Consolation Ability Bump

Observation 1: New players often ask if there is any way they can increase their ability scores. Old school dogma states that only magic can do the trick (often, literally through a magical trick feature.)

Observation 2: The visible frustration in old school games when a player rolls 1 on their hit point die at a new level.

Solution:

Well, this works because all my classes roll d6 for hit points with various modifiers. But in a more standard game, it would end up giving benefits to small hit dice types over bigger. YOu can either roll with that as a feature, or try this hack; you gain the ability bonus:

d4: on a roll of 1 ,and 3-6 then rolled on d6:
d6: on a roll of 1
d8: on a roll of 1, or a roll of 2 if 5-6 then rolled on d6.
d10: on a roll of 1, or a roll of 2 if 3-6 then rolled on d6.
d12: on a roll of 1-2.

For monks' starting HP roll, if you're not using "maximum HP at first level" or similar, the stat gain ison a roll of 2 or 3 on 2d4; for rangers, 2 through 4 on 2d8.

Players Align Characters Through Actions

Since I got back into role-playing almost 5 years ago I have never used alignment in a game. It just seems ass-backwards -- writing down a promise to do some abstract things on your sheet, in a vague terminology, and then arguing about whether the specific things you do add up to that vague promise or not. If you're not arguing about your alignment, you're either doing your alignment or ignoring it, either of which is equivalent to what a player does in my games anyway, depending on whether or not they have a clear character concept.

To paraphrase Gygax, "character background is the first three levels" and in the same spirit, alignment is what you do with your character. Player alignment. Not the semi-jokey kind of schemes that lay out how players tend to behave towards each other, the GM and the game structure. One of those appears below.

By now several of these sectors are as mythical as the catoblepas (has anyone ever actually seen a "scenery-chewing thespian" player?) but this will do to illustrate what I am not talking about. I am talking about observations made over the years as to how players, when not constrained by alignment, tend to play their characters. Player-determined alignment is real but, going beyond what I wrote several years ago, it doesn't correspond to any alignment scheme used in D&D or in the most fervid, hair-splitting heartbreaker. It's a characterology all its own, that deserves its own terms, put together in opposing pairs.

Impulsive: The player can't stand boredom and pushes the character to propose reckless plans, start fights, and generally see what they can get away with. Their action will usually account for half the party's failures and half their successes.


Strategic: One kind of leadership role, this player moves very cautiously, often is found physically restraining other characters, and wants time to think things through. Not a rules lawyer, but the most likely to consider the rules as part of the plan.

Exuberant: Another kind of leadership role, the player runs the character as a striding, swaggering bag of charm; not so much reckless as eager to please the crowd with the best move, the best solution. The crowd, by the way, includes the GM.

Quiet: This player may be introverted, unsure, or just enjoys watching the game play out around them. They respond when spoken to, are often asked to run point or guard the rear or cast a spell, but rarely propose anything on their own. There is a lot of middling GMing advice written about trying to draw this player out but I find that acknowledging their existence in small and meaningful ways works best.

Dark: This player, through their character, expects the worst of what's around them, and so feels justified in doing the second-worst. This can take many forms and is not always the stereotypical dark elf assassin, but distrust, avoidance and sneak attack form part of their usual counsel to the rest.

Naive: The player enjoys portraying an overly trusting person, whether a fool or just really kind-hearted, to lighten up the grim, heavy, paranoid world of adventure. They're such a perfect patsy for the usual DM array of sympathy traps that you almost feel bad springing them on such an obvious mark.

Obsessive: What the "thespian" stereotype gets wrong is that real acting is hard, ham acting is self-policing, and usually players who want to play their character to the hilt open up a can of spam based on one obsession, be it food, wealth, combat, sex, religion, or hate. They use it more as a running gag than an excuse for soliloquies. Really, there's enough irony in the water these days that if the room isn't laughing heartily, they'll turn off the shtick real quick.

Eccentric:  Kind of the mirror twin of the obsessive but coming from an opposite place, this character sends out a lot of random signals but there's a difference between playing weirdo and playing impulsive - the impulsive player is trying to accomplish something and sometimes succeeds but the eccentric is just trying to make a style point, like Nerval walking a lobster. Truth be told, though, frame-breaking jokes are so common among everyone that this one's "wacky" in-character pronouncements get mistaken for out-of-character banter half the time. White Wolf did a good job of writing niches for this kind of player into their games.

So with this scheme in mind, there's really no reason to write it on the character sheet, because it's what the player does. But for a GM, rolling a d8 or two to come up with personality elements for an NPC that's easy to play because you have the examples all around you - that's another matter.

