The Seven-Sided Die

Wizards of the Coast has released the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide. There's a review at RPG.net that is less than glowing. Judging from the material mentioned in that review, I think my opinion would be even worse.

The 4e staples have been introduced: Dragonborn, Tieflings, the Shadowfell, Elemental Chaos, and so forth. To accomplish that they killed Mystra and had the world plunged into a hundred years of magical chaos. The reviewer gets the detail about the Great Wheel wrong (it existed in the Realms in 2nd edition and earlier, but Wizards changed that when they updated the Realms for 3e), but apparently it's been smashed up and somehow became the Chaos and Shadowfell and Feywild and stuff. Gods have been randomly removed or redefined as something that's not really a god.

Other weird things have been done. The ancient empire of Netheril, which destroyed itself in a magical holocaust centuries past, is suddenly back. There's no such thing as Maztica, which has instead been replaced by something called Returned Abeir: a confused fragment of the plane of the gods mixed up with bits of the Elemental Chaos, fallen to the planet. Apparently there's a major metropolis and a lot of wilderness on it? I don't know, but I'm not buying it.

I mean, I'm really not buying it, with money. Let's try a thought experiment: There's this setting just put out for 4th edition D&D. (Let's assume that I'm playing 4e at all.) The book presents a post-apocalyptic setting that neatly mixes up the fiction elements of the main 4e book in a novel way. There are countries swarming with undead, mystical plagues, magic-warped mutants, a mess of elemental and godling stuff going on across the sea, and the darkness and decay that a century of apocalypse brings. Now let's call it The Ravaged Domains Campaign Guide. It sounds pretty cool, but it's not the Forgotten Realms.

I do think there are some interesting ideas in there. I like the elements that have been put into this stew, and I might be tempted to get it just to scoop out and repurpose the bits I like. On the other hand, I have lots of raw material lying around as it is, and buying it would be sending Wizards of the Coast the wrong message. The right message is: I do not approve of this new Realms. I'll be keeping my 2nd edition boxed set near at hand, thank you.

Out in the wilds of Suburban Onterrible, life-giving internet connections are hard to come by. Nonetheless, I managed to discover, under a scrap of driftwood, a review of Shock not written by me. I have managed to stuff it into the narrow straw through which I am accessing the webbernets, just for you: Jono DiCarlo's review of Shock.

I have to run now, as dusk approaches and brings with it the terrible sound of the trampling herds of vicious Esyoovi that rule this land. I should have more to say next week, should I return to the green hills of my homeland safely.

I just received my copy of Shock: social science fiction in the mail this morning. I'd forgotten that I'd bought it some time ago, so I can't praise the shipping time. However, at US$24 shipping included, it's relatively cheap for a complete game. (For someone used to paying nearly twice that after tax for a single volume of the World's Most Popular Roleplaying Game, that's pocket change. I skipped buying coffee for a week and came out even.)

First some context. Shock is a science fiction roleplaying game from Joshua Newman. (Although the preferred title appears to be shock:, colon and small-cap included, that conceit is textually awkward and I'm going to forgo it.) Designed for 3 to 5 people, you create a setting with real-world issues and science-fiction twists (called Shocks), create some Protagonists and their Antagonists at the intersections of those issues and Shocks, and then take turns playing out your Protagonists while the player to your left plays your Antagonist. There is no GM—the Antagonist player assumes much of that role in this game. The intent of the game is to re-create, in roleplaying game format, the sorts of stories that get told in science fiction novels, which largely focus on questions of how technology influences society as a whole and the lives of individual people.

The physical book is modest but loud. And by loud, I mean shockingly orange. Other than the cover colour, at 87 perfect-bound square pages it's an unassuming game book. The orange will make it easy to spot on my game shelf, despite the narrow spine and tiny lettering.

I've only just started reading it. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it uses the gender-neutral pronouns "zie" and "hir" instead of "he/she" and "his/her". This is the first time that I've seen these used outside of feminist writing or MUDs, so it's a milestone of sorts. The usual objection to gender-neutral pronouns is that they're awkward to read, but I found that I stopped noticing them pretty quickly. As a real-world test of their applicability, I think that's a good sign.

That's the first major error that I noted in the text, though. The editorial explanation of "zie" and "hir" gave the wrong male/female equivalents, likely confusing 99% of the game's readers. This being the second edition of the book, that's somewhat surprising. Then again, that 1% remainder just might not have given Newman any feedback. I should fix that.

The second error that I found is in how the Audience is supposed to use their dice during Conflicts. When it's first mentioned it says only the highest-rolling Audience die gets used and ties are rerolled, but later it says that ties are broken depending on whether it will be used for or against the Protagonist's Intent. I think I prefer the former rule since it preserves the game's position that having the Protagonist fail is just as interesting as having them succeed.

