It's been a while since I played these, but since my computer died I would have to re-dowload them all to refresh my memory about them and I don't have the energy right now. So take my comments as what stuck in the mind of a casual player.
The Forest
The forest is a survival horror crafting game, which seems an odd mix of genres to begin with. I'm not experienced with survival horror at all, but I thought the point was to always feel out of your depth, uneasy, unsafe. While crafting games tend to be about mastery and slowly gaining control over an area.
The island you are on isn't infinite and the world is not a voxel world. You can build structures and permanently chop down trees. Food and water is a concern and tribes of hostiles.
There was a moment when a band of these cannibalistic weirdoids found me, were walking up slowly and checking me out, that I felt some real fear. That was cool. But being killed by them, didn't kill me, it put me in some cave of theirs that I had to escape. So the second time it happened it felt more like an annoyance.
So, you are trapped between what seemed to be several bands of these hostiles and you are meant to build a little settlement with racks to organize your sticks and gardens to grow vegetables? Didn't feel right.
A small annoyance was that, while there are plenty of alcohol bottles to drink from and craft Molotov cocktails from, you can't store water in them. Which means you have to walk and immerse yourself in a pool to drink. And thirst was off in that if I remember you could start taking damage after one day of not drinking water.
This is the game from this list that I played least. But if you are a fan of survival horror, maybe it will be more interesting to you.
Savage Lands
This is intended to be a metal, hardcore, barbarian vision of survival where you have to worry about starving, freezing, and getting killed by wolves and monsters at every turn. The monsters aren't quite as thick as the zombies of 7 Days to Die, but you'll have to fight them over and over to get needed crafting resources.
This is not an infinite world, in fact it is actually a set island map which appears to grow in difficulty as you travel inward. You can build structures, but not change the landscape otherwise. You use up ores you mine from rocks, I don't know if they eventually respawn.
One of the ways the game makes things difficult is to strictly limit your inventory. Everything you build needs sticks and rocks and logs and you can barely carry anything.
Another common way to increase difficulty in a crafting game is to add wear to items. Which is fine, unless you get the balance off. I made a pair of leather boots in this game that wore out before I could get the required materials to make another pair.
A third, obvious, way to increase difficulty is to increase the amount of items a crafting recipe requires or the difficulty of acquiring the items. Probably the moment I lost interest was when I saw the crafting recipe for all the clothing required logs! So, they want you to feel a sense of accomplishment when you have finally managed to craft enough bags and backpacks that would allow you to even carry the ingredients to make your leather armor, but requiring 25 logs to make a set of clothes seemed so absurd it threw me right out of the game.
I've always been more of an explorer, interested in seeing not only what's in the world but what's possible in that world, so survival games that are more about balancing on a knife edge of luck and anxious, perfect strategy lose my interest pretty quickly. If you are the kind of player that loves the Dark Souls games you might like Savage Lands.
Showing posts with label Meta Ideas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Meta Ideas. Show all posts
Monday, May 4, 2015
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
8 Recent Open World Video Games II
I think I'll talk about two similar games in this post: Salt and Stranded Deep. Stranded Deep is basically a Castaway simulator with relatively realistic graphics of islands and sea life. Salt is a more cartoonish island-exploring game where your main enemy is the pirates that pepper various islands.
But both involve gather rocks and sticks, crafting tools, acquiring food, and exploring infinite islands. These games focus more on the exploration part of a sandbox game than some of the others on my list, and island hopping is a really good way to do that.
Salt
I think the strong point of Salt is that the islands you find can be quite different. Some have pirate encampments, some ancient ruins. I found an ancient altar once, and have found merchants that traded with me and gave me a simple quest. I've hunted black deer at sunset and had a few terrifying nights fighting spiders by torchlight.
While you can build better boats as you get more materials and the books that teach you how to build them, one thing I found myself craving was the ability to make a change in the world-- to build a house or somehow make an island mine. But the world is not a voxel world, and when I last played the only things you could build on land where a campfire and a flag.
The worst thing about Salt for me was the poor quality of the art work for the pirates and the item icons in the UI. I realize the game is still in development and that you might want to put some placeholder artwork in a game you are making, but if your main enemy is going to be pirates I think you need to find artist to make you a better representation, even if a cartoony one. The item icons are small and cartoony and I would often have a hard time distinguishing them.
Stranded Deep
It is really cool to be able to dive into a shipwreck and find random loot in them. After a while you know all the possible items you can find in this game, but more items could be added- the point is that this setup scratches a fundamental exploration/scavenging itch I have. It's also neat to be paddling along and see a marlin, a sea turtle, or a great white shark. There are whales and sea urchins and sting rays too.
One of the things that get's frustrating is dealing with your limited inventory. I think this is another common way some of these 8 games try to make themselves more difficult and more "realistic" than minecraft by limiting how much you can carry. But when you have to go from island to island with sharks trying to bump you off your shaky raft carrying your precious bundle of sticks, rocks, and palm fronds, it can get irritating. I wonder why I can't make a raft of logs and then break it up at another island, or at least tie a bundle of fronds or sticks to my raft.
Another thing that bugged me was the way the game renders distant islands. Islands in your peripheral vision zoom closer and then zoom back out when you look directly at them. It makes it quite disorienting when trying to judge which island is closest and which you were trying to reach before the sharks attacked you and you lost your line of sight.
But I'd say the most disappointing thing is the homogeneity of the islands. Yes, they have interesting assortments of wrecks around them, but once you've seen one of the islands you've seen them all. The game really needs some islands that are bigger, with hills, waterfalls, and caves. The latest update to the game introduced Sea Forts and I've heard they might be trying to add caves, so that's cool.
But both involve gather rocks and sticks, crafting tools, acquiring food, and exploring infinite islands. These games focus more on the exploration part of a sandbox game than some of the others on my list, and island hopping is a really good way to do that.
Salt
I think the strong point of Salt is that the islands you find can be quite different. Some have pirate encampments, some ancient ruins. I found an ancient altar once, and have found merchants that traded with me and gave me a simple quest. I've hunted black deer at sunset and had a few terrifying nights fighting spiders by torchlight.
While you can build better boats as you get more materials and the books that teach you how to build them, one thing I found myself craving was the ability to make a change in the world-- to build a house or somehow make an island mine. But the world is not a voxel world, and when I last played the only things you could build on land where a campfire and a flag.
The worst thing about Salt for me was the poor quality of the art work for the pirates and the item icons in the UI. I realize the game is still in development and that you might want to put some placeholder artwork in a game you are making, but if your main enemy is going to be pirates I think you need to find artist to make you a better representation, even if a cartoony one. The item icons are small and cartoony and I would often have a hard time distinguishing them.
Stranded Deep
It is really cool to be able to dive into a shipwreck and find random loot in them. After a while you know all the possible items you can find in this game, but more items could be added- the point is that this setup scratches a fundamental exploration/scavenging itch I have. It's also neat to be paddling along and see a marlin, a sea turtle, or a great white shark. There are whales and sea urchins and sting rays too.
One of the things that get's frustrating is dealing with your limited inventory. I think this is another common way some of these 8 games try to make themselves more difficult and more "realistic" than minecraft by limiting how much you can carry. But when you have to go from island to island with sharks trying to bump you off your shaky raft carrying your precious bundle of sticks, rocks, and palm fronds, it can get irritating. I wonder why I can't make a raft of logs and then break it up at another island, or at least tie a bundle of fronds or sticks to my raft.
Another thing that bugged me was the way the game renders distant islands. Islands in your peripheral vision zoom closer and then zoom back out when you look directly at them. It makes it quite disorienting when trying to judge which island is closest and which you were trying to reach before the sharks attacked you and you lost your line of sight.
But I'd say the most disappointing thing is the homogeneity of the islands. Yes, they have interesting assortments of wrecks around them, but once you've seen one of the islands you've seen them all. The game really needs some islands that are bigger, with hills, waterfalls, and caves. The latest update to the game introduced Sea Forts and I've heard they might be trying to add caves, so that's cool.
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
8 Recent Open World Video Games
I've spend a lot of time exploring single-player video game worlds. I wanted to reflect a bit on what I've experienced in the last few months. Of course most of these are early access, but from my experience that doesn't mean a game will change significantly once they once they remove that label.
Minecraft
Not one of the 8 and obviously not new, but the benchmark. If you want a tenuous connection for this series to pen and paper gaming, Minecraft is the D&D of open world games and the rest on this list are fantasy heartbreakers. Which, actually is a pretty good fit because I think most of these games are trying to fix one of two traits of Minecraft -- making the world less cartoony and making survival more difficult.
7-Days to Die
Set in something like a post-apocalyptic Arizona, you scavenge, gather resources and try to survive. It's a voxel based world, so you can dig up every block. It touts its building physics which requires building with adequate support to prevent structural collapses (unlike Minecraft's floating blocks).
It's fun to go through the modern buildings looting, but there are way too many zombies for me. I think this might be because it's aimed at multiplayer, so they expect you to have help. Ammo is limited, weapons wear out and do less and less damage as they do, gathering and cooking meat brings more zombies down on you. But worse, for a game that includes building, it undermines any kind of building you do. You can't prevent zombie spawns in an area, so walls are useless. Zombies will dig at anything in front of them, so ditches or moats will just mean they eventually end up digging up through your floor. Worst of all, the dead flesh hands of zombies can break through anything given enough time, even reinforced concrete. In my play-throughs the only viable strategy has been to build an underground bunker, which is kind of boring.
I finally got frustrated and turned zombies off completely, which turned out to be a lot of fun. It felt oddly peaceful being the last person on earth. I was quite surprised, then, when I came back from a short break to find out I'd been killed. Apparently the zombie sieges are coded separately from normal spawns and there is no way to turn them off.. Hah, how's that for hardcore, you get monsters even when you specifically turn off monsters.
So anyway, this heartbreaker succeeds in being more realistic than minecraft, but over-does it on the difficulty aspect. Unless you enjoy killing infinite zombies forever and living in a hole, it will lose it's shine quickly.
The other 7
I'll talk about these in future posts:
Salt
Stranded Deep
The Forest
Savage Lands
the Long Dark
Subnautica
Space/Medieval Engineers
Minecraft
Not one of the 8 and obviously not new, but the benchmark. If you want a tenuous connection for this series to pen and paper gaming, Minecraft is the D&D of open world games and the rest on this list are fantasy heartbreakers. Which, actually is a pretty good fit because I think most of these games are trying to fix one of two traits of Minecraft -- making the world less cartoony and making survival more difficult.
7-Days to Die
Set in something like a post-apocalyptic Arizona, you scavenge, gather resources and try to survive. It's a voxel based world, so you can dig up every block. It touts its building physics which requires building with adequate support to prevent structural collapses (unlike Minecraft's floating blocks).
It's fun to go through the modern buildings looting, but there are way too many zombies for me. I think this might be because it's aimed at multiplayer, so they expect you to have help. Ammo is limited, weapons wear out and do less and less damage as they do, gathering and cooking meat brings more zombies down on you. But worse, for a game that includes building, it undermines any kind of building you do. You can't prevent zombie spawns in an area, so walls are useless. Zombies will dig at anything in front of them, so ditches or moats will just mean they eventually end up digging up through your floor. Worst of all, the dead flesh hands of zombies can break through anything given enough time, even reinforced concrete. In my play-throughs the only viable strategy has been to build an underground bunker, which is kind of boring.
I finally got frustrated and turned zombies off completely, which turned out to be a lot of fun. It felt oddly peaceful being the last person on earth. I was quite surprised, then, when I came back from a short break to find out I'd been killed. Apparently the zombie sieges are coded separately from normal spawns and there is no way to turn them off.. Hah, how's that for hardcore, you get monsters even when you specifically turn off monsters.