Impulsiveness

I'm not sure if I'll get around to recounting the latest misadventure of the Muleteers, but there's a couple of posts to be had reflecting about the last session.

Huizinga, in The Waning of the Middle Ages, calls to attention "The Violent Tenor of Life"; the ease with which harsh and tender passions in alternation were unleashed, the revelling in cruelty. Although controversial as historiography, this description perhaps tells us more about what we moderns seek in the medieval, the archaic, the Renaissance or the Regency or the Wild West, when these are presented as times where life was cheap, morals were loose.


The role-playing game in its imaginative detachment allows the same vicarious pleasure in the impulsive act of grisly consequence. Vicarious? No, the direct pleasure of being able to say "I waste him with my crossbow" and having it happen as easily as saying it; of watching, horrified and grinning, in the mind's eye as a series of critical and fatal hits makes Peckinpah work of the enemy. The pleasure of being such a fearsome character and choosing to exert a brash and self-serving virtue; of hoisting sacks of coppers to urchins, the equivalent of Nino Brown serving up turkeys. The pleasure, even for mild-mannered character players, of being the monk hiding from the Vikings, the Wild West schoolmarm, the scholar who can live a little shady and still look a saint by comparison.

The roleplaying scenario strips away nervous inhibition and allows action as transgressive and pointless as that of the pictured fellow under the terrier crest who is spit-roasting a man for the crime of wearing a rebec on his head. Dealing out violence under these circumstances acquires a palatable irony because these are people long since dead, or better yet, who never could have lived.

One final pleasure, to the player, is finding out the boundaries of the world of action and joy. Does having a handful of hit points above the norm means that world is your arena whose inhabitants are merely bled and bowed bulls for the matador? Or rather, is it a place where crime is abhorred, vengeance is meted, and the arm of punishment is long if not swift?  Hurrah, for the scales are tipped in the favor of the latter option, the morality of the Hays Code, where we see every murder and blasphemy dealt out by the arch-hoodlum before the coppers surround him and fill him full of lead. Because to deal out the rough justice of consequences is the particular pleasure of the gamemaster. And the truly dispassionate gamemaster knows to make the delay or denial of justice, as unlikely as it may seem, a possible adventure in itself, if one of the hardest.

Running 5th Edition

I wanted to introduce D&D to my other brother-in-law's kids (age, 9, 13, and 15 with the latter having played 4th edition before). The best thing for their gaming future was to give them the industry standard experience. So I bit the bullet and downloaded 5th edition Basic, figuring that what with all the conversion resources out there I could lead them to the familiar Citadel of Evil.

They never got there but they had a blast, over two sessions. Below are some of the pro and con features of my experience.

PRO: Character creation is long by old school standards, but the best parts are backgrounds and their associated roleplaying hooks. Backgrounds are great and the implicit idea that splatbooks will focus on them rather than mechanically new classes is genius. Choosing the non-optimal background from the starter set gave two characters some interesting "multiclass" dynamics as an ex-acolyte wizard and an ex-criminal fighter who in action operated more like a combat rogue. It is great to have the mechanical elements pull one way and the roleplaying elements pull another way.

The three starting characters came raring out of creation with reasons to adventure: take back the halfling folk-hero's village while ducking minions of the tyrant; defend the wizard's Zen-like faith against the more military offshoot of the same (literally, a case of Mumon vs. Musashi); find a lost heirloom stolen from the reforming highway robber.

Trinkets are a thing I have used before so they also provided nice hooks, in particular the coincidence of "defend a sacred text" with "diary with seven pages missing" would have been immediate plot fodder in a longer campaign.

Combat, when it came, was very simple and classic-feeling. I ported in some of my "good ideas" like morale rolls, and used Stan Shinn's monster conversion formula for a random stirge encounter and for the climactic battle with the hobgoblins and evil wizard occupying the halfling village. Using this system, 12 hobgoblins and their boss were a very even match for the 3 PCs and handful of halfling refugees, and that only because the kids showed excellent tactical sense, doing a thorough recon, and shooting from high up in trees, by preference at the hobgoblin bowmen. If I had used the 2d8+1 HP, AC 18, +2d6-damage-when-team-fighting ho-gos from the Dragon Queen monster list, the good guys would have been utterly crushed. As it was, two of the PCs and one NPC emerged successfully from the Land of Death Saves.

Knowing how tough monsters actually are in 5th edition, the leveling numbers make a little more sense. The 300 xp needed to get from 1st to 2nd is almost like a 0-level "funnel" now that classic cannon fodder like orcs are best matched to 2nd and 3rd level parties. From there things proceed pretty much as they do in 3rd edition and my own old school rules.

