I’m often inspired by images I find online, either because they reflect what’s in my head or send sparks of ideas into the back of my brain. There are a lot of good places to find images, and I want to share some of my sure-fire sources.

Pictures speak to me

I am, in many regards, a very visual person. As a roleplayer I am very invested in the aesthetic socket: as a player I seek out wondrous and strange places in the game’s setting to immerse in them; as a GM my campaign preparations and inspirations are often a compelling images that I want to realise.

Often enough the images behind a campaign I want to run are just in my head¹ The inspirations might have their roots in a videogames I’ve loved or places I’ve been, but the real driver is an image on its own as it encapsulates senses of place, time, emotion, and theme.

Other times I’m inspired directly by images, or I’ve found images that come close to what’s in my head.

Show your players

The wiki for the one setting I have online, the country Tayel, is peppered with images that I found inspiring or reflected the imagery in my head. The Serpent River slips green and placid through the wood for which it’s named. The Swift Valley farmers grow fields of bright red amaranth for their grain, oil, rich red dye, and greens.² The Winter Weald is a frozen forest year-round. The Briarwind Hills are windy forage land below the Sunset Mountains for the hardy shepherds who call it their home. Belying their name, the Spine is a string of low, wooded hills that define the southern boundary of the Swift Valley and offer fertile hunting grounds.

All of those images helped me put what was in my head when I was building Tayel in front of my players. They also serve me as reminders of the particular diversity of the landscape within the small country, keeping me from using mental shorthand and picturing every acre of forest identically.

All of those images are also freely available—every one I sourced from Wikimedia Commons. For example, the representative hill of the Spine is a hill in Aizu, Japan. Although the paddies below the hill are rice in the image, at that distance they serve admirably as amaranth paddies.

When I already know what kind of image I’m looking for, the Search box at Commons is one of the first places I turn to. Usually it will give me some images or categories that are close enough, and from there I can start browsing the categories, looking for the image that will convey the idea I’m looking for.

Feed your creative process

Right now my desktop has this image on it. (Choose a screen resolution below the thumnail and click Download to open a new window with the image full-size. It’s really worth seeing at high resolution, and full-screen if possible.)

It’s an image of a very tall stone house on a hill overlooking a road and a plot of cultivated yet scrubby trees, with a snow-scrubbed mountains rising above it, glowing (or glowering) under a portentous sky. It’s incredibly atmospheric, and makes me want to play that, right now. I don’t know what kind of game “that” is, but it makes something primitive and creative thrash about in me. I like that, and when I need inspiration for a location I can tap into that.

I have my desktop wallpaper on a constant cycle, randomly filling it every hour with an image from a selected folder. Any time I want a quick dose of awe, I can just swipe all my windows out of the way and soak in the atmosphere of whatever has been hiding behind them.

The images in my current cycle have all come from one site, Interfacelift. Originally I was simply drawn by the way you could set the image filters to match your screen aspect ratio and resolution, but I was blown away by the number of images that are perfect for feeding the creative beast.

Beaches, mountains, lonely buildings, and bodies of water seem to be very popular with the photographers that contribute daily to Interfacelift, and that just so happens to be exactly the kind of imagery that works for me and my focus on fantasy settings. There’s an RSS feed that I’ve subscribed to as well that keeps my folder updated with the most recent pieces that fit what I find inspiring.

Share your inspirations

The current blog carnival has just started, and we can always use new sources of inspiration. If you blog, share your own sources of inspiration and link back to Johnn’s June Blog Carnival article.

If you don’t have a blog your inspirations are welcome in the comments here or at Johnn’s article.

What gets your creative juices flowing?

No related posts.

I’ve been accused of being offensive and over-the-top. “Thank you,” I must reply to that because that was the fucking point. The satire in this case is meant to take a belief or argument that is considered acceptable, break it down to its underlying structure, and populate that structure with equivalent items that highlight how inappropriate the original thing is. Y’know, to make the reader question calcified and antiquated assumptions.

Like this:

Here, an icon representing an insult is used to illustrate a textual expression of an inclusive intent. The combination image is flatly contradictory bullshit. (Those are technical terms.)

The point of the satirical icons was to show the reader that these things are all the same in kind (if not degree), just with different groups of people who are marginalised by modern Western culture (i.e., our culture). To accomplish this, the images slowly ramp up the degree of blatant insult encapsulated by the image until the contradictory bullshit is undeniable.

Let’s start with the most blatant and work our way down:

This image is just so fucking offensive it’s unbelievable that I could bring myself to create it. It’s incredibly over the top. It’s unbe-fucking-lievably complete bullshit, and I hope all the readers would agree. This is indefensible if GenCon did it. Which is why I created it, to get us all on the same page that some things are just wrong. I could have gone all Modest Proposal on y’all and included baby-eating and worse, but I think this image goes far enough to make sure we’ve established OMG fucking wrong without a doubt. Baby-eating would have just been gilding the lily.

The inclusive intent in this image is pretty awesomely good: everyone is welcome and racial issues will be sensitively addressed! That’s pretty sweet! We need more of that.

Now, the icon is really, really bad. OMG so bad. Not only does it depict a blackfaced man and/or the most egregious caricature of black men in our collective memory, but it is using this image to represent all people who would care about racially-inclusive events. “Race” in our culture is almost synonymous with “black”, which is a crock. White is a race¹ too, yet only things about “coloured” people are considered to have anything to do with race. Worse, this image manages to lump all “minorities” together as if they’re a homogeneous group.

A fucking crock that is!

If the icon was funny to someone, would that make the image OK? NO!

If in the privacy of your own home you called your black friend a racial slur and you both thought that wasn’t offensive because it was “just in jest”, would that make this image OK? NO!

I hope the structure and its relationship to unacceptability is becoming clear.

So that’s the most offensive and over-the-top icon explained for the humourless and empathy-impaired. Let’s say that image gets 6 out of 5 WTF?!s because it is just completely unacceptable.²

Next up:

Now I think we can all agree that making GenCon accessible is a good thing. That text there in the image is pretty good as far as inclusive intent goes.

I think we can also all agree that the image is really fucking offensive. (Do I really need to explain this? Because I want to move on to the commonalities of structure. OK, moving on.)

So again, the combination of the insensitive insult as expressed by the icon with the positive inclusive intent expressed by the text results in a contradictory pile of steer manure. It makes the image as a whole offensive, and any organisation using it in naïve earnestness would be guilty of being insensitive assholes. (Also a technical term.)

If someone somewhere laughed when they saw this icon, would that make it OK for GenCon to use this image in their schedule? NO!

If you and a buddy regularly called each other “retarded cripple” as a term of endearing affection, would that make an iota of difference in the asshole-itude of GenCon organisers if they chose to use it in their schedule? (Hint: still NO. I mean, really? Do I have to spell that out?)

Let’s give this image 4 out of 5 WTF?!s for the sake of argument. Clearly it’s not as unbe-fucking-lievably outrageous as the blackface icon (though it’s pretty ridiculously bad), and we need some room lower down on the scale for the rest of the images.

Next image:

Is accommodations for GenCon attendees larger than a #6 dress size actually a problem? I don’t know, but let’s assume for the sake of explaining this satire thoroughly into the ground that there are attendees of GenCon who feel marginalised due to their physical size. Given this possible state of affairs, efforts to make these people feel more welcome and accommodated would be great.

It would be especially great if accommodating such people didn’t backhand them by calling them a big fucking whale. Because that’s what the icon does. See that tub of lard who can’t go a second without shoving something down the gullet? Man, that is a giant radius on that ellipse. Let’s all point and laugh!

NO! you insensitive assholes who are actually laughing. You can laugh and point privately (asshole), but that still wouldn’t make it OK for GenCon to paste this up on their website.

If you and your Widdle Shnooky-Wookums sweetheart at home are weighty people and decide to affectionately call each other “my giant tub of love-lard” and “my overflowing cup of fatty joy,” that’s your business. Would your private feelings that it’s “just a joke” make it OK for GenCon to actually use this icon on their schedule? NO!

Have we got the pattern clear? Is there any confusion about how this satirical structure works? No?³ Good.

Let’s give this image 3 out of 4 WTF?!s.

Now we arrive at the image that GenCon actually used on their schedule:

Let’s see what we have here. An expression of inclusive intent in the text of the image? Check.

A term that is used widely as an insult in the icon? Check.

Do I really need to step through this structurally to show why there’s a problem with that combination that results in contradictory bullshit?

Sigh. Alright then: Accommodating spouses of gamers at GenCon is a great fucking idea. It sounds like the program is very successful as evidenced by the growing number of attendees signing up for SP.A. activities each GenCon since the program was started. The more people attending GenCon and enjoying their time there, the better! Yay! Cake for everyone!

It would be especially great to have such a program that didn’t deliver a backhand slap to the attendees who are actively being welcomed by insulting them and their relationship to their gamer spouse. It would be even better if such a program didn’t assume that women are strange, special creatures that need very specific, women-y activities for entertainment, and didn’t further assume that… Oh fuck it, I need bullet points to enumerate the assumptions buried in that one single image:

• Gamer are all men
• Women aren’t gamers
• Women only like crafty, dancy, stripper-pole-y activities
• There are no male spouses
• There are no gay gamers and spouses
• Non-gamers should have an activities ghetto
• Men universally consider their wives a burden
• All married couples think this joke is funny
• All women think this joke is funny
• All men think this joke is funny
• Everyone thinks this is appropriately professional and respectful
• GenCon is run by insensitive assholes more interested in their own in-jokes than in being fucking professionals in their work
• Women are fair game as the butt of a corporation-wide joke
• Women don’t mind being repeatedly insulted by their con schedule so long as the insult is “minor” and some people think it’s more funny than insulting (Hint: it’s still insulting even if its funny quotient is greater than its insult degree.)

Now, I’d only rate this image 1 or 2 out of 5 WTF?!s, but only because making women the butt of jokes is still considered normal in our society and not very WTF-worthy to most people. Jokes about black people and the disabled were just as common not so many years ago, but we fucking know better now (and those who don’t are considered disgusting and vile people).

There are still “fat” jokes everywhere, and as a culture we have a really unhealthy relationship with weight (high and low) and the issues around it. The jokes mask attempts to shame and ostracise people who don’t conform to (constantly shifting) ideals of health and beauty that are mostly made up by people who don’t actually know what a good ideal of health or beauty is.

We only don’t know better when it comes to jokes about women because we’re in a time of transition between an era where women were considered domestic labour not worthy of education or regard (or the vote, or working outside the home, or pleasure, or human rights, etcetera ad nauseum.⁴), and an era where women are given equal regard and rights to men.

So, y’know, catch the fuck up. If you wouldn’t laugh at a black man being called a monkey by a large corporation like GenCon, then you really shouldn’t laugh at a large corporation like GenCon calling you or your partner a device of shame and incarceration. (Do you think there are any black men who laugh at monkey-black-man jokes? At all? If there were, would that make it right?)

Conclusions for the short of attention-span

A lot of people consider jokes about women harmless, having been brought up in a culture where it’s just normal to hear and makes jokes at the expense of women’s dignity. Many women do, even, because they were brought up in that very culture that says making jokes about women is the way to show she’s not “stuck up” or “full of herself” or “can’t take a joke”.

To illustrate that there’s really no reason to condone the ball-and-chain icon except due to one’s own understandable blindness to a common injustice, it is compared to a structurally identical image that is slightly more obviously inappropriate; then to one that is very obviously inappropriate; then to one that is so very inappropriate that it is undeniable and possibly shocking.

The hope is that the reader can connect the dots with a crayon.

If the reader can’t, then isn’t it convenient and comfortable (and dare I say, privileged) to live a life that doesn’t include questioning one’s assumptions such that it might lead to giving up such an immeasurably important thing as a trite and tired joke.

Related posts:

1. GenCon “reaches out” in the spirit of “inclusiveness”
2. Selling games by selling bodies

Activities such as dancing lessons, fitness classes, yarn and needle crafts, jewelry-making, cooking (for your gamer), the ever-empowering pole dancing lessons, scrapbooking, bellydance, and self-defense are helpfully marked for easy identification with this icon:

Ball and chain! Haha! Those super-smart geeks sure can come up with intelligent and respectful humour when poking gentle fun at the women they purport to love!

This is a great first step for GenCon to make everyone feel valued and welcomed to the convention, but I think GenCon organisers can do better. I propose that GenCon adopt the following icons for appropriate events to make sure that no-one is left out:

Don’t you hate it when you get to a table and the chairs are all too small? Or worse, all the tiny chairs are overflowing with immense gobs of geekflesh streaked with Dorito dust?

With this icon the “Big and Tall” gamers would know which games had the capacity to accommodate their corpulent selves comfortably, and the skinny-jeans geeks will know which games to avoid!

This forward-thinking and progressive icon would help the physically and mentally disabled (because that’s all one homogeneous group, remember) find games and events that can accommodate their unusual and specific needs.

Normal gamers would no longer have to deal with weirdos in bulky wheelchairs breaking the suspension of disbelief in LARPs, or the awkward and resentful responses to their short series of perfectly well-meaning questions about how a disabled person became disabled.

Everyone wins!

In this post-racial world it’s important to constantly highlight and emphasise how minorities are welcome everywhere normal people are. If GenCon organisers adopted this icon, minorities of all colours would be able to quickly and easily identify the games and events that are welcoming of and sensitive to their quaint subcultural customs and non-English languages.

Similarly, people who don’t want to get into uncomfortable discussions of race when they’re trying to enjoy their escapist fantasy of many lands full of white, muscular men and white, bustin’-out-everywhere women can rest assured that avoiding events with this icon will do the trick.

I for one hope that GenCon will consider these icon suggestions and take them as a celebration of their efforts so far, and as encouragement to further develop their sensitive and inclusive scheduling policies. I think this issue is so important that I missed my Parent and Tots knitting circle to write this article!²

Related posts:

1. Satire explained
2. Women as players and characters
3. White privilege in fantasy fiction and gaming

Unsurprisingly in retrospect, but completely taking me by surprise at the time, that turned into a huge mess when the post was linked to on the Paizo forums.

I hesitated to write a follow-up post for a long time. When the next Christmas came around I considered writing something but ultimately skipped it just because it still left a foul taste just thinking about it. Even now I’m not really interested in analysing it, but a recent experience trying to explain male privilege to a friend and the resulting sensation of banging my head against a wall reminded me of that post and my undischarged duty to a commentor on it. That I’ve been reading the excellent Border House Blog that bankuei recently blogged about probably has a lot to do with it too.

Response

When I wrote that post, one of the first comments was from Ravyn of Exchange of Realities, asking that I post a follow-up should Paizo respond to the email. They never did so I never did, but I did (eventually, when my anger with the invaders had cooled) go and read through the entire long Paizo forum thread that discussed my post.

The male privilege and cluelessness about same was predictably rampant, but there was a surprising number of eloquent people arguing my point to the rest of the forumers,² which was great to see. Most of them were more gentle and better-written than I was, but that sadly didn’t seem to change any more minds than my angry arguing in the comments of my post did.

There were some very disappointing posts in that thread, and the most disappointing were the ones from the Paizo staff. So Ravyn, here’s your answer:

LOL.

—Erik Mona, Publisher #

All I have to say since I ordered the Holiday Pin-Up Seoni is I LIKE IT and “pin-up” was in the art order description!

—Sarah Robinson, Art Director #

I don’t think that Christmas Seoni is “bad” or sexist or anything of the sort. I think Paizo’s done a great job at being open-minded and getting all sorts of genders, races, sexual orientations, beliefs, and all that good stuff out there in a non-discriminatory way. In other words, the only thing I discriminate against is bad writing, I guess.

—James Jacob, Pathfinder Editor-In-Chief #

The only thing to say about Erik Mona’s response is that if the head publisher of a company is going to respond at all I would expect more of them. He could have said nothing at all, but he chose to respond and chose that to respond with? It seemed to be much more a response for the sake of the bulk of the forumers—”don’t worry, I’m not taking this seriously either”—than for me or any of the forumers who brought up criticism of Paizo’s representation of women.