So anyway, this heartbreaker succeeds in being more realistic than minecraft, but over-does it on the difficulty aspect. Unless you enjoy killing infinite zombies forever and living in a hole, it will lose it's shine quickly.
The other 7
I'll talk about these in future posts:
Salt
Stranded Deep
The Forest
Savage Lands
the Long Dark
Subnautica
Space/Medieval Engineers
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
30 Magic Treasures Revised
I planned to do a quick follow up to my last post with a list of 30 consumable magic treasures, but I only came up with about 15 that I considered high enough quality. So instead I'll give a few revisions for that last list.
Curses
First of all, I realized that the burdensome blade is, in fact, only detrimental- a cursed item. So I revised it to be:
Burdensome Blade – Each day the blade draws no blood it becomes heavier to bear but more likely to land a blow.
That means a player getting that will have to make a choice of having the sword around, managing its blood needs or just tossing it. It did make me think about why I didn't want anything cursed. I suppose at the most basic, I'm trying to think of things that would be fun to find and that players would want to seek out and feel happy to find.
I don't really see the place for bags of devouring and such that just make the players hesitate to experiment with items. If I were to use cursed items I think I would try to make sure they were a bit amusing. As an example, my Torc of Trammel (which almost made the list) was fun for a player to roleplay the time it came up in my campaign.
Treasures for All
Some other observations. I really like the idea of the Parchment Sash but didn't include it because I'm trying to make these treasures usable by almost any character. Although the shields and swords are pretty fighter-centric now that I think of it. I guess that is the difficulty of class restrictions and magical rewards. I suppose I could have things like the Burdensome Blade be so magical that they morph into the favored weapon type of the holder. Staff, dagger, or sword, if it is gaining weight everyday, you'll still need to make a choice.
3 Substitutions
I removed Godith's Gauge because it seems to vague, and the two I mentioned as being great to put in a dungeon - Branwalather's bridge and Clement's Docent - for that very reason, because they feel more like dungeon tricks or features than a personal item a character would want to carry around.
I added these instead:
Marvelous Folding Coracle – Saying the magical word will cause this small packet of willow bark to unfold into a circular vessel large enough for one person.
Ranulph’s Veil – A cage locked over the character's head with a muzzle built in. Wearing it makes them invisible and undetectable but mute and they must have someone unlock them to get the veil off.
Wolf Pelt – When a player drapes this over their shoulders they become a wolf.
I think the first and last are pretty evidently going to be useful at times and give players tools to use. The middle one, like Anan's Veil, also on the list is just a ring of invisibility with big restrictions.
I'm going to try and make the chart with these revisions a pdf in the future.
Curses
First of all, I realized that the burdensome blade is, in fact, only detrimental- a cursed item. So I revised it to be:
Burdensome Blade – Each day the blade draws no blood it becomes heavier to bear but more likely to land a blow.
That means a player getting that will have to make a choice of having the sword around, managing its blood needs or just tossing it. It did make me think about why I didn't want anything cursed. I suppose at the most basic, I'm trying to think of things that would be fun to find and that players would want to seek out and feel happy to find.
I don't really see the place for bags of devouring and such that just make the players hesitate to experiment with items. If I were to use cursed items I think I would try to make sure they were a bit amusing. As an example, my Torc of Trammel (which almost made the list) was fun for a player to roleplay the time it came up in my campaign.
Treasures for All
Some other observations. I really like the idea of the Parchment Sash but didn't include it because I'm trying to make these treasures usable by almost any character. Although the shields and swords are pretty fighter-centric now that I think of it. I guess that is the difficulty of class restrictions and magical rewards. I suppose I could have things like the Burdensome Blade be so magical that they morph into the favored weapon type of the holder. Staff, dagger, or sword, if it is gaining weight everyday, you'll still need to make a choice.
3 Substitutions
I removed Godith's Gauge because it seems to vague, and the two I mentioned as being great to put in a dungeon - Branwalather's bridge and Clement's Docent - for that very reason, because they feel more like dungeon tricks or features than a personal item a character would want to carry around.
I added these instead:
Marvelous Folding Coracle – Saying the magical word will cause this small packet of willow bark to unfold into a circular vessel large enough for one person.
Ranulph’s Veil – A cage locked over the character's head with a muzzle built in. Wearing it makes them invisible and undetectable but mute and they must have someone unlock them to get the veil off.
Wolf Pelt – When a player drapes this over their shoulders they become a wolf.
I think the first and last are pretty evidently going to be useful at times and give players tools to use. The middle one, like Anan's Veil, also on the list is just a ring of invisibility with big restrictions.
I'm going to try and make the chart with these revisions a pdf in the future.
Sunday, July 6, 2014
Tools not Rules
I get it, it's interesting to see what the new standard guidelines for D&D will be, especially because 4e was such an outlier. But as far as I'm concerned a different set of standardized guidelines for play is not what I need. And I'm not talking here about having perfectly good older standardized guidelines for D&D.
Are you really concerned that you track ammunition like the DM across town? Or that your players are leveling at the same pace as everyone else at the game store? I doubt it.
I'm guessing the kind of things coming out in the new rule books are the things you are probably very familiar with: classes, xp charts, spell lists. I think of these as the "What" of D&D: "What armor can a wizard wear? What can I do to get my hit points back? What do I need to hit?" They often lead to binary questions: "Can I climb up the wall and onto the ceiling?" "Can I use a sword in each hand?" They are about what is allowed. They seem to be defensive to prevent player creativity from "taking advantage."
I'm much more interested in the "How" of D&D, doing things new or puzzling to me. And I think WotC could still make money selling tools that help with these "Hows." I think a good example is the monster manual. Instead of worrying so much that goblins are the same from campaign to campaign, give me some tools to make my own creatures. But maybe a better example of what I mean by "Tool" is to recount a bit of my session fom Friday night.
Friday Night in Ulminster
My players are in a city. One of them happens to be able to see the future. How the heck do you handle that? Well I made a chart. I let her roll on it each session and we (mostly I) interpret the results. This time someone beloved would be destroyed by sacrifice. Interesting, because she has a great grandfather in the city. How did I know that? Well, I had her roll on this table earlier. So, I said" "You see your great grandfather on a table surrounded by people and they are ceremoniously putting something serpentine down his throat, killing him." So she decided to visit great granpappy. And now I wonder what he's up to, or what he might have to say to her? How do I determine that off the top of my head? We go back to the dramarama table, I have her roll the other three columns, but this time I let her pick the entry rolled or those above or below it (a great technique I learned from ZakS). We find out he is in love but wants her to kill the women. Interesting. Why? Well, if we tie it back to her vision it would be neat and help me out, so I decided she was involved with a cult that my player saw in the vision. But how do I "play" great granpappy? What is his personality? Oh, I've got a table I made for that. I roll and find out he is missing teeth and has a great abundance of . . . talkativeness. Haha, and thus began a goofy monologue, by me, relaying his love for this woman and how she has to die anyway.
Later in the evening the players were at a bear-baiting. How do you do something like that? Cock fights, dog fights? Well I suppose you could run them like regular combat with initiative and everything, but I came up with a simple method of my own. Another player just got rich betting on the bear. And he intends to use that money at an auction of several barges worth or fireworks. An auction, how do you do that? Umm, I think I'm going to come up with interested parties, write their goals and money on index cards and let my other players roleplay them in the auction. But I'm not sure yet.
__________________________________________________________________________
So that's four tools right there, that I feel I needed to get me through that session and one I need to devise for next time.
I suppose other DMs might consider improvving these details an expectation of being a DM. Or maybe other DMs figure you are supposed to prep all that detail on your own ahead of time. But my guess is that there are a lot of folks out there like me that could use tools to help them run D&D. And I don't see many people selling that (Vornheim is one I know of, giving you a tool for dealing with players searching a library, for example).
I suppose the things in the rulebooks might be tools for folks that are having trouble with different things than me. So, an explanation of skill checks, for example, helps a newer DM know what to do when a player wants to run across a wet log over a stream, or something. But for those mechanical questions we have stats and dice and you can use the two to figure it out. It isn't like there's some optimal solution game designers are trying to suss out like the Higgs boson.
I think I realize now that most of the tools I mention are about generating things on the fly. But not all, auctions, searching libraries, foretelling the future are more prickly problems and not just crutches for DMs with poor improv skills. Anyway, I wish our hobby and the industry attached to it would spend less time worried about standard rules and more time coming up with cool new tools that help me run my game.
Are you really concerned that you track ammunition like the DM across town? Or that your players are leveling at the same pace as everyone else at the game store? I doubt it.
I'm guessing the kind of things coming out in the new rule books are the things you are probably very familiar with: classes, xp charts, spell lists. I think of these as the "What" of D&D: "What armor can a wizard wear? What can I do to get my hit points back? What do I need to hit?" They often lead to binary questions: "Can I climb up the wall and onto the ceiling?" "Can I use a sword in each hand?" They are about what is allowed. They seem to be defensive to prevent player creativity from "taking advantage."
I'm much more interested in the "How" of D&D, doing things new or puzzling to me. And I think WotC could still make money selling tools that help with these "Hows." I think a good example is the monster manual. Instead of worrying so much that goblins are the same from campaign to campaign, give me some tools to make my own creatures. But maybe a better example of what I mean by "Tool" is to recount a bit of my session fom Friday night.
Friday Night in Ulminster
My players are in a city. One of them happens to be able to see the future. How the heck do you handle that? Well I made a chart. I let her roll on it each session and we (mostly I) interpret the results. This time someone beloved would be destroyed by sacrifice. Interesting, because she has a great grandfather in the city. How did I know that? Well, I had her roll on this table earlier. So, I said" "You see your great grandfather on a table surrounded by people and they are ceremoniously putting something serpentine down his throat, killing him." So she decided to visit great granpappy. And now I wonder what he's up to, or what he might have to say to her? How do I determine that off the top of my head? We go back to the dramarama table, I have her roll the other three columns, but this time I let her pick the entry rolled or those above or below it (a great technique I learned from ZakS). We find out he is in love but wants her to kill the women. Interesting. Why? Well, if we tie it back to her vision it would be neat and help me out, so I decided she was involved with a cult that my player saw in the vision. But how do I "play" great granpappy? What is his personality? Oh, I've got a table I made for that. I roll and find out he is missing teeth and has a great abundance of . . . talkativeness. Haha, and thus began a goofy monologue, by me, relaying his love for this woman and how she has to die anyway.
Later in the evening the players were at a bear-baiting. How do you do something like that? Cock fights, dog fights? Well I suppose you could run them like regular combat with initiative and everything, but I came up with a simple method of my own. Another player just got rich betting on the bear. And he intends to use that money at an auction of several barges worth or fireworks. An auction, how do you do that? Umm, I think I'm going to come up with interested parties, write their goals and money on index cards and let my other players roleplay them in the auction. But I'm not sure yet.
__________________________________________________________________________
So that's four tools right there, that I feel I needed to get me through that session and one I need to devise for next time.
I suppose other DMs might consider improvving these details an expectation of being a DM. Or maybe other DMs figure you are supposed to prep all that detail on your own ahead of time. But my guess is that there are a lot of folks out there like me that could use tools to help them run D&D. And I don't see many people selling that (Vornheim is one I know of, giving you a tool for dealing with players searching a library, for example).
I suppose the things in the rulebooks might be tools for folks that are having trouble with different things than me. So, an explanation of skill checks, for example, helps a newer DM know what to do when a player wants to run across a wet log over a stream, or something. But for those mechanical questions we have stats and dice and you can use the two to figure it out. It isn't like there's some optimal solution game designers are trying to suss out like the Higgs boson.