Inspiration I had doubts about, but for these starting roleplayers it was a good, limited and non-intrusive way to have them think about whether their actions in the game reflected their character concept at the end of a session.

Nine-year-old boys have a hard time playing Lawful Good.

CON: My biggest gripe with 5th was the lack of class role differentiation. Spells and special abilities themselves muddle the classes (fighters can self-heal and clerics get a sweet damage spell, for instance), but this doesn't bother me as much. It's more the decision to boil the mechanical class benefits for skills, weapons and equipment down to a proficiency bonus which starts at +2. This means that a rogue isn't much better at lockpicking than a fighter or wizard with a DEX bonus; and in our party, the melee combat beast was the lucky wizard who rolled high stats for STR and DEX as well as INT, meaning he did the best damage with the quarterstaff and, once buffed with Mage Armor, had the highest AC. The Santa-Claus-like handout of ability numbers, "highest of 4d6" plus race, subrace, class and background ability bonuses further tips the balance away from class and toward abilities, so that a +0 bonus was the new -1, and +2 and above was standard.

Being able to cast spells in the face of melee further de-differentiates the classes. We had a two wizard, one fighter party but there was definitely no feeling of "protect the squishy wizards!"

I can see the logic of combat and, as others have said and I found out, it makes for tough experiences. At the same time, the challenge is definitely oriented toward individual fights rather than resource management over a longer haul, due to the healing and spell recovery effects from short and long rests.

But the point is, we had a good time and I feel like I know what I need in order to run this game in a fluid way. I will definitely be getting the Starter Set as a present for the kids ... if I can find a game store that has any in stock, that is ...

Today You Need A Maltese Name Generator

As the action in my Band of Iron campaign promises to shift to the fake-Mediterranean island of fake-Malta

if Malta were brachiated instead of compact and huge instead of tiny and populated by dragons instead of rabbits and the battlefield between three faiths some of which have cannons and some of which have dinosaurs

here is an edited-down version of a list of Maltese surnames I found online. It is perfect for generating slightly off-Mediterranean nomenclature for memorable characters and gadabouts.

Click to generate in a pop-up. Copy and paste the link location for a peek at the table.

Thusly, your next five henchmen can be Medati, Cauchi, Segond, Ciarlo and Xuereb. Fiorentino is already spoken for; taken on for great toughness and a willingness to reconcile his own belief in the Platinum Dragon with his orthodox Militant boss' devotion to St. Gonsalvo.

Demihumans In Hardcore Mode

The basic superiority of demihuman player characters bedeviled the first and second editions of AD&D and haunted later versions of the game. In AD&D you got a raftload of benefits for being an elf or a dwarf - languages, dark vision, special defenses. Also, there were stat bonuses and penalties you could optimize to your class so the bonuses really helped and the penalties didn't hurt, especially with the generous "4d6 drop lowest" method of generating scores.

Simply put, there were few reasons to take a human over an elf magic-user, a human over a dwarf or half-orc fighter, a human over a demi-human thief. Most campaigns wouldn't live long enough to push up against level limits, and multiclassing could soften their sting by packing as many levels as allowed into a more slowly-advancing, super-skilled character. Then there was that other curious drawback of elves, again only really relevant at high levels: the raise dead spell wouldn't work on them because they didn't have souls.

Usually (certainly, in D&D from 2000 on) the solution is to give humans extra skills, feats, ability scores to compensate. But the raise dead peculiarity suggests another solution. Most house rules I know have some way to mitigate death at zero HP, whether it be AD&D's "bleeding out" or the kind of "death and dismemberment" rules I use in my game. Why not have these options available only to humans, or at least give humans a greater chance of surviving at 0 hit points and below?

In effect, the benefits of being a demi-human would be balanced by making them like computer games' hardcore mode, where there are no saves and death is permanent. At the very least, for example, they would bleed out at -5 instead of -10 HP, or suffer a -2 penalty to a 2d6 dismemberment table. Most harshly, they would die at -1 HP, with just the tiniest saving grace at 0.

The setting rationale could go as follows:

• Elves: Have no souls, their spirits once loosed from flesh are quick to return to the great beyond.
• Half-orcs: Likewise a bit light in the soul department. If a DM really is serious about making their social stigma count in the campaign, then they can compensate by giving only 50% of the penalty, and likewise for half-elves.
• Dwarves: Are tough, but when seriously injured, have a tendency to return to the native stone; dead dwarves turn to stone statues and can be stone-fleshed back to a point where healing can work for a little while.
• Gnomes and halflings: Have really sweet afterlives full of rollercoasters and second breakfast, and don't bother sticking around in this vale of tears.
• Humans: Are uncertain about their final destination, so cling tenaciously to life against the odds.