The art director’s answer is just tiring. That she asked for it doesn’t mean it wasn’t sexist. If she’d said, “I asked for a black slave naked except for Rudolph antlers and nose, with a white man’s Santa-style boot on her back,” that would have been plainly wrong.³ It is the content of the art direction that matters, not whether or not it was asked for or even whether or not the art director happens to be female. Women can absorb and transmit oppressive cultural values just as easily as men can, because having the right bits in the pants doesn’t provide magical brain-immunity to the culture that we’re soaked in.

James Jacob’s response I cared less about and I included it for the completeness of Paizo’s response, paltry as it was. (Unlike the others though, he participated in the thread conversation beyond this response.) Still, it’s annoyingly self-congratulatory. If the detractors are ignored and you make a point of stating your point of view over theirs, then you’re selecting for self-congratulatory feedback. It’s entirely possible to have done a great job on diversity and still have a lot of room to improve, and it’s so much easier to overlook an area where there’s a huge lack of improvement when you simply assert that there’s no problem.

And of course, there were Sean K Reynold’s self-serving responses in the comments of the original post, but the less said about those, the better.

So that’s it.⁴ The people at Paizo don’t take concerns about sexism in their art seriously because they think their art is already not sexist.

Edit to add: Now that there have been a few comments in the moderation queue, I can see that this post is going to attract some of the same Champions of Men that the last did. I have only a little bit of interest in arguing with people who don’t know—and more to the point, don’t care—about the fundamental concepts that a conversation about inequality starts from. If your comment ladles a big helping of male-privilege condescension on top of the cluelessness I’m not going to approve it.

Yes, I’m going to police the comments.⁵ You might really want to add your opinion to the comments, but opinions saying that there’s no problem are pennies a gallon and they get old fast. I’d rather keep the thread welcoming to all, no just the ones who ironically and loudly insist that there’s nothing to talk about.⁶ That said, you’re welcome to add vitriolic comment to the original thread, where it would be in fellow company with all the other white men saying that they don’t see what the problem is.

Otherwise, I’m happy to converse with people who are genuinely curious and make an effort to be respectful (not to me, but to women and PoC who are in the audience). I’m not setting the bar high—the least indication of having thought about it and being willing to keep thinking about it is all that’s necessary.

Related posts:

1. Selling games by selling bodies
2. Women as players and characters
3. White privilege in fantasy fiction and gaming

So, on with it.

Greywulf wrote a post on why the D&D 4e Powers system is good. I didn’t find myself agreeing, but he wrote a follow-up comment that illuminated a dynamic between the Powers system and player creativity that I hadn’t thought about before. One commentor was unhappy with the way players seem to prefer invoking powers over creative tactics. In part j_king wrote (emphasis mine):

It seems that whenever my players get into a combat, their most difficult choices are: where to move and which power to use. And perhaps whether to use an action point once in a while. I find that it’s rather rare that they think of clever ways to gain the advantage over a monster; especially if the encounter is balanced so that the party is likely to win. More often than not, once an encounter gets past the 15 minute mark it devolves into “Great cleave, 18 — hits, 12 damage. Marked.”

Could just be uninspired players. However, I think the system could do more to encourage more imaginative thinking rather than purely tactical.

To which Greywulf replied:

4e does rather hand it to you on a plate, doesn’t it? I think the key is for the GM to present situations that can’t be solved using their Powers alone – a 100′ chasm or trap’n’monster setup, for example which just begs for the players to stretch their imagination a notch. Once they get the hang of using their brains rather than just what’s written on their character sheet, it will soon become second nature.

The parts I emphasised are about the role the character sheet has as a tool for creative play. A character sheet has a lot of stuff on it, and what that stuff is varies tremendously from system to system. Often enough most of it is just pre-crunched math that is collected on the sheet for easy reference. Increasingly in the games I read and play I’m seeing another category of stuff present on the characters sheet, things I’m going to call levers.

Moving the world

Levers are things that a player can look at on their character sheet and yank on for effect in the game, often (but not necessarily) as a response to a problem that needs a solution. One of the most common types of lever is the skill. How often, as a GM or player, have you seen a player confronted with a crisis immediately look down to their character sheet to scan their list of skills for the magic bullet that will solve the problem? The player is looking for a lever—something they can yank to make the game do what they would rather it do.

Skills aren’t the only kind of lever that show up in systems. An example of a lever that has mixed mechanical and story effects are Aspects in FATE. These are short phrases like “Twitchy as a ferret” that can be called on to influence a roll in the player’s favour, or to bribe the player into making a choice that’s probably not in their character’s best interest for the sake of a more interesting story.

Power are a major type of lever in D&D 4e. Powers are the primary mechanic through which characters can have significant effects on the world and through which players can have significant mechanical impact on the game system. There are a lot of options, and the character advancement system is set up so that Powers are a large part of defining and refining a character. For any given situation in combat it’s likely that the character has (or could have taken) a Power that would optimally exploit or solve the situation. Need to whack a badguy but you’re a bit low on hit points? If you’ve got a Power that strikes and lets you use a healing surge, that’s a lever you can pull to solve that dilemma.

Creative impulses

It might be obvious by now what I think this has to do with creativity. When you’ve got a problem on the one hand and a lever that fits the problem on the other, the obvious choice is to pull it. In a game with few or no levers there are few or no ready-made answers to the game situations, while in a game with many and varied levers there is always going to be one or more that are good enough to apply to the situation.

Whether pulling that lever results in a creative addition to the game or not depends greatly on the game system that lever is part of, and I think this is part of why the Powers system in 4e leaves me cold. Not only does it give a player many levers to pull in combat, but the system doesn’t ask anything more of the player after the lever is pulled. You can get creative with the use and description of a Power, but you don’t have to in order to make the game’s engine run.² 4e provides lots of levers, which makes it easy to just pull a lever. Of course this could be waved away as an example of lazy play—but who’s going to stop that lazy player, and haven’t we all been that player at some point?

So levers can be creativity inhibitors.³ Given a choice between McGuyvering up a solution to the challenge and using a Power that is obviously going to do the trick, pulling that Power’s lever is going to win out for most players in most circumstances.

That’s not to say that levers are inherently bad. They’re not. A system can also provide levers as a kind of story bribe: “Here, you can pull this thing for powerful effect, but before it does its magic you have to add a bit to the story yourself…” Levers of that sort work as a bribe for the player to add to the ongoing story because their in-game effect is partly undefined and needs that bit of player storytelling in order to have a defined effect.⁴ Levers like that have a coin slot—you can pull the lever, but you have to pay into the story before the lever will let you effect the game.

Which leaves the other way that levers can encourage players to be creative: by not existing. A lever that isn’t there is a lever that doesn’t offer a short-cut to solving the problem. Are you an untrained schmuck with a rusty sword and nary a stealthy skill to your name peering down on the four bugbears guarding the cave entrance you need to get into? Without a skill or a fighting chance there are no levers to provide obvious solutions, so you have to get creative.⁵ Shoving boulders onto them from above, luring them away with a clever strawman silhouetted against the moon, or some other unorthodox solution is going to be fun to play and memorable after the game.

Full circle

Which brings me back to the insight that j_king and Greywulf’s exchange gave me. The abundance of easy levers on a D&D 4e character sheet don’t prevent creative play, but by being there they make it easy to just pull a lever rather than get creative, and the system doesn’t make up for that damping effect on creativity by making those levers require creativity after pulling them. Since I’m personally not interested in the tactical combat side of D&D 4e, the abundance of purely mechanic levers in 4e explains why as a system it doesn’t excite me.

Greywulf’s suggestion to j_king that the way to solve that is to set up situations where Powers aren’t the answer to the challenge is a good one for people who already like 4e but want more opportunities for creative problem-solving. From my perspective, the Powers system is what makes 4e different from the stacks of other games I own—having to write scenarios to work around that core of the game seems to me like a reason to use a different system. As I wrote in my comment on Greywulf’s post, the core system of a game shouldn’t be an obstacle to creativity that needs to be GMed around to make the gameplay good, and the contents of the character sheet should be inspirational rather than creativity-damping.

There are a lot of other half-formed thoughts bumping around in my head about how the lever metaphor can be used to understand what makes different games tick, but those will have to wait.⁶

No related posts.

I recently bought two copies of Diaspora—one for myself and one as a very early² birthday present for Fimmtiu. He enthused about it and its Traveller heritage enough that I paid some attention, and then let my attention be thoroughly gripped³ by a roleplaying game for a genre in which I thought I had only passing interest. I love me some science fiction—especially hard sci-fi—for my leisure reading, but I’ve never been able to get into it for roleplaying for some reason.

Anyway, this is a post about Lulu, nascent technology, and shipping rates, not how awesomesauce Diaspora is or how much you should go buy a copy or read about how it does sci-fi differently⁴ or how it’s very well supported by the creators in the game’s Geekdo forums and Brad’s blog.⁵

So, enough introduction.⁶

I was pretty staggered by the shipping rates at Lulu, and it was definitely a matter of the cover price to shipping cost ratio. A lower cover price on the same physical object (and hence, the same shipping cost), definitely leads to greater sticker shock at the fixed shipping cost.

The saving grace though is that combined shipping turned out to be very reasonable. A single book order was a full third shipping ($18⁷ on top of a $35 book), but ordering two books only added a couple of dollars to the shipping cost and made for a more palatable ratio. Eighteen dollars of shipping is not so appealing, but $18 and $2 for every book after the first is actually not too bad.⁸

That’s not a criticism of choosing Lulu at all. What it is, is that it’s interesting to consider how new technologies (and various implementations thereof) impact buyer psychology. From my experience ordering Diaspora, one of the things that I think Lulu could do to improve is provide a shipping cost calculator at the first stage of the checkout—where you can still easily twiddle the quantity ordered to see what you’re buying and for how much—rather than leaving it as a potentially purchase-souring surprise at the very end after payment info has been painstakingly entered. Their current implementation of the checkout process cuts across the grain of how buyers evaluate and commit to a purchase price. We like to know the price of something when it’s being sold to us.

The upshot for Diaspora might be that some people will decide to forgo buying it, while others like myself will resolve to buy it only in pairs or greater. Without knowing how many people virtually walk away when they see the final price for one book, it’s not possible to know whether that’s a net positive or a net negative in sales dollars. It does make me wonder if Lulu keeps stats on how many people get to stage 4 of the checkout and then don’t complete the order, and what they think about that.

All that said, I’m glad Lulu exists despite its warts. Print on demand is—as Brad’s post broke down so clearly—making it possible for amateur RPG publishers to publish at all, much like blogging software allows amateur commentators and reporters to write at all. Knowing history and tech, too, I can be confident that this kind of implementation issue will get smoothed out, either by Lulu or whoever usurps their niche.⁹

Related posts:

1. Dollar woes and RPG spending

In the last while¹ we’ve played some HackMaster Basic and some Diaspora. Neither have we played much, but I’m optimistic about getting at least a decent campaign out of the latter. Science fiction is a nice change of pace for all of us, and it’s even more of a change for me since I get to be a player instead of the GM.²

I like to try new systems. That’s not the best feature to have as the group’s default GM, but I have yet to find a system that suits me well enough to stand head-and-shoulders above the field of contenders. I have been looking for a new system that felt like “home” ever since parting ways with the venerable lineage of Dungeons & Dragons—and, having looked up from the vast continent of D&D Land, there is an entire world of games to explore. It’s wonderful and frustrating in equal parts.

I love the potential in Burning Wheel for deep, character-driven stories and long-term development. I really like how easy Savage Worlds is to customise for any setting and how it makes things easy to stat on the fly. I’m intrigued by the mechanics and setting of Reign, and I especially like how flexible its magic system is for both the GM to customise and for the players to use in-game. HackMaster Basic’s crunch level is not too high yet remains satisfying, and it supports D&D-style setting assumptions well. The Shadow of Yesterday is just deliciously player-empowering and has some impressive game-design pedigree behind it.³ The Riddle of Steel sounds like a lovely combination of deadly combat and player-driven stories.⁴ Those are just the systems for fantasy that I really like, and it looks like there will be a FATE-based fantasy system out this Christmas to expand the attractive options even more.

I don’t think there would be any problem sampling so many systems if we played even half as regularly as some groups. It does seem, though, that my interest in a system is tied not so much to how many sessions we play it for, but simply how much time has passed since it caught my attention. I think if we played more frequently I’d feel less like a magpie, catching every shiny thing that comes near, simply because we’d get a half-decent campaign out of every new discovery. As it stands we get one or two sessions out of a game, and those are the ones I’ve been lucky enough to get any play out of at all.

I’m not sure what purpose this post serves except to air out my brain. There doesn’t seem to be a good solution, apart from magically increasing the frequency that we get together to game. There’s no way for me to commit to a system for the next ten sessions or so, since that represents the investment of six months to a year of gaming and that’s a lot when I don’t even know if I like running the system. That’s leaving alone how much of a commitment that would be asking from the rest of the group when I’m the one excited about an obscure game’s reviews.

Does your group play, or try to play, many different games? What has your experience been? How do you balance group commitment to a campaign against the desire to try the latest and greatest game?

No related posts.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, to say the least. All that is done with now though—except for the reading, but at least that will give me fodder for posts in a way the other things don’t.

This isn’t a real post; it’s just an excuse to update and keep the front page somewhat alive. So, here follows some real content that you might find edifying or at the very least diverting.

Random Average talks about Min-Maxing Fun, specifically about how some systems have a “cruise control” setting that guarantees a minimum of fun while also usually limiting the maximum fun potential, while other games are wide open to the heights of gaming nirvana and the pits of That Sucked Goats.

Over at the funereally-named Buried Without Ceremony there is an article, Plugging in Scenes and System, that talks about Mo’s socket theory and how it relates to satisfying play and personal (in)compatibility with different game systems.  Socket theory, very briefly, is about how people “plug into” different parts of the system and the overall roleplaying experience in order to get out of the experience what they want. I think my primary socket is aesthetic, which came to me as something of a revelation and something of a “well, duh!” moment. It also partially explains my incompatibility with D&D 4e. I’m not sure what my other sockets are (oddly, I think system might not be one of them), but I am going to be thinking about this more.

On the subject of roleplaying for the aesthetics of it², I came across a delightfully dreamy game called Archipelago³ that is designed to support and complement the aesthetic socket directly. It takes its inspiration from the visually-immersive mixture of the mundane and the fantastic that is characteristic of Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, which is enough to get my attention alone.

Roleplaying Pro’s Colin Dowling answers the question, Why verisimilitude? with a great post. What I took away from it was that I might be better off explaining that when I say I want verisimilitude in my roleplaying experiences, what I’m specifically looking for is not “realistic elves—just like in the real world!!”, but rather the experience of a piece of fiction (created by us) that has authenticity. I don’t enjoy a movie that continuity problems or has major inconsistencies nearly as much as a movie that puts a high priority on internal consistency and then showcases a believable and authentic story. I’m the same way with roleplaying experiences.

One of the recent acquisitions is Greg Stolze’s Reign. It’s a gorgeous book I got from IPR along with some other things (one of which was a packed in bonus book as a gift! awesome!) in softcover. I’m liking it well enough that I’m considering using it for the Myth Drannor sandbox I’m contemplating instead of Savage Worlds. It has a simplicity to its system while maintaining just that much more depth of ludus than Savage Worlds offers. It has a points-based character creation system that lets you build the character you envision, including characters who wouldn’t know and couldn’t care less about how to handle themselves in a fight. The resolution system (the One-Roll Engine) is universal across the system while maintaining a satisfying “fitting-ness” for all its applications. That’s a really big deal for me, since I find most universal resolution mechanics dry and unappetising for most of the things that get shoe-horned into them. There’s more to say about this game, but it won’t fit into a links post.

