A Question for the Readers

I'll start with a confession, I like night time soap operas in small doses, Dallas and Dynasty when I was a kid, occasionally others. Of late I have been enjoying the sleazy Melrose Place remake on NetFlix.

For those who haven't watched it, those show is way sexed up compared to the dreadful 1991 version and in addition to the usual schemers the leads include an obsessed psycho, a thief, and a med school student turned prostitute (played by the same gorgeous actress who played the Chinese Aussie resistance fighter is Terminator Sarah Conner Chronicles)

Let me ask you this.

Are Conventional RPGS (not Indy games designed for this purpose) good for other kinds of games than action story derived ones?

Can they with the right group be effectively used to game those stories of betrayal, jealousy, decadence and other sorts of immorality without implied violence?

If so, what is needed to make it work?

D&D and the Gift Economy

As I was looking through some of the old school modules I realized that they were jam packed with magic items and that in fact there probably was more weapons and armor than a party could really use even with upgrades.

After some thought it occurred to me that maybe these were supposed to be given to henchmen as part of a D&D gift economy.

Let me explain, the default play style I am used to is

The Party, this is the PC's , and the occasional pet, NPC or familiar.

However there is another option I've seen mentioned in extended play,one I call the Warband

This setup consists of the PC's, their pets (dogs, familiars, mules, animal companions, horses) NPC hirelings (Mercs to keep monsters away from the MU or horse, torch bearers, specialists) and henchmen (NPC's with levels)

This kind of set up lowers the difficulty of the module and means more treasure recovery (more eyes to search means more chances to spot loot and concealed or secret items) and that extra magic treasure instead of being sold for cash (a difficult task all in all) is gifted to increase both the power and loyalty of henchmen. Thus instead of the module having tons of treasure it has basically about enough for a larger troop.

This hearkens back the original idea of D&D as a war-game extension and explains why there is as much emphasis on Charisma. In such games not only is Charisma not a dump stat but its vital to the long term success. It also ties into the "followers" system for Fighters, Thieves and the others too . Reaching "name" level gives you a free boost to your leadership as a bonus for playing that long.

Now I'll note that this does slow down the advancement rate (XP sharing and all) a little at low to middle levels but thats an intentional as it results in longer more involved campaigns. And it has only modest effects in high levels, also intentional as by that time, the PC's are playing the post game anyway.

So what do you all think?

Politics, a facet of D&D I really like

No not pseudo feudalism or projecting modern issues into the game. No ,I like that the default assumptions allow people to earn the right to have their own kingdom, to earn power and to use it for ends good and ill.

Unlike Supers games which are pretty much still directed by the Comics Code Status Quo or Modern Fantasy's Masquerade or the impossibility of real in game change in modern games, D&D and its sibs lets you use the power you have earned. Charm the king, slay the tyrant heck be the tyrant, be the tyrant of a 100 worlds . Its an enormous field of possibility.

These days most people don't chose to partakeor really know how but thats changing . Given the release of stuff like Kingmaker (for Pathfinder) and Adventurer Conquerer King, its pretty clear people are starting to realize how much fun this can be. Good for them I say and go conquer something In the Name of the 5 Stone!

Been playing Fable 2 and its implications for table top

OK sure Fable 2 like all such games suffers from the repetitiousness but I'll tell you what, that game is a lot of fun.

Probably too much as I've stared to attach Fable style names to food. Last nights supper was Marrow and Mates and the night before that I had Unicorn Cheese om the hamburger. Yum.

anyway I digress. Fable 2 is enough fun to suggest this law to me.

"As most gamers now have access to X-Box and similar technologies, any successful table top RPG needs to be more fun than a convenient video game or it will fail."

Now mind you back in 1981 and thereabouts this was not an issue. Many players had no console game or computer and even such jewels as Pool of Radiance could not compete with the Table Top Experience . However the modern video game is a lot more compelling and convenient and as such we need to be better and emphasize how much more fun it can be."

If we don't our players will stay home and play WoW or something.

Learning from the Movies: Runaway

James Lileks once said "Nothing ages faster than yesterday's tomorrow." and in my experience this is true even in Sci-Fi gaming.

in fact the last "old sci-fi" that I saw that didn't age too badly was an obscure movie from 1984 ,Runaway written by none other than Michael Crichton and starring Tom Selleck.

Without going into spoilers other than its about robots, this old movie has held up very well .

Sure stylistic elements are slightly dated (clothes, retro-future cars, object shapes and the relentless whiteness of L.A.) however its telling that it is not set at any given time and could be set any 20 minutes into the future.

Now I didn't see cell phones but there was no point in the movie in which they would have been used anyway and I did see an I-Pad like device.