Really, if you play by-the-book AD&D, PCs have to be handed huge amounts of loot in order to level up, so buying raise dead spells eventually fulfils a safety-net niche similar to death and dismemberment - a risk you take with the system shock roll, but by no means the automatic end of the character. In that case, the elf drawback starts kicking in around third level or so when it becomes economically feasible to buy clerical services. But my new idea is more in line with how a lot of new-old-school DMs run games, and extends to all the demihuman races.

52 Baroque Character Backgrounds

This time, the random finger of fate has decreed that the Character Background and Languages page get the Baroque treatment. I suppose if you play that "Dungeon Crawl Classics" game, these might also be useful as backgrounds for your little pit-fodder avatars. As always roll d100, in half, rounded up, and use 51 or 52 to replace a dull or inappropriate outcome.

Turning the Fantasy Party to Superheroes

We now pause our discussion of coolness in D&D for a word from our Joesky sponsor.

In the fantasy adventuring party, some of them fight and others have spells.

In the superhero party, everyone fights and everyone has one "spell."

(Except Batman.)

(And Doctor Strange.)

Superknight by John Staub.

This suggests a "medieval mutants" campaign using the standard rules of your D&D-oid system, but there are no clerics or wizards. Instead, everyone is a fighter or thief (or a scholar, with stats as a wizard and gaining experience twice as quickly).

All PCs and major villains get a mutant power that is a (d6: 1-3, cleric, 4-6, wizard) spell, level determined by the minimum of 2d6. You get an additional, thematically related spell at every odd level. If the power's level is:

Greater than twice your level: Using it knocks you out for 1 hour.
Greater than your level: You can only use it once a day.
Equal to your level: You can use it twice per day.
Lower than your level: You can use it three times a day
Lower than half your level: You can use it at will.

Also, this looks good for a psionics system in a standard fantasy campaign, with an appropriate XP tax on the lucky psionicist.

Magic Items: You Are Your Stuff

Recently playing a little of the "roguelike" computer game Brogue, I was struck by one aspect of its stripped-down design. You are guiding a character through a dungeon, but the character has no variable stats, no levels, no class, no race, not even a name. The powers of this adventurer derive entirely from the items found in the dungeon - magic items to wear and wield, potions that increase strength and health permanently.
.

He's a bro. He's a rogue.

This brings up loot-based enhancements in a tabletop game. Players' characters can get more powerful and specialized in three ways: through automatic level-ups in the rules; through choices they make in leveling their character (feats, options, spell choices and the like); and through loot, spells and enhancement found in adventuring. While the first two are in the player's hands, the last factor is the GM's responsibility. 

At the same time, especially if you're running a stripped-down system where class choices are few and customization options limited, AND if you put a lot of special flavor into your magic items, the items can end up helping define the character - a dwarf with boots of leaping and a +2 shortsword/dagger combo; a priest with a necklace of lightning bolts; a henchman fighter who prefers a pole arm with a purple worm tooth blade.

So, not just power but fun gets placed in the GM's hands. Let's just dismiss entirely the notion, from later D&D editions, that item gain should be programmed and expected, level by level, as part of a "build." The essence of my old school approach is presenting a world that isn't always built around the saga of the PCs. But some technique needs to apply to these choices. It's one of the most difficult balancing acts in the game.

I suggest an average - not a guarantee - of one permanent and two expendable items per every three character levels of advancement, for each character. This should not be a sure thing for the players or the GM, either, and I find it's better to let magical treasure come up semi-randomly or as a result of other people's modules you use (with appropriate pruning) than to put yourself in charge of rationing out the players' fun. In practice, I've tended to stick to these limits, plus buyable "special" items, but if anything being a little stingy on the expendable stuff.

Is it too much of a coincidence that most roguelike games - including Brogue - go for approximately equal ratios of the three classic item categories: potions, scrolls and permanents (armor, weapons, rings, wands)? That is, a 2:1 ratio of expendable to permanent items?

Who Brings New Player Characters? The Plot-Copter Does

The usual way to integrate a new player-character into the party is some "hail fellow well met" cut scene at Ye Olde Tavern. But what happens if the party is on long-range recon and there isn't a tavern for miles?

Well, you can always be hardcore and require them to return to civilization before the new player can start. But that frustrates everyone.