I will have more to say about it when I finish reading it. I'm really looking forward to being able to play it.

For the Edge of Empire campaign I'm using 1st edition AD&D rules, but with some tweaks.

First, we're using stone weight encumbrance from Delta's AD&D house rules. This reduces the amount of calculation immensely, and results in numbers that are easy to visualise. A knight wearing 3 stone of armour, carrying 1-½ stone of weaponry, and hauling 2 stone of gear has a total of 6-½ stone of equipment. With average strength, that means she's moving at half speed.

Since Delta's rules and Gygax's tables are a pain to reconcile on-the-fly, I've done up a set of tables for stone weight carrying capacities and their effects on movement rate: Stone Weight - Weight and Speed tables. (More win from Google Docs.)

In addition to that lovely encumbrance system, we're also using two different Experience houserules instead of awarding XP for monsters defeated and treasure recovered. The first is a modified version of Clinton R. Nixon's Sweet20 experience system, which brings the Keys from The Shadow of Yesterday to D&D 3e. (We're modifying them to suit the different philosophy behind XP in 1e.) The idea is that each character has one or more Keys, which are bundles of actions that grant the character XP. For example, the Key of Conscience rewards a character with XP for helping the helpless or less fortunate, while the Key of the Vow rewards the character with XP when they keep a vow (which is chosen by the player) despite inconvenient or dangerous circumstances.

The other XP system we're using (only slightly modified) is Wyrds from Chimera Creative Workshop. (Yay for the Wayback Machine, since that page doesn't exist anymore!) Wyrds are personal quests or goals that give a roll bonus (that increases with level) when doing anything in pursuit of the Wyrd and that, when completed, give a significant amount of XP. Wyrds are player-chosen and can be anything on any scale, so it could be as big as "save the village from the marauding dragon" or as small as "defeat the goblins guarding that door", or even just "cross this river". What keeps it from getting ridiculous is that a character can only receive experience for completing a Wyrd a limited number of times per game session.

What I like about both these XP systems is that they're player-driven. A player can decide that the "Forsaken Temple" on my map looks like it might be full of undead, and declare her Wyrd as "cleanse the Forsaken Temple of undead". I hadn't decided what was in that dungeon beforehand, and now I have a player telling me clearly what kind of adventure they would enjoy having next. (Note too that there are measures built into those systems to change or add to the details of a pull should a player want things to go in a different direction.) What sort of Key a player gives their character also tells me a lot about what kind of play they hope for—a game with a bunch of PCs with the Key of Bloodshed is going to be completely different than a group with the Key of Diplomacy and similar.

Really, that's the best part. They're pure pull mechanics: the player adds something to their character sheet that quietly tells me "do this thing and I will have fun". GMs in traditional games often have a real hard time soliciting any feedback at all, and end up trying to guess how well their campaign direction is being received. A lot of bored players and stressed GMs is a frequent result, though really good GMs learned how to judge and guess what their players want. With two big pulls being laid on me through the Experience system, I will have a much easier time deciding on where to take the game. I won't have to worry about trying to tell the differenced between players who don't like how I'm running the game and players who are just uninterested in the direction it's going. Now, the players are responsible for not only where their PCs go, but also why. I just have to make it happen and make it interesting.

Since I got so much interest in and suggestions for the area I'm working on with the last WIP map, I thought y'all might like this: Cities and towns of the Iron Valley.

I've only written anything for Cantos yet, but I'll be adding more as inspiration strikes. There is some undercity to Cantos that I want to add, but I have to better figure out how I imagine it before I do.

Incidentally, Google Docs is great for working on this stuff. Mostly the portability is nice, because I can work on things whenever I'm near a computer and not just when I'm near my local files. The instant-publish feature is a very nice bonus, and I like that it generates a PDF for ease of printing.

I'm almost finished the map I was working on using this tutorial. It still needs a compass rose, title banner, nice border, and other finishing touches like that, but the natural and societal geography is done. For some reason, when I export to PNG it gets a shade darker than what I see in the Gimp, which is minor but annoying.

I still need to name this region, though. It's a region of independent towns and cities scattered across wilderness, sandwiched between a fallen empire to the south and the endless* plains to the north, and the high mountains to the east and... something to the west. Maybe something involving a lot of water, or perhaps giant bees.

Any suggestions for a name?

* Not really endless, but I forget the name of the tribal elven country on the far side that one of my players came up with.

I always intuitively felt that D&D, as a game of creative imagination, was intensely flavoured by its rules. I didn't really understand what this intuition meant when I was a high school–aged DM and I was trying to figure out why I did and didn't like certain sets of rules. Later when 3e came along I bemoaned the treatment of psionics, but I could never articulate why beyond complaining, "it's just magic with a different paint job".

