The Vancian Wizard, Doomed Science-Hero

It seems there are two different ways of thinking about magic.

The first, though perhaps more recent school of thought, is that magic is essentially a scientific discipline that does not exist in the real world. In the world of fantasy, certain words, gestures, ingredients and so on will produce testable and replicable effects. For example, the same magic words will always produce a fireball when spoken. Magicians may not understand the mechanism behind their magic, any more than the modern-day layman understands the mechanisms of quantum physics. However, they understand the results of those mechanisms and know how to apply them in the art of spellcasting. Therefore, a wizard is essentially a scientist who has discovered that his school of study is especially easy to weaponize.
This form of magic appears in fantasy stories like Harry Potter, Magicka, Eberron, The Wheel of Time, and the Old Norse Sayings of the High One.

SCIENCE!

The second school of thought is that magic is fundamentally different to science. Magic has an undeniable presence in the world, but it cannot be empirically tested. It does not operate by rational laws. It moves in unexpected ways, not because our understanding of it is incomplete but because our entire rational-scientific model cannot encompass it. Magic is the unconscious, unprovable, and other vague wishy-washy concepts that are impossible to pin down or define.
This form of magic appears in fantasy stories like Game of Thrones, The Sandman, The Invisibles, the Conan stories, and many mythological texts. It is also the basis for any form of belief that claims magic is literally real, ranging from Aleister Crowley's esotericism to psychic TV and alternative medicine. Obviously homeopathy is something "beyond the realm of the empirical", because when you test it empirically you quickly find out that it's complete horseshit.

not science!

You'll notice that so far I haven't mentioned two of the most important texts (important to pretentious nerds, that is) of the wizardly canon: namely the Dying Earth and the D&D Magic-User. That's because the Vancian wizard occupies a space somewhere between these two schools, or in both schools at once.

In D&D, spellcasting is certainly an empirical affair. Every time you memorize Magic Missile, you get to cast Magic Missile once, and that spell is always the same. It would appear that magic in D&D is of the 'scientific' variety.
But on the other hand, there is so much more to magic than simply spellcasting. There are any number of supernatural beings with inexplicable spell-like abilities; magic items and artifacts with powers that are impossible to replicate; tricks, traps and puzzles of every kind that defy categorization according to the mean and piddling magic of the spellbook. This is very clear in the Dying Earth stories (where in fact the highest form of magic is not spellcasting but the binding of inscrutable alien beings to do one's will). It's also pretty clear in AD&D, both in the books (the liberal use of 'funhouse' tricks) and in actual play (because no DM worth his salt is going to let his adventure design be limited by some dorky system of magical metaphysics).

So although it's not stated explicitly, I feel like the premise behind Vancian spellcasting is this: that magic is vast, untameable and unfathomable - Type 2 in our survey above - but the system of fire-and-forget spellcasting represents a very miniscule effort by humankind to bite off one tiny part of that vastness and compress it down into a device that works the same way every time - Type 1.

This is why crafting a new spell is such an arduous process, and why many spells are named after the legendary wizard who created them. It's not that Tenser actually invented the floating disk so much as he discovered a very precise fragment of the seething unknown that can be reliably shaped into a floating disk. This was a process of research, but it was done in the face of something that inherently rejects being researched - a process of embattled trial and error, where no assumptions can ever be taken for granted. I imagine that Tenser's laboratory saw a great many Exploding Disks, Horrifying Disks, Cheese Disks and Floating Anti-Disks before he finally settled on the formula that he was seeking.

Even the method of spellcasting evokes a feeling of precarious uncertainty - in order to be a wizard, you have to let an alien meme burrow into your brain, and when you discharge it your memories of the meme will be wiped clean. Every day you memorize the same words and incantations, but every day they vanish from your mind. You can't tell me that there won't be long-term neurological consequences from that. And the very event of forgetting serves to challenge our precious rationality, to remind us that no matter how right we think we are, we are still trapped in a brain made of fallible meat. The original Vancian magic story, Mazirian the Magician, is a story about a man who sets out utterly sure of his intellectual superiority, and is gradually stripped of it - figuratively and literally - until he has nothing left and is devoured by evil trees.