Taking a cue from picaresque literature, I prefer the meeting to be on-site, and covered by the barest fig leaf of plausibility. There's always room in a fantastic universe for the party to meet up with a fellow "solo adventurer" in the ruins, or to encounter a wanderer from even stranger spaces and times who was placed in temporal stasis or thrust through a gate. A strange origin can itself be a plot hook for the new player.

In my campaign there have been three character introductions, none of them in a tavern. For the first, I took the character through a mini-game detailing his travels from south to north, before joining him to a caravan that the party had been hired to guard. For the second, two players had to be introduced, so I had it that the one (hermit) met the other (merchant agent), who had been hired by the party's current employer to follow the party, joining it if necessary, in order to make sure they were carrying out the duty they had been hired to do.

Most recently, a rogue and her wizardly henchwoman were introduced to the party in the middle of a coastal maze of cliffs and rocks. Having been shipwrecked, the new players had been huddling in a cave until the party showed up. Conveniently, this cave was a good parking place for the hermit character to go on a retreat, because her player was going to be away over the summer; another, less common real-world occurrence where an in-game solution needs to be thought up.

Regardless, I always also the new player with words such as "You take an instant liking to her for some reason" or "You all feel you can trust each other and move on." Yes, in reality, these kinds of wilderness meetings would be hedged round with suspicion, and any NPC met under those circumstances would be treated very differently.

But there's no getting around it; the players know that the new player wants to get along and become part of the band. Better to acknowledge that immediately and move on, rather than give the impression that the game is about setting the players against each other. If there's any jarring incongruity about the meeting, it will quickly be forgotten as the players create new memories of fun and adventure together.

Hermits of Renown

The holy lands of the Inviolacy have attracted and encouraged a roster of religious eccentrics. Abandoning comfort and hygiene, they dispense wisdom from sylvan retreats. Here are three of the most notable.

THE DENDRITE

Renouncing his name, this venerable fellow set to climb the most secluded oak in the park of the bustling city of Schiecchi. He has been there so many years that he could not leave if he wanted, because his beard has become entangled in the leaves and branches of the tree; his garment is simply this self-same beard, augmented by dead leaves and acorns. Birds and squirrels bring his meager provender. He is a beloved treasure of the town, and especially valued when the affairs so often consummated in the leafy lanes of the park bring unwanted complications.

Advises the laity on: Practical matters, the lovelorn, the casting off of passions.
Weakness: Greatly craves any verbal description of food and drink.

THE TWO HERMITS

Reasoning that solitude is an even more meaningful devotion when practiced in the company of another, these two men - alias "Destra" and "Sinistra" - decided to join forces, sharing the same cavern two miles outside the metropolis of Fanguillia, but refusing to acknowledge each other's existence. They receive visitors in a glade, where they sit on opposite sides of the same stump. Their devotion is reinforced by the braiding together of their beards, which have reached a prodigious length.

A small devotional industry has sprung up around the Two Hermits; pilgrims must pay 2 silver pieces in the chapel of St. Sylvain in the Fanguillia cathedral for an oak leaf badge for the journey, then a consulting fee of 5 silver on arrival, and a further fee of 2 silver to replace their oak leaf with the twig rood indicating successful pilgrimage. Furthermore, a great variety of refreshments, religious figurines, medallions, scapulars, unguents, lamps, candles and candelabra are on sale from a spacious shack outside their grove. Based on these proceeds, their forms avoid any suggestion of haggardness, and their garments, while plain, are never shabby.

Advise the laity on: Visions suggesting what to do next, especially for those who feel they have missed something obvious, with a touch of homespun pragmatism (Destra) or tough love (Sinestra).
Weakness: They have grown to hate each other and will not pass up the opportunity to make some pointed comment, which the other must pretend not to hear.

TITHONUS, THE FORMER ORNAMENT

The Duke of Santilena, having enclosed and ornamented a spacious pleasure garden with flora, wildlife, and picturesque ruins brought in from every corner of the Middle Sea, found lacking from this romantic idyll only a wise old hermit. Being more comfortable with the mystique of faith than its uncomfortable restrictions, he advertised around the town for a desperate young man of the laity who would be contracted to grow out beard and nails, dwell in a hut on the premises, and offer pithy aphorisms to visitors. The cleverest of the applicants, one Neppo, was hired on the spot and took the holy name Tithonus.

This ornamental hermit, however, came to inhabit his role so seriously that he underwent a religious conversion. Subtly tinging his advice with barbed remarks about the Duke's dissolute ways, Tithonus eventually forced a confrontation, from which he emerged victorious. The Duke bequeathed the estate and duchy to Tithonus, and went on a penitent's pilgrimage to the Axis Mundi, from which he never returned.

