can build them around any of these approaches in all sorts of varying proportions.

Let's move on.

Flying With a Co-Pilot

This would have been a post about the rare practice of running D&D with two GMs. I've heard of people doing it before, but I've never tried it myself (nor do I know anyone who has). It sounds awful tricky, but I keep coming back to it because of some interesting possibilities.

One of the main reasons I never wrote this post is because I didn't have the personal experience, so it would just be conjecture. I also know that there are, y'know, games without GMs and games where the traditional GM responsibilities are distributed across a couple people instead and blablabla. And while I've played some of those games, I'm far from an expert on them, and would feel a bit of imposter syndrome writing a post where I just spitball about something that lots of other people could speak authoritatively on.

But even just having one extra GM is cutting the amount of work you do in half.

• You take turns narrating.
• You split up control of monsters in combat.
• One will work on bookkeeping or prepping the next bit of material while the other is talking.
• You can better act out a conversation with multiple NPCs.
• You have twice the creative energy to improvise and worldbuild and tell the story.
• You can occasionally intentionally separate information from each other to avoid metagaming issues, like by retaining control of NPC factions separately and not informing the other of their plans.
• You might even split up pretty big roles, like having one be "the rules GM" and the other be "the lore GM."

Most of my thoughts are inspired by real-world experience I have with something similar. When I was in undergrad, I taught a freshman-level course with a co-instructor. You didn't get to pick your partner, but the bosses who decided each pair were pretty good at it. I've had a decent amount of experience teaching and coaching alone, but doing it with a partner is entirely different.

I did that job for several years, and taught a bunch of classes with a bunch of different partners. I was really good at it, and so I accumulated a bit of expertise at the fine art of "co-teaching," with lots of tips and tricks for it.

You don't actually split the class in half and each take one half of the classroom. It tends to be more like, you each take turns with your hands at the wheel. Many of my lesson plans would have 4-6 activities planned and each one would have a designated "leader" between the two of us while the other one would hang back and support from the rear. The leader will be doing most of the talking, especially if it's a presentation of some kind. The supporter will be observing the students and trying to pick up on their nonverbals. They'll interject occasionally with an additional comment or they'll ask a good question to stimulate a slow conversation. They'll notice when the students clearly aren't "getting it" more easily than the leader teacher will and they can help fix that.

So I thought, I dunno, maybe that could translate to running an RPG. It's somewhat similar to having a Caller in the party. I would benefit from another set of eyes and ears keeping track of the chaos.

This was also something I could connect to my experiences in a really popular FKR Braunstein megagame you may have heard of before called Model United Nations. Being the most popular megagame in the world, you can imagine that MUN gameplay is much more logistically complicated than D&D, where the number of "players" is usually between 8-20 and the scale of actions and events is usually on the order of weeks or months rather than moment-to-moment. The tradeoff is that you usually get a good 20-30 minutes to think of how to resolve each player action rather than being under pressure to make an immediate judgment. Plus, of course, you have a team. That's right, an entire team of GMs who discuss the game in a separate room from the players and bounce ideas off each other for how to resolve each action and move the simulation forward.

Of course, no matter how often I write about it, RPG folks don't seem to be interested in MUN. It's very weird having hundreds of hours of experience running Braunstein megagames and fucking nobody cares to hear more about it or ask for my opinion whenever the subject comes up.

Basic vs Advanced

Ugh okay yeah so this is another WotC D&D one. Even worse, it would be me weighing in on discourse. Even worse even worse, it would be an attempt at "future edition speculation," which is always folly.

The gist is that I feel like D&D might benefit from once again being split into a Basic version and an Advanced version. Two product lines running in parallel to one another, much like during the TSR era.

In my view, 5E's biggest commercial weakness is that it's trying to cater to too many different appeals simultaneously. Not that it's suffering commercially or anything. I have referred to it as the "Goldilocks edition" before, and the data bears out my claim: 5E is the most nut-bustingly popular RPG in the whole world. But I assume their goal will always be to expand the player base further. And the one major obstacle I've pinpointed is that they're failing to reach RPG players who have more specific, narrow desires out of a game.

... 

It's a lot easier to make a lite game crunchier than a crunchy game lighter. I remember back when it came out, people praised it for its modularity. You don't hear that a lot anymore, but I still think it's something the game should aim for. 

Yeah I mean, when I started writing this post years ago, I didn't realize that WotC was about to embark on a marathon of terrible and unpopular decisions. I think it's now pretty universally agreed that D&D's biggest commercial weakness is the threat of WotC fucking up again somehow.

Most of the thoughts I have about this argument ended up in my retrospective on D&D 5E anyway, so this post is truly pointless to write now.