Later, more or less every book, module and blog post would introduce new spells that PC wizards could potentially learn, and many of these spells are pretty great. But I also like the idea that the spells in the PHB are the only spells in existence. The world is ancient, and thousands upon thousands of magic-users have come before you, yet these spells are the only ones they have left behind. Of all the wonders that magic can work, only this handful have ever been bound into words that a human can have control over. No wonder Sleep is overpowered and Affect Normal Fires is terrible! These are not the powers of a well-read arcanist, but the blind fumblings of a thousand generations, crawling on hands and knees through a rat-maze as big as the multiverse.

This, then, is the Vancian wizard: a scientist, a Science Hero, one for whom the sword of reason is the greatest weapon - but tragically, a hero of rationality who lives in an inherently irrational world. No matter how he tries, his efforts are ultimately futile. The incomprehensible chaos of magic remains, huge and indifferent to his most rigorous testing. And one day, when civilisations fall and the flames of war sweep through the land, the books of magic will be burnt; the knowledge of spells will be wiped out; and the little piece of enlightenment that Tenser and Mordenkainen brought into the world will be gone, returned to the endless unknown from whence it came.

The Prestige Class in Old-School D&D

Old-school D&D players don't seem to dig the concept of a prestige class very much, probably because it makes character generation more cluttered and build-y and blah blah, I'm sure if you're reading this blog you know all that already and if you don't, well, there is surely someone posting about it on RPGnet at this very moment.

But: I think there is room for the concept of 'extra abilities/training that you tack onto your character' in OSR/DIY D&D play. Look at it this way: my FLAILSNAILS character Blodgrist has developed x-ray vision from drinking the blood of a mutant crab, and has a Sword of Rage that he stole from the goddess Kali. Both of those things arguably define his character more than his class (Fighter), but they aren't things I picked so much as they just happened to him (though I still had some agency because I chose to drink the blood and to steal the sword). And other people have been turned into talking dogs or cursed with the grief of a million mothers or some other thing. And there is this thing where Ian talks about how 'Paladin' can be something you sort of lay over the top of 'Fighter' on a temporary basis.

What I'm getting at is that Prestige Classes could be not too dissimilar from curses, magic items, mutations, and other things that happen to your character to make them who they are - which is kind of the core principle of character development in OSR, right? But there would be some differences from the PrCs in 3e or the Paragon Paths in 4e:

A Prestige Class is diegetic. Finding a prestige class in a splatbook in no way entitles you to pick that class. If you want to train as a Monk of the Spiral Fang then you don't buy the Ultimate Monk Handbook, you actually have to trek to the Spiral Fang Monastery and probably perform some quest to prove your worthiness, and then undergo intensive training for six months before you come out knowing kung fu or whatever.
Now, if you see a PrC in a book somewhere you can maybe convince your DM that this class exists somewhere in his/her world, but then maybe not because...

A Prestige Class is usually campaign-specific. Just as you can't expect every campaign to have a Deck of Many Things or a mad wizard who will give you mutations from Gamma World, you can't expect every campaign to include every prestige class. And furthermore, just as most DMs like to make up their own magic items, many of their prestige classes will only exist in that world. So if I'm running a Viking campaign maybe I cooked up a Berserker PrC, but someone else's science fantasy game will have Alchemical Gunsmith and a city-based game could have the Urban Ranger. But they could also get much more specific than that, like even 'Farseer of the Obsidian Tower' or 'Gullet Scavenger' 'Most Holiest Jester-Mendicant' etc.
I think this would be cool for FLAILSNAILS games because it would be another thing that you've picked up on your weird picaresque adventures through the multiverse. "Yeah, I got this sword in the Vats of Mazarin, this scar comes from a thoat stampede, and I learned to kill a man with a sewing needle from the Metassassins of Kwishtar."

A Prestige Class is mysterious. You can't plan to build your character around a certain PrC because you mostly don't know which ones are available. You go looking around the world and then you discover what's out there. The DM is not obliged to give you a PrC that you like any more than he/she is obliged to give you a particular magic item. (The DM can incorporate players' suggestions if they're good and fitting, though.)

