The Seven-Sided Die

What about surprise?

Of course, sometimes, as the DM, you’re going to turn the screws a bit and ask a different question: instead of “Do you want to deal with this thing? How?” you might ask “You’re already faced with this thing! What are you going to do about it? Run? Fight? Door number three?” That’s totally legitimate, but carries with it the whiff of railroading and opens the door to the same frustrations as the Quantum Ogre.

The old school has an answer for this, and it’s a parallel to the random encounter itself: the DM can disclaim fiat choice and turn to the dice. There’s a random encounter, and the DM doesn’t know whether a direct encounter or a distant, clue-laden approach is best for play and the player’s mood right now. Take it out of the DM’s hands and put the question to the dice: Roll for surprise!

Randomness is another tool to avoid railroads. The DM gets put into the same position as the players when they disclaim choice and trust the dice, in that they are equally as surprised by what happens next as the players are. Rather than DM tyranny and imposed ideas, the twist is left to fate.

If the DM isn’t forcing the encounter but the dice say it happens, it may not be be obvious to the players whether this is an instance of a Quantum Encounter or random chance. However, as the encounters add up over the hours and over the sessions, players can tell the difference. The Quantum Ogre is a problem precisely because players can tell over time that the DM’s hand is laying heavy on the encounters they face. By the same mechanism of social insight, players can also tell when that heavy hand is missing, and the randomness of the dice is one of the best ways of taking the DM’s hand off.

Druid

Druids are the guardians of nature and the self-appointed arbiters of the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Where small rural communities exist on the edge of the wilderness, the druid is a welcome—if awed—presence that calms weather, tames beasts, and drives out blight. From their perspective, druids serve the wilderness as much as such communities by keeping people’s incursions away from sensitive areas, teaching them how to co-exist with the beasts who are their neighbours, and educating the benighted to avoid the obvious mistakes when planting a field.

Musts: Druids channel the power latent in the patterns of nature, shaping it with their sentience to further and sustain those self-same natural cycles. Like clerics of gods, druids must take Divine Miracles but can only choose Nature as the sponsoring power (a Refresh Cost of −4.) In order to cast rituals, in addition to the other ritual components the druid must bear a focus item: a sprig of mistletoe harvested during the full moon with a silver or golden sickle consecrated to that purpose. Casting an evocation while not in a natural setting (assuming the lack of a natural environment allows the desired effect at all) also relies on this focus item as a link to the natural world that gives a druid their power.

Options: An experienced druid can call on Nature’s Wisdom [−1] to infallibly identify wild plants and animals, as well as clean water. Many can Pass Without a Trace [−1] through undergrowth without slowing their pace. A sign of an accomplished Druid is the ability to take on the Shape of Wild Creatures [−2] or the form of their Totem Animal [−1].

What this means for the Dungeoneer’s Handbook

This means two interlinked things for the Dungeoneer’s Handbook. Wait, three. [1] Three things for the future of the DHB.

First, it means that it’s going to be way simpler for me if I just make this a personal project never intended for release. (Turns out that there’s another reason this would be the simplest route for me, but that’s nothing to do with DFRPG—see below.) However, pretending that I’m eventually going to show this to people who don’t have me there as the DM to explain away the rough spots means I’m taking a more rigorous approach to the writing and design. So, in practice, regardless of whether I eventually aim for a public release, this first point doesn’t change that pretending that I will in my own head improves the project.

Second, and this is interlinked with the third point, it means that I can’t refer to Stunts and Powers that appear in DFRPG. This is mostly not a problem, since I don’t need most of them to make a derivative work in a completely different setting. I can’t use a Power like “Knight of the Cross”, but I don’t want to anyway. Dresdenverse bits like “Knight of the Cross” are exactly the sort of “special ability” that Product Identity was designed to protect, and the sort of thing that Evil Hat doesn’t want to accidentally just hand away on Jim Butcher’s behalf. Since I’m not using the Dresdenverse at all, this sort of thing doesn’t pose a problem.

