Index — The Seven-Sided Die

Dyson Logos' awesome and easy map tutorial

written by d7, on Mar 16, 2012 3:48:15 PM.

I discovered Dyson Logos’ inspiring side-view dungeon map tutorial a couple of days ago. Since then I’ve been experimenting with the style and I find it suits me really well.

A drawing depicting a cut-away view of a waterfall descending into a sinkhole, with caves in the walls. A tree and a ruined tower overlook the sinkhole.

I started by doodling from memory an old dungeon I ran years ago for D&D 3.5 and shook out some of the kinks in the style and started making it look good. I found that the real key to making it look good, as he points out in the tutorial, is to go over the lines that separate solid ground from air a second time to darken them. It’s such a simple thing, but when you slow down to make the tracing accurate it transforms shaky, amateurish lines into confident, polished ones.

The sample at right is a work-in-progress so the crosshatching hasn’t been finished, but it gives a good idea of how nice the results look even when it’s incomplete [1]. The crosshatching gives it a great finished look, and isn’t nearly as hard as I anticipated. The trick I’ve found is to slow down enough to make the lines evenly spaced and parallel – getting the orientation just right is much less important.

I’m still finding it hard to conceptualise the layout before committing it to ink and I’m still running into room shapes and details that look better in my head than when executed on paper, but practice is very quickly paying off. I’m learning what sort of shapes look good and which convey information well much faster than I would have thought, so the exercise is having a very encouraging effort/payoff curve.

I have to say that I’ve never been good at drawing a straight line without a ruler, and yet look at how nice those lines look! This sample is only the second map I’ve done since reading the tutorial. I don’t consider myself to be very artistically skilled, so if I can do this, so can you!

I haven’t tried it in pencil yet, but I think pen is the way to practice. Drawing in ink is forcing me to think about what I’m doing rather than rushing something onto the page just to kill the abhorrent blankness.

For more map awesomeness go read through the rest of his mapping blog, the (hilariously misnamed) A Character For Every Game. And if that only whets your appetite for maps in this line style (side-view and otherwise), there’s always Tony Dowler’s Year of the Dungeon. Now that I’ve shown myself that I can do this at all, I’ve got a stack of index cards that are earmarked for drawing Dowler-style microdungeons for even more practice. I’m determined to have a hexcrawl that is well-stocked with my own subterranean creations among the One Page Dungeons and published megadungeons I’ll be using.

[1]	Even when photographed with a cellphone under terrible conditions. Post-processing makes it marginally presentable, but don’t look too close at the tower in the top-right!

Making a calendar

written by d7, on Mar 15, 2012 4:47:00 PM.

I’m in the early stages of setting up a sandbox setting for potentially multiple groups with variable player rosters. In brainstorming how I would organise my records for such a persistent setting independent of the PC parties, I realised I needed to create a calendar. I’d need to keep track of when things happened so that I could restock dungeons believably, track the progress of event lines the PCs neglect to interrupt, determine the likelihood of items on fallen PCs remaining where they died, and sundry little play logbook things I like keeping track of like local weather.

The last time I ran a game where bothering to track time made a difference I already had a calendar provided by the Forgotten Realms setting; the time previous was more than a decade back and I fudged with an expired real calendar for some year in the 1990s.

But I like building settings and the bits that make them unique, so I didn’t want to use a real calendar, and obviously I wasn’t going to be handed a published fantasy calendar.

I’m also lazy, and I wanted a calendar that was conceptually easy while not being dull. So here’s how I went about building one.

Calendar specs

I had a few requirements for my calendar that were dictated purely by usability and personal convenience. Sure, I could make something arbitrarily complex, but I wanted something that would at least have a chance of being comprehensible to players who will frequently have more important things on their mind than what month it is, let alone whether it was a month of short days or how many feast days there were coming up.