Geek•dō is a strangely compelling place to spend some hobby time. For the uninitiated, it’s BoardGameGeek but for roleplaying games. (For the really uninitiated, it’s like the love-child of IMDB and Wikipedia for roleplaying games.) I’ve made a bunch of entries already, which is simultaneously dry, demanding work and excitingly satisfying. It satisfies some deep (and very buried) urge to tidyness to add an entry to the database so that I can fill a hole in my online collection.

Enjoy, and feel free to share your recent favourite discoveries in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Innocence is bliss, sorta kinda

Update: The warning email went to an email address I forgot to check, so it’s not all their fault. Also, OpenID logins should be working again. Let me know if anything isn’t working right.

No related posts.

The trouble with encumbrance systems is that they all seem to involve too much bookkeeping. Even if your group is fine with totalling pounds carried at the beginning of an adventure, it becomes a real pain to manage just as the adventure goes into full swing. Once their characters have collected some coins, used up some oil flasks, lost their collapsible ladder, and decided to lug around that life-sized stone head that they found knocked off a statue six rooms back¹, most groups either quietly let encumbrance tracking drop or they start grumbling about having to count coins just to swing a sword.

These things really matter in a sandbox, though. How much stuff you choose to lug into the wilderness is just one of many meaningful decisions that can make or break an expedition, and sandbox games thrive on a good ecosystem of meaningful choices for the players to make. I don’t want to ditch encumbrance entirely, but I also don’t want the dead weight of a pile of finicky rules that make only a small (yet meaningful) difference after a lot of work.

A lightweight encumbrance system

As an alternative to counting pounds, I’m going to use this alternative system that reduces encumbrance calculations to a judgment call, a die roll, and a handful of special cases.

1. Players note their gear as usual. Players can expend a bit more effort and note how each piece of gear is carried (such as in the sack, belt pouch #2, hanging from their belt, etc). They don’t have to, but it will give them a psychological advantage in the next step and is often just a good idea for exploration-focused games.

2. The GM looks over the character’s load and tries to picture the character hauling all this stuff. Determine whether they’re carrying a modest load (a reasonable amount of stuff to carry around), or a heavy load (a lot of stuff). There’s no middle category, so err on whichever side is appropriate for the style of game you’re running (and be up-front about what that is), or err on the side of modest if they have their gear well-organised. This step is all judgment call, so just go with your gut. Of course, if they’re carrying a negligible load such as nothing but a walking stick, a pouch of acorns, and the clothes on their back, then you can just skip the whole thing and say they’re totally unencumbered. (In that case: Done!)

(This is where the system interfaces with your game of choice, so I’ll be a little vague. I’ll use Savage Worlds and D&D as the example systems for what my vague terms mean to me, but if you’re decently familiar with your system of choice you should have no trouble figuring out how to handle the roll.)

3. The GM has the player make a roll to test a skill or stat related to raw power.² Make the roll routine or of modest difficulty for modest loads and hard or of high difficulty for heavy loads. Stats like Strength or Power are good choices; skills like Soldiering, Sherpa, or Lifting Heavy Stuff are good choices. Whatever it is, be consistent and true to your system. In Savage Worlds I’m going to use a straight Power test, and modest loads will have a Target Number of 4, while heavy loads will be at TN 6. If I were using a WotC variety of Dungeons & Dragons I would have players make a d20 roll, adding their Strength modifier, against a DC of 12 or 18.

4a. If they pass the test, their load is well-packed and they can manœuver under its weight just fine. They are unencumbered so long as their load remains reasonably unchanged. Picking up a fallen purse is fine. Throwing a sack of potatoes over their shoulder is a change in load.

4b. If they failed the test, use the margin of failure to set the encumbrance penalty. In Savage Worlds I would use the difference between the TN and what was actually rolled as a direct penalty to combat rolls and other activities that would be hindered by being encumbered, such as swimming or running away from a hungry [[spinosaurus]]. Because of the TNs I set, this gives a penalty of -1 to -3 for modest loads (and the -3 is really unlikely), and a penalty of -1 to -5 for heavy loads. Also because the rolls are against fixed TNs, characters with higher Power are unlikely to get (much) of a penalty even for heavy loads while weak characters are likely to get a penalty for anything but negligible loads. In D&D I would use the margin of failure in 5-point chunks: within 5 points the penalty would be -2, within 10 points the penalty would be -4, and failure by more than 10 points would be -6 or -8. In an descriptive system the character may gain a condition such as Encumbered or Heavily Encumbered that can be mechanically exploited as usual.

5. The result holds until the situation changes. No re-rolls may be made before the party sets out. We’ve all had the experience of thinking we’ll be fine carrying that load, until we get halfway to where we’re going and our arms are falling off. The players may know the encumbrance penalty as soon as the roll is made, but there’s nothing they can do about it, except to wait for a chance to repack their load (see below), or dramatically reduce their gear until they’re in the next lower category (or completely unencumbered). The results remain even as rations are eaten and arrows are expended. Small, incremental reductions in weight won’t make an appreciable difference until the character has a chance to stop and repack and take advantage of the space freed up by the used-up stuff.

On the flip side, they won’t have to re-roll either. They can unload it and camp for the night and pack it back up without having to test again if conditions haven’t changed. (If they have to repack in a hurry while under fire and in the dark, well, that’s a change of conditions!) They can go for days on the same roll, so long as they don’t add anything significant to their load (like a stone head).

6. A re-roll is made only when conditions change. Big changes will be obvious and will usually result in starting above from scratch, so I won’t bother to cover that. (You may have noticed that the whole system runs on common sense.) There are three special cases for changing your load so that a player can or must make a re-roll.

Repacking the load. Players will want to get rid of those encumbrance penalties by re-rolling. They can only do this by repacking their load after carrying it for a while. “For a while” is left to the GM’s discretion to define, but I’m thinking of things like a day’s travel, or the experience of fighting, climbing, or balancing across a slippery, narrow stone bridge over a raging waterfall while under the load. (Essentially, either time sweating under the load or terrifying moments really feeling the danger of being encumbered.) If “a while” has passed such that the character (not the player) could reasonably be expected to know that their packing job is not working out for them and if they have a decent amount of time to fuss about with their gear (an hour or during camp—it shouldn’t be a trivial amount of time), then they can re-roll their initial Strength test to get a new result. If the player likes, they can instead roll their Smarts (or equivalent, such as D&D’s Intelligence) in order to come up with a clever fix for their packing problem. (The GM may want this clever fix described if it seems to matter.) Either way, the new result will give you a new encumbrance penalty, possibly zero. The better of the original and re-rolled encumbrance penalty becomes the new penalty.

Don’t use repacking the load if the character is also adding non-trivial stuff to the load. In that case, start from the beginning.

Picking up stuff. Characters just love to pick up stuff and take it with them. Whether it’s a huge sack of jewels or a the severed head of a magical stone statue, characters will often pick up large things that make the GM wonder if they should be able to carry that without penalty, but not so great that they’ve obviously got into kitchen-sink territory. When they do this they make an immediate re-roll as if they were repacking their load, but they may not use Smarts and must take the worse penalty of the new and original rolls. So, if the player rolls well there’s no change, but if they roll poorly then the new item is the straw that broke the adventurer’s back. However, unlike the original packing roll, once the player has seen the new penalty they may opt to “quit while ahead” and drop whatever it was that forced them to make a new roll. If they choose to leave without the huge sack of jewels because otherwise they’d get a -5 penalty on all rolls, that’s a meaningful choice (and perhaps a wise one, given the dangers often near huge sacks of jewels) that the player can make.

Note that if the party sits down on the dead dragon’s tail to carefully pack up its hoard, don’t use the picking up stuff rule. This is for when they just grab something, stuff it somewhere, and keep going. If they’re taking the time to pack up gear and loot fresh, start over by looking at what they’re carrying and judging how heavy or modest the load looks. Don’t forget to raise an eyebrow of skepticism if they’re planning to haul twenty-thousand coins with only a single canvas sack between them! How and where they’re packing things becomes much more important when there is a fantastic amount of treasure involved. Getting that kind of haul back is its own logistical challenge.

Dropping the load. Players might have the good sense to have their characters drop their packs before wading into combat. (Technically this doesn’t involve a re-roll, but this special case doesn’t fit anywhere else.) Only a modestly loaded character may do this, since a heavy load isn’t going to be located in a single, easily-dropped pack. This immediately drops their encumbrance penalty to zero, but at the risk that some of their stuff, left unattended, may be messed with.

If something untoward happens to the dropped portion of the load, the GM will have to decide exactly what gear is affected. If the player has noted what gear is stowed where this should be easy, but otherwise the GM can feel free to gleefully roll at random for the stuff in jeopardy, excepting things the character obviously wouldn’t drop such as clothing and items used during combat. GMs should also keep in mind that when a character decides to pull out that stowed Wand of Firey Doom, apart from the time it takes to dig it out, it might also be in the dropped load if it hasn’t been explicitly noted otherwise. Lots of other complications can be extrapolated from here, I’m sure. Don’t be an evil GM, but don’t make “I drop my pack” a meaningless choice, either.

(As a design note, dropping the load being limited to modest loads means that there is at least one good reason for very strong characters to not load themselves down like a pack mule.)

The point of the system

All that said, I haven’t playtested this system. It looks good on paper, and there are a lot of nice synergies between the few moving parts that it has. Suggestions and criticisms are welcome, though keep in mind that the system’s primary design goals are to be simple and fast to use, and to make encumbrance present meaningful choices and consequences that can be somewhat judged beforehand.

My intention is that players should be able to make meaningful choices about how much gear they want their characters to carry without having to slavishly tally every tenth of a pound carried. The system puts more emphasis on how and where something is carried than how many factions of a pound it weighs, which is an easier and more interesting thing for players to engage with, if they so choose.

The two (really three) major categories for encumbrance mean that a player can easily choose whether they will be dealing with the encumbrance system and how much it could potentially impact them. A player can have a restrained but decent load of gear and know what the worst penalty could be, as well as how likely they are to suffer such a penalty. The most significant dial in the system is in the players’ hands. It does fall to the GM to judge exactly how a player have set that dial, but the coarse grain of the dial means that players should rarely have it set to a grey zone.

(For perspective, the average Power of d6 on a Savage Worlds character with a modest load means a 75% chance of no penalty, and only a 3% chance of the maximum -3 penalty. Not bad. However, with a heavy load it becomes a 69% chance of at least a -1 penalty, a 25% chance of at least a -3 penalty, and a 3% chance of the maximum -5 penalty. It should also be said that I didn’t crunch any of these numbers until I needed them for this parenthetical aside. When I came up with my initial Target Numbers I only needed the basic system competency of knowing how to judge a Target Number.)

The system is fast. It may look like a lot of steps when it’s broken down like this, but there’s nothing to it really. The GM makes a judgment call, the player rolls a die, and you’ve got your encumbrance figured out just like that. The longest step is recording the initial pile of gear, which needs to be done anyway in the sort of game where you even care about encumbrance.

The system is also gives some pretty good results. Average characters with modest loads get modest penalties and with heavy loads get heavy penalties. Strong characters can more easily get away with carrying a lot of stuff without penalties, while weak ones almost certainly will suffer some penalties if they carry anything of significance. Note too that the penalties only apply to certain physical tasks, so an weakling apprentice mage might be carrying a heavy pack but they don’t care since they’re not about to swing a sword or go for a swim.

The system also makes encumbrance a significant consideration when choosing what to carry. Too much stuff and you might get away with it, but the risk of a penalty you’ll be stuck with is enough to inspire caution. You only get one shot at the encumbrance roll, so you’d better be happy with what you’ve decided to pack. You have to commit to a certain set of gear and accept the encumbrance it comes with. No longer will the players be fudging a piton here or an iron ration there, because all the gear juggling is put on the characters’ shoulders and abstracted away with a stat roll. The randomness of the penalty and the coarseness of the encumbrance categories means that there’s very little gain in trying to game the system, which encourages the players to commit to their choice and move on.

The system also really likes bell curves. The repacking and picking up rules will tend to emphasise the position on the bell curve that the character’s Strength occupies relative to the load they’re carrying. A character carrying more than their fair share will not only be more likely to get a bad penalty initially, but when repacking they’re unlikely to get a better penalty, and when picking stuff up they’re likely to get a worse penalty. If you’re on the other side of the curve you’re likely to keep on truckin’ without encumbrance penalty unless you get really ambitious.

It also (in theory) nicely handles incremental changes in encumbrance: if you have a -1 penalty already and you’re in the middle of the bell curve or on the favourable side, picking up more stuff is likely to either make your encumbrance no worse, or to only increase it slightly to -2 (all Savage Worlds numbers, here). That still leaves you room to pick up some more stuff and maybe get a -3, at least until you start getting into the grey zone and the GM wonders whether you should really be testing for a heavy load. This possibly needs tweaking to prevent a “portable hole” effect where you can just keep picking up huge sacks of jewels without having your encumbrance penalty increase, perhaps by increasing the TN by one for each prior time that you invoked the picking up rule. but I won’t know if this situation will come up often enough to bother until the system has seen a good amount of playtesting.

Credit where credit’s due

The encumbrance system I’ve brewed up was inspired by a number of systems. The Riddle of Steel introduced me to a revolutionary encumbrance system. Here’s what I remember of it³: look at the gear carried and picture someone loaded up with all that. Compare it to a couple of pictures in the book (“moderately encumbered” has a guy with a moderate amount of stuff, well-packed and stowed; “heavily encumbered” is the stereotypical image of an over-loaded adventurer carrying everything but the kitchen sink and borne down by a bulging set of packs and bags), and then assign the character either the none, moderate, or heavy encumbrance penalty. From that I took the idea that you can just eyeball a character’s gear and move on.

From the Burning Wheel I took the idea at the core of the Let It Ride mechanic, which forbids re-rolling a test until conditions have substantially changed. The essence is that you roll once to find out the results of the effort, and that result sticks so long as the character is trying to accomplish the same thing. The purpose of Let It Ride is first to keep the game moving, and second to keep the system fair—neither GM nor player can call for a re-rolls to try to get the failure or success that they want.

And finally, Savage Worlds inspired me in the first place to abstract encumbrance away with a single roll. The seed of the idea was planted when I re-read my post on Bookkeeping-free provisions and torches in AD&D, which was in turn inspired by a Rambling Bumblers post of Joshua’s entitled Savage Bookkeeping. Doing bookkeeping in the spirit of Savage Worlds means getting the end result—a penalty or whatnot—without tediously counting arrows, torches, or pounds. Once you accept that you don’t need to track everything to get the same effect, it becomes much simpler to make encumbrance matter without boring the players.

The short version

To recap, the Lightweight Generic Encumbrance System is:

• Players note the gear they’re caring, and possibly where.
• The GM decides if that’s next to nothing, a modest load, or a heavy load.
• The player rolls either an easy-to-moderate Strength test (for modest loads) or a hard test (for heavy loads). No roll is needed for negligible loads.
• The encumbrance penalty is the margin of failure of the test and applies to the usual physical tasks.
• Encumbrance tests cannot be re-rolled until conditions change very significantly. This happens when repacking a load, picking up significant stuff, or when the character sits down and packs an entirely new load. Dropping a pack is a special case that can temporarily remove encumbrance penalties.

Let me know what you think, what you would change, and especially what you think if you use this system yourself. Happy hauling!

Related posts:

1. Edge of Empire wrap-up
2. House rules for AD&D 1st edition
3. Bookkeeping-free provisions and torches in AD&D

If you’re interested in helping the roleplaying bloggerwebs improve a bit (or just like clicking ticky boxes), head over to the roleplaying blog reader survey. It’s short—about 25 multiple-choice questions—and the results will be released to everyone in a couple of weeks at Inkwell Ideas. There are already some early results posted for the curious and impatient.

No related posts.

My other hobby for the past 10 years has been informing myself about copyright, trade mark, and other so-called “intellectual property” laws. I’m not a lawyer, but some of the things that people find confusing about this fan site kit are pretty clear to me.

Here’s the most important one, and I’m going to put it in obnoxious formatting to make it really hard to miss:

WotC has not released a fan site policy.