HeroQuest 2021 Review

Back in 2020, Hasbro acquired the rights to the classic and beloved board game HeroQuest and then crowdfunded a new version of the game. I dropped $200 on that crowdfunding campaign and got aaaall the goodies. So I thought I would write a prompt and timely review on it as soon as I received my campaign rewards.

Obviously, that didn't happen. I didn't end up getting a chance to play my new board game for about five or six months after receiving it. I spent so much time and effort trying to set up a session to play it and for whatever reason, it just kept not happening. By the time I finally did play it, writing a review was pointless. I still wrote a good deal of the review ahead of time, since I knew there'd be stuff that I would need to cover but which didn't require firsthand experience yet.

For those who don't know, HeroQuest (HQ) is a much-beloved D&D-inspired dungeoncrawling board game first developed by Milton Bradley in conjunction with Games Workshop in 1989, but which went out of print in 1997. It has been infamously difficult to obtain in the two decades since, with copies reselling for (usually) as low as $200 for just the base set, and as high as $700 in some cases (from what I've seen). The most-recommended way to get your hands on it was literally to 3D print your own set.

...

I never played any version of the game before now. It went out of print before I was even born, so I'm approaching this with a very modern perspective. But I think it'll be of interest to folks who like game design. For those curious, from what I've gathered, this new version is almost identical to the original except for a shift in art style (which I, like many, believe to be a downgrade), with the addition of a few new expansions you can add on.

After that, my plan was to write an overview of the rules and components, then talk about my experience playing it, then assign a rating to a bunch of different review categories (e.g. fun, complexity, theme and lore, aesthetics, material quality, etc.). And then of course I'd give my recommendations.

Because I'm not a critic by trade, I've tried to make sure that I only ever write a review when I have some special angle to provide. Something more than just a basic product overview and a rating. And I actually did have an idea for a section I could devote to this.

So the thing is that, if we're being honest, this game is meant as an introduction to D&D for the audience who is juuuust too young to be playing that (at least in the popular perception of such things). It introduces you to the fantasy concept of the dungeoncrawl and wets your appetite for sword and sorcery adventure, but it's really, really easy to learn and get into and demands virtually no imagination power. The box says ages 14+, but the truth is that this game is perfect if you have a kid aged 8-12, maybe even as young as 6 if they do well with board games in general. But of course, once you get introduced to the right version of D&D, there isn't much reason to go back.

...

See, things like character customization and leveling up and making backstory and all that crap isn't really what appeals to me when it comes to RPGs. That stuff is all well and good, but the ultimate reason I play these games is because I love the freeform nature of their gameplay. "Tactical infinity" provided by a human brain as the game engine, y'know? So while you might initially think that trying to make HQ more like D&D would be adding unnecessary complexity and inconvenience, understand that I'm not talking about the complex parts of D&D. I'm not saying the game would be improved by adding a 3-hour character creation stage. I'm saying that the game is improved when it... stops being a board game.

This is not a novel argument. Still though, I said something sort of along these lines later when I wrote about HeroQuest in my first Capsule Game post.

Honestly, my actual best take on HeroQuest is that, even though it's a board game and not an RPG, it's actually a great introduction to RPGs in its own way because it provides a chance for any kid to jump into the Game Master role very easily.

Most people who play D&D with kids still have to hold onto the GM title for a long time before their players are ready to give it a shot. One of the most valuable things that can come out of just one experience with GMing is perspective. I generally find that everyone becomes a better player after they try GMing for the first time, and I know of no "RPG for kids" that can impart this lesson as quickly and easily as HeroQuest. Not because they'll be taking on GM responsibilities like crafting a world or stories, or making rulings, or roleplaying NPCs, or anything like that. But just from being on the other side of the screen. Having to take actions on the part of agents who are not aligned with all your other friends, and having to deal with the complications of knowing information the players don't have and understanding when it's right to reveal that information. That is the baseline, fundamental, unbelievably-easy-to-take-for-granted perspective that is gained by just one session of being the GM. And the reason it's so difficult for most other games to grant you that perspective is because they first ask of you a lot of work in doing those things like crafting a world, roleplaying NPCs, learning lots of rules, and so on.

That said, the review isn't worth writing. I've now played a good deal of HeroQuest and I love it dearly, but I have no special insights on it and there are plenty of more qualified critics out there who can tell you whether or not it's worth your money.

Alternatives to "Competing Factions" in Dungeons

Yeah you can tell just from the "title" that this was going to be a weak post. The basic idea stems from a pet peeve I have, regarding the OSR's habit of being weirdly dogmatic and formulaic sometimes.