I wanted to have regular months. No variable days per month, no leap days, no funkiness from one month to the next.
I wanted to have a year roughly equal to 365 days. I’ve read novels where the year was a very different length from ours, and it takes mental gymnastics to follow along whenever time is relevant to the plot. I wanted “a year” to mean a year to my players.
Ditto weeks. If possible, I wanted 7-day weeks so that when an NPC says, “Your sword will be ready in a week, m’lady,” my players would immediately know what that meant without having to ask me (again and again) how long a week is in my weird funky calendar.
Months I wanted to be in the rough neighbourhood of real-world month, but I wasn’t going to push this one too hard because…
I didn’t want too many months. Players are only human, and humans deal best with quantities that are roughly seven in number, give or take. I didn’t want to have 12 months, really, as that’s just too many to ask players to care about paying attention to. My desire for the calendar to be meaningful in play to others than myself would best be served by having the fewest number of months so that players actually remembered them and had a rough idea of what they meant without having to constantly say, “Marpenoth is roughly like March”. [1]

I also had some stylistic preferences that I wanted to fit into the calendar.

There would be the usual four seasons. Seasons are usually more relevant to play because villages and weather react to the turn of seasons, not arbitrary month divisions.
Months should relate directly to the seasons. A system that is useful and comprehensible to farmers rather than an hurdle to properly timing plantings and harvest seems much more likely to be in widespread use. If I want to have the date come up naturally in-game in a useful way for the PCs, having NPCs using the calendar in their daily lives will better convey date information than me shoving it at them as meta-game information.
I like how the Forgotten Realms’ calendar includes days that are not part of any month or week, and these are culturally meaningful days. This sort of thing can also provide the wiggle room necessary to make some of the usability specs happen.
I wanted the division between years to be the last day of winter and the first day of spring, rather than the astronomical winter solstice. [2]

The calendar

So I built a calendar with 7-day weeks, six weeks to a month, one extra day-of-rest “feast day” per two weeks, 360 days to the year, two months to a season, and eight months to a year.

A calendar of eight months. Months are in pairs under each of the four seasons. Each month is six 7-day weeks stacked atop each other, every second week having an 8th day sticking out of the right side of the month's box.

It’s not terribly exciting, but I wasn’t going for exciting. It accomplishes the primary goal of giving me something easily-understandable to write in the headings of each day’s entry in an adventure log.

As a bonus it has all these interesting “non-calendar” days for me to play with. Some of those days are going to be special: the one between Early Summer and Late Summer is obviously Midsummer’s Day; the last day of Winter (well, not really part of the Winter months nor part of the Spring months) is some kind of year-death or new year’s day. Similarly, there are obvious prospects for harvest festivals and holy days. Those non-calendar days that aren’t claimed by religions or seasonal celebrations are going to be plain old feast days or market days or whatever sort of day of rest is culturally appropriate to the setting.

You’ll notice the names of the months aren’t marked. There’s an early and a late month in each season, and to avoid the Marpenoth Problem I’m going to assume that the inhabitants of this world are pragmatic and never saw a need to name the months with anything especial or non-obvious. So we have Late Fall and Early Summer, or New Spring and Old Winter, as references for month names. Really, any fantasy-sounding names I created would, if I were being sensible about it, mean those terms anyway, so made-up names would just be imposing a barrier between the players and their ability to reference time.

If the inhabitants are that pragmatic, and since I’m making it all up anyway and might as well have the world be gameable where it’s not implausible, I figure the days of the month are just going to be tracked with numbers. For spice, I might have some people count “the 10th of Early Summer” and other people count “the 3rd of two of Early Summer”. I kind of like the sound of the latter, though, so I think I’ll count time by default with “the [day]th of [week number] of [month]”. That way, “the 8th” will always be the strange day, the feast day, the day of celebration. I can use the other way of counting days as a marker for a particular culture or nation being odd and foreign, with their 32nds of Old Summer and Twelfths of New Winter. I figure they’ll just count the feast days in there too, as the 15th, 30th, and 45th.

Public Domain

For the reasons above I find this an eminently usable calendar for game records-keeping and for informing players, and has just enough flavour to say “fantasy” to me. It’s also pretty generic, being different from our own calendar while still matching our sense of year and week lengths. For a GM who needs a calendar this could be dropped into most implied settings with little to no work. [3]

If you want to use this in your home campaign you of course need no permission from me, but since I hate the headaches that licenses can bring I’ll just make it simple and put the calendar into the public domain. (If you use it I’d love to hear about it, but don’t count that an obligation!)