I think I realize now that most of the tools I mention are about generating things on the fly. But not all, auctions, searching libraries, foretelling the future are more prickly problems and not just crutches for DMs with poor improv skills. Anyway, I wish our hobby and the industry attached to it would spend less time worried about standard rules and more time coming up with cool new tools that help me run my game.
Monday, March 25, 2013
My OSR
It's been almost four years since I started this blog and began to take part in the excitement of what we came to call the Old School Renaissance. It seems that the community has already coalesced around a narrative of what the OSR was. The story that will probably be told in thirty years is something like this:
In 2000 Wizards of the Coast created the Open Game License which several years later allowed folks like Matthew Finch, Daniel Proctor, and Stuart Marshall to create clones of old Dungeons & Dragons rules systems that were no longer being published. These retroclones were unexpectedly popular and led to a flourishing of amateur and independent products designed for the older systems. In 2012 WotC began selling reprints of first edition D&D hardbacks and 2013 made many of the old TSR products available as pdfs and discussion of the upcoming D&D release, D&D Next, indicated that some old school sensibilities were taken into account when developing the rules. The OSR had succeeded! A community of enthusiasts bridged the drought of old system availability and re-introduced a whole new generation of gamers to the fun of old school style play.
That's not my OSR.
My OSR goes something like this: After a multi-year break from the game, I was hungry to play again and ready to try and find some fellow players. About that time I stumbled on to the Swords & Wizardy retroclone. I don't remember how, to be honest, but it was probably articles on the death of Gygax leading me to the Grognardia blog and then a larger search of D&D online. My initial excitement was based on a misunderstanding. You see, I missed out on the 3rd edition branch of D&D entirely, so when I saw some of the changes made to D&D in Swords & Wizardry I saw them as awesome revisions. I didn't know that ascending armor class and a simplified saving throw were backported by Mr. Finch because of copyright infringement worries. I thought he came up with those as house rules and included them because it made the game better.
To me, the retroclone as a clone, allowing for playing the old systems, was kind of a silly idea since I had multiple copies of most the old D&Ds. I'd seen them for years like flotsam on thrift store shelves. No, to me the retroclone was a license to embrace the old rules while revising them. Not nostalgia, but innovation. Not carefully filling the gaps of a corporate product line but reinvigorating the idea that I could do it myself.
Well, not by myself exactly. The real thrill of the OSR, and it sure as hell seemed like this was shared by a lot of other bloggers at the time, was a conversation between a lot of makers about what they were making and why. I had been thinking about the game on my own for almost thirty years and almost every blog I checked had cool approaches and ideas I'd never had a glimmer of a thought of. So my OSR was the best combination of the permission to do my own thing and a community of people sharing and helping each other.
Back to the accepted history. I think the reason you see some arguments in the community about whether the OSR includes just D&D or other games from the old days is because this complicates the narrative. I know there were blog posts about Tunnels & Trolls and Traveler back when I started, but those games had never gone away so they don't fit the story of the OSR as a bridge. It's true that most conversation circled around D&Ds, but there were whole series of posts about Fantasy Wargaming and Warhammer Fantasy and porting some of their ideas back into those D&Ds. If you focus on the fact that the emphasis was on D&D in the OSR because you think it was the product we all wanted and couldn't buy, you are misunderstanding that it was just the dominant dialect in a wide ranging conversation about role playing. We were looking everywhere for ideas with merit.
Another common discussion is whether there are too many clones. Again, this is based on the assumption that the service that was needed was to fill in for the lack of published older games. And once you have a viable stand-in why would you need another? But Vornheim should be the beautiful burr under that saddle. It isn't cloning anything. It isn't even a system. And surely everyone agrees Vornheim came out of the OSR. What about Carcosa? What about Lamentations of the Flame Princess? It is certainly a system, but it just as certainly isn't cloning an old D&D. Even if you limit your view of the highly polished, published products of the OSR they don't really fit the common narrative.
I guess the reason I wanted to make this post is that, while sure, there is truth in the story of the retroclones providing old school gamers with the game they loved when WotC wouldn't, it leaves out a lot of the best of what happened. The open minded review of the old ways, the crazy innovation, the sharing, the punk rock ethos (we jammed econo!), was also the OSR.
But I also realized that these narratives are the result of people thinking about roleplaying much the way people think about writing.
Process vs. Products
In my day job I try to help people become better writers. In that field there is the concept of Process vs. Products. I'll spare you most the details, but the basic idea is that if you focus too much on the texts you're writing, you make it very hard to become better as a writer. The most obvious reason is that if you write an unsatisfying text the way to make it more satisfying is probably not located in the particular sentences of that draft. You really need to push the draft aside and explore the possibilities, the assumptions, the questions that aren't in that draft. I don't know if this is because of Western Culture, a legacy of traditional teaching, or the fact that products are far easier to evaluate than how they were made, but all anyone ever sees are products. I see this same thing with the OSR.
If you find someone talking about the OSR, its impact, its value, its achievements, invariably they will focus on published products like stepping stones across a stream. The exciting thing about Secret Santicore was not making stuff for others or the surprise of what someone would make for you, it was the awesome pdf at the end of the process. The awesome thing about Petty Gods is not riffing on an old school product, the bunches of kooky gods many different people come up with, or even the cool way the illustrators interpret these. No, it is the book that will eventually be published. And if the book is not published all those drawings, all those ideas, may as well have never existed.
But I'm not writing this just to lament the fact that people think of this all too commercially (Secret Santicore was free after all). Product here doesn't mean something for sale so much as an object or artifact. So many times on G+ I've seen someone pose a question that goes something like: "I want to run a game that is more Swords and Planet than Swords and Sorcery. What system would be good for that?" or "I want to have a post-apocalyptic game with a strong element of survival horror, what system would be good for that?" This assumes there are discreet systems that would fulfill every odd niche of a game a DM wanted to play. And even if someone comes up with a decent answer to this question it assumes that's the best anyone can do. (People that ask "What makes for a good swords and planet game?" are framing it more in terms of process.)
When folks proudly advertise what system they're playing it always seems odd to me because the system I'm playing has drifted so far from where I started, it is hard to call it anything. And to call it Telecanter's D&D wouldn't even be right because I make changes to it after almost every session. My "system" is better thought of as my goals for a night of D&D and how I go about trying to do that. Rules are just part of the equation.
And when people announce they are playing DCC or Tunnels & Trolls 2nd edition, or whatever, I always wonder, if I observed them DM, how much they would be bringing to the table from their own experience of gaming over the years? How much of the "system" was all the things they'd had to figure out about making rulings, and improvving, and time management, and so on, but nowhere in the rule book?
I'm not saying System Doesn't Matter, because I think that is often ham-handedly used to justify that rules have no effect on play. I'm saying you shouldn't be talking about systems as if they were cooked dishes, things that no one can change. I'm saying that a large part of my OSR was realizing that "Hey, all these D&Ds do a really crappy job of handling wilderness travel" and not only feeling okay about telling people about it, but feeling empowered to fix it myself. I didn't need to hunt for a system that had solved the problem or wait in breathless anticipation to see if D&D Next would do a better job of it. I could do my best to fix it myself the way I thought Matt Finch had fixed descending armor class.
And isn't that what Vornheim was? Zak saying "Hey all these D&Ds are crappy at running city adventures" and then doing his best to provide his solutions?
The OSR was more than a bunch of objects. It was a feeling of power. It was a license to create. It was a conversation. It was about examining our beliefs and revising them. It was messy and recursive. There was no end goal.
So, anyone writing about the history of the OSR that talks about Vornheim in terms of numbers sold or quality of printing — anyone who writes about the OSR as a timeline of products or systems like OSRIC or ACKs, — anyone who insists on framing discussion of the OSR in terms of WotC and decisions they made about what they would offer for sale, is missing, if not the real story, at least the whole story of the OSR.
They'll be missing my OSR.
In 2000 Wizards of the Coast created the Open Game License which several years later allowed folks like Matthew Finch, Daniel Proctor, and Stuart Marshall to create clones of old Dungeons & Dragons rules systems that were no longer being published. These retroclones were unexpectedly popular and led to a flourishing of amateur and independent products designed for the older systems. In 2012 WotC began selling reprints of first edition D&D hardbacks and 2013 made many of the old TSR products available as pdfs and discussion of the upcoming D&D release, D&D Next, indicated that some old school sensibilities were taken into account when developing the rules. The OSR had succeeded! A community of enthusiasts bridged the drought of old system availability and re-introduced a whole new generation of gamers to the fun of old school style play.
That's not my OSR.
 |
| The accepted history |
My OSR goes something like this: After a multi-year break from the game, I was hungry to play again and ready to try and find some fellow players. About that time I stumbled on to the Swords & Wizardy retroclone. I don't remember how, to be honest, but it was probably articles on the death of Gygax leading me to the Grognardia blog and then a larger search of D&D online. My initial excitement was based on a misunderstanding. You see, I missed out on the 3rd edition branch of D&D entirely, so when I saw some of the changes made to D&D in Swords & Wizardry I saw them as awesome revisions. I didn't know that ascending armor class and a simplified saving throw were backported by Mr. Finch because of copyright infringement worries. I thought he came up with those as house rules and included them because it made the game better.
To me, the retroclone as a clone, allowing for playing the old systems, was kind of a silly idea since I had multiple copies of most the old D&Ds. I'd seen them for years like flotsam on thrift store shelves. No, to me the retroclone was a license to embrace the old rules while revising them. Not nostalgia, but innovation. Not carefully filling the gaps of a corporate product line but reinvigorating the idea that I could do it myself.
Well, not by myself exactly. The real thrill of the OSR, and it sure as hell seemed like this was shared by a lot of other bloggers at the time, was a conversation between a lot of makers about what they were making and why. I had been thinking about the game on my own for almost thirty years and almost every blog I checked had cool approaches and ideas I'd never had a glimmer of a thought of. So my OSR was the best combination of the permission to do my own thing and a community of people sharing and helping each other.
Back to the accepted history. I think the reason you see some arguments in the community about whether the OSR includes just D&D or other games from the old days is because this complicates the narrative. I know there were blog posts about Tunnels & Trolls and Traveler back when I started, but those games had never gone away so they don't fit the story of the OSR as a bridge. It's true that most conversation circled around D&Ds, but there were whole series of posts about Fantasy Wargaming and Warhammer Fantasy and porting some of their ideas back into those D&Ds. If you focus on the fact that the emphasis was on D&D in the OSR because you think it was the product we all wanted and couldn't buy, you are misunderstanding that it was just the dominant dialect in a wide ranging conversation about role playing. We were looking everywhere for ideas with merit.
Another common discussion is whether there are too many clones. Again, this is based on the assumption that the service that was needed was to fill in for the lack of published older games. And once you have a viable stand-in why would you need another? But Vornheim should be the beautiful burr under that saddle. It isn't cloning anything. It isn't even a system. And surely everyone agrees Vornheim came out of the OSR. What about Carcosa? What about Lamentations of the Flame Princess? It is certainly a system, but it just as certainly isn't cloning an old D&D. Even if you limit your view of the highly polished, published products of the OSR they don't really fit the common narrative.
I guess the reason I wanted to make this post is that, while sure, there is truth in the story of the retroclones providing old school gamers with the game they loved when WotC wouldn't, it leaves out a lot of the best of what happened. The open minded review of the old ways, the crazy innovation, the sharing, the punk rock ethos (we jammed econo!), was also the OSR.