A Prestige Class can have any rules that you like. It's DIY, so do whatever you want. Balance? Pfah! I spit on your balance!

A PrC could be just something that you fulfill the requirements for and then you get it. Like if you wanted to become an Animagus from Harry Potter, you don't take levels in that, you either are an Animagus or you aren't. Alternatively, a PrC could let you 'spend' XP to gain levels in that instead of your regular class. Presumably the amount of content that the DM wrote for the class would set a limit on how high you can go. Personally I'd prefer to limit them to 1-3 levels. I like the idea better if your base class remains the thing that you really are, and the PrC is just something on top of that. So maybe a general rule that you can't have more levels in your PrC than you do in your regular class.

A PrC could have stringent requirements of stat, class, race, etc. Though you should be careful not to have the player travel all the way to the monastery only to be told, "No, you need 13 Wisdom to join our order, you only have 12."

A PrC could happen due to wholly diegetic reasons - for example you could become a paladin because a priest charges you with a holy mission, and you don't have to expend any character resources on that any more than you'd pay extra to be able to wield a magic sword once you'd acquired it. Or it could be something that costs XP or levels - perhaps it's paid in advance so you get your powers as soon as your training is complete but you don't get anything the next time you level up.
Realistically you would get special training by actually spending time on training, but that's pretty boring unless you're already playing a game with lots of structured downtime.

I guess my vision of how PrCs would work is similar to everything else in FLAILSNAILS in that it's a total wild west; anything goes as long as everyone's having fun. If, on the other hand, you were running a closed-circuit campaign, then PrCs would be much more restricted and would serve to tie your players more closely into the setting.

80 Alternative Class Titles

One of my favourite D&D moments in memory was when one of my players fought and subdued a giant caterpillar. When he asked me, I told him I couldn't see any reason why he shouldn't be able to train the monstrous insect and ride on it. In response he gleefully crossed out the word 'Fighter' on his character sheet and replaced it with 'Caterpillar Knight'.

& in FLAILSNAILS games where character mortality is high, people often don't seem to bother much with putting any unique spin on their character. It's just "I'm a Fighter." And I know that your character is supposed to emerge from play over time, but you could *also* give a little bit of a twist to your guy at 1st level, which seems only fair to him since he's probably going to die soon anyway.

So how's this for a houserule: after you pick what your character class 'really' is, you then have to pick what you will call it. You're allowed to pick any name you like except for the following four: Fighter, Specialist, Magic-User, Cleric.
If you're unsure about what you want your class to be, or you just can't be bothered because you're probably going to die anyway - then roll or choose from the following table:

(d20)	Fighter	Specialist	Magic-User	Cleric
1	Man-at-Arms	Cutpurse	Wizard	Clergyman
2	Barbarian	Assassin	Warlock	Witchfinder
3	Brigand	Con Artist	Pyromancer	Sun Worshipper
4	Huntsman	Tomb Robber	Necromancer	Satanist
5	Crusader	Gambler	Alchemist	Druid
6	Mercenary	Bastard	Prestidigitator	Hermit
7	Monster Hunter	Harlot	Summoner	Monk
8	Swashbuckler	Bard	Illusionist	Preacher
9	Blade Dancer	Dandy	Psion	Shaman
10	Zealot	Urchin	War Mage	Nun
11	Treasure Hunter	Smuggler	Enchantress	War-Priest
12	Duellist	Poisoner	Sorceror	Vampire Hunter
13	Samurai	Cattle Rustler	Scholar	Healer
14	Hoplite	Tinker	Lunatic	Medicine Man
15	Blacksmith	Pirate	Apprentice	Taoist
16	Squire	Burglar	Voodoo-User	Prophet
17	Skald	Forager	Witch	Theologian
18	Refugee	Mummer	Cartomancer	Death-Priest
19	Berserker	Acrobat	Dreamwalker	Gnostic
20	Wild Man	Charlatan Priest	Mystic Chef	Rabbi

