Business Idea

I was at lunch with my father and brother, excitedly talking away about potential game-related business ideas when I stumbled on the perfect opportunity: Scratch & Sniff monster cards! :)

House Rules - Starting Equipment

Since getting Swords & Wizardy I've been trying to recruit a few friends with no roleplaying experience. Because of this I've been thinking very carefully about how to streamline the process of playing, how to simplify.

After deciding on an encumbrance system, I wanted a streamlined equipment list. I read through many forums and looked at all the various equipment lists in game books I have. I've mentioned before how important I think the equipment list is. I wanted to capture that flavor I remember as a kid, the mystery and real world detail (this isn't a board game!) of all the items in the list. But I didn't want to overwhelm my friends who will also have to maneuver the new concepts of character class, weapons, and possibly spells. I decided to limit the equipment list to one page. I started with the list from Swords & Wizardry, revised from there, and added encumbrance information. That list can be found here as an open office file in case you want to do anything with it.

Vedron has a nice summary of real world detail on torches, lamp oil, rations, and rope I found useful.

But, even while making that list I was getting the feeling it was still too much. I needed something simpler. I saw several implementations of "Fast Packs" but I don't even like the term, it sounds like something designed for tournaments, and those that offered 2 or 3 numbered options remind me too much of ordering at McDonalds. Where is that old mystique I valued?

One solution that seems to offer the simplicity of the fast pack with some of the flavor and detail I value I found on Lord Kilgore's blog here. In a nutshell, his solution is all players start with standard equipment and then choose a few more items from a small list.

Below, I tweak Lord Kilgore's list to my taste. This allows me to choose a small core of equipment any sane adventurer would want, tally the encumbrance, and make a small list for my beginning players to choose from that captures some of that old time dungeoneering flavor.

• Backpack
• Bedroll
• Tinderbox (with flint & steel)
• Rations, Dried (1 week)
• Waterskin
• 3 torches
• Leather Armor
• Dagger or Hatchet
• Weapon of choice
• 2d6 gold pieces
  

This comes out to about 20 gold and 4 stones.

Choose four:

• 50' Rope
• Grapnel
• 5 Iron Spikes & a Small Hammer
• 10' pole
• Upgrade from Torches to Lantern & 3 pints of oil
• Second Weapon
• Shield

If a character chooses the four heaviest items, they will still be about the 10 stone limit for normal movement. As far as cost goes, I cut Lord Kilgore's option to upgrade from leather to chain-- if a player chose: chain, shield, two-handed sword and long bow, the total is over 180 gold! That's max gold for the core rules. I think I'll let them earn their chain.

I didn't list thieves' tools, holy symbols or spell books, because the classes that use them are kind of pointless without those things. If you feel this is unfair to the fighter you could grant them a shield as one of the core items.

Beyond the Black Gate gives an NPC and backstory for the selling of equipment packs, but again, it isn't quite to my taste. It reminds me of hearing about the early megadungeon with a turnstile installed, makes the dungeon more mundane if so many people are going there it merits selling standardized packs to them.

But the idea of backstory is great. And the idea of how valuable this gear is, is a factor that should probably be dealt with. I think my solution to both will be to have these on loan from a patron. I'm thinking a patron might be important in getting these beginners even headed into the sand box. After they realize what they are capable of and what their options are, the patron can ask for reimbursement for his gear and slip away, leaving them to decide if they want to go back into the dungeon or not.

My Sordid Gaming Past

Although I sometimes feel out of my league when I read on blogs that people have been DMing since the 70s, especially since I've never been able to game as much as I'd like, when I think of all the products I've bought and games I've dabbled with I'm sure I fall squarely in the geeky/gamer camp. So, I thought I'd make a list of games I played at least one session in:

• Basic D&D
• AD&D
• Gamma World
• Traveller
• Rolemaster (we called it I.C.E. and had photocopies of Arms Law, Claw Law et. al)
• Champions
• Marvel Heroes
• DC Heroes (played a lot)
  
• Star Frontiers
• Boot Hill
• Top Secret
• Tunnels & Trolls (solo)
• Thieves World
• Toon
• Rifts
• My DMs homebrew (recreating the Jack Chalker's Well of Souls world)
  
• And several versions of my own home brews (the most-played was recreating the movie Aliens)
• 2e D&D
  
• 4e D&D
  

Things I remember having, reading, and creating characters for, but not sure if we ever played:

• Gang Busters
• Elf Quest

And maybe some I'm forgetting. I always wanted to try Space Opera and Chivalry & Sorcery, but never saw them-- our FLGS was not so local, over an hours drive away when we were kids.

I spent a lot of time designing my own games. The first big effort was based on the coolness in the 1e DMG that was conversions for the different systems (Boot Hill, Gamma World). I wanted a basic universal system that could be the rulesystem for any genre of campaign. Later I heard about GURPS. After that, my more sophisticated attempt was a game that's magic system was open and would let players make any spell they needed on the spot, like making a sentence. I remember when I first opened Ars Magica in a store feeling both validated (it was a good idea) and like crying (my ideas are always a day late and a dollar short!). Oh well.

And solo play . . . my last good idea I've never seen pulled off. With POD maybe I can pull it off now.

Update 6/13/09: How could I forget Car Wars!? (trying to recreate Road Warrior)

One Page Dungeon from 1934

Did anyone else catch this? Apparently a one page dungeon featuring a 5000 year old lizard people cult tunneling for gold! I don't own Call of Cthulu, but this seems perfect for exploring under 1930's L.A.

House Rules - Encumbrance

I've spent more hours pouring over the equipment list in the 1e PHP than any textbook. Partially because I was making more characters than I was playing, but also because the equipment list was evocative of what adventures might await-- why was belladonna on the list, and what would a pound of garlic do to a vampire, really? I only had brief encounters with grognards in my early days of the game so I didn't know what one was supposed to do with iron spikes and 10' poles.

The choosing of equipment reminds me of the Vancian magic system; you need to make choices before the adventure based on what you expect lies ahead, and you can't change your decision later when it is convenient.

Of course this only holds if you are limited in what you can carry and choose. Ahh, encumbrance. A prime example of trying to add choices to a game without adding too much complexity. The idea of encumbrance is true to the essence of the game-- just as you approach the submerged temple of the slime-worshippers your last torch starts to flicker-- but in 1e turned out way too fiddly-- how many coins does a potion way again?. I'd wager that most people hand wave encumbrance, but then you lose the hard choices of what to take and what to leave behind.

In my own campaign I tried something more video-gamey with sacks and backpacks broken into squares, but I think it was still too fiddly. Now for the solution that more than anything crystallized my desire to blog: Delta's post on encumbrance.

In a nutshell, he raises the granularity of the system, so that rather than working with pounds we work with 14 to 15 pound "stones." This abstracting of detail seems brilliant and obvious in retrospect; how many game systems have tried to add complexity to the combat system of D&D only to find the elegance in its abstraction? It simplifies things enough to allow us back our player choices based on weight and carrying capacity with the added flavor of an imperial unit.

This is exactly the kind of rule I want to focus on in this blog: one that reduces complexity while adding choice and flavor to the game.