But I also realized that these narratives are the result of people thinking about roleplaying much the way people think about writing.
Process vs. Products
In my day job I try to help people become better writers. In that field there is the concept of Process vs. Products. I'll spare you most the details, but the basic idea is that if you focus too much on the texts you're writing, you make it very hard to become better as a writer. The most obvious reason is that if you write an unsatisfying text the way to make it more satisfying is probably not located in the particular sentences of that draft. You really need to push the draft aside and explore the possibilities, the assumptions, the questions that aren't in that draft. I don't know if this is because of Western Culture, a legacy of traditional teaching, or the fact that products are far easier to evaluate than how they were made, but all anyone ever sees are products. I see this same thing with the OSR.
If you find someone talking about the OSR, its impact, its value, its achievements, invariably they will focus on published products like stepping stones across a stream. The exciting thing about Secret Santicore was not making stuff for others or the surprise of what someone would make for you, it was the awesome pdf at the end of the process. The awesome thing about Petty Gods is not riffing on an old school product, the bunches of kooky gods many different people come up with, or even the cool way the illustrators interpret these. No, it is the book that will eventually be published. And if the book is not published all those drawings, all those ideas, may as well have never existed.
But I'm not writing this just to lament the fact that people think of this all too commercially (Secret Santicore was free after all). Product here doesn't mean something for sale so much as an object or artifact. So many times on G+ I've seen someone pose a question that goes something like: "I want to run a game that is more Swords and Planet than Swords and Sorcery. What system would be good for that?" or "I want to have a post-apocalyptic game with a strong element of survival horror, what system would be good for that?" This assumes there are discreet systems that would fulfill every odd niche of a game a DM wanted to play. And even if someone comes up with a decent answer to this question it assumes that's the best anyone can do. (People that ask "What makes for a good swords and planet game?" are framing it more in terms of process.)
When folks proudly advertise what system they're playing it always seems odd to me because the system I'm playing has drifted so far from where I started, it is hard to call it anything. And to call it Telecanter's D&D wouldn't even be right because I make changes to it after almost every session. My "system" is better thought of as my goals for a night of D&D and how I go about trying to do that. Rules are just part of the equation.
And when people announce they are playing DCC or Tunnels & Trolls 2nd edition, or whatever, I always wonder, if I observed them DM, how much they would be bringing to the table from their own experience of gaming over the years? How much of the "system" was all the things they'd had to figure out about making rulings, and improvving, and time management, and so on, but nowhere in the rule book?
I'm not saying System Doesn't Matter, because I think that is often ham-handedly used to justify that rules have no effect on play. I'm saying you shouldn't be talking about systems as if they were cooked dishes, things that no one can change. I'm saying that a large part of my OSR was realizing that "Hey, all these D&Ds do a really crappy job of handling wilderness travel" and not only feeling okay about telling people about it, but feeling empowered to fix it myself. I didn't need to hunt for a system that had solved the problem or wait in breathless anticipation to see if D&D Next would do a better job of it. I could do my best to fix it myself the way I thought Matt Finch had fixed descending armor class.
And isn't that what Vornheim was? Zak saying "Hey all these D&Ds are crappy at running city adventures" and then doing his best to provide his solutions?
The OSR was more than a bunch of objects. It was a feeling of power. It was a license to create. It was a conversation. It was about examining our beliefs and revising them. It was messy and recursive. There was no end goal.
So, anyone writing about the history of the OSR that talks about Vornheim in terms of numbers sold or quality of printing — anyone who writes about the OSR as a timeline of products or systems like OSRIC or ACKs, — anyone who insists on framing discussion of the OSR in terms of WotC and decisions they made about what they would offer for sale, is missing, if not the real story, at least the whole story of the OSR.
They'll be missing my OSR.
Monday, March 4, 2013
Pass-It-On Modules
Saw this post on Reddit about people passing on Minecraft maps. Basically one person plays it at a time and then saves it and gives it up for another person to take a turn. I thought it could be fun to try that with D&D modules. Rather than one person playing you start with a dungeon, have a DM run a party through it, record all the marks they leave and pass it on.
Now that I've written that, I remember people doing the same thing with Dwarf Fortress to hilarious results. (See the saga of Boatmurdered).
I know that an open-table megadungeon or Flailsnails campaign is already pretty close to this. But the DM's time and resources are still a bottleneck. With a Pass-it-On module, as long as there's a central location where it's hosted anyone could pick up the latest version and run with it. (I suppose there might be some technical difficulty with preventing simultaneous turn-taking or enforcing time limits).
It would be cool if each DM would submit a concise post-play summary when they re-post it. Not long narratives, but "party went left here, lost cleric to the trap" type affairs so there is a bit of context for the next DM to read up before running. You'd need to provide lists of the gear left on player corpses and explanations of non-standard magic item mechanics as well.
I wonder if this would quickly result in a wasteland devoid of life or treasure? Seems like tricks, or toy-like dungeon features that can't be moved or used up would work well. Maybe a slightly higher level would work so that parties coming in bring some of their own magic items and treasure, and some of them die leaving it behind. Maybe there could be 3-4 factions surrounding this area and players can never fully eradicate them just shift the balance enough that now one faction is ascendant, now the next.
Another thought that comes to me, is that both examples above involve building things so the map constantly has human-made additions. That might be more analogous to DMs collaboratively making a dungeon by adding chambers and features. But that doesn't seem as new an idea in D&D to me. I think I've heard of people doing that. But what if you could incorporate building into the dungeon by players?
Maybe a location on another plane or completely underground that requires work to secure food, safe lodging, or relatively safe travel from one area to another. Hmm, has anyone done much with building in dungeons by players? How long or difficult is it to block off an area with a brick wall, put in a sturdy door and lock, or build a bridge across a chasm? That might be shifting the game a bit from post-apocalyptic exploration to settling in at the old megadungeon, but could be interesting.
Now that I've written that, I remember people doing the same thing with Dwarf Fortress to hilarious results. (See the saga of Boatmurdered).
I know that an open-table megadungeon or Flailsnails campaign is already pretty close to this. But the DM's time and resources are still a bottleneck. With a Pass-it-On module, as long as there's a central location where it's hosted anyone could pick up the latest version and run with it. (I suppose there might be some technical difficulty with preventing simultaneous turn-taking or enforcing time limits).
It would be cool if each DM would submit a concise post-play summary when they re-post it. Not long narratives, but "party went left here, lost cleric to the trap" type affairs so there is a bit of context for the next DM to read up before running. You'd need to provide lists of the gear left on player corpses and explanations of non-standard magic item mechanics as well.
I wonder if this would quickly result in a wasteland devoid of life or treasure? Seems like tricks, or toy-like dungeon features that can't be moved or used up would work well. Maybe a slightly higher level would work so that parties coming in bring some of their own magic items and treasure, and some of them die leaving it behind. Maybe there could be 3-4 factions surrounding this area and players can never fully eradicate them just shift the balance enough that now one faction is ascendant, now the next.
Another thought that comes to me, is that both examples above involve building things so the map constantly has human-made additions. That might be more analogous to DMs collaboratively making a dungeon by adding chambers and features. But that doesn't seem as new an idea in D&D to me. I think I've heard of people doing that. But what if you could incorporate building into the dungeon by players?
Maybe a location on another plane or completely underground that requires work to secure food, safe lodging, or relatively safe travel from one area to another. Hmm, has anyone done much with building in dungeons by players? How long or difficult is it to block off an area with a brick wall, put in a sturdy door and lock, or build a bridge across a chasm? That might be shifting the game a bit from post-apocalyptic exploration to settling in at the old megadungeon, but could be interesting.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Secret Doors
Secret Doors in a Dungeon:
- might be the ultimate exploration payoff, the exact kind of mysterious feature you were hoping to find when you set off into the unknown.
- are simple machines that still function (unless they don't).
- are the dungeon feature that has the most story built in; someone was doing something they wanted to hide.
- are an important part of the genre trappings.
- might assume players will make several visits to that dungeon and thus have more chance of finding them.
- might assume that dungeon has intelligent factions that can use them as an advantage against a party and help tip off their existence.
- can be a shortcut that makes travel between two spots in a dungeon faster and easier.
- can lead to hidden rooms with treasure items that may never be found.
- can act as "pinch points" that will open up whole new areas of a dungeon once found.
- require thought and effort by the DM to create and place and might never be found.
- are probably the best example of the difficulty of negotiating player vs character skill (well, along with traps).
- might assume a more adversarial DMing style that is trying to challenge clever, persistent players.
- might assume a search of the dungeon 10' by 10' by 10' by 10' section, and a particularly slow and laborious progress through the dungeon.
- might assume players are making detailed maps.
- might assume more experienced players that have been introduced to all these ideas.
- Design a dungeon as I normally would and then roll randomly to determine which of the doors are actually secret, and then see how that changes the place.
- Make a table of secrets people would want to keep hidden and think about how those might affect the shape / function / location of a secret door.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Every Secret Door a Trap
As a fourth level DM one of the things I still haven't mastered is relaying details to players from the abstract imagined world. What I mean is, anything I mention specifically is assumed to be important because I mentioned it. If I'm not careful an offhand detail for atmosphere will set players on long, goose-chase searches. Or, on the other hand, an actual important trigger is easy as pie to find, because, well, again, it had to be mentioned.
This isn't a problem for me with traps because I try to make traps visible anyway. But it relegates secret doors to either easy finds (if I have a specific trigger designed) or impossible finds (search every section of wall you suspect and roll to see if you find something).
I'd love to hear how other DM's negotiate this difficulty, but in the mean time I figured out a kludge of a fix. Make every secret door also a trap if triggered incorrectly.
That way you can have your "There is a moosehead mounted on the wall here" type triggers but players that turn it the wrong way can run into trouble. I'd want the trouble telegraphed the same way I do normal traps-- bloodstains, bones, body parts. And that would mean the existence or (approximate) location of secret doors would not, in fact, be secret any more, but how to pass through them would be.
But then, if you have traps peppered about a dungeon, a trapped secret door might not be obvious. Players seeing it might assume it's just another trap and avoid it altogether. And only normal things that tip off secret doors ("hey, there's a blank spot on the map here!") would send them back to re-check it.
Anyway, here's an example of what I had in mind: a square room has a mosaic running hip-high around all its walls. Each wall has underwater scenes with mermaids, shipwrecks and a single giant clam with a pearl in it. There is a bit of bloody cloth jammed into the crack between floor and wall. Pushing one of the pearls will 1) open a a pit trap below the whole room 2) open a dummy secret door to a dead-end hallway and shut the door behind you in 5 rounds 3) nothing 4) open the real secret door.
I guess that might be more of what people call a "trick," and it certainly makes more work for the DM to put in than a plain vanilla secret door, but it's another possible approach.
This isn't a problem for me with traps because I try to make traps visible anyway. But it relegates secret doors to either easy finds (if I have a specific trigger designed) or impossible finds (search every section of wall you suspect and roll to see if you find something).
I'd love to hear how other DM's negotiate this difficulty, but in the mean time I figured out a kludge of a fix. Make every secret door also a trap if triggered incorrectly.
That way you can have your "There is a moosehead mounted on the wall here" type triggers but players that turn it the wrong way can run into trouble. I'd want the trouble telegraphed the same way I do normal traps-- bloodstains, bones, body parts. And that would mean the existence or (approximate) location of secret doors would not, in fact, be secret any more, but how to pass through them would be.
But then, if you have traps peppered about a dungeon, a trapped secret door might not be obvious. Players seeing it might assume it's just another trap and avoid it altogether. And only normal things that tip off secret doors ("hey, there's a blank spot on the map here!") would send them back to re-check it.
