The Seven-Sided Die

I've just started reading Tommi Brander's blog, Cogito, ergo ludo. So far I've found Tommi to be a consistently engaging writer and an imaginative roleplayer. His homebrewed persistent fantasy roleplaying system looks intriguing, but I think I'd need a pile of designer's commentary to successfully digest it. I do like the goals of the system and it does look like it fulfills those.

I was going to write about Tommi's division of play-preparation into sandbox, scripted, and volatile, but I need to think about it some more. I've always tended toward improvisation GMing and something non-obvious in there is speaking to me on that. I would just write a rambling post if I didn't ferret it out first.

In the meantime, go read some of Cogito, ergo ludo. Tommi's quality of writing and thinking on roleplaying is quickly becoming a personal benchmark for what I aspire to someday do.

Recently I was reading the Creative Commons version of Clinton R. Nixon's The Shadow of Yesterday. That he chose to release it under an open license is awesome, and though I could write about that I'm more interested in an aside he buried in the game.

Note that this is from an older version of TSoY, marked as version 0.9, which is somewhat less polished than The Shadow of Yesterday 2005. The neat thing about the older version 0.9 is that it contains a bunch of design notes, including the following (emphasis mine):

The phrase "role-playing game" is totally misleading. The types of games lumped into this phrase differ from each other as much as playing a first-person shooter computer game differs from acting in a play or recreating a historical battle. [...]

Why is it a misnomer? Here's why: some RPGs provide a framework for telling a story with your friends, others provide a structured system for representing day-to-day occurrences in a real or fictional world, and others provide a play environment for competition among the participants. Only one of the above—the last—is what would traditionally be called a game, and none of the above, with the possible exception of the second, fit the definition of role-playing as it's used in psychiatrists' offices or corporate team-building exercises.

That bolded phrase above is what really caught my eye. I don't think it's exhaustive—it likely wasn't intended to be—but it neatly chops up different kinds of roleplaying styles.

There is a huge variety of roleplaying games out there. Very few of them actually make explicit the style of play that they are suited for. Like tourists visiting a foreign culture, most people who game assume that their favourite style of play is the only or best way to play. On encountering a new game most gamers will try to evaluate it by a standard of play that doesn't apply to the game, and consequently they find the new game coming up short.

That's why I like that short list Nixon wrote. You don't have to be steeped in hard-core roleplaying theory to catch the simple idea that different games are enjoyed for different reasons.

The creator of the world of Hârn and its companion system HârnMaster, N. Robin Crossby, died recently. I'm sorry to say that I had never heard of his lovingly-detailed creation until the news coverage following his death. It's a good example of a world and a system that seems to sharply divide roleplayers: some love it and sing its praises, while others consider those player's tales of roleplaying feeble escaped peasants and their senseless deaths at the whim of the dice to be thoroughly inane.

The difference is in those lines Nixon wrote. There are so many different kinds of game that go under the misnomer "roleplaying game" that it's often like comparing apples to sheep. Hârn really appeals to me precisely because it offers a different sort of play than what I usually get: deep immersion in a plausible fictional fantasy world. The detractors of the game might focus on the crazy-complex rules system, but for people looking for that deep immersion the rules are not the point, but merely a tool to achieve their nirvana.

Which brings me back to The Shadow of Yesterday. I like me some fantasy swords and sorcery roleplaying, but I'm increasingly leery of combat-focused rules systems for that style of play. (I suspect that this is mostly a phase in my tastes, because I don't see anything wrong with D&D 3e when I'm in the mood for it.) Most traditional fantasy RPG systems detail the combat and character creation and then stop there, assuming that the why of playing is self-evident. These systems are great for exploring fictional worlds, but they're not so good at creating stories that are anything more than just travelogues with swords and monsters.

The Shadow of Yesterday offers something different. The conflict resolution system is designed to address not only physical confrontations, but also social and moral conflicts. It provides a framework for character creation that puts the motive for adventuring in the spotlight, and supports all kinds of dramatic play equally well with a structured resolution mechanic that isn't just about swinging swords or slinging spells.

Most importantly, its reward system hooks directly into the character motivations, which means a player powergaming the system is roleplaying more. I want to play more games like that.

My recent return to 1st edition AD&D has been illuminating. Re-reading the books now, I realise that much of what I thought was "wrong" with the game then was a product of my immaturity, both as a person and as a gamer and GM. I've been a D&D player of various editions after AD&D, and many mistaken impressions I established then have followed my play since. Not least of these is the meaning and purpose of alignment, although I have the dubious consolation that I'm very much not alone in that.

Alignment is usually maligned as unnecessarily restrictive, offering a stereotype of behaviour that drastically limits roleplay. It's been accused of stifling creativity and mechanically enforcing play decisions. I've felt this way about it, more or less, for most of my roleplaying career. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I began reading those old books and found that it was never intended as such.

Over at the excellent Gnome Stew, Walt Ciechanowski writes of alignment that "[it] only seems universally acceptable in games where it is an explicit part of the genre (e.g. jedi knights and occult professors reading things that they shouldn’t)." What made this jump out at me is that alignment in D&D was, originally, an explicit in-fiction mark of which sides of the cosmic battles of Good versus Evil and Law versus Chaos the characters had literally aligned themselves with. Alignment was an explicit setting detail.

(Oddly to our sensibilitiese, the Law versus Chaos battle, culminating in Ragnarok, was the more important one. That's why OD&D has the tripartite Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic alignment system that baffles so many modern gamers.)

