Urban Gameplay Part 6: Concrete Jungle Gyms

I sure do talk a lot about the needs of "simulation," huh? Truly the least interesting approach to design. But my defense of simulationism is a topic for another day. Instead, I want to make sure we enter into this grand conclusion agreed on something more important: simulation isn't worth much without gameability. It doesn't matter if you've created a settlement that's accurate to some standard of "realism" if it isn't also fit for play. That is the theme of this final part of our long series.

To be honest, Part 5 wasn't exactly revolutionary. There's more than enough advice and resources out there to help you stock your settlements with detail.

To me, the far greater obstacle is getting your prep into action. It's all too easy to spend lots of time creating great material, only to watch it go unused during the session for reasons you don't quite understand. This is my attempt to systematically attack that problem and understand how to avoid it.

Urban Gameplay Part 5: Breaking Ground (without breaking your back)

Does this guy have any actual solutions for us? Of course I do! I'm not just here to poop parties! But first, we must once again return to the ancient wisdom: the difference between game design and level design.

Urban Gameplay Part 4: Megacities (aren't always the answer)

Ready for a major departure from everything I've been arguing in this series so far?

Blades in the Dark, Magical Industrial Revolution, Electric Bastionland, Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, Oz, Hex. Megacity campaigns. In each of these games / settings, there's a single, massive settlement that serves as the centerpiece of the whole campaign. That means the designers had the burden of ensuring that their city has a lot of depth and detail. Enough mileage to carry 20+ sessions all by itself. If you're reading this post right now because you also want to run a megacity campaign, then I recommend you read those books and plunder greedily. They are chock full of awesome ideas. I'm going to highlight some of them.

Urban Gameplay Part 3: Maps (usually aren't useful)

Credit: Mike Schley

Whether it's a pre-rendered map or a resource for creating your own, the idealized city map for D&D is usually assumed to be lushly illustrated, showing the exact layout of streets and buildings in meticulous and precise detail. This is, of course, based off of the flawed assumptions I addressed in Lesson 2: that cities are meant to be crawled.

But once you know that adjudicating movement street-by-street is a bad way to run the game in most circumstances, that also means that the level of detail in those maps isn't actually of much practical use to you.

Urban Gameplay Part 2: Crawling (is not the answer)

Credit: Ralph Horsley

So you're trying to make your ultimate citycrawl procedure anyway. And right there, you've already run into the second problem. You assumed that it should be a "crawl" procedure, one that's built around incremented movement decisions. The classic blunder.

Why is this a bad idea? Well, it could be for one of two reasons.

Urban Gameplay Part 1: the Search for the Holy Grail (is futile)

Alternative series title: My (Frequently Tested, Yet Still Dubious) Theory of Urban Gameplay

Apparently it's been too long since I last wrote about settlements in D&D (and similar games). I've certainly written a lot on the subject in the past, but the whippersnappers have been discussing it lately and, by golly, I have wisdom aplenty to share.

Anyway, the point is that I've spent a lot more time thinking about, researching, and experimenting with this topic than most folks, and I've come to some valuable conclusions. If you're interested, I'm here to share.

Urban Gameplay Bibliography

This is my best attempt at cataloguing all the sources I've read while trying to learn more about urban gameplay in D&D-like games. This is partly because it may interest you and partly because I don't want people recommending me stuff I've already read. Or if they are recommending me something new, they might read this list and realize "oh, wait, the thing I'm recommending won't actually add much to what this guy already knows." And you might also be interested in these things. A lot of ideas in here I ended up not agreeing with, but you might.

R&L: Unarmed Fighting

This is a post about our wuxia game that's currently in development. You can check it out here.

Most RPGs try to support a variety of playstyles. In a D&D-like, you might be a fighting guy, a support guy, a talk-y guy, a skill-monkey, etc. But Rivers & Lakes is a fighting game, meaning that everyone is a fighting guy, and therefore, we need a variety of different fighting playstyles.