Anyway, here's an example of what I had in mind: a square room has a mosaic running hip-high around all its walls. Each wall has underwater scenes with mermaids, shipwrecks and a single giant clam with a pearl in it. There is a bit of bloody cloth jammed into the crack between floor and wall. Pushing one of the pearls will 1) open a a pit trap below the whole room 2) open a dummy secret door to a dead-end hallway and shut the door behind you in 5 rounds 3) nothing 4) open the real secret door.
I guess that might be more of what people call a "trick," and it certainly makes more work for the DM to put in than a plain vanilla secret door, but it's another possible approach.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Anecdote
One of my employees excitedly shared with me that she had tried roleplaying for the first time.
They all know I'm into D&D and blog, though I don't think any of them really know what D&D is except something you laugh at on an episode of Community.
She went on to say they played Fiasco.
I thought, hmm, interesting that these indie games are getting some mainstream reach. I wonder if part of it is that they avoid any stigma attached to D&D and its "basement" players.
Then she said they all watched some of Wil Wheaton's YouTube video to learn how to create characters. Then, after creating characters, watched more of the video to see what to do next . . .
And my heart sank. I've got nothing against Fiasco and if you play it and love it, that's cool. But if I care about anything I care about making D&D accessible to folks who would otherwise never try it. And the thought that the stigma and hermetic nature of old school rpgs is so strong that a fresh-face-of-a-game can be more attractive to new players, even though you need to watch a video to understand how to play it, is just depressing to me.
Can you imagine any other game in this context? "We're playing bridge tonight so let's all watch this video on how to play."
Of course, I'm assuming stigma is at play here. One other thing she mentioned is that the DM for the night was big into D&D back in the day. So I wonder if another thing going on with indie games is "games for experienced gamers." You've played rpgs for more than 20 years and you want to stretch your wings a bit, try something more daring with more improv required, or maybe something more focused on one aspect of what can be fun about rpgs in general-- you play an indie game. And then you invite your non-gamer friends to play too. And maybe they'll have fun. But it seems to me like taking a friend who has never seen a movie before to see a Bergman film or Fellini or something.
They all know I'm into D&D and blog, though I don't think any of them really know what D&D is except something you laugh at on an episode of Community.
She went on to say they played Fiasco.
I thought, hmm, interesting that these indie games are getting some mainstream reach. I wonder if part of it is that they avoid any stigma attached to D&D and its "basement" players.
Then she said they all watched some of Wil Wheaton's YouTube video to learn how to create characters. Then, after creating characters, watched more of the video to see what to do next . . .
And my heart sank. I've got nothing against Fiasco and if you play it and love it, that's cool. But if I care about anything I care about making D&D accessible to folks who would otherwise never try it. And the thought that the stigma and hermetic nature of old school rpgs is so strong that a fresh-face-of-a-game can be more attractive to new players, even though you need to watch a video to understand how to play it, is just depressing to me.
Can you imagine any other game in this context? "We're playing bridge tonight so let's all watch this video on how to play."
Of course, I'm assuming stigma is at play here. One other thing she mentioned is that the DM for the night was big into D&D back in the day. So I wonder if another thing going on with indie games is "games for experienced gamers." You've played rpgs for more than 20 years and you want to stretch your wings a bit, try something more daring with more improv required, or maybe something more focused on one aspect of what can be fun about rpgs in general-- you play an indie game. And then you invite your non-gamer friends to play too. And maybe they'll have fun. But it seems to me like taking a friend who has never seen a movie before to see a Bergman film or Fellini or something.
Thursday, December 27, 2012
The Dramarama
I was never as excited about Jeff Rient's Carousing Table as everyone else because it seemed the only player that would roll on a table that takes your money and gets you into trouble is thinking a little more extra-diegetically than made sense to me. Or maybe I should just say I doubt I would take the risk with any of my characters.
But then I got to thinking, what carousing is really doing is injecting some story complications from outside player or DM contributions into the game that has few ways to do that. Well, the players are choosing to roll on the table, so you could say they are injecting these twists, but they don't know all the possibilities on the chart and they certainly aren't making up bits of story on their own. Neither DM nor players have to be responsible for it making sense or being good, or all the things you might feel responsible for if you were plotting out a railroad. This works because when carousing you are presumably soused out of your mind, so the player can feel okay about giving up some agency for any choices they make while carousing.
I realized this some time after making my table that let's you know what you did when you were a werewolf. Which absolves players of responsibility in a different way. And I started wondering if there were any other ways than carousing or lycanthropy you might inject some story-like twists without taking away the players' agency. And I thought the one thing we can't choose and all have is Family, baby! And thus was born the Dramarama:
Roll 4d30. First tells you which of your family members is causing a ruckus, second what they are up to, third is for who else is involved and fourth is what they want from you.
There are nonsensical and gonzo results possible, as well as results that may require a little interpretation work on you part.
Why would players want to mess with this? Well, it could be a "fee" for coming back into town. That would keep players from shopping incessantly or hunkering down and not exploring. I would probably roll randomly to determine which party member was affected once per session spent in town to go this route.
Or, you could balance it with reward: allow any player to gather a rumor per roll on the Dramarama or gather more information about things they want to investigate. Presumably their sprawling chaotic families have heard lots.
Of course, the results from the table could be completely ignored by players. But I would probably make the Second Parties involved or local authorities (for the more criminal results) put some pressure on PCs about the issue somehow.
I'll upload a pdf when I'm back home.
Update: Here is the pdf.
But then I got to thinking, what carousing is really doing is injecting some story complications from outside player or DM contributions into the game that has few ways to do that. Well, the players are choosing to roll on the table, so you could say they are injecting these twists, but they don't know all the possibilities on the chart and they certainly aren't making up bits of story on their own. Neither DM nor players have to be responsible for it making sense or being good, or all the things you might feel responsible for if you were plotting out a railroad. This works because when carousing you are presumably soused out of your mind, so the player can feel okay about giving up some agency for any choices they make while carousing.
I realized this some time after making my table that let's you know what you did when you were a werewolf. Which absolves players of responsibility in a different way. And I started wondering if there were any other ways than carousing or lycanthropy you might inject some story-like twists without taking away the players' agency. And I thought the one thing we can't choose and all have is Family, baby! And thus was born the Dramarama:
There are nonsensical and gonzo results possible, as well as results that may require a little interpretation work on you part.
Why would players want to mess with this? Well, it could be a "fee" for coming back into town. That would keep players from shopping incessantly or hunkering down and not exploring. I would probably roll randomly to determine which party member was affected once per session spent in town to go this route.
Or, you could balance it with reward: allow any player to gather a rumor per roll on the Dramarama or gather more information about things they want to investigate. Presumably their sprawling chaotic families have heard lots.
Of course, the results from the table could be completely ignored by players. But I would probably make the Second Parties involved or local authorities (for the more criminal results) put some pressure on PCs about the issue somehow.
I'll upload a pdf when I'm back home.
Update: Here is the pdf.
Thursday, December 20, 2012
The Beginner Sandbox
Where is it? By beginner sandbox I mean a small setting set up to help a DM run 1st level adventurers through a wilderness. A place to locate various lower level dungeons and let players make choices about where they want to go.
It seems the closest we've ever had to this was B2 the Keep on the Borderlands. This gives a pretty clear run down on a home base where players can buy supplies and rest and heal safely. It provides one major pocket of adventure and several small encounters scattered through the wilderness.
I know people have said they used T1 The Village of Hommlet as a home base. That does a good job of fleshing out some npcs and buildings in the town but doesn't even have an overland map to get to the local adventure area.
There are Sample Dungeons
It may be that this was never provided because the assumption is that every DM would create their own and it wasn't needed. But this isn't the assumption made for dungeons, which I consider the much easier problem to crack.
Starting with the original D&D you get examples of what a dungeon looks like. You get an even more fleshed out one in Holmes and a smaller but still helpful one in Moldvay basic. Module B1 is actually set up to help a DM learn to stock a dungeon.
It seems that the place to look for a similar helpful approach to wilderness adventuring would be the Marsh and Cook Expert book. And we are given a map with 6 mile hexes and an example gnome lair. But that's it. I'm not even sure where the map maker is assuming characters would start, Specularum? The information given seems more appropriate to a geography text book than an adventure setting.
Wilderness as Gazeteer
I've never owned the Forgotten Realms (I've seen its map and have played in the Realms under other DMs) but I did own the World of Greyhawk boxed set. I remember reading that set so closely and puzzling about what I was supposed to do with the information on how many thousands of demi-humans lived in different areas. Was it about army formation? Was this necessary if players get into the endgame and have to raise an army of gnomes?
This is the same approach the Expert sample world takes; some of the most prominent information is how many thousands of troops the Duke can raise.
What these products seem to want to do is give you a whole fantasy continent complete with history and the current political situation. These seem to be trying to fashion their own Middle Earth, more than setting up a place you can run your players through. Because you are being given a whole world, the information is presented as a gazeteer.
As I said, I don't own Forgotten Realms so maybe I'm mistaken about it. Does it give a starting area? Does it give any guidance on where you might start play? Another product that might be relevant is the Wilderness of High Fantasy. It's one of the few roleplaying standards I'd never heard of until joining the OSR. But the way it is talked about it sounds to be set up in a similar way. Does it give a starting area? Does it give any guidance on where you might start play?
I suppose one thing these products might be trying to do is allow DMs to set up a starting point for a campaign in many different areas. Allowing choice and possibilities. But I kind of doubt that's what's going on. It's like these kinds of setting products are based on the assumption that by the time you need a setting map the players will be high enough level that they'll be interacting with armies and whole populations-- that up until that point various dungeons are enough.
Wilderness as Infinite Hexes
Another way of dealing with wilderness, possibly the result of how little use you get from the gazeteer-style continent overview, is to treat each hex as a dungeon room. Each hex has one thing in it and I assume the idea is the party will encounter that thing no matter how many square miles the hex is. What is in the hexes seems to be just a more detailed encounter.
Coming up with encounters is not difficult for me.
I remember early on in my blogging career someone on the Swords & Wizardry forums saying that they treated the wilderness like a big-ceilinged dungeon. Which is the clearest surrender on trying to make wilderness play work I've ever heard.
What Would a Beginner Sandbox Look Like?
You might be thinking, well, what is it you actually want Telecanter? I've done a few posts about this. How about a sandbox:
It seems the closest we've ever had to this was B2 the Keep on the Borderlands. This gives a pretty clear run down on a home base where players can buy supplies and rest and heal safely. It provides one major pocket of adventure and several small encounters scattered through the wilderness.
I know people have said they used T1 The Village of Hommlet as a home base. That does a good job of fleshing out some npcs and buildings in the town but doesn't even have an overland map to get to the local adventure area.
There are Sample Dungeons
It may be that this was never provided because the assumption is that every DM would create their own and it wasn't needed. But this isn't the assumption made for dungeons, which I consider the much easier problem to crack.
Starting with the original D&D you get examples of what a dungeon looks like. You get an even more fleshed out one in Holmes and a smaller but still helpful one in Moldvay basic. Module B1 is actually set up to help a DM learn to stock a dungeon.
It seems that the place to look for a similar helpful approach to wilderness adventuring would be the Marsh and Cook Expert book. And we are given a map with 6 mile hexes and an example gnome lair. But that's it. I'm not even sure where the map maker is assuming characters would start, Specularum? The information given seems more appropriate to a geography text book than an adventure setting.