Tithonus now rules the Duchy in sobriety, chastity, and benevolence, although most of his day is spent in conference with bailiffs and administrators. He has hired the wastrel youngest son of a declining line as an ornamental Duke, to dwell in the palace, excite gossip, and in general furnish the bad example that Tithonus' sermons need.

Advises the laity on: Matters requiring justice and discretion.
Weakness: Is losing his connection to the Almighty with so much hustle and bustle around; feels the need to get away for a while.

Tiny Competences

It started when the Band of Iron tried to snap the bard's ghost off the path of regret by singing one of his songs to him.

So the question came up for each of the characters - can they sing?

From twistedtwee

Singing, dancing, playing an instrument, riding, swimming, whistling ... Let's call these kinds of abilities competences. I find them tricky to handle because ...

• They don't easily fit into a given ability score or skill. Someone who's a great athlete could still have never learned how to swim. Someone who's a great singer may not know how to whistle.
• They don't work as skills that the characters can invest in, because many if not most people in the setting can do these things at some basic level; some people are hopeless at it, or never learned; and some people are naturally great at it. The distribution is two-tailed with a fat middle; it's not something like lockpicking where most people are bad and only a few are trained.

A comprehensive game system would have a list of several dozen skills already on each character sheet, with each of these competences represented. It's not likely any of these characters would put "points" into singing, so they would all be treated as fairly inept at the task. But this is not really satisfactory, even if we were playing that kind of complicated game. Some people are just naturally good at singing, others are not.

Another kind of solution, more compatible with the rules-light old-school ethos, is to key singing ability to the closest available stat, in this case Charisma, and roll an off-the-cuff check. But something about this solution also doesn't satisfy. It assumes that someone who is a great singer will also be a great leader and vice versa, but these things don't always go together.

In play, when the party's singing ability was called for, I just had them each roll d6 and note the result on their sheet:

1 = hopeless at it
2 = not good
3-4 = average
5 = good at it
6 = great at it

This system then got used in actual play to determine further uses of competences such as whistling (don't ask) and riding.

More recently, I've produced a character sheet with a list of short words, using an even simpler system. For each competence, you roll the die, circle the word if you got a "6" - meaning you're especially good - and X it out if you got a "1" - meaning you're especially bad.

So far, the list is: Ride, Swim, Sing, Dance, Play (instrument), Gamble. In practice, some of the competences do relate to ability scores if people are trying to do something exceptional or contested, but mostly it's a case of whether or not people can do the activity at a basic level.

Any more ideas for the list?

The B Team Can Relieve Your Campaign

A couple of recent gaming developments have made me really appreciate the practice of keeping up more than one set of characters in any long-term gaming group.

Part of my recent travels involved returning to the Cafe 28 on New York's 5th Avenue where some of the Red Box NYC games take place. Investigating, I found that a Glantri game was taking place the night before I took off back home, so I showed up to a table packed full of Erics (no, seriously, there were 4 Erics out of 7 guys at table).

One of these Erics was blogger "the Mule," who'd been present at my previous foray, and another was the GM. He ran a B/X game mostly by rules as written with some nice touches - no duplicate spell memorizing, declaring only spells and withdrawal from combat before the initiative roll. The players had maps of Eric's megadungeon from three years of continuous play, spanning five levels and hundreds of rooms. This "Chateau D'Amberville" is based on Castle Amber in the sense that The Lord of the Rings is based on the Elder Edda. It was truly a great glimpse into the potential of the format.

As it turned out, my newly rolled wizard character - Raz, son of Taz - was adventuring that evening with a B-list party consisting of players' secondary characters, mostly level 5 and 6. This explained the nonchalance when two of them got double-level drained, in merciless old school style, by some unexpected spectres, which we quickly fled from. I admired the good spirits of these players, who were evidently playing in a very free-wheeling table with drop-in party composition and multiple characters.

On returning home I unleashed the lead-in to an episode I'd been brooding over all January - a climax adventure that could take place in one session, and would cap off the plot of the "Faerie war" arc they'd been following since the summer. Today I learned the limits of plot-heavy climax adventures ... when one of the players called in sick and we realized that we just couldn't play on in this adventure without her.

So we decided to form a B-Team with the existing group, rolling up new characters and embarking ad-hoc on an adventure. The A team (Band of Iron) had started in the Valley of Milk and Cheese where I had also placed Jeff Sparks' Labyrinth Lord adventure Wheel of Evil, purchased but never engaged with, an appropriately cheese-themed adventure. And so, the new group started in the uneasy town of Renneton, got a good way into the cheese caves, and everyone seemed to enjoy the change of perspective and freedom from the burdensome importance of actions in the by now year-long main campaign.