I think we've accomplished that quite well. Technically, every character has a unique "fighting style." But even just looking at the handful of core ingredients those fighting styles are built from, we wanted to make sure that each ingredient offered a distinct experience that would be fun and interesting and have its own role to fill. D&D-likes usually just settle for "melee vs ranged" with only a couple extra details on top. But we have a lot more than that, giving you tons of possibilities to explore.

There's one in particular that I want to talk about, because it presented a design challenge that I find especially interesting: unarmed fighting.

R&L: Biding Your Time

This is a post about our wuxia game that's currently in development. You can check it out here.

Tell me if this has ever happened to you: you're playing D&D, and you find yourself waiting a while for your turn. But when it finally arrives, you can't seem to contribute in any meaningful way! "Even if I use my full movement, I still can't reach the nearest enemy." You try to reposition yourself to be better set up for the next turn, but otherwise do pretty much nothing.

There are few things worse than this. It's a huge waste and kills player motivation. But read on, dear gamer, as there's hope for you yet!

Now, we can't prevent that situation from ever happening to you. No matter what, there will occasionally arise some combination of factors that puts you into this frustrating position. That's the price of playing an open-ended, tactical combat simulator. But what we can do is offer you a consolation. One that I think you'll agree is well worth it.

R&L: Setting the Stakes

This is a post about our wuxia game that's currently in development. You can check it out here.

This post has required reading: Defeat, Not Death

Among those who study kung fu, a fight is never just a fight. It always exists within a context, especially a social one. To that end, we have a unique rule for framing each battle, setting its narrative weight, the pacing of gameplay, and the amount of XP it imparts. It's called setting the stakes.

R&L: Character Creation

This is a post about our wuxia game that's currently in development. You can check it out here.

Always one of the most popular parts of any RPG, and usually the first point of contact for the players: character creation. This saw a fair amount of change over time, so I'll take a moment to explain the intentions that went into its current form.

You'll see that it's mostly a matter of random generation, but not entirely. Partly this is our OSR influences coming through, as we're wary of players getting "distracted" spending more time planning their character builds rather than actually playing the game. Many of us prefer to "discover" our character rather than design them. But all your character info that's generated randomly serves as a mere foundation, which you (hopefully) have enough power to then build upon in a way you can feel happy with.

The tables are sort of like a lifepath system, in a sense. They don't pin down a sequence of events, but they do tell your backstory. Your elements, your weapons, your other gear, etc. all have an origin you can point to for where you got them from.

The hope is that, as you roll on table after table, a story naturally emerges out of them. You make connections, recognize parallels, or feel inspired to explain something seemingly inexplicable. In practice, I've watched this work quite well for pretty much all players. It goes even better when two or more players make their characters together, as they have more threads to pull on, weaving their backstories into one tapestry.

This should also provide the GM plenty of fuel for setting up scenarios and conflict. If you're running the game, I recommend you create a spreadsheet to record all the PCs' background info during or shortly after character creation. Even if you're using a pre-made scenario / sandbox, you can take those NPCs and factions and goals and insert them somehow. Random attack by bandits in the woods? Eh. But what about if those bandits have kidnapped one of the PCs' family members? And maybe they're members of a sect that has a longstanding rivalry with a PCs' mentor? Boom, instant plot threads explode right out of a simple ambush.

Now your fighting style, well, that's another story. Developing your fighting style is definitely the most burdensome part, as you'll probably find yourself reading lots and lots of arts from many paths. In the first draft of the game, it was actually also randomly generated, to save you from all that work. How convenient, right?

Well, you can imagine how many playtesters liked that. In hindsight, it was pretty silly. Getting to customize your own personal fighting style is exactly what a player comes to a kung fu game for.

That said, if you're the kind of player who finds that sort of thing a bit tiring, here's some advice: just pick your favorite two elements first, without even reading about the arts that you can get with them. Either read about the elements on "Elemental Benefits" spread on pages 10-11, or, hell, just whichever two you think are coolest. After that, when the time comes to pick your two paths, when you have to start reading arts in order to make a decision, go ahead and just read the basic arts. The advanced arts and master arts are something you can work towards later.