Most of these 'classes' should be self-explanatory. For the few that aren't:
A Refugee is a character like the Flame Princess. You were probably just some ordinary peasant until your family/village was destroyed by monsters/soldiers, and since then you've gotten pretty good at fighting because the people who weren't good at fighting are all dead.
A Berserker is not a Barbarian. Duh! A Barbarian is like Conan or Red Sonja, a Berserker is a Viking who froths at the mouth.
A Bastard is just you're a shit. You don't have any particular profession other than treating people terribly.
A Charlatan Priest is a Rogue pretending to be a Cleric.
A Cartomancer is like, you have a deck of tarot cards and you say something like "In your future, all I predict is... *pulls out card* Death." (then you cast Finger of Death.)
A Monk is just a bald guy from a monastery, let's not get into the kung fu angle at this point.

Note: Some of these concepts might require minor mechanical support from your DM. For example, a Pyromancer's Magic Missile will probably be a little fireball, so it should be able to set things on fire. Check with your DM first! (FLAILSNAILS players, remember: you only have to get one DM to agree to it and then all the DMs have to go along with you.)

Note 2: All this is for Lamentations of the Flame Princess but I'm sure you can figure out how to use it for whatever game you're playing.

thinkin' 'bout combat maneuvers

Everybody seems to have a different idea about how to do combat maneuvers in old-school D&D (i.e. tripping, blinding, pushing, etc.). This system is sort of stuck together from a bunch of different sources, but I've tried to make them fit elegantly.

Part 1: Getting Damage Dice
Usually you only roll one damage die. There are three main ways to get more than that:
1. Criticals: If you roll a 20, you roll an extra damage die. But furthermore, you can increase your chance of getting a critical by fighting wildly, but this increases your chance of fumbling as well. So if you want to crit on a 15+, then you will fumble on a 6 or less. If you're desperate or just mental, you can go all the way to crit 11+/fumble 10-.
2. Combat advantage: If you have an advantage over your opponent, such as being uphill of them, or flanking*, or they're entangled by animated intestines or whatever, then you get +2 to hit AND you roll an extra damage die.
3. Stunts: If you just want to do something cool, then that's a stunt. Backflipping off the stairs, tipping over the bookshelf, distracting the enemy by pointing over their shoulder, whatever. Just say what you want to do and then we will make up rules for it. But usually the rule will be that you have to make an ability check, and if you suceed then you get to roll an attack and add one damage die if you hit. If you fail your ability check you can't attack this round, and you might suffer some other consequence as well.

Part 2: Trading Damage Dice
To perform a combat maneuver other than just hitting the enemy, you can trade one damage die for an effect. (You have to do this before you roll the damage dice.)
These effects include, but are not limited to: push back (distance = your move rate); knock prone/trip; disarm; stun for one round; etc.
The following effects cost two damage dice: blind; sunder shield/armour; force morale check (requires you to say a suitably terrifying one-liner); etc.
You still have to narrate what you're doing to cause this effect, and it has to be plausible**. If you say "I trade my combat advantage die for the disarm effect" then you get cheetos thrown at you.

I guess this would make it pretty easy to use combat maneuvers, but I'm cool with that. If every important fight starts out with the players trying to blind and entangle their foes, then that's a good thing, right? Hopefully it won't bog down the minor combats too much, because why bother paying 1d8 damage to trip over a kobold when that's almost certainly going to kill him anyway?
I thought about saying that all these rules are available to Fighters only, but that's probably not necessary.

*Still thinking about how to handle flanking without using miniatures. Probably you aren't allowed to just say "Ok, I walk around the enemy so I'm flanking him now," because the enemy will be actively trying to prevent you from doing that. You can get flanking if you've come around by a different path, or if you come up with some cool way of getting past the enemy (i.e. swinging on a chandelier, which would require a DEX check). You could also get flanking if you greatly outnumbered your opponents, but there would need to be some sort of table for that.

**Adjust plausibility to taste. "You can do it if someone could do it in [real life/Game of Thrones/Conan/Star Wars/House of Flying Daggers/Naruto]."

Batman Points

So let's say you have a villain in your game who you want to be threatening, not because of their physical power (or not just that) but because of their genius intellect and general outwittery. Someone like Batman or Adrian Veidt; or like an ancient scheming dragon or a vicious robber baron. You know the type I'm talking about.