Wilderness as Gazeteer
I've never owned the Forgotten Realms (I've seen its map and have played in the Realms under other DMs) but I did own the World of Greyhawk boxed set. I remember reading that set so closely and puzzling about what I was supposed to do with the information on how many thousands of demi-humans lived in different areas. Was it about army formation? Was this necessary if players get into the endgame and have to raise an army of gnomes?
This is the same approach the Expert sample world takes; some of the most prominent information is how many thousands of troops the Duke can raise.
What these products seem to want to do is give you a whole fantasy continent complete with history and the current political situation. These seem to be trying to fashion their own Middle Earth, more than setting up a place you can run your players through. Because you are being given a whole world, the information is presented as a gazeteer.
As I said, I don't own Forgotten Realms so maybe I'm mistaken about it. Does it give a starting area? Does it give any guidance on where you might start play? Another product that might be relevant is the Wilderness of High Fantasy. It's one of the few roleplaying standards I'd never heard of until joining the OSR. But the way it is talked about it sounds to be set up in a similar way. Does it give a starting area? Does it give any guidance on where you might start play?
I suppose one thing these products might be trying to do is allow DMs to set up a starting point for a campaign in many different areas. Allowing choice and possibilities. But I kind of doubt that's what's going on. It's like these kinds of setting products are based on the assumption that by the time you need a setting map the players will be high enough level that they'll be interacting with armies and whole populations-- that up until that point various dungeons are enough.
Wilderness as Infinite Hexes
Another way of dealing with wilderness, possibly the result of how little use you get from the gazeteer-style continent overview, is to treat each hex as a dungeon room. Each hex has one thing in it and I assume the idea is the party will encounter that thing no matter how many square miles the hex is. What is in the hexes seems to be just a more detailed encounter.
Coming up with encounters is not difficult for me.
I remember early on in my blogging career someone on the Swords & Wizardry forums saying that they treated the wilderness like a big-ceilinged dungeon. Which is the clearest surrender on trying to make wilderness play work I've ever heard.
What Would a Beginner Sandbox Look Like?
You might be thinking, well, what is it you actually want Telecanter? I've done a few posts about this. How about a sandbox:
- peppered with locations that allow for different and traditional types of adventure.
- with interesting geographical chokepoints.
- with landmarks that help players navigate.
- with sophisticated thought put into how the players can travel to different locations and what choices will be involved.
- Or, even, a starting area that has different travel choices, chokepoints, and encounters depending on the season.
- And on top of all that, somehow adds geographic variety while keeping it within reasonable travelling distance.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
The Accessible Sandbox
My conception of a sandbox has always involved a "starter" village that has a few roads or routes to bigger settlements all set in a wilderness that get increasingly dangerous the further from civilization you get. The difficulty of the sandbox could be seen as concentric circles emanating from that first village, because even the roads and big urban areas they lead to could have encounters and dangers.
Morrowind has me re-thinking this.
From the very beginning, as a weak first leveller, you can access a huge portion of the existing sandbox, and safely. The world has Silt Striders that look like big fleas which you can ride from some towns to others. There are also boats that can be taken from most coastal towns which allow for circumnavigating the island sandbox completely. This is all safe and relatively cheap. With a tiny bit of effort you can even become a member of the Mage's Guild which allows for teleportation between the five guilds on the island (again, for a small fee).
Magic available in the game helps with the ease of travel too. There are spells (and magic items) that allow for teleportation to both native and Imperial temples. Crafty use of these can let you take shortcuts in travel-- popping over to a temple that is near a Silt Strider port, for example. There is also a Mark/Recall set of spells that allows you to set a specific anchor you want to easily return to later.
The danger is still present between these points of civilization, but there is much more flexibility in travel and exploration than I have experienced in any other video game sandboxes. If you don't want to mess about in the grimy swamps along the coast you can spend time in the dry ashlands further inland, or head to the grassy grazelands far to the west.
Danger is fairly well signaled; any old ruins are likely to have things you shouldn't mess with and as you near the center of the island more of the creatures are blighted and contagious. So your choices about where to travel can be informed choices.
The settlements offer pretty much redundant services, for example temples and Imperial garrisons. This means if you have a particular kind of character you like to play, you can take of advantage of all these travel opportunities without being penalized. The cities aren't identical, though, and you often need to travel around to find a spell or item you need.
I think one way this is possible is the sandbox is circular and several hops of travel doesn't take you so far away as to be unable to still access other environments. In a more traditional rectangular map, traveling towards a desert environment most likely leads you farther and farther from your original location.
I suppose a traditional D&D sandbox is also bigger, though, in-game this world feel huge. I wouldn't want to have to walk across the island real time.
I guess it all comes down to how much prep you can do. The video game all has to be ready for players from the moment play starts. So, as long as you can compartmentalize real danger (shove it into ruins and underground) you can let the player amble about all over. For a DM, having multiple areas that players could choose to start from sounds like lots of work.
But I will certainly think more about safe, clearly marked, ways players can move about so they can have choices where they want to explore.
Morrowind has me re-thinking this.
 |
| Map edited from here. The red dots are the Mage guilds which all can be accessed from each other. You start the game in Seyd Neen in the South West. |
Magic available in the game helps with the ease of travel too. There are spells (and magic items) that allow for teleportation to both native and Imperial temples. Crafty use of these can let you take shortcuts in travel-- popping over to a temple that is near a Silt Strider port, for example. There is also a Mark/Recall set of spells that allows you to set a specific anchor you want to easily return to later.
The danger is still present between these points of civilization, but there is much more flexibility in travel and exploration than I have experienced in any other video game sandboxes. If you don't want to mess about in the grimy swamps along the coast you can spend time in the dry ashlands further inland, or head to the grassy grazelands far to the west.
Danger is fairly well signaled; any old ruins are likely to have things you shouldn't mess with and as you near the center of the island more of the creatures are blighted and contagious. So your choices about where to travel can be informed choices.
The settlements offer pretty much redundant services, for example temples and Imperial garrisons. This means if you have a particular kind of character you like to play, you can take of advantage of all these travel opportunities without being penalized. The cities aren't identical, though, and you often need to travel around to find a spell or item you need.
I think one way this is possible is the sandbox is circular and several hops of travel doesn't take you so far away as to be unable to still access other environments. In a more traditional rectangular map, traveling towards a desert environment most likely leads you farther and farther from your original location.
I suppose a traditional D&D sandbox is also bigger, though, in-game this world feel huge. I wouldn't want to have to walk across the island real time.
I guess it all comes down to how much prep you can do. The video game all has to be ready for players from the moment play starts. So, as long as you can compartmentalize real danger (shove it into ruins and underground) you can let the player amble about all over. For a DM, having multiple areas that players could choose to start from sounds like lots of work.
But I will certainly think more about safe, clearly marked, ways players can move about so they can have choices where they want to explore.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Complex Monsters III
It comes from this post way back in the olden times of yore. Basically it is a simple visual hit location system. I wanted to try my hand at it, so above is my image of a hydra with heads that do different types of damage. Boxes are all filled, that particular head is dead. Determine where a hit lands the way Zak suggests, toss a d4.
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Complex Monsters II
Here's another attempt at a monster that would require more explanation to run. In the last post the monster was complicated because it had something like a biological life cycle. Complexity can also come from Magic and its quirky rules and steps, so let's explore that angle. An older monster that might fit the bill is the Nested Golem. I can imagine a seperate illustration for each stage making even more than a page possible to present it. Here is a similar but slightly different Golem. This one doesn't have actual physical stages but magical rule stages:
Hermetic Golem
The most learned of Kabbalists could not only make inert matter come to life, but make it impervious to harm. Not completely impervious; always one secret way remained to make the creations able to be harmed. Refinements to the process led these sages to layer the dweomers so that even if a person were to dicover the secret to harming the golem, another different secret awaited underneath. Like tumblers in a lock these secrets must be presented in the right order:
Hit it with:
- a blunt weapon
- a sharp weapon
- magic
- wood
- iron
- earth
- water
- fire
- salt
- acid
- a map
- a piece of clothing that was worn by its maker
- a singular book
- salt
- accidentally spilled wine
- a poem written in chalk
- its shadow
- the shadow of a child
- the clothes of someone you love
- the hair of a dead family member
- speak it's name
- speak your name
- speak the name of its maker
- rebuke it in the language of its maker
- speak a secret word
- sing a song in the language of the maker
- recite the story of its making
- give the just reasons that you must pass
- laugh genuinely
- lists the names of your children awaiting you
Monday, December 3, 2012
Complex Monsters
Here's one attempt:
_____________________________________________
Thrig
Thrig are human size bugs found underground. Their hives are made of paper like a wasp's, though the cells are ellipsoid, smell of ginger, and have thin mithril threads running through them as support.
They are protective of the territory of their hive. Hundreds will come swarming and biting if intruders are detected.
Here's the catch, if a thrig is killed by physical harm its corpse will start shuddering the next round and hatch out a Floater. These will attempt to attach to warriors and carry them off to suitably distant locations in the dungeon, often dropping them from heights.
But, if a Thrig is killed by magic, it will metamorphose into a Layer and attack any spell casters nearby, thrusting its long abdomen down their throats to lay Thrig eggs in the victim's stomach.
If a Floater or a Layer are slain their husks remain on the ground. If any additional Thrig are killed while both Layers and Floaters lie dead, however, and killed in any way, all the corpses will begin scuttling towards each other and in a matter of rounds form a Thrig Queen. Then things start getting ugly.
_____________________________________________
Well, I guess that's not quite a page. I could go into more detail about how to handle the two grappling-type attacks and maybe even complexify the cycle a bit with more ways to kill them and new Thrig that result. Oh and I never explained the Queen . . . yeah that could be interesing maybe a chart of effects it could cause in characters.
And in the end, it isn't really one monster just several subtypes with an interesting way to produce them.
Anyway, now it's your turn, what would be an interesting monster complicated enough to takes some room to explain?
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Playing Around
This is a question not an assertion. I wonder if the type of play that happens with experienced players, especially DMs as players, is goofier and more about the impression it leaves on each other than it was back in the day when we were learning the game.
Granted, meta-goofiness has always been there in my experience. Even the most dire of dungeon situations could be put on hold for joking around.
Also, with adult players brand new to the game I've seen a goofiness-used-as-defence appear. Where they aren't really sure what to make of this game and so pick funny names for their character and ask about doing silly things. They don't really understand the boundaries of the world or what their choices are and they don't want to look foolish in front of their friends.
But aside from that there has always been a kind serious desire to survive, desire to explore and find what is behind the next heavy oaken door.
The type of play I'm talking about is related to carousing tables. It is a kind of play that says "I want to put my character in a pickle because that will be funny. I will make choices I know to be bad for my character because that will make things interesting." The character that drinks from every pool in a world that has magical pools. The player that releases the demon from the iron bottle when they know it is a demon in the bottle.
I'm wondering if this comes about because the games being played are more one-offs (although Flailsnails allows people on G+ to use the same character again and again) so there is less concern for keeping your character alive to see the next session and also a sense of "We need to pack as much fun into these hours as possible. I may never see these guys again"
I'm wondering if it has to do with playing with folks you don't know as well personally and so the meta-joking is harder. When playing with people you've only known as a name on the internet maybe the easiest joking to do is within the game.
Maybe it is just a matter of jadedness; more experienced players have already survived the hardest dungeons, have achieved name level, have run their own domain. There is little fun left in to trying and eke those earning out yet again.
As I type this I'm also wondering if this is related to one of the trickiest parts of our game; how it tells you to survive on one hand and calls you a coward if you don't try to open doors or chests. It is the whole courage versus caution problem- why even go into this dread place if we know a vampire is there. A kind of nonchalance seems to be a very sophisticated way to handle this problem by sidestepping it and placing on the character's shoulders: "Of course we might die, but Rutherford of the Top Hat is too dumb to realize it."