So it starts with someone writing a blog post about Keep on the Borderlands and the Caves of Chaos and what makes it so good. And they talk about how the Caves have all these different factions in tension with one another. From the original module:

TRIBAL ALLIANCES AND WARFARE: You might allow player characters to somehow become aware that there is a [sic] constant fighting going on between the goblins and hobgoblins on one side and the orcs, sometimes with gnoll allies, on the other - with the kobolds hoping to be forgotten by all, and the bugbears picking off any stragglers who happen by. With this knowledge, they might be able to set tribes to fighting one another, and then the adventurers can take advantage of the weakened state of the feuding humanoids.

And they explain how this is a really awesome feature for a big dungeon to have, how lots of old megadungeons used this trick, how it creates lots of cool possibilities for the players to exploit, how it leads to emergent story, blablabla.

10+ years later, this somehow transforms into "for a dungeon to be good, in needs to have competing NPC factions." It's kind of annoying. Like, it's weird for this one highly specific design idea to suddenly be turned into a checklist item, right? Don't get me wrong, it's a cool trope, but it's not the only cool trope. I can name a lot of songs that are highly improved by the inclusion of an excellent guitar solo, but that doesn't mean that every song should have a guitar solo, or that it's the only way for a song to be good.

Dungeons are an idea with infinite potential. Why would we ever reduce them to a singular formula? I think this mistake may have come from folks not really understanding the actual value of the "competing NPC factions" trope. They just read a bunch of old OSR blogs that all said it was a good part of a lot of good dungeons, and they simply internalized it as a thing that good dungeons must therefore have.

The thing that makes it a good element of dungeon design is that it create a dynamic hook for the whole crawl experience. A basic dungeon is just a series of self-contained bite-sized challenges, strung together with some hallway connectors. A combat here, a puzzle there, a trap over there, and some treasure right past that. But a great dungeon usually has some element that shapes the whole adventure across multiple rooms. An overarching challenge element for the players to be thinking about and interacting with even as they advance from one chamber to the next.

NPC factions fulfill this purpose really well because they're a challenge element that span many rooms (each one "holding down territory" that they control in the dungeon), they're totally open-ended in how you can interact with them (friends? foes? lies? bargaining?), and they provide a consistent source of ongoing gameplay material (kill an ogre, the fight is done. Solve a puzzle, the puzzle is over. But piss off a whole faction, and now you have a plot).

So this is the part where I would then make a list of other level design tropes that fulfill the same function, and how they do it. Of course, doing this was going to require that I research and gather and read and annotate lots and lots and lots of dungeon and megadungeons and probably also a lot of video games and hoo boy man do you realize how exhausting it is to write this blog?

Example the first: mazes, labyrinths, navigation challenges, etc.

This is actually the dynamic hook that predates inter-faction political conflict. OD&D was all about the maze gameplay, with lots of tricks developed over time like tricky dungeon architecture, stuck doors, and randomized layouts. This is a tradition of level design that I and many others have written about a lot over the years, but maybe a "master post" really doing it justice would still be worth writing. In particular, helping to illuminate the potential of "mapping the dungeon's layout" as a legitimate source of interesting challenge is something that I still suspect I'll be forced to write eventually.

Example the second: puzzle dungeons

As in, a dungeon that has a big overarching puzzle to it, or perhaps a series of puzzles that all tie together. Some of the best thinking / designing on the subject in the TTRPG world has come from my friend Directsun. But the real goldmine is, obviously, The Legend of Zelda. A good enough puzzle dungeon can honestly get by with zero NPC interaction at all.

Example the third: shift over time

Y'know, a dungeon that's rotating, filling with water, getting infested by fungi, gradually collapsing, getting consumed by another dimension, that sort of thing. All proper dungeoncrawl has time management as an element, where torches and rations and random encounters and whatnot provide the consequences for spending time. But you can also create a bespoke consequence that defines the whole crawl. The Waking of Willowby Hall is a good example, where the undead and even the house itself are gradually "awakening" over the course of the scenario.

And then hopefully I would have come up with more examples, and also fleshed all of these out more. And of course, none of this is to say that you can't mix any of these ideas together. You can totally include both an overarching puzzle element and have competing NPC factions. I just wanted to broaden the conversation a bit, since I had felt like it was getting stale.

Conclusion

Knight at the Opera will certainly not be starting 2025 with a clean slate or anything. This is only five posts erased from my drafts folder. Still 60+ to go. Still though, it's kind of a relief. Feels like getting a haircut.

And if you somehow don't know, we are in the midst of Bloggie season. Go ahead and nominate your favorite RPG-related blog posts from the last year while there's still time. It's a great tradition that celebrates one of the best parts of our hobby and helps to keep it alive.

-Dwiz