So one way you could create a villain who's super-prepared and ready for anything the PCs can come up with is just to write lots of preparations in advance. "The dragon's lair is booby-trapped here and here; the dragon will always cast dispel illusion on his servants when they enter his sanctum;" etc. until you think you have prepared for everything the PCs might try. But this will take a lot of time and effort.

An alternative that I've been thinking about is to give your villain a number of 'Batman Points' (or whatever else you want to call them.) Basically, by spending a Batman Point, you can retroactively state that the villain has predicted the PCs' plans and engaged some sort of countermeasure. Whatever they've come up with, he's already come up with an answer to it; he's just that good.

There are a few limitations on this ability:

1. The villain can't acquire new abilities, items or resources out of nowhere; all he can do is guess what his enemies are trying to do. So if the PCs are scrying him to learn his evil plans, then you can spend a Batman Point to say "Well too bad, he writes his diary in a code that only he can read." But you can't say "Well too bad, he has an Amulet of Anti-Scrying." (Unless, of course, he is super rich and there's a shop in his city that sells Amulets of Anti-Scrying.)
2.  The villain doesn't gain any knowledge beyond what he already had; he just has a hunch. So in the previous example, he wouldn't suddenly be aware that the PCs are trying to scry him - he just has a vague idea that his enemies might try to scry him, so he's taking precautions against it.
3. The villain's counter can't be overly specific or unbelievable. If the PCs are hiding in a bush beside the road to ambush him, you can say "He orders his guards to investigate each bush in advance" but you can't say "He orders his guards to go straight to the bush you're hiding in and stick their spears into it."
4. The DM has a limited amount of time (let's say one minute) to think of a counter; if you can't, then the Batman Point can't be spent.

How many Batman Points should a villain have? It's hard to say without testing it, but I'd guess not very many. Even a supreme chessmaster like Veidt would probably only have 3-4 Batman Points. And they would regenerate slowly, if at all.

The advantage of this rule would be that you can get that "Oh fuck!" moment like you get in fiction where the heroes realise just how smart their opponent is (in this case, the villain is much smarter than the dungeonmaster who plays him!) It would encourage the PCs to come up with more plans to wear down the enemy's supply of Batman Points, or else to come up with really tight and clever plans so that the DM can't use the Batman Points.

The disadvantage of this rule would be that it might just make the players feel like you've given yourself a license to screw them over, or that their first few gambits don't really matter because they're just used to burn through the Batman Points. (But if their gambits are too lazy, then of course you can choose not to spend a Batman Point and just counter them normally.) I'm not sure how you would communicate this mechanic to the players. You would probably need to explain it before the villain appears, or it would feel unfair. But it's a pretty obscure subsystem that will probably only crop up once or twice in a campaign, so will anyone even remember the rule by the time you get around to using it?

To be clear, I've never actually tested this rule, so I'm not recommending it so much as just putting it out there as a possibility.

one way to run the Wörld of Metal

So if I was going to run a Wörld of Metal campaign... here is one idea for how to do it. This would work pretty well sitting around a tabletop but it is really well-suited to an online Google+ game with a fluid playerbase.

1. One week (or more?) before each session, I pick one of the players at random to be the party leader. If we're on G+ then it's their job to pick a time and assemble whatever other FLAILSNAILS players they can get.
2. In addition, the leader has to choose a metal album that will form the seed for the adventure.
3. If they want, they can also pick which region they want to go to. If not, the region will be the same genre as the adventure seed. (This is mainly so that you can visit the Land of NSBM without actually having to listen to NSBM, because fuck that.)
4. I will write an adventure based on the album. This may involve repeated listens to fully understand the album's lyrical themes or I may just look at the cover and take a good guess.
5. When we start playing, any form of travel is handwaved immediately. If the last session was in the far western isles and the next one is in psuedo-Japan, I will just say "Well, you spend about three years travelling across the continent, having many adventures along the way. No, they don't give you any XP." Think of each session as a different sword & sorcery story; Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard* never felt the need to document every last detail of the characters' travels from one adventure to the other.
6. Of course this structure is flexible. If the adventure takes more than one session to run then the players can stay in the same place. If they start generating their own objectives then they can do that also.