While I don’t want to Dresdenverse concepts embodied by stunts and powers, there are generic stunts and powers that aren’t unique to the Dresdenverse that I’d like to use. Things like Toughness, the supernatural ability for a creature to ignore a certain amount of stress unless you find its weakness, is a concept that predates DFRPG and appears in most fantasy RPGs. Werewolves who can’t be hurt except by overwhelming damage (say, being hit by a truck), but are deathly susceptible to injuries dealt by silver, is exactly the sort of thing that Toughness and its higher-powered variants are perfect for representing. These are the sorts of things that I look at as useful Fate innovations that would be great to re-use.

Though they’d be great to re-use, the PI declaration in DFRPG does capture the names and descriptions of “special abilities” since those do fall under the definition of Product Identity in the OGL. So, I can’t use the name of Toughness in a derivative like the DHB. I can’t even refer to it in my own writeup for werewolves in the DHB, saying “look it up in your copy of DFRPG:YS,” because the name itself is claimed as PI. This sort of thing is probably not what Evil Hat intended to cover with the blanket PI claim in DFRPG’s OGL, but it would have been prohibitive to separate out such things as Open Game Content without getting into grey territory regarding Dresdenverse copyright. A blanket PI claim is the safe, responsible way to handle this kind of thing, even if it’s inconvenient for me. In order to model werewolves and the like in the DHB, then, I have to write my own version of Toughness with a different name, or some other stunt/power that fills the same generic narrative concept of “unnaturally hard to hurt except with weakness X.” This brings me to the related impact on the DHB:

Third, I have to make the Dungeoneer’s Handbook a stand-alone product (should I hypothetically publish it). It would have been far easier for me to just say, “The DHB requires the use of The Dresden Files: Your Story from Evil Hat LLC” and not bother writing up my own special abilities that are already adequately provided by DFRPG. This would have been nice for me as it would save work, and actually I would have felt a bit happier saying “go buy DFRPG! You can’t use this without it!” On the other hand, I realise that would have been more annoying for the hypothetical players who would end up flipping back and forth between the DHB and DFRPG books in order to make their character creation choices.

In some ways this is a blessing in disguise, though. It means that the (hypothetical) release edition of the Dungeoneer’s Handbook will be a complete game unto itself, with no dependencies on third-party “core” books, and that’s a better experience for the end reader and user. (I’m still going to say “Go buy DFRPG!” in a hypothetical DHB release though, because really yes yes read DFRPG.)

Of course that’s not all

As I implied above, there’s more in the way of such a hypothetical release. As it turns out, the DFRPG OGL isn’t the stickiest bit of copyright that I’m running into as I write. If you recall, I’m aiming to use this as a handbook for a home Forgotten Realms campaign. As I write, I find that I’m embedding a lot of setting concepts from the Realms that there’s no way could ever see the light of day without being infringing. I’m putting them in anyway because I want this stuff available for my players, but if I eventually turn the handbook into a releasable form it will mean a lot of text will have to be rewritten or outright stripped out.

For example, I have a template called Touched by Mystra. Right there in the name, I can’t put that out in a product. However, something like that is necessary to reflect character options related to the way magic has changed in my Realms after the Avatar Crisis, and since it’s directly tied to Mystra (and fiction matters in Fate) it’s necessary to have that baked right into the template. For a home game that’ll be fine, and in the meantime I’m just not worrying about it. It does mean that I’ll be looking in two directions should I endeavour to sanitise the manuscript for publication: toward DFRPG to identify and remove/rewrite any Product Identity that we relied on for our home campaign, and toward the Forgotten Realms to remove (utterly) any references to Wizards’ copyrighted game setting. [2]

The Dungeoneer’s Handbook

To that end, I’m working on something tentatively called the Dungeoneer’s Handbook, “a guide for Fate players and GMs who love dragons and dungeons”. My first goal is a slim handbook [3] that we can use at the table as a quick reference and character-conversion guide to make using DFRPG for a D&D-style game as easy as possible. Things like skill changes, sample stunts, a combat manœuver guide to help map D&D-combat thinking into Fate mechanics, templates for the class archetypes, and a monster-conversion guide for me are the sorts of things that will go into this.