[1]	Marpenoth is actually equivalent to October in the Realms’ calendar which just goes to show that needing to keep the calendar mentally straight is an additional burden on anyone, GM included, and so likely to get neglected as a PITA.

[2]

Yes, I know that the visible demarcation between winter and spring is fuzzy and varies by year, which is why astronomical divisions were originally used in real-world calendars, but I’m planning on having a cosmology that isn’t based on planets orbiting a star in space. Without the inclination of a planet’s axis the solstice wouldn’t be determinable from the stars and would need good clocks instead. The winter/spring changeover is going to be conventional, fundamental to the establishment of the calendar, and keeping track of its return is the original function of the first calendar of this sort. As a convenience to me and time-tracking (because I don’t really want to figure out sunrise and sunset variations across the year but I still want sunrise, sunset, and midday to be practically meaningful), I may even make day/night lengths invariate between seasons, eliminating the concepts of solstice and equinox entirely.

[3]

Maybe shift the year-split to between the two winter months if that’s your taste, and the feast-days can easily by eliminated if you don’t like them by making the months a straightforward six weeks of seven days each for 42 days a month. And if you really like 12-month calendars you can easily redistribute the last two weeks and the first two weeks of each season’s months to make a third seasonal month, each of four weeks or 30 days (with feast days; 28 without).

DHB Preview: Turn Undead

written by d7, on Mar 2, 2012 1:59:00 PM.

Here’s another taste of how I’m handling traditional D&D concepts in the first draft of the Dungeoneer’s Handbook.

Turn Undead [−1]

You can rebuke undead creatures and send them fleeing or destroy them outright.
Musts: Your High Concept must be related to faith in some way.
Effects:
Rebuke: When you present the symbol of your faith and stand firm against an undead creature, you may make an opposed Conviction roll against its Discipline to place the aspect “Held At Bay” on it.
Cleansed In Light: You may make an attack using Conviction against the creature’s Discipline. If the undead is corporeal, stress dealt in this way is physical rather than mental.
By The Word: By paying one shift you may affect all undead in a zone, or (when using Rebuke) place the aspect “Fleeing!” instead of “Held At Bay”.

I was going to make the Must for Turn Undead be having Divine Miracles (the DHB equivalent of Sponsored Magic I’m using for priestly spellcasters), but for the Cleric template I took some inspiration from very early D&D editions and made spellcasting optional at character creation. So, Turn Undead (and their ability to use armour and decent weapons) is key to making a classic cleric work and I had to hang it on their faith-based character concept rather than spellcasting. The upshot is that characters without the Cleric template could conceivably take Turn Undead given a High Concept that is faith-related, but I don’t think that’s a problem as much as it might be a feature.

What I like about this power/stunt is that it captures the turn/destroy mechanic of D&D’s turn undead ability without needing a big table for it. Does the undead creature have low discipline (a zombie or skeleton, say)? Then you can very likely send it running, and if you’re good enough you can destroy it outright with the power of your faith. Of course, you have to choose which one you’re doing first, but that introduces a nice tactical consideration, I think. Are you facing a vampire necromancer and its zombie minions? If you just Rebuke you’re likely to get enough shifts to turn all the zombies but the vampire will be unimpressed; if you opt to attack then you likely won’t generate enough shifts to fill the zombies’ stress boxes and deal them enough consequences to take them out outright, but you’ve got a good chance of stinging the vampire if you try.

Of course, all this has to see playtesting before it can be considered good and functional under actual play conditions. But I certainly am fond of how this one has shaped up initially.

Player agency and random encounters

written by d7, on Feb 28, 2012 1:14:00 PM.

Nobody likes a railroad, least of all proponents of the OSR. Apparently there has been some debate about the evil of the Quantum Ogre—an encounter that gets dropped in front of the players regardless of where they go or what they do.

Alex Schroeder makes the excellent point [1] that the problem with the Quantum Ogre is really two problems:

An adventure involving the quantum ogre is bad because the players’ choices don’t matter: either they don’t have enough info to make a meaningful choice or the information they have is useless since the quantum ogre will show up no matter what they do. They have no agency – they have no capacity “to make choices and to impose those choices on the world.” Either they cannot make a meaningful choice because they lack information, or they cannot impose their choice on the world because the quantum ogre shows up anyway.