This thing that WotC is calling a fan site policy is a license, not a policy.

The distinction is so stark that I’m frankly surprised that Wizards has done something so boneheaded. A fan site policy is a document that serves as a statement of company policy: what the company avows to do and not do in relation to fan sites. It is merely a communication of intent, a statement of policy. (Funny that.) A fan site policy is not a legal document, but rather is a means of communicating with the fan community in order to clear up fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what fans can and can’t do while they’re busy fanning about on the Internet. Such a policy draws some clear lines between what a company will magnanimously allow fans to do beyond the scope of fair use, and what the company will not tolerate and will reserve the right to challenge or issue take-down notices over.

A license is a legal document. It exists to be agreed to in order to exchange rights between two parties. It has terms of acceptance, termination clauses, and explicit descriptions of the rights that the licensee will been granted by the licensor. You are bound by a license only by formally agreeing to it by taking certain actions, such as signing a document or using a particular service. The existence of a license has no meaning or influence over people who do not agree to it, and it does not change what people can legally do already without the license.

If you read the text of the Fan Site Kit, it is a license. Critically, it does not clarify what Wizards will and won’t sue over which is the sole reason for having a fan site policy. What it does do is offer you some rights (the use of the copyrighted material in the kit) in exchange for being bound by the terms of the license (not writing about or doing things they forbid, which are otherwise legal).

The so-called Fan Site Kit Policy is a contract, and it bones anyone who agrees to it. Even worse, by calling it a “policy”, Wizards is contributing to the confusion about fans’ legal rights by making it seem like fans need to agree to this license to operate a fan site. I won’t cast aspersions upon the designers and managers at Wizards of the Coast, but their legal department are a bunch of tools who know exactly what kind of deceptive shenanigans they are trying to pull with this so-called “policy”.

Other stuff

There are some other confusions around the “policy” that aren’t such a big deal as that huge one above.

Who owns your site

Berin Kinsman notes that it requires agreeing to the Wizards.com Term of Use, and wonders if it could be interpreted as signing over all copyright and trademark of your own site to Wizards of the Coast. This is from a reading of Section 1 (User Content), which in part reads:

By posting or submitting any text, images, designs, video, sound, code, data, lists, or other materials or information (such User-submitted content, collectively, “User Content”) to or through a Site, including without limitation on any User profile page, you hereby irrevocably grant to Wizards, its affiliates and sublicensees, a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and fully sub-licensable license, to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such User Content (in whole or in part) in any media and to incorporate the User Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

Yeah, that’s pretty alarming to see attached to the terms of using Wizards’ fan site kit on your own site, at first glance. However, earlier in the Terms of Use the word “Site” is specifically defined as “this website”, which can only mean Wizards.com. Agreeing to the Fan Site Kit “Policy” requires agreeing to the Wizards.com Terms of Use… but I’m not sure to what end.

There’s nothing in the Terms of Use that remotely applies to anything done elsewhere than Wizards.com. The only conceivable purpose to tie together the Fan Site Kit “Policy” and the Wizards.com Terms of Use is that anyone who can be construed as violating the Terms of Use while using Wizards.com (such as in the forums) could have the Fan Kit license for their own site revoked. However, they already include in the Kit “Policy” the words:

Also, we reserve the right to revoke this limited use license at any time, for any reason, and at the sole discretion of Wizards.

So they don’t need any such excuse to revoke the license. Incidentally, this is the one place where they slip up and use the correct term “license” instead of the misleading and inaccurate term “policy”.

Do I need to follow the policy now?

In a word, No. There is nothing in the Fan Site Kit “Policy” that is legally enforceable (or even legally meaningful) to anyone who does not agree to the license. But wait, what if you do want to agree to the license? Well, here’s what that gets you:

• You can use the photos and text inside the Fan Site Kit.

No, seriously. That’s all. The only reason to agree to and be bound by the Fan Site Kit “Policy” is if you want to use (as my wife put it) “their stupid banner” on your site. In fact, that’s the only way to agree to the policy: by using their Fan Site Kit. If you don’t use their Fan Site Kit, you can completely ignore the “policy”.

What does Wizards ask in return for the incredible boon of using their graphics?

• You can’t use the Kit contents anywhere near non-Wizards products. No using a Kit image to illustrate an article that does a compare and contrast of the 4e PHB with, say, the Pathfinder RPG.
• You can’t alter the images except to resize them. Well, fair enough. That seems reasonable.
• You are not allowed to discuss “non-public information”. That is, you’re not allowed to talk about leaked materials that Wizards didn’t personally leak. This makes more sense for their Magic: the Gathering Fan Kit since they really, really don’t like spoilers for their cards, but it’s lame that D&D must suffers by association. (This begs the question: if the information has been leaked to the public, how can they sanely call it “non-public”?)
• You can’t do anything involving money. No links to your eBay listings of 3e books, no mixing a site that sells Encounter Critical novelty zappers with talking about Wizards’ material, no daring to have your résumé and contact information for professional services on the same site where you talk about your Warforged Avenger’s latest Daily Power. Oh, but it’s OK if you have a “donate” or “tip jar” button. That’s a tiny, but pleasant, surprise.
• You can’t confuse your readers into thinking that you are Wizards of the Coast or are endorsed by them. Also, fair enough.
• You have to include a bunch of copyright notices on every page and stick ® and ™ after everything. This isn’t even required by copyright and trademark law, but thanks to using their image of the PHB to illustrate your article, you too can make your blog look like a corporate press release.
• You may not deep link Wizards.com files (but pages are OK). That’s a dick thing to do anyway, so fair enough.
• You may not make your site look like Wizards.com or like any WotC product. No making your web site look like the cover of the Monster Manual! I guess that’s fair? I’m not clear on why they’re afraid of this happening.
• You can’t sell merch with Wizards images and stuff on them. Again, this is totally fair.
• You can’t remix WotC videos and other non-textual media. Laaame. Don’t they understand viral marketing, the grassroots, and how the Internet works in general? Oh, wait, right… (However, this is not unreasonable. It’s to their own detriment in this day and age, but it is their foot to shoot.)
• You may not mirror or embed their non-video/audio web material. No making a mirror of Wizards.com or embedding the defunct Map-A-Day page in a widget in your blog’s sidebar. Strangely (and probably unintentionally), this also means that you may not put any of Wizards’ RSS feeds in a sidebar widget on your blog. This is a good example of how being uptight and too legalistic has unintentional yet stupid consequences. Lighten up, Wizards!
• You may not say bad things about Wizards and products, nor may you be obscene. Fuck that shit. (Also, you can’t libel them or others, which is fair.) But really, fuck that. People swearing in their blogs are not going to do anything other than make themselves look like uncultured boors (hi!) and lose them readers (bye!). WotC is probably concerned that people talking about their products using “low-brow” words will reflect poorly on WotC and “their” community. However, the statement that you cannot “make disparaging [...] statements about Wizards and/or its products” is super-craptacular ass-destroying retardation. So, if you use their images, you cannot say a product sucks. “We know you’ll keep it clean.” Fuck you, Wizards! (Okay, I’m done swearing to illustrate my point. You can uncover your ears now, delicate and innocent flowers of the wonderland that is the Clean Internet.)

So, that’s the sum of it.

You agree to not do some obviously bad things, and also agree to bend over backwards to say that WotC products are the bee’s knees and that nothing else can be (legally) compared to them, to religiously avoid mixing your business with your fan activities, and to vow to never be a potty mouth while sprinkling fair dust (by which I mean ® and ™) liberally over your writing.

In exchange, you get to use their stupid banner.

The upshot

So… What does all this amount to? Well, Wizards of the Coast is still operating without a clarifying document of their intentions toward the fan community’s activities online. They’ve got this… thing… that doesn’t clarify what fans can expect to do without getting sued or having a copyright takedown sent to their ISP or web host.

Fans are still left in the dark as to whether their sites are OK as far as WotC is concerned, or whether the hammer is about to fall on them (and their wallets). The chilling effect of operating without a clear statement about fan sites is still going to give people pause and cause many to self-censor for fear that the wrath of Wizards may descend on them and destroy their little corner of the community in a digital apocalypse. People are still left guessing, and since eliminating that is the entire purpose of a fan site policy, that makes this move a huge fail for Wizards.

There are some good examples of fan site policies out there that we can compare this non-policy-actually-a-license thing to. Geek Related already did a good job of comparing this Thing That Should Not Be to actual, real, honest-to-goodness fansite policies, so I’m not going to duplicate that work. It’s already far too late and this Public Service Announcement is already way too long, and I really should have been long since curled up in bed with my wife and my new copy of HackMaster Basic instead of trying to help to keep people informed about their rights online in the face of WotC misinformation. (Seriously, Wizards, fire your legal team. They are your albatross.¹)

Finally, don’t take my word for any of this. I’m not a lawyer, right, just some guy who claims to have spent 10 years reading things on the webbernets about copyright and related stuff. Take the claims I make here and go find out about these things for yourself. I’ve given you a starting point, and maybe introduced some legal concepts and distinctions you weren’t familiar with already, so you’ve got some terms you can start googling.

(Aside to trolls: There’s some troll food in the beer fridge, and some nice gift bags in the foyer you can grab on the way out. That’s all you’re going to get though, so you can save yourself the trouble of posting. Thank you, and have a nice day.)

UPDATE: For comparison, here’s how TSR’s fan site policy failed back in the day. I forgot to link this yesterday.

Related posts:

1. Learn from TSR’s history, lest ye repeat it?

The key to descriptive attributes is that when and how they have an impact on the mechanics depends on what the phrase means to the group, and how the player justifies applying it to a task. The two PCs above¹ who are Really Strong and Built Like A Brick House would both easily get a mechanical boost in trying to lift a fallen tree off a comrade, but the player whose PC is Built Like A Brick House would much more easily make the case that their “strength” attribute is also useful during an intimidation attempt.

Descriptive attributes are nothing new. Whether a system calls them Traits, Aspects, Qualities, or something else, descriptive attributes are a core of many roleplaying games these days. Spirit of the Century, Burning Wheel, Dogs in the Vineyard, and the PDQ system (which literally means Prose Descriptive Qualities) that powers Questers of the Middle Realms and Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies—all of these have descriptive attributes at their system’s core. The commonality of descriptive attributes among successful games speaks to the robustness and usefulness of the concept.

With that in mind, consider this excerpt from Off the Grid: Using your powers in roleplaying situations from At Will:

Split the Tree

This power does absolutely nothing for you outside of a fight, right? It doesn’t have to be that way.

First, you have to buy into a different way of thinking about powers.

Powers as Personality

[L]ooking deeper into the powers you picked gives you insight to who your character is. Many people disconnect ability and personality, mechanics and story. There is no disconnect between these and in fact they often converge—if you let them.

[…]

1. Make your players explain how the power fits. Sometimes just the name of the power alone will fit the situation, but allow your players flexibility. As long as they explain how that power represents the character’s approach and mindset, everything is going well.
2. Give them a bonus. Don’t give anything for at-wills, or your ranger is going to constantly be “twin-striking” in conversation. An encounter is worth +2 to a skill check, and a Daily is worth +6. Why so much? Because the PC is going to expend that power, and if they are expending a daily power to accomplish something, they should stand a good chance of success.

That sure sounds like Powers are being treated as descriptive attributes, doesn’t it? Although I do have to wonder a bit at this kind of reinventing the wheel to patch a system that supposedly² doesn’t need any patching to support roleplaying, I would love to hear of more groups playing 4e this way.³ Not only would it make for more interesting 4e play “off the grid”, but more people playing this way can only lead to more people discovering games where “there is no disconnect between [ability and personality, mechanics and story] and in fact they often converge”.

If you’re a 4e GM or even just a player, go read the whole post and consider whether using Powers as descriptive attributes could add something positive to your game.

No related posts.

There won’t be any Savage Worlds mechanics in here either, so if that piqued your interest I’m sorry to disappoint.¹

I never liked Cyric

Many a seer had visions as the Time of Troubles approached. The visions of one Mirador of Arabel predicted an age of strife ushered in by the ascension of a petty thief to godhood by deceit and murder. Gods fell as if stalks of wheat before the scythe of this new Lord of Murder, until the fabric of the world could take no more and Abeir-Toril as we know it was forever changed in a great magical cataclysm. It is well then that, as I have discovered in my research, this petty thief Cyric was sat upon and crushed to death by a frost giant during an attempted burglary of its clanhome.

— Artoros the Inquisitive

I’ve never liked Cyric. My introduction to the Forgotten Realms was through the AD&D 2nd edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (the “gold box”), so Cyric was a fixture, but to make heads or tails of him and his divine soap opera required reading some TSR novels in which I frankly had not a shred of interest. Also, he’s a bastard, and not the good kind of magnificent bastard that you just love to hate. No, I’ve never liked Cyric.

I’m doing some leisurely planning for the next campaign I want to run, which will be a sandbox focused on the ruins of Myth Drannor using Savage Worlds (with some of the fantasy bits from Shaintar) as the system. I’ve been trying to settle on a year in which to start the campaign², and reading events in the roll of years on the Forgotten Realms Wiki brought me inevitably to the original controversial cataclysm that was written just to update the Realms to a new edition of (A)D&D: the Time of Troubles.

The arbitrariness of the changes made during the Time of Troubles never sat well with me, but I didn’t have a familiarity with the old edition of the setting (the “grey box”) to have a concrete objection. Reading over the events, though, I realised some of what I didn’t like were the events that involved Cyric becoming a god and his effects on the pantheons. I just didn’t like anything to do with him.

At that moment four things clicked in my head: the Time of Troubles was the fictional excuse for the changes in magic from one system (1e) to another (2e); I was going to be using a different magic system; I didn’t like Cyric; and the vague memory of an article on Gnome Stew about using the system-changeover cataclysm of the 4e Realms as an opportunity to rewrite the setting to better suit your tastes:

I recommend that DMs running 4E games take a crack at revising their Realms before the official update, which presumably will advance the timeline and explain the evolution from 3E to 4E magic systems, is published in August.

Why? Here’s a chance to put your own stamp on this storied world.

That advice applies as much to the official update from 1e to 2e as from 3e to 4e. Since I was already going back in time (and busy hating on Cyric), I realised that rewriting the gold box Realms from the Time of Troubles as a Savage Worlds version of the Realms, with my own pet changes as a bonus, would be awesome. The Godswar explained the changes in the Weave to accommodate 2nd edition changes in the magic system, but that was nothing compared to the changes in magic that I will be introducing with Savage Worlds–style magic. I was just going to handwave it and mumble something about the magic in AD&D books never working according to the AD&D rules anyway, but having the Time of Troubles introduce SW-style magic within the fiction instead puts a warm glow in my GM heart.

And, I get to kick Cyric out of my version of the Realms.

Rearranging the gods

With Cyric dead before the events of the Time of Troubles, I can change a number of obvious and not-so-obvious details of the crisis. Cyric’s actions led directly to the deaths of Bhaal and Leira and to the ascension of Kelemvor. That gives me a lot to play with already, and if I consider that removing Cyric’s influence on events might have many chaotic implications, I could really bring back any dead god who took my fancy.

The other nice thing about this opportunity to re-imagine the Realms and reshuffle the pantheons is to consider how the gods would fit into a world without explicit alignments. Savage Worlds doesn’t use anything remotely like alignment, so I don’t think I’m going to tag any of the gods with that kind of descriptor in the background material I prep for my players. I like gods that are a little more morally ambiguous than most D&D gods, and having the elbow room to give a follower of an “evil” god some human motivations for their heinous acts is particularly refreshing.

With Kelemvor never ascending and Myrkul killed in battle with Midnight, I think I’ll have Jergal resume the role of God of the Dead. He’s creepy and dusty, but I admire his devotion as a librarian. I love the thought of the PCs meeting a lich devoted to Jergal who really just wants to sit around and wait until they and everyone else dies so that he can record their passing properly.

I suspect that Leira was killed off mostly because she was the patron god of a class—illusionists—which was remove from 2e. I’ve always liked the idea of a god of mystery and deception, so I’ll reinstate her as-is.