I will say, min-maxing is tempting, but pretty risky. Attempting to (lightly) discourage it, we ruled that starting the game with 0 in an element leaves you maimed. That said, I did have one playtester who still made a character with three 0s. To compensate for his pathetic mobility, he rides on another PC's back, using him as a mount. I encourage you to likewise feel out the edges of the system and do something weird with it.

-Dwiz

R&L: Better Tactical Crunch

This is a post about our wuxia game that's currently in development. You can check it out here.

I want to continue comparing and contrasting this game with D&D, as it informed a lot of the design. I'm here to make the case that you can change relatively minor parts of a game and result in a dramatically different experience in play. To that end, I want to highlight three mechanics found in modern D&D that don't exist in Rivers & Lakes, but which are replaced with three equivalent mechanics that I like more.

Specifically, all three examples are mechanics that are meant to add tactical depth to the fighting parts of D&D. It's long aspired to be at least partially a crunchy combat simulator. 3rd and 5th Edition achieve this by including a handful of little tactical wrinkles for players to contend with. None of these mechanics are mind-blowing individually, but in aggregate they manage to twist most fights into a complicated problem to unravel. That said, I think we can do better.

R&L: Three Key Things

This is a post about our wuxia game that's currently in development. You can check it out here.

When I pitch the game to someone who's used to D&D, here's the three main features I like to highlight. They were the first three ideas that my brother came up with and have remained pillars of the game's design ever since then.

R&L: Background

This is a post about our wuxia game that's currently in development. You can check it out here.

We've been teasing the game on here for a few years now, only occasionally giving glimpses. But seeing as how we've kept it pretty close to the chest, as well as how significantly it departs from a lot of the design philosophy I discuss on this blog, I figure you may be curious about where the heck this project is even coming from.

Rivers & Lakes: a Tabletop Fighting Game (Beta)

My brother and I are making a wuxia tactical combat game. We're finally ready to release a beta version to the world.

We started this project in the summer of 2020. It began as a hack of Knave 1E, actually. At first a sort of "monk class" that you could bolt onto Knave, but then quickly it became an entire wuxia hack of Knave, and then soon after simply became its own thing. It wasn't long before the game very clearly stopped being OSR in any meaningful way. With the amount of combat crunch it has, it's probably more accurate to say that it exists in the same lineage as D&D 4E, Lancer, ICON, Gubat Banwa, and those sorts. That said, you might notice some of our old school sensibilities creep in here and there.

This game is still built using the basic D&D chassis. The core mechanic is d20 + stat, a formalized combat procedure is at the front and center of most gameplay, combat is broken into rounds and turns, when you attack someone you roll to hit against their static defense value, if you succeed then you roll damage, etc. Don't expect something avant-garde.

That said, I've long been a proponent of the power of small houserules with big impact. Obviously, changing the AC of chainmail armor from 16 to 15 won't have a noticeable effect on the game. But changing the length of a short rest from 1 hour to 8 hours is utterly transformative. In both cases, it's just one small number being replaced. But some numbers matter more than others. A design space I find myself often drawn to is that thrilling exercise of pinpointing the sometimes-subtle fulcrum points of a game's design and toying with them to reinvent the experience.

So yeah, it's true—Rivers & Lakes is, like, 90% just D&D. But where it departs from the D&D formula, the results are staggering. This game has made me enjoy Combat-as-Sport again.

Here's what we want to work on next:

1. I'll upload a "monster manual" within the week. It's taking a while. Until then, just create PCs and have them fight each other.
2. Lots more in the core rulebook. An entire chapter just for non-combat rules. Wealth and commerce, a social mechanic called "face," cooking meals, overland travel, and downtime. Plus some appendices material.
3. Artwork, and lots of it.
4. Ironing out the advancement rules, which haven't really seen playtesting.
5. More stat blocks in the bestiary, especially adding in animals and some magical creatures.
6. A fancy "example of play" booklet.
7. A proper GM's guide.
8. A proper setting guide.
9. A sample scenario to get started.