Which brings me to the monograph I've quoted up there. I loved reading game rulebooks. Like a sponge, I sucked up the ambiance that the art, layout, side-bar fiction, examples of play, lists of equipment, and the mechanics themselves wove together. Most importantly, reading game books made me want to play because my brain was overflowing with scenes of such delightful events and imagery. I wanted to pull those out, show them off to my players, and then see them inhabit, explore, and expand these imagined places and histories.

I'm sure that this is why I was never a fan of GURPS and other "universal" systems. They deliberately omitted the very inspirational elements that resonated with my imagination. I knew that much of the reason for such universal systems was for them to impassively and impartially represent any imaginary world I could think of, but they were dull, dry, and soulless: I wanted them to sing to me, and they just gave me a blank staff. Sci-fi almost always went with dry and mechanical rules too, which would explain why none inspired me until I became aware of Blue Planet and Shock.

There have been a lot of arguments lately that rules don't matter, just the roleplay. Mostly I've seen this argued by people advocating for D&D 4th Edition against hold-outs. Even leaving aside the inherent contradiction in that approach ("you should use these rules, because it doesn't matter what rules you use"), there's a problem with this line of reasoning. The rules do matter. The fictional objects they emphasise; how they feel and flow as they're handled during play; the implicit and explicit bounds on the fiction that they represent: all those serve to inspire the imagination in different ways than another set of rules would.

The roleplay is certainly paramount, but it doesn't spring from players in a vacuum. If the roleplay that a group produces can be likened to a meal, then the game rules are an important ingredient that contributes to the overall character of the final dish.

I'm no artist, but I've always wanted to make nice-looking maps on the computer. That's why this mapping tutorial for the GIMP is awesome. Using it I've managed to take this:

And turn it into this:

Rheall should recognise it, since it's the land I used for the solo game I ran for her recently. (Actual play first half, second half , and debrief .) It's still a work in progress—the hills need to be added, roads and towns placed, and I need to do something with the moors in the lower right to make them look better. I'm really pleased with it so far, though.

(For my players on Tuesday, this is the map of the area your characters will start in and be exploring. Yeah, I know the names on the drawn map are hard to read. It's a bad photo, not even a bad scan.)

Old school gaming gets defined differently depending on who you ask.

The two most common definitions—that an old game is "old school", or that the earliest edition of a ruleset is "old school"—aren't what do it for me. I don't think that Everway is old school, nor do I think that 1st edition Vampire: The Masquerade is. The definition of "old school" that I subscribe to is a style (or "school") of play that developed in the early years of the roleplaying game hobby. Although both old and modern styles are "roleplaying", the basic assumptions of how the players, the referee, characters, and world interrelate are completely different. Not better or worse, but different, and the superficial similarities make it hard for players coming from different backgrounds to appreciate the enjoyment that comes from each.

I wanted to sum up the differences succinctly right here but ended up deleting every attempt. I'll just give a link to the PDF "A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming" by Matthew Finch, which was the point of this post anyway. As it says in the blurb under the download link, "open-ended rules ... are USED very differently than rules are used in modern systems". I think anyone who is going to be giving pre-1990s rules (or new rules designed to support old school play) will increase their enjoyment tenfold by reading this brief primer. It's also well-written and a pleasure to read.

Just last week Microlite74 was released. It's a d20 variant designed to have modern rules (based on Microlite20) that enable an old-school play experience. It manages to get character creation, task resolution, spells, and more than 80 monsters into a mere 4 pages!

But my purpose in posting is to quote this paragraph on skills in the game. It really highlights the old-school philosophy of success being a matter of thinking, rather than dicing:

Unlike most modern RPGs, there aren’t any skills. Players are intended to have their characters act like adventurers. So don’t search your character sheet for the perfect solution in Microlite74. Instead, you just tell the GM what your character is trying to do. If you need to keep a door open or shut, tell the GM your character is using a spike to keep the door open or closed. A ten foot pole is your friend for checking for traps. Searching a room means looking in and under objects, not rolling a skill check. While this may seem strange at first, you will quickly learn to appreciate the freedom it gives you. No longer are you limited to the skills and feats on your character sheet, you can try anything your character should be capable of trying. You might not succeed, but the rules generally will not stop you from trying.

I'm not completely opposed to skills in RPGs, though. Having skills in an exploration-focused RPG system is good for one thing: indicating something about the character you're playing. What they're not good for is mechanically framing a fictional interaction that is, in its basest form, a creative exercise. Heavily mechanised skills encourage players to seek the "right" answer to an in-game challenge instead of applying their imagination. And, after all, isn't the point of playing an RPG to be creative and imaginative?