What really caught my eye was unlike almost any SF movie l everyone even the reporters seemed familiar and comfortable with the settings tech. That bit movie-wise is quite remarkable in many ways.

If I as a DM/GM could capture in any game fantasy or SF that casual sense of reality that you see in the movie, the familiarity with technology and such , well if I could pull that off (with player help) that more than even plot would make for a great game.

Its more than action and story but a sense of a world coming to life.

Its not easy but its well worth trying and a skill well worth cultivating and my next entry will suggest tricks to make it happen.

Less Books. More Gaming. Part #1

Less Books. More Gaming. Its sounds contradictory but one of things I've noticed over the years is that often the more books (or PDF's, same difference) we buy and are in play, the less actual play we do.

This topic is of course discussed at length in Barry Schwartz's book of the Paradox of Choice but as for our little niche well what I think happens gaming wise is this ...

We start buying books to make up for not gaming then we get caught up in reading and assessing the game material instead of using it in a game. In time this effects our actual gaming making it harder to settle down and actually game .. Vicious Circle

Breaking this cycle is tricky.


1st -- Read the books you have. Just one mans opinion but no game book should go unread. And yes in case anyone asks, I often let my books linger unread. Mea Culpa. Just read them before you buy more.

2nd -- After you read your books , use them before you buy more.

3rd -- Heck I'll go as far as to say unless you are a collector of a line or want to support a favorite company or co-hobbyist, (like some of our friends in the OSR and Pathfinder communities) don't buy books unless you know how you are going to use them.

4th Resist the urge to fiddle and settle for good enough. Yes there may be a cool rule or two in that shiny shiny book. Resist. Use the rule you have that are good enough to get the job done.

5th Last, consider making a compendium for the campaign containing what extra rules you plan to use in games. use this, the core books you need and nothing else .


And there you have it, 5 tricks to decrease the Tyranny of Choice, reduce clutter and help get down to actual play.

Feel free to suggest your tricks as well.

Let Us Not Go To Midrea For it is a Silly Place

One of the things I decided to embrace with my Midrea game world was a kind of absurdist humor, not truly "silly" in the sense of random or slapstick or even the Monte Python I was paraphrasing but an essential sense of the absurd like you might see in say Snarf Quest or Wormy.

The reasons are pretty simple,

#1 Humor adds to the fun for me and my group

#2 Its really hard to take a game in which middle aged men playing elf maidens roll dice, spout Python references all the while doing bookkeeping in an imaginary world that is as Ken Hite would put it

a pastiche of Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard adventure stories, set in a Tolkeinian world of Moorcockian morality, using Jack Vance's magic system, redacted for multiple protagonists. .

#3 Even if I can somehow get the players to be serious and me to be serious, the dice can turn any game into something more worthy of French Farce than any serious at role-playing. Sometimes it even seems like the dice conspire to do that on purpose.

Because of that I let the laughs fall where they may and if the game starts and ends serious, great. If not, thats great too as long as its fun for all.

And yes there probably are Zeetvah on Midrea. They just fit and as while I don't have the Snarfquest D20 any more certainly I'd allow them. I mean why not I have robots and every other crazy thing and it still works. Besides I like Snarf and his folks better than Halflings ;)

Three kinds of options that are never clutter

There are three kinds of options that, so long as they are well organized that really never become clutter and no matter how many you have any game came benefit from them

1st, Magic Items

You can never have too many of these for a campaign, not only to add variety but also to make jaded players happy. Instead of yet another +2 sword, nothing lights up a players eyes faster than something cool like a Sword of Thorn-Spray or something cool.


2nd Spells

Since you get to control which of these come into the game, I figure you can never have too many well thought out balanced interesting spells. Now most of the time you'll only use one or two of them in any given encounter, but in a long campaign, well, more spells is not going to be too much of a good thing. Why I especially enjoy having a variety is that it keeps those jaded players who think they have seen everything on their toes and gets them more involved .

And yes I have been players side of this, I love it.


3rd Monsters

I rarely use monsters but so long as they are well divided by type, you can never have too many. Even enormous books like the upcoming Compiled Tome of Horrors (1000 pages!) are not wretched excess. Instead its simply more variety and thats a fine thing .


Needless to say the Magic Item Compendium and the Encyclopedia Magica (back from 2e) along with the various random magic item systems , the Spell Compendium and 2e's Wizard and Priest Compendiums were among my favorite books. So much good stuff for the plucking ...

What if there are too many options in D&D (open)

Just something I am thinking about..

What if more options doesn't improve the game but makes it incoherent and less fun?

Instead of allowing all sorts of things, maybe its better to just set up front limits and play from there.

Instead of the dozens of classes and archetypes and prestige classes and such, maybe the older rules were right to limit classes (ignoring Dragon Magazine of course) and abilities just to encourage creativity and play instead of so much "char-op" and metagaming

Let me ask is it possible all this hoo-hah started back with 2e and for those who didn't put the kibosh on them stuff started for many peopleto get "less fun" with kits and all the options.