That detail makes alignment in D&D make so much more sense. Alignment languages (anyone remember those?) seemed odd and out of place to me, but they were actual in-game Shibboleths that people in the game setting were aware of. Gygax noted in the AD&D Players Guide that it was a grave social faux-pas to speak in an alignment tongue in public.

The alignment restrictions also made more sense. It wasn't that only certain alignments could become Paladins or Monks, but that such organisations only existed within certain sides of the cosmic war. Similarly, the harsh penalties for changing alignments wasn't an arbitrary mechanic to enforce behavioural compliance with an even-more-arbitrary rules feature. Rather, those lost experience points and class abilities represented the character's loss of moral compass and place in the world that comes from transitioning through moral crisis, abandoning everything they once thought they understood, and discovering their place in the world anew through a fundamentally different conceptual lens.

Of course, the players of the game who misunderstood that aren't entirely at fault. The game itself, though explicit in a rare few places and implicit in a few others, undermined this by equivocating with the meaning of alignment. Mostly, this happened by over-using non-Neutral alignments. If the typical city-dweller your character comes across is Lawful Good just because they're a townie and thus invested in good government and orderly life, that cheapens the meaning of a character having aligned themselves relative to the cosmic struggle. Monsters are the worst for this: is it really plausible that every random non-animal creature encountered has either taken a moral stand on a cosmic scale, or is in the direct or indirect employ of the greater powers? Perhaps in some campaigns, but even in those the GM would have needed a good grip on the point of alignment in the first place, which wasn't a given.

An over-use of alignment in the original books implied that it was just what people took it to be: a simple indication of a broad behavioural profile. A more sparing treatment of it would have kept it clear and purposeful, maintaining its status as a marker of alignment with a cause.

Of course, later editions of D&D did not share the implied setting that featured such a cosmic war, yet they retained the concept of alignment. More blame for the oddness of the alignment system can probably be laid at the feet of 2nd edition AD&D and D&D 3.x. They no longer had Ragnarok looming in the future to motivate heroes to align themselves with or against the forces of Chaos, yet alignment remained. In these editions, it really did just serve as an odd and inflexible behavioural rule of thumb.

Ironically, though this is essay is overall a defense of alignment in D&D, I do think that it really should have been removed entirely from all editions from 2e on. It's now more of a hindrance than a help, and there are much more interesting and better ways of fostering focused character behaviour and roleplay.

OpenCourseWare is a pile of lecture notes, tests, syllabi, and other course materials put together by MIT for anyone's use. It's intended as a resource for instructors and students, but the list of course materials for each of the hundreds of courses is complete enough that someone could use it to do casual self-directed study entirely outside the traditional institutions of academia.

The navigation leaves something to be desired, but it's good once I figured it out: once a course has been chosen, the left navbar's scope isn't site-wide anymore, and that's where they keep all the links to the different materials.

Damn, there's some cool stuff here. There's a Women's Studies course called The Anthropology of Computing. It seems to be more focused on the tech stuff than on the women's issues stuff, but it folds in gender-aware cultural study. Actually, I guess that's a nice balance: anthropology and tech study that acknowledges gender inequality, rather than a course on gender inequality that happens to mention some computers sometimes.

And week four of that course has the best title: "World War Two: Cybernetics, Communication, and Control". It makes me think of an alternate history where soldiers marched through that horror bristling with vacuum tube–punk technology, and enigmatic code-breaking computers with whispers of a machine soul pondered nascent plans of their own.

(Yeah, these days everything sounds like a roleplaying game to me.)

There's a lot to like here for roleplayers. Many GMs consider the library one of their best setting "sourcebooks" for their system of preference. Courses like The Ancient World: Rome offer a tonne of inspiration and reading resources for building a game, all in one place. The materials presented are thorough enough that you could build a setting around not only the elites in the capital during the heyday of Rome, but also the daily lives of the common people, or during the monumental build-up to the establishment of the Empire.

For players, it's a great resource for inspiring characters. History is full of dramatic personæ and stories laden with pathos.

Traditional roleplaying games make the player responsible for the success or failure of one character in the game, and gives responsibility for the challenges, structure, integrity, and enjoyability of the game to the Game Master.[1. Yes, this is a huge simplification. Run with it.] Understandably, many players then decide that the point of the game is to seek out good things to happen to the character ("successes") and avoid bad things that might befall them ("failures").

In extreme cases, the player will do what Brand Robins calls turtling.[1. This is the best Actual Play report I've read, for any game, ever. It's an interesting short story in it's own right, too, and accessible to non-gamers. I highly recommend reading the whole post.] They make sure their character is safe from anything the GM might throw at them by creating a static character with no motivations, no relationships, and no hooks to give the GM a way to make the character's life difficult. And yet, the greatest desire of a roleplayer is to be handed conflict tailored to the character they've created. A player who turtles is undermining their own enjoyment.

Shock: social science fiction does exactly the opposite of this. Shock has the players (there is no GM) each create a Protagonist with conflict built-in. (Actually, there's nothing on the character sheet that isn't an element waiting to push the character off-balance.) At the same time, players briefly sketch an idea for an Antagonist to the next player to the left, who will be creating and running the Antagonist to the first player's Protagonist. The Antagonist's job is to make the Protagonist's life miserable. A Protagonist pushed to their limits—who changes, bends, and maybe breaks—is what makes science fiction stories so compelling. So it is with a game of shock.

Read on...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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