Perhaps this is what most campaigns need past a certain point - a way to deal with missing or guest players, to blow off steam, and get the kind of fast-and-loose play that comes with an adventure rather than story focus.

Mad Men Story Lessons

My wife and I are currently deep into season 2 of Mad Men. Apart from its amazing period detail we're finding it to be a very deep and fascinating show. Nothing could be further from Dungeons and Dragons than Mad Men's Papers and Paychecks. And yet in commentary on a Mad Men blog I ran across an insight that made me feel tons better about the way I run my game.

They report an interview with series creator Matt Weiner where he says:

There’s a mystery being unraveled and pieces are not connected and sometimes they are. Some things go nowhere. If there wasn’t stuff that went nowhere, you wouldn’t be excited about the things that go somewhere. When you’re telling a story where you don’t want people to know the end it’s very important that you keep them on their toes.

Later on, one of the blog owners, Roberta Lipp, posts this comment:

This ain’t Harry Potter. Like Harry Potter (sorry, it’s all I had), everything is carefully planted. But unlike it, not everything is some seed for the future. And not knowing which is which does create incredible tension.

This removes my last possible regret about running a campaign where events get improvised week to week and sometimes at the actual table. Once a writer or DM gets serious about running a mature, multilayered game - call it the "Second Edition of the mind" - there is a temptation to take it too far in the scripted direction, and make everything have a point and a purpose. But then you get a life that looks like a story, rather than a story that more realistically is a thread running through life.

Here's how the mind works: it takes the chaos of right now and imposes order on it, connects the dots and tells a Rorschach story. The more things recede into the past, the more the story gets smoothed out. Dream researcher J. Allan Hobson found that people awoken in the middle of REM sleep, when they actually dream, give very incoherent reports. The smoother if still surreal stories we tell to psychiatrists and friends are the product of processing in non-REM sleep and waking life.

Although loose ends can get edited out of memory, their existence can also create suspense, as Weiner reveals. Working in the non-interactive form of TV, Weiner's loose ends can illustrate character points or something about the world. Our medium as gamemasters, though, requires players' active collaboration.

So, maybe we can say that a gaming session becomes relevant to the larger picture the more it holds opportunities for the players to define their characters and to find out about the world. All that's needed are a few overarching structures - the kind provided by the Law vs. Chaos conflict, for example - that doom-laden events and prophecies without a plan can hang from.

This Is the Story of a Thing That Is Not a Story

Here's the difference between an immersive game and a story:

The persons in a story don't know they are in a story.  The persons reading it do.

So the person playing an immersive game shouldn't be aware of a story structure to his or her experience, either. The player should be focused on the play within the world, not consciously waiting for the big twist, the climax moment, or any of the other screenwriting-class crutches. ("Hey, GM, is this the part where they invade my safe space?")

Just like the experience of playing a tactical miniatures game, i've found the experience of playing a "story game" with mechanics aimed directly at narrative elements can be enjoyable, but is ultimately somewhat "cool" in all senses of the word. It sticks a critical, self-aware distance between the players and the characters. Perhaps this is what some people want ... but to me it comes off a tad insecure.

Embrace character identification! It's our hobby's dark, dorky secret. Hell, I'll even let you wear elf ears to the table if that helps.

These thoughts have come up as I preside over the wrapping up of our Tomb of the Iron God game. Instead of a big, climactic mastermind fight, there have been a number of tense moments, revealing areas, and epic battles, and the party is currently debating how many loose ends to tie up in the dungeon before moving on. C'mon ... you know you want to fight the Eater of the Dead ...

The Order of St. Hermas

So here are details on the secret society/level titles/ advancement costs hybrid I proposed earlier.

Click to enlarge

This will certainly work best if the Society is the only reliable source for all these goods and services, which adventurers in laxer worlds have come to rely upon as their birthright. Henchmen can be obtained elsewhere, but may not be loyal or brave in the heat of the moment, and may shun a boss under whom too many have failed to return. Banking and treasure identification can certainly be presented as precarious enterprises in a savage world. Clerics, prophets, or whoever do not usually offer their services for a fee.

The four branches are identified with the four iconic classes of D&D but can also substitute for their absence in a party. It is reasonable for a wizard to join the Sword path wanting henchmen as bodyguards, or for a cleric to serve as the party's money handler, joining the Pentacles.

Can you spot the third idea from AD&D this draws on? Yep, alignment language.

More on St. Hermas here.

Like A (Stumbling) Thief in the Dark

So this weekend I kicked off a new campaign using Matt Finch's Tomb of the Iron God as the starting adventure. Last year it was recommended to me and it definitely delivered on the old school funhouse-plus-meaningful exploration front. My players are fellow psychology students and researchers, seasoned online gamers all.