What do y'all think?

A Core Idea: Balance is in the numbers

One of the core ideas I use in my games is one I learned long ago from Champions and from an excellent 2e encounter is this

Game Balance is in the Numbers not in the flavor. In D&D terms this means a spell is 3rd level not because its a Fireball but because it does 1d6 per level in a 20 radius. Push comes to shove, it doesn't matter if the spell is fire, ice, screaming skulls and puss yellow beetles so long as the level is the same and the relative ability to defend remains.

Now later editions can complicate things with spell schools and such (certain specialties do not get certain kids of magic effects) but as a general thing you can name a monster, a spell or a class whatever you want and "reskin" it as anything and it won't hurt your game.

In my next post, you'll see how this can be applied to allow D&D, especially the later editions to make almost any kind of character ...

I like the Term Judge

Sure most people use Dungeon Master for D&D games or Game Master for others but I like the term Judge just like the guys at the eponymous Judges Guild use.

It seems to me that Judge implies a more neutral less adversarial relationship than "Master" and gives people especially non gamers a good idea what exactly I do.

I judge the actions taken in game and the worlds response to them.

Nice and simple.

What do Aligments Mean (9 Alignment system)

In my games alignment is just shorthand for world view. In no particular order this is how I see those world views.



Lawful Good, service in the common good

Chaotic Good, personal freedom is the right thing

Neutral Good, you are just basically a decent person

Neutral, I look out for my own

Neutral Evil, I look out for me.

Chaotic Neutral, I do whatever I want but I probably look out for my own

Chaotic Evil, screw you. I do whatever a rutting feel like, when I feel like it.

Lawful Evil, the weak serve the strong

Lawful Neutral, the law is the most important thing.

Can Diverging Aligments Work Together? With Firefly Content

My take? Of course they can. With the exception of say some divine classes who have vows against associating with certain alignments, people often do in real life and in fiction. You can be friends or family with people of radically different views than yours as well.

Let me give you a recent media example, the character of Joss Whedon's Firefly. You'll hardly ever get a more diversely aligned crew anywhere.

We have

Mal, Chaotic Neutral leaning to Good

Zoe, Same

Wash, Neutral

Kaylee, Neutral Good

Book, Neutral Good

Inara, Neutral

River , Chaotic Neutral (more or less, she is damaged and thus normal CN tropes are magnified )

Simon, Neutral

Jayne, Neutral Evil (he'll sell out people for money and is fundamentally selfish)


The bad guys in the show

Alliance -- full spectrum of lawful, mostly Neutral or Evil with a few Good guys even ....

Jubal Early -- Chaotic Neutral

The Operative - Lawful Evil

Nishka -- Chaotic Evil

YoSaffBridge -- Neutral Evil

The Blue Hands -- Unknown, probably Lawful evil

Patience-- Probably Neutral

And in case anyone asks, the Reavers don;t really have an alignment or a world view. They act Chaotic Evil but as they have no free will to speak of, they are more or less Zombies and don;t count.

So if you Like E6/E8 so much Why Old School?

Well its a fair question with a simple answer. Old School is my (the DM's) game E6/E8 is more theirs (the players)

Old school provides the classic D&D experience I remember. Its a game of imagination and exploration and roleplaying and combat and treasure of course . More importantly its wild and woolly and personal in ways that the modern rules rigorous games are not.

E6/E8 OTOH is a lot of fun (or at least D&D is at those levels IME as I haven't played with the extra feats) but its modernness can be off putting and its a game with builds and optimization and a host of things that change the flavor of the game.

Its analogous to say reading a print books vs reading on a screen. They are both reading but the book is simply different.

And in case you ask, assuming I run D&D of some kind this year (its not certain and in fact I might even run GURPS or Angel) it will probably be E6/E8 . The likely players (they are 2e ear guys) seem to like this idea a bit better and while maybe its not as cool as introducing them to S&W of LL, it will still be fun.

And having fun is the whole point anyway.

What is your Sweet Spot?

A simple question and an open post.

What is your sweet spot, that is, what level is D&D most fun for you ?

For me its under 10th or so depending on edition (a little higher is fine with OSR games)

How about you?

For your consideration... The Sweet Spot and some tricks therein

This is a very long article on the EN World archive about preserving the Sweet Spot, that is the place in any D&D campaign in which the game is the most fun.

For me that spot tends to be pretty low around 6th or so. This is the place where the game is action oriented but still human. Regular stuff like say wolves or bandits can still challenge the party and its not "monster of the week" or "How come we never saw those before?" but OMG Orcs!