Ideally, I would like to have a second milestone for fleshing it out into a minimalist but complete Dungeon Delving with Fate book under the OGL, but the OGL notice in DFRPG is one of those super-restrictive ones that claims everything:

Any material found in this book which is not directly taken from the above named works [Fudge 1995, FATE, Spirit of the Century] is deemed to be product identity.

I’m not a lawyer [2], but I find this a concerning OGL notice. As far as the OGL is concerned, not just anything can be claimed as Product Identity. In particular, mechanics can’t be claimed as PI. But since DFRPG does introduce game mechanics (as defined under “Open Game Content”) that are new since Spirit of the Century, that puts the licensing status of DFRPG and anything based on it in considerable doubt. Regardless, PI does legitimately cover the names and descriptions of “special abilities [and] magical or supernatural abilities”, so reusing DFRPG stunts in a derivative work is verboten and making a “clean” derivative is prohibitive.

At some point I may take it up with Fred Hicks at Evil Hat to get some clarification, but the first, personal-use milestone is going to be plenty of work. Time enough to worry about the OGL later. And with that said, I really should get back to it!

Rules are tools

Nobody questions what movement grid rules are good for, or why it could be useful for a game to assign different weapons different damage ratings. A movement grid takes the guesswork out of determining where every character is. The point is not to know where everyone is standing, never mind the absurd “to teach players how walking around works.” The point is to make position simple and intuitive so that everyone can save their thinking, strategising, and teamwork on what everyone is going to do about where the characters are standing.

Rules are tools for streamlining a process that is fundamentally a complicated human social and mental process: a bunch of people sitting around trying to simultaneously agree on what happens in their shared imagination while each trying to coordinate their efforts and trying to play their “best”, whatever that means for the part of the game at hand.

Streamlining your roleplay

Rules for roleplaying are just such tools. If you’ve played and enjoyed such games then you can probably see where I’m going with this. For the benefit of those who haven’t and have found themselves asking the question in the title: Games that have rules for roleplaying don’t tell you how to play any more than a movement grid tells you how to walk. What they do is streamline certain sticking points about playing a role so that you can get on with the interesting parts of playing a role.

A movement grid streamlines play by prevent everyone from slowing down the round with questions like, “Wait, where is that orc standing? Does it have cover? What do you mean it sees me?! I said I was crouched behind the rubble. What, the rubble was in the other room? Can we rewind? ‘Cause I would have cast a spell before the fight in that case…”

Similarly, a roleplaying rule streamlines away confusion and argument over certain details[1]_ about how fictional characters interact with each other..

Cutting to the chase

Rules about roleplaying aren’t about how to roleplay, they’re about cutting to the chase. They don’t replace how you play your character with a bunch of mechanical “if this then that” rules, but rather replace the messy conversations players have whenever there’s disagreement about what should happen next. They are just as much a practical tool for eliding the boring parts of Make Believe as to-hit rules are. Even improv theatre – a more free-form kind of pure roleplaying than nearly every roleplaying game in existence – has “rules” that are really tools and communication tricks for getting everyone moving forward together when the performance might otherwise drag to a halt while the audience watches.

So next time someone wonders, honestly or otherwise, how anyone could possibly need rules for how to roleplay, remember that they’re asking the wrong question. Nobody needs rules for how to roleplay. Rules that stimulate the players’ imaginations and take play in unexpected directions, while smoothing over the usual conversational hitches that come up between creative people, can increase the drama of a game no matter how good at roleplaying the group already is.