No wall sconces down here...

Because of the tactical mindset, one issue came up during play that I'd like some feedback on. My wife played a rogue character, as she'd been wanting to do ever since the RPG bug hit our household. But in practice, a rogue/thief/whatever under the Basic D&D or OD&D dispensation is very limited as a dungeon scout explorer. With race-as-class, a human thief can have no infravision, and sneaking around a dungeon with a shiny light is not very practical.

Of course, in race-plus-class systems like AD&D this is one big reason to take a nonhuman thief (plus all the racial skill bonuses) and in thiefless systems like true OD&D it's a non-issue.

So, have any players or DMs come up with creative solutions to let the thief-type take point in a dark, dark dungeon?

A Quickstart Idea, and Troll in the Hole

Another Mad Archmage Saturday at the gaming society, augmented by three potential players for a new campaign, including my wife (why does she always roll up magic-users?) I wanted them to get used to the system and my GMing ways before committing to something lengthier.

With the mixture of new and returning players the pressure to streamline character generation was greater than before. Say what you will about pre-THACO systems where the GM controls the attack and saving matrices, running that way means that character generation is lightning fast, with only abilities, classes, spells and equipment to determine. I skipped the saving throw step in character generation, and indeed, none of the new characters needed to make a save. I think in future, I'll skip the determination of most of the secondary bonuses and stats until they're actually called for, bring character generation closer to 15 than 30 minutes.

Followers: Your PCs are Adventurers

Followers - henchmen and hirelings - represent the sort of people who would follow a rootless adventurer into danger, and the limits on them in the One Page system reflect this.

One principle I'm following is that player characters have the class of "adventurer" modifying their role as a fighter, wizard, priest or whatever. NPCs are not playing by the same rules as PCs; they don't get experience the same way, shouldn't develop a raft of hit points on the basis of 30 years of scholarly research, may have skills and talents that adventurers never have the time to develop. So, I ended up limiting PC background skills so that adventurers don't become the craft mavens, alchemy brewers, and whatnot of other systems. You are adventurers, you pay other people to do that. If you were brought up as a beekeeper you might be able to get a discount on beeswax, but you're a failed beekeeper so your time is not best spent running a hive.

Likewise, when it comes to leading small armies around at 2nd character level, you won't really get a horde of hundreds following you unless you're backed up by some larger assurances. Maybe you're a captain in a governmental army, or the son of a duke. Maybe you're a bandit leader who started out as a rootless adventurer, with only a few henchmen and hirelings, but your successes, and your ability to offer a steady and relatively risk-free living, attracted more and more men.

The nuts and bolts of recruiting will be covered in the One Page village and town supplements. I see those as a way to codify some of the generic assumptions of what you can get in small and large campaign settlements.

Character Birth: Choice vs. Speed

Count me on the side of quick with a few choices rather than slow with a lot of choices, when it comes to generating characters for adventure games.

My One Page system cuts out an element of choice - not without some controversy as I recall -  by having class determined directly by stats which can, if necessary, be switched around once. It works choice back in, though in a relatively light way, by allowing open-ended selection of background descriptors that can have some effect on when skills work best.

Oh yeah, I changed the skills sheet some so that languages and backgrounds could fit in.  I am pretty happy now with the way backgrounds are a kind of "adjective" or "subject" that modify the base chance that the very generic skill gives you. You only get to use Knowledge to remember facts that are part of your background, and if you try using most skills in a setting or task consistent with your background you get a +2 on that (these are indicated on the new version of the character sheet, below).

I've noticed recently, though, that character generation with this system tends to bog down around skill and equipment selection.

The solution for equipment is to have random tables for weapons and standard starting armor, and to pass around a deck of cards with the six equipment packages so that the party as a whole is adequately equipped for their first expedition. That's for a future post ...

The solution for skills was simple. As I had it, players were "choosing" only a pip or two of skills to shift around their character sheet. So why not just have skills also flow from class and stats - keeping in mind that the flavor and scope of each skill in my system is modified by the freely chosen background descriptors ...

Anyway, this is what's going on the end of this sheet now.

At this point I'm a little overwhelmed by the multi-ring circus I've got going on in my free time, what with the One Page system ( a little stalled out, as I got done what I needed to run a few games with it, so the impulse to complete is kind of dormant for now ), the Genre Worlds tables, Zak giving the high sign for the Obstacles & Openings cards, and even more, including some contributions to other people's product and a big slow secret project. It will all come complete in the fullness of time, I guess.