Of course this is all assuming that what I'm asking about is actually a phenomenon. And there seems to have always been a thread of pretty cornball things going on in the game since the beginning (I'm thinking now of Arneson's turnstile in front of his dungeon). Maybe I personally like a more serious take on things, want to survive, want to climb in level and am just seeing a different style of play.
I don't know. How serious do you take your play? How does that change depending on context? What is the limit of too serious or too goofy for you?
Granted, meta-goofiness has always been there in my experience. Even the most dire of dungeon situations could be put on hold for joking around.
Also, with adult players brand new to the game I've seen a goofiness-used-as-defence appear. Where they aren't really sure what to make of this game and so pick funny names for their character and ask about doing silly things. They don't really understand the boundaries of the world or what their choices are and they don't want to look foolish in front of their friends.
But aside from that there has always been a kind serious desire to survive, desire to explore and find what is behind the next heavy oaken door.
The type of play I'm talking about is related to carousing tables. It is a kind of play that says "I want to put my character in a pickle because that will be funny. I will make choices I know to be bad for my character because that will make things interesting." The character that drinks from every pool in a world that has magical pools. The player that releases the demon from the iron bottle when they know it is a demon in the bottle.
I'm wondering if this comes about because the games being played are more one-offs (although Flailsnails allows people on G+ to use the same character again and again) so there is less concern for keeping your character alive to see the next session and also a sense of "We need to pack as much fun into these hours as possible. I may never see these guys again"
I'm wondering if it has to do with playing with folks you don't know as well personally and so the meta-joking is harder. When playing with people you've only known as a name on the internet maybe the easiest joking to do is within the game.
Maybe it is just a matter of jadedness; more experienced players have already survived the hardest dungeons, have achieved name level, have run their own domain. There is little fun left in to trying and eke those earning out yet again.
As I type this I'm also wondering if this is related to one of the trickiest parts of our game; how it tells you to survive on one hand and calls you a coward if you don't try to open doors or chests. It is the whole courage versus caution problem- why even go into this dread place if we know a vampire is there. A kind of nonchalance seems to be a very sophisticated way to handle this problem by sidestepping it and placing on the character's shoulders: "Of course we might die, but Rutherford of the Top Hat is too dumb to realize it."
Of course this is all assuming that what I'm asking about is actually a phenomenon. And there seems to have always been a thread of pretty cornball things going on in the game since the beginning (I'm thinking now of Arneson's turnstile in front of his dungeon). Maybe I personally like a more serious take on things, want to survive, want to climb in level and am just seeing a different style of play.
I don't know. How serious do you take your play? How does that change depending on context? What is the limit of too serious or too goofy for you?
Sunday, June 24, 2012
3 Ways to Forsee III
The Future as Web (aka the Grand Destiny)
This view of the future isn't really a third model, but a complication of one of the other two. It's just the idea that events have more than one cause and to change the future can be a complex undertaking. Avoiding a negative future is more difficult than just assassinating one person. Ensuring a good future equally involves chains of smaller events that have to happen or be avoided.
Trapped in History
I think his view of the future has become popularized, oddly enough, by seeing the future from the past. In other words, time travel stories. A character travels back in time and the problem becomes, not predicting the future, but how the choices that character makes interact with a future we already know.
In that sense Future as Web is most commonly related to a Future as Fate. The events in the time traveler's future are inescapable because, well, that's our history. But the Future as web isn't about that so much as a means used to prevent any change from happening. Oh, you think you can stop WWII from happening just by killing Hitler? Well, you actually killed a body double who was conspiring to replace Hitler. Or, you miss your shot and make Hitler more paranoid and dedicated to his war aims. If the Future as Web is used with the model of the future being fated, the layers of causes act as a buffer to any change to the future that's already known.
Alternate Histories = Future as Possible Paths
There are some examples of the opposite, though, basically any story where history as we know it is malleable. This is frequently seen in time travel stories where something has been screwed up by the traveler and they need to make things right so the future happens as expected. A familiar example is Marty McFly trying to get his parents to fall in love. This is the Future as Possible Paths, because we see, even when Marty succeeds, he returns to a different present. Again, Future as a Web is not in reference that he could change the future but the idea of the interconnectedness of all the causes that result in what will become the future. It isn't as easy as just getting his parents in the same room, he has to deal with Biff, the principal, and the time crunch of scheduled events.
The Future that's Bigger than You
Because Future as Web is about something harder to change with many interconnected causes , it's usually about something bigger than any one person. It is a kind of Grand Destiny. Wars, the succession of Kings, great plagues, these are foretold. To avoid destiny takes more than a single act. The seer will still be affected by future events but this future isn't their personal fate (even with Marty, there's also the existence of his siblings hanging in the balance). Future as a Web is less "how do I prevent the halfing from stealing my purse" and more "how do we ensure the Empress Dowager is dethroned?"
Mechanics
I think these Grand Destinies can come into play either as adventure hook prophecies that players hear, or when players desire to make a big change in the world and go to someone with sight of the future to give them guidance on how to achieve it.
Rather than a table here to generate particular Grand Destinies, I'll just say they should be things that happen in a sandbox but not require players to interact with them. My post here looks at some possible examples and one way of handling them, escalating things over time if players don't get involved. Contrary to my advice in the Future as a Possible Paths post, because these destinies are harder to avoid, I don't think they should be related so closely to things the PCs own or people they know. That route leads to frustrating railroading.
Now, how you model predictions of these magnitudes depends on which of the two views of history you are using.
If Future is Fate, I think you can choose a destiny and several smaller trigger fortunes. Then, use Zak's method of allowing players to say when a foretold event happens except that those smaller fortunes either a) have to happen in a particular order, or b) need to happen simultaneously.
If the Future is Possible Paths, it becomes trickier (for the DM at least). Because prophecies are just one possibility, players can just work against them to make them not happen. There isn't the sense of "stickiness" or difficulty in working against destiny. Here's an idea for a way to allow players to do what they want and still give that sense of the complexity of changing what is destined:
Usually players will be trying to prevent foretold events, because otherwise they could just stand back and let them happen. For a particular event of great importance that players want to stop, come up with 4 smaller events or preconditions that will affect its likelihood. Let these be discoverable by players-- wise npcs advise them, they find them in books, they see them in dreams. When it comes time to see if players can prevent the destined event roll 1d6, 6 = yes. Modify the roll by +1 for each of the smaller events that PCs managed to make happen. I think I would make this transparent to players, to give them a sense that they are up against that die roll and destiny itself. But allow players to come up with additional factors that would result in modifiers.
This view of the future isn't really a third model, but a complication of one of the other two. It's just the idea that events have more than one cause and to change the future can be a complex undertaking. Avoiding a negative future is more difficult than just assassinating one person. Ensuring a good future equally involves chains of smaller events that have to happen or be avoided.
Trapped in History
I think his view of the future has become popularized, oddly enough, by seeing the future from the past. In other words, time travel stories. A character travels back in time and the problem becomes, not predicting the future, but how the choices that character makes interact with a future we already know.
In that sense Future as Web is most commonly related to a Future as Fate. The events in the time traveler's future are inescapable because, well, that's our history. But the Future as web isn't about that so much as a means used to prevent any change from happening. Oh, you think you can stop WWII from happening just by killing Hitler? Well, you actually killed a body double who was conspiring to replace Hitler. Or, you miss your shot and make Hitler more paranoid and dedicated to his war aims. If the Future as Web is used with the model of the future being fated, the layers of causes act as a buffer to any change to the future that's already known.
Alternate Histories = Future as Possible Paths
There are some examples of the opposite, though, basically any story where history as we know it is malleable. This is frequently seen in time travel stories where something has been screwed up by the traveler and they need to make things right so the future happens as expected. A familiar example is Marty McFly trying to get his parents to fall in love. This is the Future as Possible Paths, because we see, even when Marty succeeds, he returns to a different present. Again, Future as a Web is not in reference that he could change the future but the idea of the interconnectedness of all the causes that result in what will become the future. It isn't as easy as just getting his parents in the same room, he has to deal with Biff, the principal, and the time crunch of scheduled events.
The Future that's Bigger than You
Because Future as Web is about something harder to change with many interconnected causes , it's usually about something bigger than any one person. It is a kind of Grand Destiny. Wars, the succession of Kings, great plagues, these are foretold. To avoid destiny takes more than a single act. The seer will still be affected by future events but this future isn't their personal fate (even with Marty, there's also the existence of his siblings hanging in the balance). Future as a Web is less "how do I prevent the halfing from stealing my purse" and more "how do we ensure the Empress Dowager is dethroned?"
Mechanics
I think these Grand Destinies can come into play either as adventure hook prophecies that players hear, or when players desire to make a big change in the world and go to someone with sight of the future to give them guidance on how to achieve it.
Rather than a table here to generate particular Grand Destinies, I'll just say they should be things that happen in a sandbox but not require players to interact with them. My post here looks at some possible examples and one way of handling them, escalating things over time if players don't get involved. Contrary to my advice in the Future as a Possible Paths post, because these destinies are harder to avoid, I don't think they should be related so closely to things the PCs own or people they know. That route leads to frustrating railroading.
Now, how you model predictions of these magnitudes depends on which of the two views of history you are using.
If Future is Fate, I think you can choose a destiny and several smaller trigger fortunes. Then, use Zak's method of allowing players to say when a foretold event happens except that those smaller fortunes either a) have to happen in a particular order, or b) need to happen simultaneously.
Example: The Empress Dowager will lose her throne when a feast is prepared but not eaten, a rope snaps as music plays, a crown rolls across a stone floor.Here, the predictions become a kind of key to the prophecy; if players can arrange a situation where they all happen, then the prophecy comes true.
The PCs realize the heir apparent will be hung for the pleasure of the Empress and her court and wish to prevent it for their own reasons. They interrupt the execution/banquet, manage to snap the noose, and roll the hereditary Great Crown they've recovered across the floor for all to see.
The courtiers and generals present are shocked and pivot to support the heir.
If the Future is Possible Paths, it becomes trickier (for the DM at least). Because prophecies are just one possibility, players can just work against them to make them not happen. There isn't the sense of "stickiness" or difficulty in working against destiny. Here's an idea for a way to allow players to do what they want and still give that sense of the complexity of changing what is destined:
Usually players will be trying to prevent foretold events, because otherwise they could just stand back and let them happen. For a particular event of great importance that players want to stop, come up with 4 smaller events or preconditions that will affect its likelihood. Let these be discoverable by players-- wise npcs advise them, they find them in books, they see them in dreams. When it comes time to see if players can prevent the destined event roll 1d6, 6 = yes. Modify the roll by +1 for each of the smaller events that PCs managed to make happen. I think I would make this transparent to players, to give them a sense that they are up against that die roll and destiny itself. But allow players to come up with additional factors that would result in modifiers.
Example: Prophecies say the Empress Dowager will rule for a 1000 years.To liven it up, agents of the parties desiring the prophesied outcomes could actively work against the PCs-- the cultists wishing the World Plague to occur, the rebels desiring the Elf-Dwarf War. If this works as I envision it, any time Players chafe at a grand prophecy could result in a whole mini-campaign of them trying to overturn it.
PCs learn that getting her generals against her will make a difference (+1), they learn that the Great Crown that true Imperials wear has been missing (+1). They learn the heir apparent is secretly held captive in a tower (+1). Coming up is an important political/religious ritual where the Imperial power is reaffirmed (+1).