Its what Ryan Dancy calls the 1st (and maybe early second quartile)

Levels 1-5: Gritty fantasy
Levels 6-10: Heroic fantasy
Levels 11-15: Wuxia
Levels 16-20: Superheroes

Gritty to Heroic

I guess this comes from a steady diet of things like GURPS and Runequest where combat can be deadly. Of course I also want my fantasy to have verisimilitude, the notion that "well that could happen"

Now this sweet spot idea is nothing new,.

The older editions had an implied one in the form of an end game that capped hit points at levels 9-11 and abilities that lagged back a bit as well. Not much point in being past14th as a thief. 95% at everything is pretty awesome and it doesn't get better than that.

Spellcasters of course broke this mold with higher level spells but on the whole D&D was calibrated to "Pretty Heroic" as vs the Superheros we see in the last few articles I've written.


Now of course there are ways to alter the game to lengthen the sweet spot, E6 the game within D&D is decently well known (thread one, and thread two and great for those who like lower level play (L1-L6 or so) . There is also an E8 Variant and even an E10 has been bandied about

Another technique is to limit the spells list to remove abusive spells and spells that really effect verisimilitude.

This can be a bit of work but if you like higher level play (just not some of the spells) it can be worth it. Which ones to disallow is up to you but the usual ones are the ones that require magic to overcome, anything that creates stuff Ex Nilho (no more wall of Iron w/o a time limit) anything permanent (including Continual Flame) Teleports and Raises.

I've also seen people limiting spell casting classes to once every two levels, so that a 20th level type can have at most 10 caster levels. This can be cool as it encourages some the more mediocre prestige classes with limited caster levels that we seldom see such as Spellsword

All of these work to one degree or another .They key is to pick which you like, your players like and run with it.

The League of Justice in 3x The Wrap

One thing I learned with this little experiment is that the common assertion that 15+ level characters in D&D are functionally superheroes in many respects is entirely true .

I had only modest trouble making the entire JLA in 3x terms and while the ersatz heroes cannot throw tanks or buildings or the like, the certainly could handle any number of normal 1-3rd level people and create a battle that could easily grace the pages of any 4 color magazine.

Had I chosen to use Epic Levels (my original write up for Paragon was 30th level!) the power gap would have been even greater.

Now mind you, this is not a complaint, only an observation and as such, someone who is hoping for a more literary flavored game will want to take this into account.


Tomorrow or so, we will have a longer discussion on stuff like this and the Sweet Spot for play and E6 and well a bunch of other stuff. Till then, good gaming !

What If: The Inspiration had been Pirates

One of the more interesting ideas that has come from the OSR is the "faux revival" game "Mazes and Minotaurs" which the author describes as

Mazes & Minotaurs is what the first fantasy roleplaying game could have been if its authors had taken their inspiration from Jason & the Argonauts (yes, the 1963 movie with all the cool Ray Harryhausen monsters) and Homer’s Odyssey rather than from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts & Three Lions.

So let me ask you this

What if the inspiration of D&D had been pirate tales, pirate movies and the swashbucklers with the random inclusion of magic instead of Tolkien, Howard, Lieber and Anderson?

Personally I can see some Faerie stuff creeping in (Elves and Swashbuckling have been a good fit far longer than Xtreme Legolas) and lots of Vance, but where else would this lead us?

On practical magic

One of the complaints about D&D magic seems to be that its not very “magical” well I guess thats true after a fashion, D&D magic is methodical and efficient to an almost scientific degree.

This really doesn't bother me though. Real world magic was mostly used for perfectly practical purposes (love spells, fertility , protection ) and it was scientific and repeatable at least in the minds of its practitioners. And I have no doubt that if it were possible to blast people with fire, our ancestors would be memorizing fireball at every battle.

The only real grumps I have is that fact that there really aren't enough “day to day” spells for my NPC's to use. I think such a supplement “Practical Magic” might be really fun for old and new school DM's

A bit of theory on Starter Characters

Starter Characters especially for new gamers

#1 ought to be a bit optimized where appropriate

#2 simple to play

#3 interesting

The reasons?

Well,

#1 Optimization increases survivability and decreases the "wiff factor" a well built character with a decent life expectancy is more fun to play and elp a new player who may not have been exposed to any RPG (even something like World of Warcraft) feel like they have "won" . This can increase immersion and the chance of a second session

#2 Many RPG's are complex enough that adding more layers will make a start up game harder than it needs to be. Keep it simple to start, not dumbed down but easy to play and if the game clicks, players can add complexity as they learn the rules over time.

#3 Boring characters are well just that boring. My favorite trick is to give everybody an off kilter ability or a special ability (within the rules of course) that gives them an extra fun thing to do in the game. This gets players thinking a bit and gives them something extra to do that can be fun at just the right time.