The advantages of this system would be that it would be relatively low-prep, and the prep would come at a steady pace rather than frontloaded. I would try to make the adventures open-ended and interesting, but the fact that the players themselves picked the adventure (in a sense) means they are motivated to engage with it. And the one-session time limit could (maybe) encourage forwardness rather than dithering. I think this system works particularly well for the Wörld of Metal because the setting is very big but it only really works if you get to experience many different parts of it. If the whole campaign was stuck solely in the Land of Death Metal, then it wouldn't be engaging with what makes the setting cool.
The main disadvantage would be that outside the adventure locations, the rest of the world is fairly empty and/or handwavy. The players don't get much choice about which adventure hooks they engage with. On the other hand, the details of the world would get more fleshed out with each session we played.

*Probably. I've never read any of the original Conan stories, so I'm guessing based on the Robert Jordan ones.

Rumours of Its Deadliness Were Greatly Exaggerated... (Part 2)

We played our second session of Tomb of Horrors yesterday. There were a few more deaths than the last session, but overall I still felt a bit disappointed with the module.

At the end of the last session, the players had gotten up to the corridor with the three pit traps behind doors. I came close to killing one of the PCs (again, Ian's halfling Tyreese who took point for virtually every part of the dungeon they explored) but she survived due to player ingenuity. Though Tyreese (formerly male, but transformed by a mysterious archway) did fall into one of the spike pits, Jason's character Cecilia acted quickly to cast feather fall to save her. Tyreese then arrested her fall with an iron spike in the wall, and then leapt off the spike using her boots of striding and springing to escape the pit. This was a great example of the kind of creative thinking I want to see in my AD&D games, but it also highlighted the fact that by the time they reach this high level, the PC spellcasters have a spell to counter just about any problem you can throw at them.

Where does the cool shit come from?

I played a game over G+ with Chris Kusel today, delving solo into his megadungeon The Core. Quite apart from being by myself, it had a different feel to the other FLAILSNAILS games I've played. The Core is very much an old-school dungeon crawl which feels like it must be pretty similar to the games that were played 'back in the day' by the earliest D&Ders. I fought some kobolds, found a secret door, evaded a dart trap and looted some coins from a treasure chest. It was generic D&D, without any of the negative connotations that the word 'generic' usually implies.

In contrast, the other FLAILSNAILS campaigns I've played in all seem to be created by people who for whatever reason have moved beyond the original premises of D&D. They've added an 'and' or a 'but' on the end. Agrivaina is like "There's dungeons and dragons and space aliens and undead armies." Caves of Myrddin and Blight of the Khazars are both (in different ways) a matter of "There's dungeons and dragons but it all fits into real-world history and geography." As someone who's entered the world of old-school D&D through these campaigns, I found it kind of refreshing to go back to the original flavour of dungeoncrawling, which I'd sort of skipped over without ever actually experiencing.

But it also got me thinking about how these different campaigns are constructed, about the cool shit that happens in them. Here's the coolest things I can remember from five different FLAILSNAILS campaigns - see if you can spot a pattern.

Jeff Rients' Caves of Myrddin: Throwing rainbow grenades at medusas; DM ruling on whether a blue cheese golem counts as a fungus monster.
Trent B's New Feierland: A Cleric got traumatically inseminated by a slug; an orc expanded until he was one with the universe.
Ian Burns' Agrivaina: Drinking mutagenic crab's blood; Samson Jones seeing a vision of himself in a satellite(?) firing a laser that blew up the entire campaign setting.
Zzarchov Kowolski's Blight of the Khazars: A giant winged lion being dissected by halfling Huns; insane hordes of adventurers running blindly into a dungeon while a boatload of Jews wisely escape over the horizon.
Chris Kusel's The Core: I put a bunch of fanged worms in a jar to make a worm grenade; I kidnapped a kobold and forced him to lead me to treasure, and he died after opening the trapped treasure chest.

