Category: Systems

gaming systems

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It’s Raining RPG Soup!

So what are you waiting for? Grab your bowl!

Stargazer’s World » Dungeonslayers: The deed is done!

This marvellous tome is based on the 3rd Edition of the original German Dungeonslayers rulebook and already includes the latest errata. The PDF document which can be downloaded for free contains all the rules you need to play Dungeonslayers including the introductory adventure “Lord of the rats”!

I haven’t had a chance to do more than glance at it yet, but it looks interesting. Seriously, the care and professionalism of the free RPGs available continues to ramp up. This is the stuff that makes me excited to be part of this hobby, not news about Hasbro’s latest quarterly reports and lawyerly parsing of either licenses or rules.

So many games, so little time!

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Tunnels & Trolls: Combat

“Combat is the true heart of any role-playing game.” – Ken St. Andre, Tunnels & Trolls v7.5

Combat is the first place that T&T is radically different from what went before…and what came after.  Combat is quite abstract, with turns taking 2 minutes each, during which there is

“probably 10 seconds of action and 110 seconds of maneuvering for advantage.  It can be considered a rapid exchange of strikes and parries by all the fighters involved. By arbitrary convention we stop and evaluate how the fighters are doing at the end of each combat round, but in your imagination you should conceive the action as hot and heavy until such time as the winners win and the losers either lie down and die or run away.”

Magic and missile fire are handled separately, but there is no blow-by-blow accounting taking place in melee combat.  In fact, T&T does away with the to-hit roll entirely.  Instead both sides roll damage, and the side with the lower total takes the difference in damage, spread among them as they like.

So that brings us to another thing about T&T combat: there’s a lot of arithmetic.  A sample combat between two parties of adventurers of 3rd to 5th level involved totaling 4d6+4 + 38 + 2d6+5 +2d6 +3 + 26 + 6d6+3 + 27  for a total of 162.  Then the other party rolls its combination of weapon dice and adds, and gets 154.   Higher level groups and monsters could probably easily see results in the many hundreds or even thousands.

It’s not particularly hard math, and each player except the GM handles a small chunk of it, but there’s a lot of it… if you play it a lot, I can foresee either getting quite good at multi-digit arithmetic or farming it out to a calculator.  For some larger monsters you probably need a dice-roller program even to calculate the damage.  A 3rd level fire-breathing dragon might have 88d6 + 440 as its roll.

For the most part, combat is just that simple.  Both sides roll all the dice for their weapons, add in any combat adds, and then compare.  The losing side divides the damage as they see fit, subtracts any armor, and applies the result against CON.  When a character’s CON goes to 0, they’re dying.  (At -10 they’re dead, dead, dead.)  Allowing the losing side to divide the damage among the characters is interesting; it means that the stronger, more heavily armored characters can effectively protect the weaker characters–at least for a while–and opens up the possibility of mixed-level parties where the low-levels aren’t automatically toast.  Other than that, there are no tactical decisions to be made in standard melee combat.

Magic and Missile fire happen at the very start of the turn, and have the unusual (for T&T) property of directly damaging a particular target as well as counting towards that side’s adds.  There’s also a rule (new in 7+) for “spite damage”… damage that happens despite win/loss or any armor: for every 6 rolled, the other side takes 1 spite damage (again divided as they see fit).  It’s entirely possible, though probably rare, that the losing side does more actual damage after armor than the winning side.  This apparently addresses the problem in earlier editions that even moderate amounts of armor could cause a fight to drag on forever if the parties are fairly equally matched.  Because you can choose specific targets for magic and missiles, this is your opportunity to try to knock out spell-casters and deliberately whittle down the effective members of the opposition, which can cause a steep drop in their side’s total damage if you can pull it off.

At its most basic, there’s not really much room for individual tactics in T&T combat….  It also has a moderately low pace of decision.  At least, it seems to me that unless you’re heavily outmatched, fights will go on for at least a few rounds.  One complaint I’ve seen on some boards is that thanks to armor, evenly matched groups stalemate and the only thing that counts is spite damage.

On the other hand, T&T offers a great deal of scope for rules-light RP modifications to combat.  That is, while there are no specific combat rules to cover any sort of facing, maneuver, special attacks like tripping, grappling, disarming, stunning or the like there is a single rule that you can describe what you’re attempting to do and the GM will give you a Saving Roll to accomplish it and rule on the results.  If you have a Talent that you can invoke, so much the better.  In one of the example combats in the rules, the centaur character decides that instead of attacking with her axe, she’ll try to kick an Ogre to knock it out of combat for a round or two.  The GM rules this is a Level 2 SR vs Dex, and the centaur succeeds by so much (rolling a 45 when she needed 25) that the GM decides that not only is the Ogre stunned and out of commission for 3 rounds, but it takes damage equivalent to the centaur’s Combat Adds.  Everything that crunchier systems handle by specific rules to cover each individual situation, T&T handles by the player specifically describing what out-of-the-ordinary feat they’re attempting to influence combat and the GM ruling on it and giving it a Saving Roll to see if it works.  For a “Rulings, not rules” approach, it’s pretty much perfect.