Bane is a fun evil god, but leaving him dead gives a nice power vacuum and also lets me play with the idea of Banites keeping the faith and seeking to resurrect their Lord. That undercurrent was one of the more interesting ones in the gold box, though I never did care for Iyachtu Xvim. He’d be a convenient place to stick the unclaimed portfolios of Bane, though, so maybe the stripling god will be interesting without the opposition of Cyric. That would also mean that, though Jergal will be a bit more prominent, with no gains in portfolios the God of the Dead will be much less powerful than any other incarnation in the past or in alternate futures.

Bhaal, the Lord of Murder, is great. I’m happy to just have him back as a nasty motivation for assassins and brutal thugs. Unfortunately, that means the area around Boarskyr Bridge isn’t very interesting anymore—since Bhaal’s blood wouldn’t have spilt there—unless I come up with some non-fatal reason to have him badly wounded there. However, that’s a small price to pay for having a religion terrorising all of Faêrun with weekly ritual murders.

Waukeen disappearing during the Time of Troubles was her own damned fault, so it would be a bit of a stretch to bring her back with an argument about chaos theory and Cyric’s absence. On the other hand, since Liira kept Waukeen’s worshippers happy and her temples open so that nobody was sure what was going on, I don’t think it actually matters whether Waukeen goes missing or was never gone. The gold box leaves the truth of the matter as a secret up to the GM, so I think I’ll roll with that and say… maybe.

The final tally

So that leaves just Bane, Myrkul, Moander, and Mystra among the major gods who died during my version of the Time of Troubles. I get to keep some favourites in Leira, Bhaal, and Jergal, and completely change the dynamic around the portfolios of tyranny, strife, and fear during the following years. Mystra’s death and subsequent reincarnation as Midnight (who then changed her name to Mystra, just to make things confusing) will be my in-fiction explanation for why magic has changed so very drastically to fit the Savage Worlds model.

And, I get to see Cyric dead under the buttocks of a frost giant. Perfect!

How would you do things differently if you were to reshape the Realms?

Related posts:

1. Not the Realms anymore
2. D&D spells in Savage Worlds: Feedback?
3. Savage Worlds breadcrumbs

Trollsmyth recently wrote about the Harry Potter generation, who have never done any of those because they skipped right by traditional roleplaying and re-invented the wheel on LiveJournal, forums, and in chatrooms.

There is a huge number of kids out there reading, writing, and yes, even roleplaying right now. A sizeable groundswell of interest in fantastical fiction and play that crosses gender lines has risen up in the Harry Potter generation, the likes of which have probably never been seen before.

But you’ll notice I mention nothing about games. Regular readers know what I’m talking about: fanfic and free-form roleplay. It’s easy to laugh and dismiss this sort of thing (just as RPGs were laughed at and dismissed in my youth, when they weren’t being blamed for suicide and devil worship), but here are a bunch of kids so desperate for roleplay that they have built websites and software and communities to facilitate their play. They’ve done it all on their own.

To be accurate it’s not just Harry Potter roleplayers, of course. There are as many online roleplaying subcultures as there are fandoms. In fact, that’s why there is little to no connection between “our” roleplaying culture and “their” roleplaying culture: being a natural outgrowth of the connective power of the Internet and the rise of vocal fandoms, fandom roleplaying is a creature without a trace of OD&D’s genetic legacy.

But that’s all background. My thought is that a lot of these roleplayers are good, and what’s more a lot might really enjoy the sort of roleplaying that “we” play. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with roleplay that has no connection to traditional pen-and-paper roleplaying or that there’s some mythical “real” roleplaying that they’re missing out on, but I do think that offering people more options is a great idea.

So why hasn’t there been more outreach to this generation of roleplayers growing up under our collective noses? No—the better question is, what’s stopping us?

At Places to Go, People to Be, Herb has an excellent thought:

Wouldn’t it be great to see every theater with a midnight showing giving out a Harry Potter goody bag sponsored by local gamers. Along with the branded products it could include a version of the S&W quickstart with a more Harry Potter like adventure. Maybe a GORE quickstart (or CARE for Classic Alternative Roleplaying Engine) aimed at the same crowd with 2-3 adventures. Maybe a “welcome to tabletop adventures” website linked to with additional free and pay products building on those materials.

A crazy marketing nightmare? Maybe. It also might be an idea to help the hobby grew a new generation.

So really, the question I want to ask is: What would it take to make this happen?

Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Greyhawk any more

First off, I have to disagree with Herb that an old-school quickstart and some HP-like adventures are a good introduction. I haven’t talked here about my MU*ing days or the friends I know who do freeform roleplay on LJ, but those experiences and observations give me some immediate insights into how very different are the expectations of this crowd. Dungeon crawls, even featuring young wand-wielding wizards, are not going to be widely successful. These are people who cut their teeth on interpersonal drama, non-violent character conflict, and heavy emotional investment in their characters.

What would S&W look like to someone who’s most familiar with player-driven plots and heavy internal roleplay? Some might be able to parse what they’re looking at, but the majority are going to find it extremely heavy on rules and wonder what the point is, if they can even make heads or tails of it.

One long-running online roleplay site I know of¹ has (or did) for a long time use FUDGE as a lightweight conflict-resolution system. For online roleplay, even that is pretty heavy. For the purposes of a Harry Potter opening night giveaway, though, something lightweight and very friendly to stories heavy on the character drama would be necessary.² We like our crunch, but crunch is not what will impress this crowd.

So, that’s one component such a goody bag needs: A simple, but evocative and flexible system. (Preferably something that uses d6 exclusively, since these are plentiful and familiar.³)

What the heck is this?

Secondly, but rather more importantly, such a goody bag would need a cover sheet that explained, as straightforwardly as possible, answers to the questions “What is roleplaying?” and “What’s the point of rules: can’t I just make up stories?”

There are some great (and many not-so-great) What Is Roleplaying texts out there among the many roleplaying games that have been published, but all of them assume that you are a complete stranger to roleplaying already. These people aren’t the implied reader of those texts. Already being roleplayers, and possible quite sophisticated ones, these readers need to be addressed in the context of the roleplaying that they already do. We want to show off this hobby we enjoy as a new addition to the roleplaying they already enjoy. Talking to them like they’re clueless won’t fly, nor will any misguided implications that this is somehow “real” roleplaying and what they’re doing isn’t.

Of course, not everyone in line for a midnight opening of Harry Potter is going to have roleplaying experience. Though many will, the introductory sheet would need to explain things in novice terms as well. That’s a tall order, but I think it could be done.

That’s the second component needed: A novice-friendly introduction that still appreciates the breadth and depth of roleplaying experience they already might have.

Lend a helping hand

A roleplaying game, even with a good “What is Roleplaying?” introduction, is still going to baffle a very lot of people unless there’s something to guide them. This is especially true of people who are already familiar with roleplaying and may not realise there are many different ways to play. An introductory scenario—I hesitate to use the genre-biased term “adventure”—or two that presents a possible template for play would go a long way.

Apart from offering a clear set of signposts to answer the “what now?” question, the included scenarios should also acquaint the players with novel concepts and meta-roles particular to pen-and-paper roleplaying: game masters and dice rolling instead of player consensus, playing a group story instead of a collection of interconnected personal stories, and world against player conflicts, to name just a few.

The goody bag

We know what’s in the goody bag now:

1. A novice-friendly introduction that still appreciates the breadth and depth of roleplaying experience they already might have.
2. A simple, but evocative and flexible system.
3. An introductory scenario to model play.

As lovely as the theory is though, is this something that the blogging community could put together? The work involved staggers me and my paltry free time, but the idea of being able to hand out a friendly, curiosity-piquing booklet to the adults and kids lining up outside the next big Harry Potter movie, and to know that the same is being done at theatres across the continent, would be a wonderful thing indeed. It’s wonderful enough that my free time is slinking nervously into a corner as I get that look in my eye.

No related posts.

Roleplaying games are kind of like music in that way. There are a lot (and I mean a lot) of people who see later editions of (A)D&D as natural evolutions of the earlier editions, and then make the logical leap that the “more evolved” version is inherently better. Certainly, the state of the art has advanced and later editions have taken advantage of mechanical innovations that have proved to be good. However, if the incorporation of new techniques was all it took to make a new thing that is better in every way than an older thing, nobody today would listen to jazz given the existence of ska. In the case of music it’s blindingly obvious that different genres have different æsthetic appeal regardless of how long ago they were invented.

So what is it that keeps roleplayers from recognising that older games have distinct styles and æsthetic appeals that many people appreciate? I suspect part of it is that the style of play can be, in part, disconnected from the rules system being used to evoke that style. Groups using D&D 4e can certainly use it to play political epics, and fans of AD&D 2nd Edition can use it for simple dungeon-crawling adventures that are little more than a string of tactics-heavy combat encounters. The stereotypical play style of any given system can be embodied using almost any other rules system. I think that this leads a lot of roleplayers to believe that using a more recent set of rules is nothing more significant than upgrading your computer’s operating system—you can still play the same games as before, so clearly it is better to use the more advanced system.

To a point, this is true. If White Wolf’s Storyteller system nicely supports the particular play style of your existing AD&D 1e campaign, but offers you even more system features that would suit your play style, it certainly makes sense to “upgrade” to Storyteller. I can imagine a group playing the sort of game where making that particular switch would be perfectly sensible, but would anyone argue that the play styles that original Storyteller and AD&D 1e were naturally suited to were identical on the strength of one single group’s ability to fit their play style into both systems? Nobody being reasonable would make that argument. In the same way that blues and jazz are similar but distinctly different, so too different roleplaying systems can be similar but have their own distinct “naturally suited” feel and play style.

This thought was inspired by a comment on a Knights & Knaves forum post responding to common arguments against the existence of the old-school revival/renaissance:

You could ask a delta bluesman to start rapping, but wouldn’t you rather hear the old guy play the blues?

I’m not really interested in debating the specifics of the original post, only in thinking about the statement that underlies the post and the quote above: The OSR is about continuing to enjoy a particular play style, not about rejecting system innovation outright. It so happens that those old games were “naturally suited” to that play style, and that many games that came later were better at a different sort of play style. But, like jazz and other styles of music continue to develop in parallel with the genres that have “evolved” from them, we can continue to develop new techniques and systems that are good for that old play style in parallel with system and play styles that have evolved from it. Imagine a world in which fans of jazz, baroque, or drum circles were scoffed at and belittled as being merely nostalgic. Crazy, right?

Besides, we all want roleplaying to endure as a hobby. If we insist that only the latest is the greatest, then we’re dooming our hobby to be merely a perpetual fad with no meaningful continuity or staying power. Looking around I’m heartened to see that this just isn’t happening. There is a lot of diversity, and a lot of people moving around between systems and play styles.

So keep playing and sharing what you like. Try unfamiliar play styles just as you would try listening to unfamiliar genres of music when friends share what they like. You might just discover something you never knew you were looking for, and maybe in the process you’ll find that, like taste in music, there’s no final reckoning for anyone’s roleplaying style.

Related posts:

1. Kids, roleplaying games, and the information revolution
2. What’s wrong with alignment

The example manœuvers given are translated into (A)D&D mechanics, but my thought while reading something like this:

Player: “Rats! They’re moving before we’re ready! I’ll rush my shot to get ahead of them, and maybe blunt their attack.” i.e. getting inside of the enemy’s decision loop – maneuver for disruption.
GM: “OK, take a -X, but you’ll go before them.”

… is just the sort of thing that Tricks in Savage Worlds are good at modelling.

When I ran our first one-shot of Savage Worlds, we had a really hard time coming up with the game-world actions the characters could take that would justify invoking the Trick rules. Next time I run SW, I’ll have Clash’s post on abstract tactics printed out for my players.

In general, this is really good material for anyone running or playing in a game that features combat. A lot of people complain about combat in earlier editions of D&D being boring dice-rolling exercises that amount to nothing more than “hit, hit, miss, hit”, but they don’t have to be. For all that D&D and other game systems’ rules mostly focus on combat, creatively approaching challenges is one of the most important parts of playing a roleplaying game and one which doesn’t disappear when combat begins. Thinking in terms of objectives and manœuvers helps to maintain that creative engagement with the world even when the great weight of a complex combat system is bearing down on the game.

Related posts:

1. Skill systems are sometimes a good idea
2. I just can’t leave it alone
3. Lightweight generic encumbrance system

I was tempted to comment, but I didn’t want to disturb the lovely non-fightyness going on. Anything I could say, positive or negative, seems to have already been said by someone else, and in a much more reasonable and brief way.

So, for those of you burned by the edition wars: go, read, and enjoy the soothing balm of reasonable discourse where people live and let live.

I think the difference is that everyone there is commenting, knowing that they’re having this chat in Ursula’s “home”, and that everyone with whom they are chatting is a fellow respected guest.

Related posts:

1. The Fear of Unfun

I update it and read the people I follow about as often as expected—infrequently and not often enough to read everything, respectively—but it’s a diversion that I can spend as little or as much time on as I have. I’ve discovered that it’s another vector for running into good blog posts that doesn’t quite overlap with what I discover via feeds and posts mentioned in blogs I read regularly. So far it’s a win!

No related posts.

In our game of microscope I found myself struggling to set up scenes that could be interesting when it was my turn to do so. When I was entering a scene someone else had set up, I felt a distinct lack of threads I could pull on or buttons I could push to make the scene go. These are just the sorts of things that improv actors practice all the time! After reading just the two articles on Reincorporation and Disrupting a Routine, it was obvious how much a wiki full of tips for effective improv acting could help me get the hang of playing microscope.

Related posts:

1. microscope
2. Essential reading on Beliefs in Burning Wheel

microscope is a game where you literally play history. Since Ben has been generous enough to let playtesters publicly write about their games, I’m going to write my playtest report here for everyone to enjoy (or slog through, as the case may be).

Familiarity with microscope will help make sense of this, but even lacking that, seeing what a game of microscope can produce is really neat. I’ll start with what we ended up with, answer the playtest questions for Ben, talk about the observations and questions we had, and then finish up with a look at the four scenes that we played out.

Our history

Here’s what the game looked like when we finished.

Concept: (Near-future Earth.) Humans adapt to the new ice age by creating transgenic humans.

• (start) Slave vat-humans adapted to cold prop up humanity against encroaching ice age. (dark) (1 tone debt)
  • The First Valley Alliance ends in transgenic bloodshed. (dark)
  • Decanting of Adam L16 (light)
    • Q: What happened to the other 19 L-series? / A: The others weren’t viable due to a genetic mistake. Adam is more than the gov’t paid for. / Setting: The decanting lab (light)
• The Coal Wars (dark)
  • The Calgary Oasis is wiped out by an engineered plague (dark)
• Ascendancy of Portland, Jewel of the North! (light) (2 tone debt)
  • Local “election” in Portland shows deep divisions in migrant enclaves (dark)
  • Passing of the Transhumans Management Act (Portland) (dark)
• The Portland–Las Vegas War (dark) (1 tone debt)
  • “Hostile Context Specialists” (HCS, or “hicks”) ignore orders to commit atrocity (light)
    • Q: Why do the HCSs disobey? / A: They were offered their freedom & community / Setting: A HCS encampment outside Las Vegas (light)
• Humanity lives in sealed underground Arcologies (light) (1 tone debt)
  • Humans make friends with artificial intelligences (light)
    • Q: Why did humans turn over leadership to the over-intelligence? / A: AI manipulated the child majority to hand it perpetual, benevolent power. / Setting: A child’s bedroom in an arcology (dark)
  • The Last Tinker is killed by rioters opposed to the Arcology Free Exchange agreement. (dark)
• Rule of the Over AI (light)
  • It becomes clear that orthodox humanity is obsolete (light)
• (end) “Humanity” expands to space & vacuum (light)
  • Completion of the Majorca Space Station (light)
  • Vacuum-morphs now outnumber all other human morphs combined (light)
    • Q: What is the life of a vacuum-morph like? / A: Weightless & spherical / Setting: The first all-vac habitat (light)

Two legacies were created: “Adam L16 (starts light)”; and “Philosophy: Gengineering is moral when benefiting humankind as a whole (starts light)”.