The pattern I'm seeing is: in The Core the coolest things were things that I made up myself, as a player. In the other campaigns, the cool stuff is almost all made up by the DM (although there are some border cases, like Ian made up the mutant crab's blood but it was our own stupid fault for fucking around with it.) So I'm wondering if the other campaigns have a different style of play where the players are more like spectators to the DM's awesome ideas?

I mean, I'm not saying that these campaigns are railroads or the players don't have agency. We definitely always had control over our own destiny, where we went, whether we lived or died... but in those campaigns, there was always so much crazy stuff to see that I think it led to a bit of creative apathy amongst the players, like why bother inventing something cool when the DM has already done it for you? Whereas The Core is more like a blank canvas inviting you to paint your own cool shit all over it.
Both styles are a heap of fun. I'm still thinking about which kind I want to emphasize in my own campaign, if/when it gets off the ground. Would it be possible to strike a balance between the two?

Rumours of Its Deadliness Were Greatly Exaggerated...

Yesterday me and my IRL gaming group decided to play Tomb of Horrors. It was the first time they had ever played AD&D, and the first time I had run it for that matter, but we had some experience of killer dungeons from playing Fourthcore. Somewhat disappointingly, though, the Tomb hasn't so far lived up to its fearsome reputation. After 4 hours of play, I've only managed to kill off one measly hireling. (Compare this to Fourthcore's Crucible of the Gods, where we had two TPKs in the first four rooms.) The following is a play report on the various traps of the dungeon and how they failed to prove deadly.

(Spoilers for Tomb of Horrors after the jump, obviously. If any of my players happen to be reading this, don't go any further until after we've finished the module.)

On Social Combat Mechanics

My opinion of social mechanics, and particularly social combat, has generally been pretty low. Social skills in 4E generally encourage the players to say "I use Diplomacy!" rather than actually talking to NPCs; it also means that whoever has the best CHA skills is treated as the 'face' while all the other characters stand back and say nothing at all. The only time I've tried to run a full-on social combat system was in our abortive attempt at Spirit of the Century: the debate lasted one round and ended when one of the players pulled out a gun and shot his debating opponent in the leg.

I'd previously come to a conclusion that goes something like this: the reason we roll dice in RPGs is to simulate complicated things that we can't actually play out. For example, we don't have the skill, courage or time to actually fight each other with swords in order to resolve a combat round. However, we do have the capacity to play out a discussion or dialogue in full, so why bother simulating it with dice?

However, while playing in Zzarchov Kowalski's Blight of the Khazars campaign, I recently witnessed social combat mechanics giving rise to one of the strangest and most memorable moments I've yet seen in a roleplaying game. The setting was a village by the Red Sea where a dungeon was about to give birth to some sort of Antichrist dragon who was the son of nine (?) evil gods. A bunch of people had been possessed by Bacchus and herded into the dungeon as sacrifices, and our dwindling party was trapped in some sort of infinite maze presided over by Belial, Prince of Lies. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that things were looking pretty grim.

Then, after Belial showed up to speak with us, Ian's character Daerith decided that he wanted to bullshit Belial into thinking that this dragon (of which Belial himself was co-father) was going to destroy the nine gods as soon as it hatched. So away we went with the social combat system. Somehow, after a few rounds of argument, Daerith came out on top! He successfully lied to the motherfuckin' Prince of Lies himself. I think Zzarchov said that Belial needed to roll three consecutive 1s on a d20 in order to fail, and that's exactly what he did. So now Belial has told us how to slay the dragon, and we have a slim hope that the entire world will not be destroyed in the next few sessions.

My point is that if there weren't any mechanics for social combat - if the rule was just to 'roleplay it out' - then Zzarchov would probably have just said "No. It's impossible for you to sell such a preposterous lie to Belial of all people, now let's move on." But the social mechanics actually gave Daerith a small chance to succeed - the task was almost impossible, but not quite. More generally, social mechanics have the virtue of bringing something to the table that's unexpected by everyone. Just as it's interesting to see that the orc warlord randomly fumbled and dropped his sword, it could be similarly engaging when the dice randomly dictate that such-and-such an NPC really hates your guts for no particular reason (or alternatively, so-and-so has just fallen in love with you...)