This is a formulation of why I really, really dislike plotting adventures. Apart from plotting being too damned much work, it creates what I feel is an inauthentic experience for the players. That lack of agency turns into frustration, that frustration turns (at best) into an attempt to regain agency, which causes a problem for me: I’m not prepared to do anything outside the plot and the improvised part of play comes off much flatter than the plotted part. It’s a dynamic I really don’t enjoy, so I’ve been striving for the last few years to figure out how to avoid plotting, even when I don’t have a lot of time to prep.

Alex also mentions the apparent distinction between the Quantum Ogre and random encounters, the latter being a favourite staple of the Old School even while the former is detested as illusionist play. His response is that random encounters are slightly better, because the GM is forced to improvise how to work in this encounter.

I think it’s a bigger difference than that.

The essential disconnect I see between fans of random encounters and their detractors is that I don’t see the random encounter roll as the beginning of a scene [2] where the PCs face the creature, but the beginning of their awareness that something is out there. There are then two parts to a random encounter: the opportunity to notice information and investigate, and the face-off itself. This opportunity is crucial to making a random encounter not just another quantum encounter. By having a chance to engage with hints and clues about the existence of a threat or opportunity [3], the players can make informed choices about this particular encounter. They may choose to confront it, escape it, stalk it until they have the advantage, or otherwise deal with it more-or-less intelligently.

Choice is the ingredient that gives players agency and keeps a game from being a railroad. Random encounters are no different.

What about surprise?

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

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

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

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

[1]	Alex’s post also links to a whole lot of other posts discussing the problem and solutions to the Quantum Ogre and is well worth your visit.

[2]	“Scene”, only for lack of a better word. I don’t tend to think in terms of scenes when I run old-school games.

[3]

Not all random encounters are monsters intent on the PC’s death! Just as often they’re neutral or positive opportunities. It all turns on what the PCs and DM together decide to do with the encounter. Even a clearly-hostile creature can be turned into an opportunity: try having them approach, but not immediately launch into a to-the-death fight. See what happens when the players are faced with a potential enemy who doesn’t immediately attack them.

Dungeoneer's Handbook draft preview: The Druid

written by d7, on Feb 15, 2012 11:08:00 AM.

The first “class” template I’ve finished a first draft of is the druid. Subject to change, of course, but this will give you an idea of how I’m translating the archetypes of D&D into Dresden Files–style Fate:

Druid

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

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

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

Important Skills: Conviction, Discipline, Presence, Survival
Bonus Languages: Druidic
Languages Available: Centaur, dryad, elvish, faun, gnomish, draconic, giant, lizard man, manticore, pixie, sprite, treant.
Minimum Refresh Cost: −4

Dresden Files RPG and the OGL

written by d7, on Feb 11, 2012 3:27:00 PM.

After an exchange on Twitter with Fred Hicks of Evil Hat, the publishers of the Dresden Files RPG, about my misgivings about DFRPG’s OGL notice, I’m somewhat reassured and have a clearer idea of what the future might look like for the Dungeoneer’s Handbook as a product.

As I understand it now, the intent of the “everything new in DFRPG is Product Identity” is filtered through the OGL’s definition of Product Identity (PI). For the simple reason that the Dresden Files universe is a property that doesn’t belong to Evil Hat, they are making sure that the RPG translation of the novels don’t “leak” any of Jim Butcher’s copyrighted work into the world for others to use. The language used is unfortunately ambiguous, but the whole point of the Open Game License is to eliminate doubt about the intent of a publisher using the OGL so I’m happy enough with that clarification of Evil Hat’s intentions.

What this means for the Dungeoneer’s Handbook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skills: the silver lining

Fortunately, one thing the definition of Product Identity in the OGL doesn’t cover is skills, so I should be able to use DFRPG’s skill list as my base, including the existing skill trappings. I wasn’t looking forward to abandoning/rewriting all that, since they’re even more integral to the mechanics than even the “generic” non-Dresdenverse Stunts and Powers are.