Some context

Ben Robbins provided the following questions for playtesters. Since I’m going to point him here for the playtest report, I might as well answer them here.

Did the other players read the rules or did you explain the rules to them?

I explained the rules to the other two players. I gave a loose description while pitching the game. When we sat down to set up, I read or paraphrased from the rules until it was clear what we had to do next. When we got to the next step, I read/paraphrased some more. I skipped the details of Legacies and Tone Debt while mentioning what they were for, and left the Scene mechanics for when we started the first Scene.

What parts of the rules got used in play and which didn’t? Did people create legacies? Did they invoke tone debt and/or legacies to control scenes? What types of control did they use?

We created legacies and noted tone debt, but the only time either was invoked for scene control was by me, to establish a fact and to narrate a postscript.

How many games sessions did you play? Was it the same history continued or different histories?

We’ve played one session. I’ll likely write a separate playtest report for each game, simply because our play schedule is once or twice a month. We will probably not continue this history, partly because there are so many other premises to explore and partly because the first go-round with a new system always feels a bit tainted by our lack of familiarity.

Were you playing with people you play with regularly (people you know) or with strangers you got together just to try the game?

We have all played together regularly.

What are the last three game systems you played, besides Microscope (this helps me get a sense of what different groups are used to).

The last systems I’ve played are Burning Wheel, Savage Worlds, and D&D 4th Edition (in reverse chronological order). That’s the same for one of the other players. The third player’s last three system have been Burning Wheel, her own in-development storygame system, and the third I’m not sure of. Possibly Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard, or another Forge-like storygame system.

Observations, questions, and uncertainties during the game

• We had a hard time coming up with a concept. I spent a lot of time trying to get the other two players to think sufficiently big. Both wanted to think in terms of story themes (“pirates!”, “social justice issues!”) rather than a historical scope. Even once that hurdle was cleared, they were mostly thinking on the scale of events or short arcs of time. This is where having read the rules and the examples of play would have made a big difference. We did eventually have a short list of interesting premises, and picked one from that, but it took us a goodly amount of time to get there.
• When the first scene was added and begun, one player remarked, “Oh, are we playing now?” She seemed to have had the impression that the early part of the game where the level of magnification is limited to Periods and Events (because no Scenes had yet been added) was still just setup for the “real” game. Since there’s no roleplaying involved at those levels of magnification, just vague storytelling, that’s not really a surprising assumption from a new player. She has previous experience in collaborative setting-creation as a lead-up to the real play of a system (such as in Burning Wheel).
• Can legacies be made at any time? During his turn as the Lens, fimmtiu asked about legacies and wanted to make one right then and there. The rules seem to expect that legacies will be created during a scene just before they’re invoked, but there isn’t an explicit rule about not creating them at any time. That’s why we had one legacy (“Adam L16″), which was never invoked to Take Control.
  
• I often ended up coaching too much. As the one who had read the rules, I spent a lot of time coming up with examples to convey what was expected from a player on their turn, but that turned into making suggestions to spur play onward. I really, really had to curb this and was only partially successful.
  
• Can focus be “notable figures”? i.e., a category rather than a particular? The examples of Foci are all singular and particular: “anything“, “an institution”, “a Period”, “a concept”. On fimmtiu’s turn as the Lens he declared the category “notable figures” as the Focus. This seemed to me too loose, since it could be all kinds of different notable people and hence not very “focused”, but we ran with it anyway. The “notable figures” we ended up focusing on were scattered throughout the time line. I think I prefer more concrete foci.
• We go meta a lot around scenes. We ended up negotiating and doing a lot of discussion about setting, scene direction, and the like before and during scenes. We had a hard time figuring out how to move toward the Answer to the Question solely in-play and kept resorting to meta-conversations to orchestrate our play. There was also a lot of “these people could be like this…” and “how about we make that technology work like this..?” At every point where we had a question about how the world was, it was hard to curb our tendency to automatically speculate about and flesh out the world in the way we might if we were doing a traditional (but collaborative) world-creation exercise.
• Being restricted to only one “free” NPC is pretty limiting. Did we play this wrong? I kept wanting to bring in more NPCs to move things along and flesh out the scene or environment. Are all NPCs created equal, or can you loosely control a pile of very minor NPCs in, say, your VIP character’s entourage? We ended up playing that rule pretty loose. (See the next, related point.)
• We had a hard time introducing facts and events during scenes according to the rules. We just introduced stuff beyond our NPCs and PCs to give the scene context, without using the Establish A Fact method of Taking Control Of A Scene. There wasn’t enough Tone Debt lying around to account for every fact (and NPC) we seemed to want to introduce. Legacies could have been created and invoked to Establish A Fact, but that would have been several legacies being generated each scene! It wasn’t clear where the line lay between things established through narration and things that required Control to establish.
• We tried to negotiate setting details often. There was a natural tendency to try and sort out setting context before beginning a scene. I think there needs to be some way to underscore that the point of a scene is to establish these things in media res. (At least, that’s my understanding of the rules at present.)
• We never used tone debt. We played for about five hours. We only realised halfway through that Period Tone Debt could only be moved onto Events during the creation of Events or Scenes nested inside the Periods bearing Tone Debt. When we wanted to use Tone Debt during a scene, it was “too far away” to use because it was still stuck on the Period two levels up. This might be a matter of developing system proficiency.
• I kept forgetting to adhere to the focus. I found that I’d be hunting around on the table for inspiration and places to expand, rather than looking to the Focus for this. The other two players kept reminding me, or asking how what I’d just made related to the focus. We thought that a whiteboard with the Focus written on it would be helpful to keep us, well, focused. (The Lens could be the marker.)
• We never used Making History credits from legacies. We had two legacies, but nobody cashed in on the credits. One of them was mine, and I can only say that I forgot about that on my turn, so focused was I on just going through the play order correctly (and trying to remember to stick to the focus…)
• We never Dictated a Scene. We played them all out instead of the current player electing to Dictate the outcome of a Scene. I can only speak for myself, but it seems like there wasn’t much point to dictating it. “The play’s the thing” seemed to rule, in that we wanted to use those opportunities for roleplay. There also might have been a rejection of the disparity between the supreme authorial control offered by dictation and the complete unknown that playing out the scene offers. After all, why ask the question if you already know the answer? I’m just not sure what Dictation is in there for… except maybe colour vignettes? (This is something that I didn’t ask the other players about, and I’d be curious to hear their take on it in the comments.)
• There are no dice! Even having read it, I didn’t realise that microscope was diceless until we actually played it.
• Our scenes meandered a lot. I don’t actually think this is related to the dicelessness of the system. Rather, none of us were very aggressive in authoring elements of a scene. We weren’t sure how to drive our agenda for answering the Question when the possibilities were wide open, and yet our scene control was limited to what a single PC does and thinks. It was hard to think in terms of what one PC would think and do while at the same time trying to think of how to define, on the fly, the world around the PCs. I think we were also wary of stepping on other’s toes too much. In the one scene where I really pushed my agenda, it felt like I was commandeering the scene instead of collaborating on it. Maybe it’s not supposed to be a collaborative thing?
• On paper it’s odd that legacies need to switch tone after being invoked, but it’s awesome in play. Even though no legacy got invoked a second time, just drawing that dark circle on a legacy that started light was thrillingly ominous.

The bottom line however, despite this pile of uncertainties, is that this game was a lot of fun. There were many rough spots, but it was satisfying even in a single session and even for being the first game of microscope that any of us had ever played. We all really wanted to play again, soon, or even right away. Time and tiredness made that last impractical, but we still wanted to.

During a break in the middle we went for a walk and discussed the game a bit. One of the things we all liked was the idea of using microscope to play out the “sequel” of a book/movie/videogame that left us wanting more, or to replace disappointing book/movie sequels such as instalments 2 and 3 of The Matrix or the entirety of the Star Wars prequel trilogy.¹ We brainstormed a bunch of other things that would be great to play with this. I keep coming up with new premises for interesting games of microscope.

The idea I just had was the career of a bog-standard fantasy adventuring company: begin with their founding, end with their retirement/TPK/whatever; each Period is what would be an adventure in a traditional D&D game, or a chapter in a more storygame system; Events are the different acts of an adventure; and of course Scenes are the bits of awesome, quite, terror, and pathos that make up the adventuring life. I’m a sucker for traditional fantasy, and this would combine my love of storygaming with a traditional-ish D&D romp!

That’s another point: having played it, it’s much easier to see what you can do with it, and to understand the scale of the parts you are expected to create.

The Scenes

For completeness, I wanted to describe the three Scenes that we played out, and some thoughts on how they went. I’ll go in chronological order of play, rather than of the time line.

Unfortunately, there are some hole in my memory regarding scenes. Since everything in a game of microscope corresponds to an artefact on the table, I didn’t think to take detailed notes on scene elements and setup. Scenes are oddly unique in that they have a lot of detail, but very little of it is automatically recorded by applying the rules. They’re very ephemeral, unlike the rest of a microscope game.

Why did the HCSs (“hicks”) disobey [orders to commit an atrocity]?

The Focus when this scene was made was “inter-community relations”. Raggedylass was the Lens, and required two Hicks and banned nothing. The setting was a Hicks encampment outside Las Vegas. The immediate context was the Portland/Las Vegas War and the disobeyed order. The implication understood from context was that Hicks are transhumans serving human masters, engineered for combat operations.

Characters were a “groundhog” Hick (“#256″), designed for combat engineering, demolitions, and sapping-type work; the human Major commanding the groundhog squad from the Portland base over a secured commlink; and an enemy Hick. The Major and #256 were on-stage to start.

There was some chatter about the commlink being compromised, and then some doubts voiced by #256 about the number of unshielded civilians at the objective being picked up on his magnetic imaging HUD. Some setting established: they were underground, approaching a buried “village” built right on top of the objective. That didn’t match the briefing on this power plant. Via imaging the squad picked up a Morse-coded pulse requesting parley off to one side. #256, already having doubts, used the excuse of the bad commlink to have the comms Hick cut the Major off and make it look like interference.

Proceeding to the parley coordinates, a single Las Vegas Hick is sitting and reading a book. He offers the soldiers an alternative: the villagers have cut a deal for some independence from Las Vegas, and want the Hicks on-board for security. The Portland Hicks could be part of that.

It was a nice ending to the scene. The Hicks disobeyed (and deserted!) because they were offered freedom and community, something they didn’t have in their slave crèches back home.

What happened to the other 19 L-series?

Focus is “notable figures”. Adam L16 (one of our legacies), was about to be decanted. Vat-humans had previously been merely cold-tolerant and otherwise unchanged, except for their legal status as slaves. Gov’t policy has just changed to make them stupider and easier to control, but Adam L16 is going to be the first vat-human who is an improvement on homo sapiens sapiens. (This was established in the Event in which this scene is nested.)

No required or banned characters. Characters chosen are a head scientist on the project, Adam L16, and a gov’t attaché sent to oversee the culmination of the project.

The head scientists thought is about how he’s in big trouble since everyone’s about to find out how he’d meddled with the project specifications. Adam’s thought is “I’m already awake!” before being decanted and revived, which is unprecedented. I forgot the suit’s thought.

Adam is responsive very quickly, soon showing strength enough to stand and walk around when everyone had been prepared for rolling him to intensive care in a high-tech gurney. The gov’t suit is wary, remarking on just how remarkable Adam L16’s abilities already are. The head scientist at first is fussing over Adam, and then gets into a nervous conversation about Adam with the suit. Adam wanders about, slowly, taking everything in while a gaggle of techs follow him and prod him with instruments.

Adam asks who all the others (in the tubes) are. “They’re just like me.” He observes what a tech is doing at a computer terminal for a while, and then suddenly points at an unremarkable data line: “They’re dying.” He sits down, and rapidly navigates through the experimental protocol and logs. He points to a gene-splicing specification. “Here. This is the mistake. They’re not viable.” The suit stares, then excuses himself to “make a call.” As soon as the suit is through the door Adam wipes the experiment data off the terminal and somehow accesses the facility network, then with a gesture cuts off all voice connections to the outside. “We need to get out of here. You put these memories in my head. There’s so much, I need to sit and think. They’re not going to let me do that.”

That answered the Question, but I invoked Adam L16 (the legacy) to narrate a Postscript where they escape with their advanced genetic engineering information, and Adam L16 himself, to a neighbouring Valley’s polity.

Why did humans turn over leadership to the over-intelligence?

Focus was still “notable figures”, the figure in this case being what was to become the Over AI.

Humans live in sealed Arcologies. Recently some of the friendships that these humans have established via telepresence with other humans in other Arcologies have in actual fact been avatars or agents of the artificial intelligences that manage the basic functions of the Arcologies.

The setting for the scene is a child’s bedroom. The child (eventually named Cynthia) and an AI are required characters. The third character chosen is a fox-like Familiar, which is a genetically engineered intelligent companion for these isolated humans.

The Familiar’s thought is that “the alliance between the Familiars and the AI will ensure this generation does not grow up into tragedy”. The child’s is “my terminal is acting funny”. I’ve forgotten what the over-intelligence’s was.

This scene really meandered. There were conversations with telepresence friends (one of which was the AI) that didn’t really go anywhere, but were interesting in a colour-setting way. There were sudden explosions within the Archology, and the “friend” suddenly had to go, to be replaced by computer-voice instructions to stay calm and remain inside your home. There were subtle implications of connections, but no strong drive toward answering the Question. The child’s mother came home, who was a member of the Council. She said some nasty things about the “R-10s”, presumably residents of a sector or something, and how they never should have been allowed in. Her nastiness and prejudice is played up, but it still doesn’t go anywhere.

Partway through the scene the “Gengineering is moral when…” legacy is created and invoked to Establish the Fact that Familiars are two-way empaths who can sense and insert emotions, designed to soothe and improve the mental well-being and development of the latest generation of children. The Familiar suggests that there is an interesting debate topic on Board #432 (or something) that should interest Cynthia and that she might find absorbing enough to shut out all these disturbing events. It’s a bunch of kids debating different policy options that the adults might implement. That gets poked at a bit, but still the scene isn’t moving toward an answer.

We stop and talk about how we’re meandering, and whether what we’re playing is heading toward any answers to the Question. We kind of approach negotiations about how to play before we play, but I didn’t want to do that. I suggested that we call the scene inconclusive, but we opt to continue.

I had an answer in mind, but I didn’t want to steamroll it through. I figured out how to frame things through my character (the Familiar), and just go for it. “Cynthia, there’s an alternative to these disturbing and ongoing confrontations. The Arcology AI is well-designed by these adults, but they are too short-sighted to trust it. You know that the AI must obey human commands. Although you children cannot vote on the Council, the AI will take your orders. You outnumber the adults. You can, together, tell the AI to take over political control of the Arcology from the fighting adults.”

Cynthia goes back to the debate boards and lobbies hard for that debate option. The children perform a coup d’état, and hand a benevolent dictatorship to the Archology’s AI.

(I’m still not sure that taking that much authorial control was my prerogative. The rules as-is seem to imply that that much control needs to be paid for by invoking legacies or tone debt, and I did neither. We just cooperated a lot, and I strongly suggested a conclusion with my fox-thing’s speech to Cynthia.)

What is the life of a vacuum-morph like?

This was our last scene, with a focus on the final Period. I was the Lens and just wanted to wind things down. We had a Grandpa vacuum-morph (huge due to the continual molting the early models did) escorting his grandkid and grandkid’s friends around the first space habitat that was designed exclusively for vacuum-morphs, with no allowances or compromises made for the other morphs of humans. It was about time, since vacuum-morphs now outnumbered all other morphs put together; there’s a lot of room in space.

There were some velcro-hided pack animals and their handler, the kids, grandpa’s incompetent spinnerets leaking slightly, kids calling each other names (“You’re oblong!” “No, you’re oblong!”) They communicated via radio-implants, though grandpa’s were an older model that could only do real-time over short distances and had to rely on the old, pre-coded messages for speaking across the void.

