R&L: A Sporting Fight

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

Pertinent to this post, I've also released the beta version of the Catalogue of Friends and Foes, which is this game's bestiary. It's now available to download on the itch.io page through that link. Today I want to talk about how we aimed to calibrate combat difficulty, and the challenges that came with that.

R&L: Character Sheet and Cheat Sheet

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

Every player needs a character sheet and a copy of the cheat sheet. Click those links to download them for free. These are, as with everything else in the beta, currently unfinished.

This one was all me. It was the single biggest roadblock of development. I refused to even attempt a playtest until I had a decent draft of the character sheet and cheat sheet to offer my players, which I didn't end up accomplishing until several years after we began the project. I certainly ought to have prioritized these tasks, but maybe if we had worked on this game like it was a full time job (rather than a side project we pick up every few months) then I could have gotten these done sooner.

Piece of advice: just make a character sheet using Excel or Google Sheets for now. You can always make a proper document later, but a sloppy spreadsheet will make playtesting way easier. Wish I had thought of that sooner. Oops.

R&L: Six Elements?

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

So you may have noticed that our game about the Chinese elements includes an extra, sixth element, for some reason. Allow me to explain.

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

The Genres the OSR Can't Do

If you only ever listened to annoying AD&D fanboys, you might think that the OSR is strictly about crawling through big megadungeons as sword and sorcery murderhobos. But no community should be defined by its worst gatekeepers. The very fact that they suggest the OSR to be anything other than a manufactured revisionist narrative is reason enough for them to be suspect. To me, the OSR is an enduring illusion in large part because it's a very flexible culture of play. And I feel that despite its reputation for being notoriously difficult to define, "old school play" is still pretty cohesive and compelling.

I usually find myself on the side arguing for an expansive definition. "Renaissance," not "revival." The most important non-D&D game in the OSR lineage is Traveller and its relatives, and indeed, moderately-hard sci fi is a cornerstone genre in this space. So too are noir / investigation games and horror games. The genres often get blended together (Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Mothership, Electric Bastionland, Esoteric Enterprises, and Liminal Horror come to mind) but they just as often remain separate! Perhaps these four genres are simply the cornerstones of all RPGs. The most robust and reliable ones you can emulate in nearly any play culture. Remember, Call of Cthulhu and World of Darkness have historically been the biggest serious competitors to D&D globally.

Despite this, I've recently been thinking about some things that have got me feeling out the borders of what can count as "OSR." This is a rare occasion when I'll be the one standing guard at the gate. But more interesting than that, I aim to discuss why these outsider genres can still be very exciting anyway for someone with OSR-inclinations like myself, even if they're "incompatible" with my default preferences.

Game Theory and Uncertainty

This goes beyond just Tabletop RPGs, and is much less organized or fruitful than most of my posts. Hope you find it interesting though. I apologize for anyone who hasn't played many of the games mentioned in this post, but take it as a list of recommendations. Well, except for Puerto Rico. Fuck that game.

Gritty Realism: Adventuring in Weeks, Not Days

Because apparently this is a 5E blog now, I'm going to talk about the Gritty Realism variant rule suggested in the DMG on page 267. But wait! Don't go! You know me better than that. Of course I'll find a way to make it relevant to you and your rules-lite artpunk post apocalyptic furry heartbreaker as well, since I know you don't play D&D 5E.

So there's a type of adventure scenario I like to call a "Die Hard plot." It's not a good name, but it's what I always think of. In the movie Die Hard, the whole ordeal takes place within a single evening. The movie almost happens in real time! It's a really jam-packed day. See also:

1. The Warriors
2. The Avengers (well, like 90% of it)
3. Night of the Living Dead
4. Clue
5. Dredd
6. The Goonies
7. Escape From New York
8. 24 (the TV show)

...and plenty of others. Now of course, lots of movies take place entirely within 1 day. But these ones here are specifically all movies that are a great model for D&D ADVENTURE! Sure, My Dinner With Andre takes place in one day, but that's because it's just a dinner conversation. These movies are set within a single day in spite of how much crazy shit happens within them.

Every movie on that list is great (and 24 is okay I guess), and you should steal from them occasionally. But the main appeal of Gritty Realism is that it affirms a simple truth: you can't run an entire campaign of just Die Hard plots. Or rather, I think you probably shouldn't.

I'd like to talk about this at length and help us all to appreciate this better.

Not All Crunch Is the Same

A lot of people put all games on a simple spectrum of "less crunch" to "more crunch," where the amount of crunchiness is measured roughly by "the number of discrete rules you can point to in the game." The more rules a game has, the crunchier it is, and that's that. While it is good to have an idea of whether you're the kind of gamer who generally prefers more crunch or less crunch, I see a lot of shallow and misleading discussions happen where people are turned away from games they may have otherwise quite enjoyed. And that tends to happen because the game was reduced down to "too much crunch" when that's just a dishonest way to represent what it's actually like.

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. 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.