Of course that’s not all

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

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

[1]	Nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition!

[2]

This is one of those ironic bits about living in a digital age. If I’m just blogging about it, I can publish bits and pieces of my home game’s rules that refer to Forgotten Realms copyrighted stuff, because most game companies (Wizards included) consider that to be OK online fan behaviour. However, if I do the very same thing in a PDF for download, it suddenly becomes “publishing” in a sense that the same companies see as a problem. There’s a difference of apparent intent, certainly—publishing a comprehensive PDF carries with it an implication of profiting from Realms details, even if the PDF is free, in a way that publishing piecemeal on a blog doesn’t. As “digital” becomes the norm, though, these sorts of distinctions are going to get even fuzzier. …Huh. That implies that there may be a future clash between hobbyists and game publishers coming, which is kind of unnerving. We’ve been there before, and it was ugly. It could be uglier yet when the difference between hobby publishing and pro publishing collapses.

Fantastic Maps

written by d7, on Feb 8, 2012 2:28:07 PM.

Do you love maps? (Of course you do!)

Do you love to draw maps? (Who doesn’t?!)

Do you love to just look at pretty, pretty maps? (Let us take this as a relatively safe assumption!)

Then get yourself over to Jon Roberts’ Fantastic Maps blog and feast your eyes, read some tips, and satisfy that itch in your fingers to draw some of your own.

That is all.

My D&D Next

written by d7, on Feb 6, 2012 1:50:00 PM.

Wizards is working on the next iteration of Dungeons & Dragons, but I’m not really waiting for them. I climbed on the 4e bandwagon only to be violently thrown off when it hit a bump in the road called dissociated mechanics, and Pathfinder didn’t appeal to me with its tightening of the rules since I didn’t like the tightness of the 3rd edition rules to begin with. D&D Next, or 5e, or “D&D-with-no-edition-number”, is sounding much more like my cup of tea than 4e or even 3e, but these things take time to develop. In the meantime, I’m helping myself and not waiting around until 2013 or 2014 or whenever it’s going to come out.

I picked up the Dresden Files RPG a while ago and I really like it. The Diaspora game I’m running now will be coming to a pause in a few weeks and I’ve been wanting to run an game in an alternate Forgotten Realms for a while. Between Fate as done in Diaspora, the elegance of the magic rules in the Dresden Files RPG, and a hankering to turn away from sci-fi back toward the worn, comfortable embrace of fantasy, it’s perfect timing to work up a conversion of DFRPG’s version of Fate for the Forgotten Realms.

In many ways Diaspora is to DFRPG as D&D 0e is to D&D 3e. DFRPG has a lot more structure than Diaspora, offering mechanics that, while still narrative in effect, are much more concretely grounded in the details of events in the game. Diaspora is much looser, giving you tools to play with a high level of story abstraction or to zoom in and do things blow-by-blow, but it doesn’t give tools that are specific to that nitty-gritty level. DFRPG does, without sliding into a simulationist model like Strands of Fate does [1].

Dresden Files RPG’s realisation of Fate is therefore perfect for a game of D&D that focuses on the grit and grime and heroics of a dungeon crawl while also directly rewarding character development. One of my goals for a game that does fantasy well but isn’t D&D is to “feel like” a D&D game. DFRPG is the closest I’ve felt a game has come to fulfilling that nebulous criterion.

The Dungeoneer’s Handbook

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

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

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

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

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

[1]	Strands of Fate is another good realisation of Fate, but it’s bent more toward Hero System and GURPS sensibilities than I want to deal with.

[2]	… Though I’ve been a keen amateur student of the issues and laws around copyright since the late 90s, so my grasp is more than trivial but short of “useful enough to save my neck in in a civil copyright dispute.”

[3]	Oh, I have to remember to enthuse about Scrivener as a pure word processor (which is not the same as a text layout engine – I’m looking at you MS Word) at some point. It’s going to make this project so much easier to manage.

"Who needs rules for roleplaying?" = Missing the Point

written by d7, on Feb 4, 2012 2:56:00 PM.