And of course, refining all the existing material with lots and lots of playtesting.

I'm also going to be writing a series of blog posts that'll serve as designer notes, explaining some of the how's and why's behind the coolest ideas in the game.

If you end up giving our game a read, or you even actually play it, then we would very much like to hear your thoughts.

And if you have any creative projects in the works, I dare you to release your beta version this year, too.

-Dwiz

Defeat, Not Death

Here's a course-correction that I wish had happened a decade ago. It's an idea surrounding the OSR that I wouldn't call a misconception, exactly, but is definitely missing out on the good stuff.

In short, I think there's an over-emphasis on deadly consequences, both in the eyes of the OSR's supporters and its detractors. The two ideas are treated as nearly synonymous, which creates bad expectations. Tons of folks who would enjoy this playstyle are turned off by it because everyone tells them how deadly it is. Meanwhile, other folks who seek it out specifically in search of grisly blood-and-guts might be disappointed.

I want us to take a step back and look at the bigger picture here. There's more to life than not being alive.

My dumb labels are better than your dumb labels

Even though the OSR as a living movement is largely stagnant, there's more folks being attracted to it than ever before. A consequence of that has been a shift in how people discuss and label things. I'm not trying to talk trash about Johnny-come-latelies or anything. It's exciting to have so much interest in this playstyle. But I think it's fair to say that they bring a bit of an outsider perspective that's lacking the context of where and how this play culture was born and developed.

I think that, even to this day, the first thing you learn about the OSR is that nobody knows what "OSR" means. But honestly, there arose a pretty solid framework relatively early on that I think made discussion a lot easier.

The early OSR was dominated by the "Revivalists," folks mostly just playing TSR editions of D&D or perhaps retroclones (and sometimes paraclones) of those editions. OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, etc. These folks were a lot more devoted to the TSR adventures like Keep on the Borderlands and are the most likely to put up a spirited defense of THAC0.

At some point there was a shift towards the "Renaissance," folks applying iterative design to old-school ideas to create new and innovative games. Largely the same playstyle, but oftentimes more slick and smooth and maybe easier to read and teach. GLOG, The Black Hack, Maze Rats, Into the Odd, ICRPG, etc.

There's arguably a third interpretation, the OSR as "Revolution." Rather than describing an abstract philosophy towards gaming, this refers to OSR as a social phenomenon. Get a movement going, write everything down for posterity, get a name, brand your products with the term (and maybe a cool OSR logo?), actively campaign for ENnie awards, try to influence name-brand D&D. With this came some embarrassing drama, cults of personality, and a splintering into countless subfactions. In truth, the "Revolution" isn't really a third interpretation, but rather a separate axis that those involved in the OSR had widely varying levels of interest in.

All of that seems to still make perfect sense to me. If anything, I seem to recall a general feeling that the Renaissance crowd was definitely where the OSR's momentum was found, whereas the Revivalists were being retroactively characterized as merely a continuation of something that had already long existed (what would now be called "Classical").

Skip ahead 10+ years and now I see a bunch of AD&D fanboys hijacking the term, claiming that the Revivalists are the only true OSR, while others instead retroactively apply terms like "NSR" onto everything that came out of the Renaissance crowd (despite them predating it by many years). I can't imagine how incomprehensible a lot of the old blogosphere must be to anyone coming into the conversation now, especially when they keep seeing the term "new school" frequently being used to refer to games like D&D 4E and Pathfinder.

It would almost be like if I coined a new term to refer to a new movement of games, "Powered by the Armageddon" or just "PbtA" for short, completely unrelated to Powered by the Apocalypse, and it somehow caught on, and started even being retroactively applied to games made 5+ years ago. Wouldn't that make talking about RPGs and reading old threads super annoying?

Maybe I'm just old and cranky.

-Dwiz