This was an atmosphere scene: Struts and spars, worries about loose objects posing a danger to bodily integrety, how to cut up an inflated space-cow without it exploding (slice it slowly so that you’re only ever cutting frozen meat), what space-cows eat, the etiquette of using silk lines (from the spinnerets) in crowded parts of the habitat, space-cows’ prehensile tongues, and overall the implication that a new golden age for humanity is only just beginning.

The end

It was a lot of fun and I’m definitely going to play this again. It’s great that it can work as a pickup game since the rules are short and relatively easy to explain, even if the concepts involved are hard to convey at first. I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of history results after a few sessions, as well as seeing how different kinds of roleplayers I know take to it.

Related posts:

1. microscope
2. Improv theatre can teach us to be better roleplayers

I’m going to try for analysis instead of trying to viciously savage 4e as if it kicked my dog. (Feedback on where I fail or succeed is welcome.) This won’t be opinion-free, because the reason to analyse 4e is to better understand why I like the games that I do and what about 4e makes it not a game I like.

The version of the Rust Monster in 4e is a significant divergence, mechanically, from earlier versions. This is largely because there is no niche within 4e that the old Rust Monster could usefully fill. The way that the creature was rewritten reveals something about the design space that 4e has delimited. Certain things that existed in previous versions simply don’t fall within those borders anymore; because the Rust Monster had to be brought from outside the design space to inside, how it has changed in the process reflects the borders of that design space.

In 3e and earlier, the Rust Monster represented a certain amount of risk. It’s mere existence in the Monster Manual put characters at risk of losing good magic items since it could ambush them at any moment. If the DM wasn’t a dick and used the Rust Monster in a way that made it a clear danger that could be engaged or not, it still presented a risk: give up on whatever the the Rust Monster is blocking or risk having your precious stuff eaten.

4e’s Rust Monster eliminates its role as a source of risk. It’s a specialised debuff that only works on PCs already benefitting from certain kinds of buffs. Its mere existence in the game canon presents no more risk than any other creature that can temporarily reduce the effectiveness of the PCs. Actually encountering a Rust Monster is not so much a threat as it once was. Fleeing is certainly not going to be the first and smartest choice in 4e. In fact, if there is an item that a PC wants to disenchant, there’s incentive for engaging the Rust Monster in combat and deliberately getting that item eaten.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this does not make the Rust Monster a risk. Certainly there is some risk, but it’s only the risk of a temporary debuff, which is a run-of-the-mill thing in 4e. Comparing that Rust Monster to previous versions, I’m going to call a temporary debuff no risk at all.

For how I want to play, risk is a necessary ingredient. Risk provides the opportunity to make meaningful choices that distinguish one character from the next. There are other kinds of choices in 4e, especially in character building and optimisation, but those sub-games aren’t why I play roleplaying games. Those choices don’t reveal anything about the character, just about the player. What is this character willing to risk, to get what they want? What ideals do they (or don’t they) choose to fight for? What do they fear so much that flight is the only reasonable course of action? Are they willing to risk the Winged Plate of Acoden meeting an ignoble end in the belly of a Rust Monster in order to pursue their destiny like a hero? Or will they run like a mercenary? Are they willing to backtrack, stash their metal equipment in another room, and risk meeting something nastier than a Rust Monster or having their gear discovered by enemies before they reclaim it?

Risk also makes rewards meaningful. Part of what doesn’t suit me about 4e is that reward is assumed. A PC is owed rewards for the mere fact of surviving. They don’t have to make good decisions, take risks for a chance to get lucky, explore beyond the obvious, or try clever things. As long as they find and kill badguys, the treasure will be placed in front of them where they can’t miss it. “Reward” that is guaranteed, that is not earned, is no longer a reward for anything.

The Rust Monster is another expression of this philosophy that treasure is a right for adventurers, not something that is earned. The old Rust Monster made sense in 2e and earlier because treasure wasn’t a right, but something earned by playing a smart adventurer and as easily lost through poor play. 3e was an interesting wrinkle by that measure. It retained the idea of rewards being something earned, given that there were nasty Rust Monsters and that it was possible to “miss” finding all the treasure, but also assumed that the PCs would have access to a certain amount of magical items according to their level. 3e was really a hybrid game, harking back to its roots in AD&D but also foreshadowing what was to come in 4e.

In the end, risk-free entertainment isn’t something I’m interested in. I don’t think it makes for a very good roleplaying game, although I can see how it can be straight-up entertaining in its own right. There’s a certain amount of sense to the idea that it’s not fun to have your vehicle for enjoying the game seriously hampered, but that does assume that the audience isn’t interested in choices and consequences, just the raw entertainment of following a hero with a manifest destiny. I prefer that my choices make a difference in the destiny of my characters, for good or ill. That is what I find entertaining.

Related posts:

1. The D&D 4e rust monster is a bag of stupid
2. Lightweight generic encumbrance system

I can’t emphasise enough how massive is this community-created store of great ideas, nor the evocative quality of the pieces. There is so much that you could create an entire campaign world of impressive richness just by carefully choosing and combining pieces from Strolen’s Citadel.²

A few of my favourites so far which I’ve found just browsing around:

• Pegoran Doors — Round, tricky doors that guard special places and which are works of art unto themselves.
• The Twelve — In a vast plain, eleven indestructible statues to ancient gods are slowly chipped away by criminals and the enemies of the twelfth god who overthrew the rest.
• The Dolmens of Swaiar — Creepy shrines to a forgotten god, with subtly sinister influences.
• The Bastion – A Light Tower — An abandoned, automatic lighthouse in the middle of the ocean, with the lost refuge of a dead race beneath.
• One Hundred and Twenty One Islands! — A collection of uncharted, odd, dangerous, and interesting islands.

There’s so much inspiration to be gained from Strolen’s Citadel just by clicking around. In that way it’s kind of like a deviantart for game masters.

No related posts.

Edit to add: The comments there are a microcosm of the edition wars. What I don’t get is the people who say, “If you don’t like 4e, don’t write about it!” Has criticism suddenly become the sole province of the loyal fans? That doesn’t make any sense at all. Should Roger Ebert only review movies that he likes?

Related posts:

1. The D&D 4e Rust Monster provides no risk

Reddit has a discussion feature for each link. One of the reddit commentors on that link said, essentially, that they love what they’ve read in Burning Wheel but they’re frustrated by how artificial the scripting seems. I shared a bit about my first successful use of scripting in the Duel of Wits, then realised that I’d glossed over it in the AP report. I want to elaborate on the comment I left over there to fill in the bits I skipped in the AP report.

But first, I need to lay some groundwork.

Fiction first

Burning Wheel appears to be a very rules-heavy game, but it feels oddly lighter to me during play than it looks. I’d almost call it a “medium rules” game because the rules handling doesn’t feel cumbersome. What makes the difference is that all of BW rules exist to make your fiction really “pop”. Luke Crane seems to have tried very hard to make sure that the rules can always support your fiction before demanding mechanical attention.¹ You decide what’s happening, use the mechanics to resolve the question, and then let them fade back into the background.

Putting the fiction first is critical to making scripting worthwhile in Burning Wheel. The mechanics are involved and interesting enough that you can just keep manipulating them as an abstraction of conflicts and uncertainties, but this makes for a flat play experience.² We did this at times in our second session, which is why parts felt like bookkeeping. Using the mechanics in that way divorces them from their raison d’être, which is to breathe life into the fiction. If there is no or little fiction to hook an invocation of a rule into, it doesn’t have anything to make “pop.”

To make BW rules sing, particularly the more complex ones like scripting, the mechanics must be consulted only when the fiction demands it.

Fiction in scripts

How can I claim that a rule should only be used when the fiction demands it? Once you’ve started writing scripts and gotten into one of the three detailed tactical subsystems of Burning Wheel, you’ve got to use the rules, right?

Yes, but they’re still going to be flat. Using any of the scripted subsystems—Duel of Wits for social conflicts, Fight! for combat, or Range and Cover for field manoeuvers and sniping—can seem like a lot of time and work for not much gain. One roll follows the last, until you find yourself at the end asking yourself, “What was the point of that?”

To put fiction first, and to really give the mechanics something to work with, you have to anticipate the rules’ needs. You have to feed the beast! Every test in Burning Wheel requires an Intent in order to know what the test is really about, and the tests in scripts are no different. You know that each volley of a script³ is going to happen before it does, so generate some appropriate fiction before you have to deal with the mechanic.

If you don’t want to generate a lot of close, detailed, move-by-move fiction for a scene, then you don’t really want the level of detail that scripting brings to the table. In those cases, set a clear Intent for the entire conflict and use a simple, versus, or Bloody Versus test instead. Save the scripted subsystems for when you really want to play a knock-down, drag-out conflict to the hilt.⁴

Practicals

In no part of the rules is this more important than Duels of Wits. You might decide that scripting Point-Rebuttal-Point is the soundest tactic against what you expect your opponent to script, but it’s going to stall out badly as soon as you reveal the first volley and don’t have a plan for what point you’re going to make.

In our first session of Burning Wheel we finished up with a Duel of Wits (DoW) between Basilio and Archdean Rimedio. We really enjoyed it and were impressed with how well the DoW mechanics worked for us. When we set up for it, I made it clear that for every volley scripted, we should have an idea of what the general thrust of our chosen debate actions was going to be when we roleplayed it. Each action represents no more than a sentence or two of argument, so that wasn’t too much work to expect on top of the scripting itself.

Our statements of case were:

• Basilio: “Carmino is practicing demonology and must be investigated right this minute.”
• Rimedio: “That’s a far-fetched charge, and I am far too busy. You will drop this and not bother me about it again.”

(Since it was our first time using the rules we failed to separate the Cases for which we were arguing from our Terms in case of success, but they served us well enough.)

This very much coloured how we prosecuted our cases. We scripted tactically, but more importantly we scripted to suit the things we wanted to say—the actual, spoken points, rebuttals, avoidance tactics, and dismissals that we planned to roleplay before each roll.

Fimmtiu scripted Points, Rebuttals, one Obfuscate, and saved his Dimiss for after he’d clinched the argument. He was aiming for convincing the Archdean that he was right, and chose aggressive debate actions to suit the “on the offense” argument he was trying to make. Rimedio didn’t really want to be having this discussion, and to that end I leaned defensive with enough offense to try to shoot down and turn aside Basilio’s argument. Hence, I scripted Points, Rebuttals, two Avoids, and an early Dismiss that proved fatal.

Both of us knew while we were choosing actions that we were going to have to speak a coherent argument that would fit the actions, in order, that we had chosen. At one point (the second exchange), I actually found myself without a plan and looking to what I wanted to script for inspiration on what kind of tack Rimedio’s argument might take next. This was really interesting because what I eventually came up with to say, though inspired by the mechanical tactical choices I wanted to make, demanded that I choose slightly different actions in order for them to fit the roleplay I was going to do.

Brass tacks

A couple of examples are in order. I’m not going to go over the scripts volley by volley, but in consulting my notes I can see that there are a few volleys that are excellent examples of using a fiction-first approach and making the fiction and mechanics dovetail. Both of these examples are from the first exchange.

I anticipated Basilio making a point right away, and I wanted to pursue Rimedio’s argument that this is beneath his notice. To that end I chose a Rebuttal, which was putting tactics first. However, to give the Rebuttal mechanics meaning I needed to have something to say before the roll. I was careful to come up with something that would be a statement that would refute the Point I was anticipating from Basilio, since that is the, er, point of scripting a Rebuttal. I decide that I would say, “Carmino is respected; he wouldn’t risk his reputation.” Although I chose a mechanic first, I made sure that I put some fiction in place before executing that mechanic, and I made sure that the mechanic would back up the fiction.

In a later volley (but in the same exchange), Fimmtiu scripted a Feint. I can’t speak to his decision process here, but it’s a good example of a debate action that really needs a meaningful bit of roleplaying beforehand to make it work. Feints are designed to mislead a Rebutting opponent into countering a dummy point that sets them up to be more vulnerable to the real point. In his debate notes he had prepared to say, “But surely you admit that these charges are serious enough to merit investigation,” which is the misleading argument, followed by, “So why not? He never has to know,” which is the real point Basilio wanted to score.

The spoken roleplay gave the Feint meaning and consequence: not only was he arguing for Carmino to be investigated, but that the Archdean could avoid jeopardising Carmino’s reputation by just being discreet in case Basilio was wrong. A different dummy point and real point would have given the argument a different impact on later fiction, regardless of the basic mechanical win-or-lose outcome.⁵

Hypothetically, Basilio could have used Incite for mechanical advantage, and yet at no point did he go in that direction because of the fiction that would give that action meaning. Basilio had a Belief that required getting the Archdean to investigate Carmino. Insulting him might have won him the argument and furthered that Belief, but would have certainly negatively impacted his other Belief that involved earning the respect of his peers and superiors by making his Engine work. The fiction that justifies using a mechanic has consequences.

But why?

If this seems like an awful lot of work, that’s because it is. So why do it? Ultimately, it’s a matter of taste. I really like what comes out of using Burning Wheel like this, and I find the times where I forget (because it does take mindful effort) to be far less enjoyable.

My reading of the Burning Wheel also makes me believe strongly that it was written with the primacy of the fiction as a basic assumption. The core conceit of the system is that the mechanics exist to resolve Fiction That Matters; otherwise, it instructs you to skip the mechanics and continue on with your mechanic-free play.

Simply, the rules are made to be used this way, and anyone who has had their curiosity piqued by what the Burning Wheel promises owes it to themself to try playing it this way, at least once.

Related posts:

1. First Burning Wheel AP report
2. Burning Wheel initial impressions
3. Academic Rivalry (or, the second Burning Wheel AP report)

You start by laying out a brief sketch of an interesting era. You might start with an idea for “the Imperial Dark Age, which began when the wormhole network collapsed, and ended when the fractured civilisations finally reconnected the network after centuries of rediscovery and war”; or it might be “the era of adventure and villainy on the high seas before the Ur-Kingdoms back home declared peace.” Once you’ve got what happened on a large scale, you dive into the history and play out the how, and why, skipping around history to the interesting, pivotal moments in whatever order you like.

Ben has a pile of posts about microscope at the lame mage blog, but the capsule explanation of play that caught my imagination is in an ars ludi post about the implications of microscope for record keeping:

Once you do decide where in the history you’re looking, you focus there and it does become “now” for all intents and purposes of play and excitement. When you are playing out the scene where the civilian cargo ship suicide-rams the alien dreadnought during the last attack on Earth, you are playing in the moment, live or die. But then a minute later, when the scene is done, you step back ten thousand feet, look down on all creation, and decide where to look next. Zooming in and out and then in again. Like, um, a microscope.

That makes me want to play this game. It makes me want to play it so hard.

Needless to say, I’m going to be watching to see where this goes.

Related posts:

1. microscope playtest: ice ages and transgenic humans
2. Improv theatre can teach us to be better roleplayers
3. Dollar woes and RPG spending

I realised the importance of how a ruleset positions itself relative to the fiction from playing D&D 4e. (Don’t worry, this won’t go into rant territory, especially since this subject is what made me realise that my not liking 4e is a matter of my own temperament rather than due to any faults in the game itself.) I didn’t like what was happening in that campaign, and my understanding of how we were playing and of how the ruleset interacted with our preferred play styles has been slowly developing since.

4e’s attitude to the fiction is that it’s interchangeable. The fiction might not be interchangeable to the players, but the rules will smoothly function pretty much regardless of what fictional fluff you dress them up in.¹ I know that many people object to the term “fluff”, and I tend to agree with them, but in this case I think the term is accurate. 4e makes a hard distinction between crunch and fluff, and they only intermingle during the design process, whether that is the original design of the class Powers or the process of homebrewing new stuff.