You might have heard this rhetorical question in a thread about competing D&D editions or on a post about some new indie game – I’ve certainly heard it many times on the front lines of the edition wars. With the open playtest for “D&D Next” coming and the verbal wrestling the fanbase will be doing over how to do it “right”, I’m sure we’ll be hearing it even more often.

The question, “who needs rules to tell them how to roleplay?” is intended to shut down the opposition. It says that they other side is being ridiculous for wanting mechanics for every damned thing that you do, at best. At worst, it says that these people clearly can’t roleplay their way out of a paper bag if they need rules for how to do it.

Like most fronts in edition wars, though, it’s really a statement of not understanding the position of the other side.

Rules are tools

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

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

Streamlining your roleplay

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

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

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

An example

I’ll use an example from Fate, since I’m reading the Dresden Files RPG right now. Compels in Fate prevent a social interaction between characters from devolving into an extended meta-game inter-player argument like: “I totally just insulted your god! Why is your priest just ignoring that? Dammit… C’mon, listen: I’m trying to distract you with an argument so our friends can sneak into the shop! It’ll be a fun bit of trouble and you can go all vengeful cleric on us when you find out?”

In Fate, the Compel mechanics lets you suggest a course of action to the player controlling another character (including the GM) that’s consistent with the nature of the character (as already detailed in sentences called Aspects). The suggestion is backed up with the offer of a Fate point—if the player accepts, that’s what their character does and they get the Fate point for themselves. Fate points can be used for various things, including buying a reroll or backing up your own Compels later, so the suggestion has mechanical appeal for the target player even while they have the option to refuse.

Compels, then, are a tool: they give players of Fate a standard process for talking about different opinions of what a character “would really do” in a given situation.

Instead of the awkward negotiation in the previous above, this happens:

Priest player: (To the GM) What? I think I would notice my companions sneaking into the shop. They can’t be up to any good. Can I roll Alterness to notice and do something about that?
Con artist player: Hold up there! I see you’ve got a character Aspect that says, “Any excuse to lecture on the greatness of Kermil”. My guy casually slights Kermil as maybe not being so great. I’ll back that up with a Fate point and make it a Compel to Inaction. How about you argue with me instead of making that Alertness roll?
Priest player: Hmm. They’re going to get us in trouble again! Then again, I really need the Fate point after spending so many on getting past the gate guards, especially if we’re going to have to leave town in a hurry… Okay, fine, my ranty priest takes the easy bait and totally misses the mischief our friends are starting…

Cutting to the chase

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

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

[1]	Different games streamline different details, naturally.

New year, new blog engine

written by d7, on Jan 6, 2012 12:20:00 PM.

The Seven-Sided Die is back for 2012 with a new engine—Zine. It’s a small, flexible engine that doesn’t have the high profile of Wordpress, and so isn’t the constant target of crackers. As a bonus its smaller and saner code base is way easier to hack, and I’ve already customised it slightly. This pleases me. [1]

If there are any issues, comment or drop me an email at the address on the About page.

Doctor Checkmate once wrote, “Buying product after product has always been the methadone to treat the addiction to play.”[2] I find myself that blogging and reading RPG blogs is also a treatment for wanting to play. Which is to say, oh look, I’m running a game right now and so I have, ironically, little urge or time to write blog posts.

I do have a blog post about the interaction of combat monkeys [3] and trying new game systems, but of course the urge to write that has been spent on getting the last few bits of this new blog engine working and moved to the production URL. I also would love to write about my group’s experience playing Diaspora, but my ambitions and my time don’t really see eye-to-eye.

I love/hate how musing out loud in order to get my thoughts in order (aka “blogging”) so often turns out to read like the classic “sorry for not blogging lately” post. At the very least, I’m optimistic that a blogging platform that requires less fucking-around-with will give me a better posts written : time spent on the blog ratio.

So, onward to 2012!

[1]	It also has built-in support for footnoting by using reStructuredText as its text parser. This pleases me immensely. [4]

[2]	Sadly, that blog post seems to have disappeared.

[3]	A term of affection, rest assured.

[4]	Oh gods, the default footnote styling needs to be fixed with fire. Still some fucking-with to be done, clearly…

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