They speak with the generals, even performing some tasks for them to win them over. They rescue the heir apparent and recover the crown. They plan to present him to the court on the ritual day. But, worried this won't be enough to shake the 1000 year reign, they decide to search for evidence of the unlawful way the Empress Dowager seized the throne and present it to all as a magical projection (+1).
That is enough, the heir apparent takes the throne. The prophecy has been avoided.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Rules that Make You Go Huh?!
Timrod recently posted about the arbitrary way invisibility disappears when you attack something. I'd forgotten about that one. I think it would be interesting to list other wuh? rules from older editions of D&D.
Don't worry about association or whether it's possible to come up with some explanation, just think back to when you were a fresh-faced youngster coming into the game and you read a rule and thought, "that's weird."
And nothing newer than 2e, we beat on the newer editions enough already.
I'll start off with the way psionic powers would often have class restrictions-- like cell adjustment. Wait, I have this awesome mental ability to heal myself but it's more powerful if I'm a mage than a thief?!
Don't worry about association or whether it's possible to come up with some explanation, just think back to when you were a fresh-faced youngster coming into the game and you read a rule and thought, "that's weird."
And nothing newer than 2e, we beat on the newer editions enough already.
I'll start off with the way psionic powers would often have class restrictions-- like cell adjustment. Wait, I have this awesome mental ability to heal myself but it's more powerful if I'm a mage than a thief?!
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
3 Ways to Forsee II
Future as Possible Paths
This kind of foretelling is the opposite of inescapable fates. The future is an infinite number of paths stretching forward from Now. Any time someone peers in to a crystal ball or has a precognitive vision they see the most likely future. It will happen if everything remains unchanged, but there is plenty of time between now and then for things to change.
This might be a more modern view of the future-- a future of variables and probabilities. Future as an equation where the inputs are fuzzy and prone to change.
These kinds of visions of the future can be specific and visual, like dreams or scenes in the mind. They could just as easily be vague like Future as Fate predictions, something like "misfortune will strike your friends" with the understanding that the misfortune could be avoided. But, because Future as Fate can only give these vague kinds of predictions, why not be distinct and present visions of future possibilities as rich visuals.
This kind of foretelling is much more useful to players because it is about gathering information to help make choices. Why find out a friend is going to die if you can't change it? This vision of the future is more active and empowered. Players find out about the future like scouting a foreign country.
A Mechanic
There won't be a single, elegant solution like Zak's for this kind of future because there are so many variables, but I think we can at least come up with some guidelines
Which Part of the Future to Show
Because the possibilities are open it becomes hard to decide what part of the future to even show. How far ahead should be shown? And what about physical distance from the seer's current location?
One thing to keep in mind is that if a future path depends upon decisions, each decision you assume for the players makes a particular path less and less likely. It might be a good rule of thumb to either show the future as the outcome of one particular choice or show the future up until the next big decision point. The first will help players decide if that is in fact the choice they want to make. The second will prime them for the upcoming big choice, and hopefully build dramatic tension.
In general, though, a week ahead would seem quite far, a month probably the limit for things revolving around the PCs (See the next way to foresee for grander destinies). As for physical distance, again a week's travel would seem far. But this still doesn't lay out what choices a vision of the future would show.
Probably the best guidance on what to show is to remember that players will want to use it to inform them. So the PCs' present situation is a good starting point:
The Players Have No Plans
If the players are in a safe place and have no particular plans it might seem odd that someone would be looking into the future. But there are things besides the PCs themselves that grant visions. A place might grant visions to those that sleep there. Fevers, drug use, or magic items all might grant a glimpse of things to come.
If players have no particular plans, this kind of DM granted vision can essentially act as an adventure hook. These may not be about choices so much because you won't be sure that players even want to get involved. The choice is, in effect, this thing is going to happen do you want to stop it, or maybe take advantage of it? But a vision that involves strangers or strange places will amount to the same thing as hearing a rumor. To be more magical and interesting these visions should probably provide a glimpse of something happening to the PCs, their friends, or their belongings. Here is the simplest chart I can imagine to help you with this:
For wilderness travel you can roll encounters and weather for a week ahead of time and relate that to players. This will let them make decisions about what to bring and how to prepare for this particular journey. Likely decision points might include which of several routes to use, or, after a dangerous encounter-- whether the party should even continue.
The Party is Heading into a Dungeon
A dungeon zooms things in considerably and it becomes difficult again to decide what part of the future to show. But there are a few focuses that players might be interested in knowing about. You could either decide which of the following is most important for this dungeon, or roll randomly to determine which of these to show them:
1) A Terrible threat. Choose the most dangerous foe the dungeon holds in store for this particular party. Show them fighting it and, if defeat is likely, show them getting slaughtered in vivid detail. This is one of the few times you might impress on players the lethality of the game and the real possibility of death without them suffering the consequences. A party might take this as an opportunity to plan carefully to take on this foe, but they also might feel empowered to just run at the first sight of it, if they've already seen themselves getting slaughtered by it.
2) Many Challenges. A Rocky-like montage of difficulties, especially terrain-based is another option. Show the PCs using ropes, iron spikes, burning oil, string to navigate mazes. This would basically serve as an overview to help players prepare. In some ways it would function as the Pre-Mapped Dungeon, but the players don't necessarily know where the images they see are located within the dungeon. It is also a way to show them many smaller scale challenges instead of a single large one.
3) Treachery. A Preview of desertions and double-crossings from factions in the dungeon and/or hirelings.
4) A Dilemma or Big Choice. There might be one particularly important choice in the dungeon, for example, releasing a bound demon or not, or starting up magical machinery. The vision could show the choice being made in one way.
A Player Wants to Know the Outcome of a Particular Choice
While the archetype of those that can see the future is often about getting visions you can't control, I think it will be more interesting to everyone if the visions are useful to players. For that reason, I don't see anything wrong in just asking the players involved "What are you interested in seeing?" They might answer any of the things we've mentioned above ("I want to see what happens if we take the shortcut in the woods," or "I want to see who will betray me in the caverns.") or they may ask about turning the handle one the big, creepy door to the left. This can essentially defang traps, but if your traps are set up more as obstacles anyway, knowing what happens won't necessarily tell the party how to get through the door safely. Also, spells, magic items, and precognitive abilities will most likely have limitations on frequency of use that will prevent layers from avoiding all uncertainty.
The next way to foresee is really a subset of both these first models. But the Future as a Web is different enough that I think it warrants a separate look.
This kind of foretelling is the opposite of inescapable fates. The future is an infinite number of paths stretching forward from Now. Any time someone peers in to a crystal ball or has a precognitive vision they see the most likely future. It will happen if everything remains unchanged, but there is plenty of time between now and then for things to change.
This might be a more modern view of the future-- a future of variables and probabilities. Future as an equation where the inputs are fuzzy and prone to change.
These kinds of visions of the future can be specific and visual, like dreams or scenes in the mind. They could just as easily be vague like Future as Fate predictions, something like "misfortune will strike your friends" with the understanding that the misfortune could be avoided. But, because Future as Fate can only give these vague kinds of predictions, why not be distinct and present visions of future possibilities as rich visuals.
This kind of foretelling is much more useful to players because it is about gathering information to help make choices. Why find out a friend is going to die if you can't change it? This vision of the future is more active and empowered. Players find out about the future like scouting a foreign country.
A Mechanic
There won't be a single, elegant solution like Zak's for this kind of future because there are so many variables, but I think we can at least come up with some guidelines
Which Part of the Future to Show
Because the possibilities are open it becomes hard to decide what part of the future to even show. How far ahead should be shown? And what about physical distance from the seer's current location?
One thing to keep in mind is that if a future path depends upon decisions, each decision you assume for the players makes a particular path less and less likely. It might be a good rule of thumb to either show the future as the outcome of one particular choice or show the future up until the next big decision point. The first will help players decide if that is in fact the choice they want to make. The second will prime them for the upcoming big choice, and hopefully build dramatic tension.
In general, though, a week ahead would seem quite far, a month probably the limit for things revolving around the PCs (See the next way to foresee for grander destinies). As for physical distance, again a week's travel would seem far. But this still doesn't lay out what choices a vision of the future would show.
Probably the best guidance on what to show is to remember that players will want to use it to inform them. So the PCs' present situation is a good starting point:
The Players Have No Plans
If the players are in a safe place and have no particular plans it might seem odd that someone would be looking into the future. But there are things besides the PCs themselves that grant visions. A place might grant visions to those that sleep there. Fevers, drug use, or magic items all might grant a glimpse of things to come.
If players have no particular plans, this kind of DM granted vision can essentially act as an adventure hook. These may not be about choices so much because you won't be sure that players even want to get involved. The choice is, in effect, this thing is going to happen do you want to stop it, or maybe take advantage of it? But a vision that involves strangers or strange places will amount to the same thing as hearing a rumor. To be more magical and interesting these visions should probably provide a glimpse of something happening to the PCs, their friends, or their belongings. Here is the simplest chart I can imagine to help you with this:
Example: Someone hated by the PCs is ravaging a familiar object out of greed.The Party is Heading on a Journey
You see the orc One-Eye who killed little Bobby the link boy last session. He's in a 10'x10' room sweating as he stoops over something, hammering. You see it now, it is the Great Crown you've been searching for. He's hammering on it to get out the rubies and the beautiful piece of art is mangled before your eyes.
For wilderness travel you can roll encounters and weather for a week ahead of time and relate that to players. This will let them make decisions about what to bring and how to prepare for this particular journey. Likely decision points might include which of several routes to use, or, after a dangerous encounter-- whether the party should even continue.
The Party is Heading into a Dungeon
A dungeon zooms things in considerably and it becomes difficult again to decide what part of the future to show. But there are a few focuses that players might be interested in knowing about. You could either decide which of the following is most important for this dungeon, or roll randomly to determine which of these to show them:
1) A Terrible threat. Choose the most dangerous foe the dungeon holds in store for this particular party. Show them fighting it and, if defeat is likely, show them getting slaughtered in vivid detail. This is one of the few times you might impress on players the lethality of the game and the real possibility of death without them suffering the consequences. A party might take this as an opportunity to plan carefully to take on this foe, but they also might feel empowered to just run at the first sight of it, if they've already seen themselves getting slaughtered by it.
2) Many Challenges. A Rocky-like montage of difficulties, especially terrain-based is another option. Show the PCs using ropes, iron spikes, burning oil, string to navigate mazes. This would basically serve as an overview to help players prepare. In some ways it would function as the Pre-Mapped Dungeon, but the players don't necessarily know where the images they see are located within the dungeon. It is also a way to show them many smaller scale challenges instead of a single large one.
3) Treachery. A Preview of desertions and double-crossings from factions in the dungeon and/or hirelings.
4) A Dilemma or Big Choice. There might be one particularly important choice in the dungeon, for example, releasing a bound demon or not, or starting up magical machinery. The vision could show the choice being made in one way.
A Player Wants to Know the Outcome of a Particular Choice
While the archetype of those that can see the future is often about getting visions you can't control, I think it will be more interesting to everyone if the visions are useful to players. For that reason, I don't see anything wrong in just asking the players involved "What are you interested in seeing?" They might answer any of the things we've mentioned above ("I want to see what happens if we take the shortcut in the woods," or "I want to see who will betray me in the caverns.") or they may ask about turning the handle one the big, creepy door to the left. This can essentially defang traps, but if your traps are set up more as obstacles anyway, knowing what happens won't necessarily tell the party how to get through the door safely. Also, spells, magic items, and precognitive abilities will most likely have limitations on frequency of use that will prevent layers from avoiding all uncertainty.
The next way to foresee is really a subset of both these first models. But the Future as a Web is different enough that I think it warrants a separate look.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)