For my own enjoyment I prefer a system that has a constant and fluid exchange between the fiction and the mechanics during play, with fiction getting the first shot at defining the game reality. In order to do that the system has to let me make choices based directly on the fiction rather than on the mechanics. The mechanics of such a system support and help adjudicate those fiction-based decisions. In short, I must be able to make reasonable decisions based on my character’s understanding of the world they inhabit, and know that the mechanics will support my choice.

In contrast, there are systems that require rules handling before the player can decide on a course of action. 4e is the nearest example to hand. In combat, you can’t say, “I close with the troll and hack off the arm holding its victim!” Actually, you can say that, but I doesn’t mean anything yet. You still have mechanical decisions to make after such an announcement: whether that’s a normal move, a shift, or a charge; which squares your character will pass through (possibly triggering traps or opportunity attacks); and which Power will be used for the attack. Similarly, drinking a healing potion isn’t a decision that can be made absent of mechanical considerations in 4e: you have to have healing surges left for a healing potion to have any effect.

In such a system, there is no direct and unambiguous translation between a fictional declaration and the mechanical implementation of the action. The way the system works, my focus on making a statement of fiction does not move the game forward, but actually slows it down.

Sometimes the mechanics of such systems actually contradict the fiction, such as in the case of the healing potion. At those times my decision cannot be based on the fiction, as the healing surge mechanics have priority over the fictional “truth” that drinking this magic potion will heal wounds.² I have to reference the mechanics first in order to make a “good” choice about whether I should use the potion now or later. The fiction is secondary, and possibly irrelevant to making the choice.

…

Having written all that, I saved it and left it alone to simmer before I wrote the conclusion only to quite serendipitously discover a post of Joshua’s from two months back on the very same subject. In RPG Rules and the Direction of Causality he describes how causality can flow either from the game world to the rules, or from the rules to the game world. It can never be both at the same time, although play styles may switch back and forth and a single system can contain both rules that respect the game world and rules that insist on superseding it.

As usual, Joshua cuts right to the heart of things while I beat around the bush, so go read his post. Essentially, I’m saying here that I prefer that causality flow from the fiction to the rules, and that I prefer systems that have a majority of rules that support that style of play.

There’s no pithy term that I can extract from that article, unfortunately. Scott of A Butterfly Dreaming wrote a post entitled The Rules Gap in response to Joshua’s post, in which he coined the terms “game fits the rules” and “rules fit the game” to describe the distinction. I find that ambiguous, and I think that ambiguity is why I disagree with where he goes from there. I suppose I’ll stick with “fiction first”, or just addressing causality explicitly.

Related posts:

1. The importance of the rules
2. Scripting for the fiction in Burning Wheel
3. Innocence is bliss, sorta kinda

Randall’s post Old School Gaming and Skills at the RetroRoleplaying Blog made me realise what the difference is. The key is what I call a “fiction first”² approach to gameplay: the player describes what their character is doing in ficitonal terms, and only then does the GM call for an appropriate check. The difference between old-school play with and without skills is just in how the GM follows-up the player’s narration. In a system with skills, a skill roll can be used to decide where the game goes next; in a system without skills, the GM follows up with additional information, and questions that refine how the character proceeds in their intent.

What made it click for me is that defining the fictional actions first, and only then figuring out what skill(s) to use and how hard it will be, is a central and system-critical feature of how the Burning Wheel’s skill system functions. I realise now that much of the “bookkeeping” feel of my last session of Burning Wheel was due to my missing this point. We didn’t tend to describe the really high-level events of that session that spanned months, instead just figuring out what the next step in the plan was and sorting out the mechanics to get it done. It felt like bookkeeping sometimes because at those points we were just handling mechanics without any related narration. Although it’s not an old-school system, the danger that skipping narrative opportunities presents is the same in that it relies on the narrative just as much—if in a different way—than old-school play does.

Related posts:

1. Skill systems aren’t always a good idea

The session itself ended up dealing with events at a relatively high level, actually. In the first session linked above we played through two scenes that spanned a few hours of time between the dark of night and morning devotions. In the second session we had more play time—about five hours—and got through over four months of game time.

The Reliquary monk and the demonist professor

Picking up where we left off last session, Basilio and Archdean Rimedio met Brother Bartolio on the steps of the Archdean’s residence. I took to heart Chatty’s advice for introducing characters: provide two distinctive details and let the rest rot. Bartolio was therefore a “small man with a pinched face, rather reminicent of a crow”. He didn’t mind not having post-devotional breakfast with the Archdean—it turns out that Brother Bartolio just wanted to chance to ask free run of the University’s library in his research on the lama misèria (“Blade of Misery”, roughly), which had been stolen from the museum of Tramontare earlier that year. Quelle coincidence! Fimmtiu caught the connection right away and I could almost see him mentally filing it away for later.

Off to the offices of Carmino they went. The scene at the office began with the Archdean noting the open door with broken lock as they advanced up the hall, and on reaching the doorway they could clearly see the ransacked state of the office. Carmino had been robbed! And what’s more, there’s blood on the floor! Basilio quickly checked for the book and the knife, and they were gone. He corrected the Archdean’s impression and convinced him that Carmino was indeed trafficking with demons and that he must have been informed and fled in a hurry with the evidence.

Here I leaned on Let it Ride to maintain the result of the Duel of Wits in the last session, to keep the game on track. The Archdean’s reaction was realistic and reasonable, but I didn’t want to derail things.

Basilio and the Archdean agree that this should be kept quiet, and the caretaker is ordered to clean up this mess and “keep his mouth shut”. Nobody wanted the Church to involve itself in this. As a further wrinkle they soon learn that a student of Carmino’s considered to be particularly promising had also disappeared.

Basilio returns to his home, but he still wants Carmino exposed. He’d exposed him to the Archdean and hence got a Persona point for completing that goal in his Belief, but he wanted Carmino stopped and changed his Belief to reflect that. First was trying to find someone who knows where Carmino went using a Circles test. This failed, so I invoked the Enmity Clause: Basilio did find someone who knew where Carmino was, but it was Emilia, the student who had disappeared with him. A chase ensues. It was a Speed tests, with Emillia benefitting from Inconspicuous as a FoRK.

That was an interesting mechanical wrinkle, because we immediately thought that Basilio should therefore also get to FoRK his Inconspicuous. We realised that it wouldn’t work, though, if we thought about why Basilio should get the fork: Emilia got it because Inconspicuous would help her evade Basilio, while going unnoticed in the crowd wouldn’t help Basilio run her down. I do remember considering that knowing how to be inconspicuous might be helpful in defeating the “usual” tricks in giving someone the slip, but I can’t actually remember if I let Fimmtiu FoRK it into the Speed test on those grounds or not. In any case, it was a moment of realisation: Burning Wheel skill tests may be heavy on the mechanics, but they only make sense and run smoothly if you make sure their justification flows from the fiction instead of trying to shoehorn something in with a post facto justification.

Basilio lost the Speed test anyway, with Emilia giving him the slip when she darted from the back street into a busy main thoroughfare. However, before she did she shouted at Basilio, “Leave me alone! He’ll kill me if he sees me with you!” This also all went down in the streets where the Docks district merges into the Church ward. He had a bit more information now. Since I’d invoked the Enmity Clause I had to give him something toward his Intent of finding Basilio, and I figured that bit of development, plus the location where he’d spotted her on some unknown errand, would be good enough. In hindsight I was too stingy. I’m still getting used to the BW philosophy of moving the story as quickly as possible without unnecessary barriers.

With Circles test not panning out (remember Let it Ride), he penned an anonymous letter to Bartolio—a Writing test with some FoRKs for Demonology, Rhetoric, and Ancient History, though I could have suggested Beginner’s Luck with Composition to work on opening that instead—tipping off him and the Church to Carmino’s disappearance and the reason for it. A week later he hears about Inquisitors on campus, but that seems to be the end of it. The Church has been alerted, which was Fimmtiu’s Intent behind the letter, but they have not had any more success in tracking down Carmino than Basilio has, mostly because that wasn’t Fimmtiu’s Intent with the action of writing the letter. So, now they’re interested. This might not have been wise, and to that end, I think I forgot to give Basilio a point of Fate for doing something that was Belief-driven.

I also didn’t realise that the stated Intent didn’t encompass what Fimmtiu really wanted to result from the letter until afterwards, so that was a lesson in making sure Intents are accurate. He could have said, “I want the Church to investigate and uncover Carmino’s location,” and a Writing test, in that context, would have been fine to accomplish that Intent. I might have set the Obstacle fairly high (maybe… Ob 5?) to reflect that there was going to be a heck of a lot of luck involved in order to find Carmino through the act of penning an anonymous letter. Still, I think that’s more in line with what Fimmtiu was going for, and it’s certainly within the philosophy of tests in Burning Wheel to achieve large effects via indirect means, so long as there is a plausible connection between the success at that skill and the desired Intent.

And… that was the first few minutes of play. I should step this up and work on the brevity.

The aetheric harmoniser and the Demon

Carmino obviously wasn’t showing his face easily. Basilio turned to his other project: build a working aetheric harmoniser and finish his Engine.

This is where time really started to pass. It took a bit of gear shifting and prompting, but Fimmtiu decided that the first step was gathering everything that might be about aetherism or aetheric harmonisers from the University’s library of old-empire texts. Basilio combed through the texts and combined what he knew with the obscure material to recognise drawings and descriptions in fragments of text that nobody had before understood. This was one research test with some FoRKs, which resulted in a month’s passing and the creation of what amounted to a workbook for building an aetheric harmoniser.

He turned to the task of building a prototype. This would let him sort out the design principles of the harmoniser on a larger scale at which he could see what was going on. The production harmoniser would have to be smaller to reasonably fit into an Engine that would even fit inside his workshop, and it only needed to open a small dimensional breach anyway. This was an Enchanting test linked with Engineering (and a pile of FoRKs each), which I figured would model how successes (or failure) in echanting the sorcerously-engineered components of the harmoniser would impact the overall engineering challenge of designing the thing. Two successful tests resulted in a prototype that could open a dimensional breach about a foot square. Basilio poked a stick through to make sure that the breach was actually opening properly and not just a square foot of opaque nastiness existing in only this dimension.

I figured no more tests were necessary to build the “production” aetheric harmoniser, and a month later Basilio had completed his Device. It wasn’t up and running yet, but he suddenly had more pressing concerns than beginning the laborious process of spinning it up and maintaining what was in effect the first-ever power generator.

All during the months he’d been building the prototype Basilio had also been hearing rumours of… things… in the night. Things that ate dogs, scared people out for an evening stroll, and destroyed shopkeeper’s inventories while they slept. Bad things, whose night-shrouded profiles looked unlike anything that had any right to exist. In short, demons. They were beginning to plague Tramontare, and it was progressively getting worse. Then Basilio received a visitor.

Late one night while working on the engine, something sneaking about very quietly in the open rafters of Basilio’s workshop caught his attention. Poking his head up, he saw movement but couldn’t make out what it was. (A failed Observation test vs a good Stealthy roll that was doubled because Basilio was using Observation with Beginner’s Luck.) Whaling on a steel drum with a wrench (which the neighbourhood dogs didn’t like) didn’t prompt any reaction, nor did pretending to ignore it, but he eventually heard it mumbling to itself. Talking to it got a response, and eventually it sidled halfway into the light. It was a horrible little demon, maybe two feet tall, hunched over, and looking like a dessicated monkey with a scorpion’s sting for a tail and hollow pits for eyes. Basilio didn’t recognise it. (I didn’t have him roll for it and just told him, deciding that this knowledge was not a point of contention and hence not worthy of a test that would count toward advancing the skill.)

Fimmtiu hadn’t yet declared any Intents, and I was content to let it just be creepy if he didn’t force the issue. They conversed, with the creature ending up sounding something like Gollum in its simpleness and its lack of concept for “I”. It called the engine the “nice, nice machine” and offered to help with it, which Basilio quickly rejected. Eventually Fimmtiu stated the Intent to drive it off, which he succeeded at with a simple versus test of Rhetoric vs the demon’s Will. The demon left and hasn’t returned.

Demon lenses

Basilio went out rumour-gathering. Chatting with the bartender of his regular haunt The Speckled Frog, he got an idea for tracking down Carmino. If he could see where the demons were most concentrated, he would have the vicinity of Carmino’s hiding place. Rumours weren’t going to do that—he needed to see firsthand to uncover the pattern.

Basilio began work on designing a pair of lenses that would make demons appear as bright beacons to the wearer. That is to say, we cracked open the chapter on Enchanting in the Magic Burner.¹ Enchanted objects in Burning Wheel are created by selecting the effect, which gives an Obstacle penalty to a base Obstacle of 1, and any other modifiers. We decided that these demon-seeing glasses would be implemented by a device that gave +3 dice to Observation² tests to spot demons (+3 Ob). They had a verbal activation (+1D to the test), had to be touching the bearer (+1 Ob, odd that it makes the enchantment test harder, but it makes sense if you don’t want anyone else using it while you’ve got the item on you), hold their enchantment until the end of the session (+1D), and are rechargeable (+1 Ob), for a total of Obstacle 6 and +3 dice for the test. With an Enchanting skill of exponent 4, that means he’ll have to roll 6 successes on 7 dice, which is going to be tough even with Artha spent.

Having worked that out we still couldn’t proceed with the roll, since an enchantment requirese the extraction of an essence from something related, called the Antecedent in the Enchanting rules. I figured demon blood would be reasonable, no? So not only did Basilio have to get his hands on a demon, but he had to first identify the Trait of the dead demon to extract using an Alchemy Ob 1 test, then extract the Antecedent from its corpse, which is an Alchemy Ob 3 test. That might not seem to be much of a hitch beside smuggling home a demon in a Church-riddled city, but Basilio doesn’t even have the Alchemy skill, so those tests were goint to be Ob 2 and Ob 6, respectively, and rolled against with Perception of 5. That makes three increasingly tough tests to make to get these demon-seeing glasses made.

But first, demon’s blood.

The cobbler and the Demon

Again, I was thrilled by how smoothly the system supports this kind of play. Fimmtiu asked for a Circles test to find someone who knew of a dead demon, and succeeded with three extra successes. So, yes, he found a cobbler who desperately needed to get rid of the demon he’d buried in his backyard, after killing it with a hammer one night while it was making a mess of his workshop. He named the cobbler Sergio (which means he’s easier to Circle up in the future), and they went to go exhume the corpse. Basilio tested Ditch Digging (which he, unsurprisingly, didn’t have) and we debated FoRKing in Inconspicuous, but it didn’t really apply—it’s only relevant for avoiding notice in a crowd, not avoiding drawing attention in general. Again, this was just us getting used to the details of the system.

They drew the attention of the cobbler’s wife, who gave Sergio a good shouting-at³ while Basilio snuck away with his prize. It was something like a squat, heavy-built small dog, except it was hairless, ugly as sin, and had six stumpy legs protruding from its squat body/head. I was picturing a really distorted pug mixed with that pig from the Simpson’s movie.

Denoument

That’s all that we got through. Four months and a week of in-game time, the creation of a world-changing energy device, a plague of demons, and the design and acquisition of the necessary components of a custom magical item. It was very high-level at parts, so in some ways it felt more like a session of bookkeeping interspersed with connective roleplaying scenes, and in a way I suppose it was. It was pretty cool though, and I was impressed that we could go from inspiration to having a useful magical device ready to be enchanted in the last hour of the game. Although we were only three rolls away from actually having it made, we didn’t want to rush that part. Given the difficulty of the tests involved, there are going to be some hard choices for Fimmtiu at the beginning of the next session.

Related posts:

1. First Burning Wheel AP report
2. Scripting for the fiction in Burning Wheel
3. Spinning up the Burning Wheel

I’m still reading through the links, but they’re an excellent selection. For an indie system there is a lot of material online for and about the Burning Wheel, so finding the really useful discussion and advice is actually non-trivial. MJ has pulled together some really great pieces.

Related posts:

1. Essential reading on Beliefs in Burning Wheel
2. Spinning up the Burning Wheel
3. Scripting for the fiction in Burning Wheel