It’s easy to see why T&T is a success for solo gaming and play-by-post: with no blow-by-blow adjudication or maneuver you can easily and relatively quickly resolve combats even if they involve lots of characters.  And because combats can be resolved without much decision-making if you’re not playing real-time or with a live GM, it’s ideal for the sort of “if you beat the monster, go to 12A, otherwise go to 27B” thing found in solo adventures.  On the other hand, if you have a live GM and bandwidth for everybody to describe what they want to do, the sky’s the limit to what kind of combat you can RP.

Overall, I’d give T&T combat a B.  It’s simple, and flexible, can be explained to someone in a sentence or two, and there’s plenty of scope for clever ideas, though perhaps not a lot of tactics… but the sheer number of dice that need to be rolled and resulting arithmetic is a burden.  Play-by-post, with a handy die-roller, it’s no big deal, but I don’t like to be reliant on something like that for face-to-face play.

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Tunnels & Trolls: Armor, Poisons, and Treasure

Continuing our look at T&T 7.5, the next bits deal with Armor, Poisons, and Treasure.

Armor is damage resistance; the value of the armor is subtracted from any damage rolled against the character (apparently including magical damage), though not against “spite” damage.  It can be bought either in complete suits or piece-by-piece, with the values of the pieces being additive. They seem to be equivalent, though you have to be up on your armor names to be able to deduce exactly what pieces go into a particular suit.  They have Min STR requirements, also additive.  As near as I can tell you are flatly prohibited from using any armor or weapon for which you don’t meet the minimum requirements; that’s certainly simpler than figuring in penalties.  Warriors, remember, get double the benefit from any armor worn, which is a pretty spiffy ability, and probably necessary to distinguish them further from everybody else in the world who can wear heavy armor as long as they meet the STR minimum.

Next is a list of 11 example poisons, most of which can be applied to weapons or are a result of a bite or sting by a monster; some do damage, some reduce combat adds, some paralyze a creature, and some permanently reduce an Attribute.  There are also rules for Antidotes (each poison has a specific antidote) and for potions of permanent immunity to a particular type of poison.

Finally (as far as this post is concerned), there’s a Random Treasure Generator.  This is a fairly standard table of types of treasure and sub-tables for more specific details about each type: money, weapon, armor, jewelry, potions, and jewels.  Of note are the facts that, like absolutely everything else in T&T, the charts only use d6; armor is sized for a particular type of Kindred; and potions require a Level 1 SR vs LUCK to see if they do anything each time they’re used!

Nothing particularly special here, though at the time armor as damage reduction instead of armor class as a reduction in the chance of scoring a meaningful blow was a big innovation.  If I recall correctly, T&T armor used to be ablative–that is each hit reduced the value of the armor until it was gone.  Subtracting from each attack is a much more meaningful contribution.  It all seems pretty playable.

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Tunnels & Trolls: Thoughts About Characters

I went over chargen in T&T in some detail yesterday, but because of the length of the post held off on my musings.  Overall I’d say I quite like it. It’s simple, quick, and reasonably flexible for a class-based system.

It does have a large random aspect, which is going to be a turn-off for quite a few people, but I’m used to it from my friend Mac’s D&D homebrew game (3d6 in order, no exceptions, no adjustments for race or class).  Also, since advancement in T&T means advancing your attributes, if you survive eventually you’re going to be able to overcome any initial deficit.

As an aside, my favorite way of rolling strict 3d6 is to assign each roll as you go…that way with some luck you can steer your character towards the type of class you want to play, without being able to min-max as precisely as roll 8 times and then arrange to suit.  If you want tougher characters you could easily adopt any D&D method such as roll 4d6 and drop lowest, roll 3d6 in order then switch 1 pair, roll in order and exchange points 2 for 1, etc.  You can also just skip the rolling and use the point-buy option T&T provides; you don’t get the Kindred modifiers in that case, so you can end up with a really weak dwarf compared to the standard…but that just means that you’ve gone out adventuring at level 1 instead of waiting until you’re second or third level like most Dwarves do.

The class mix is fairly traditional…though surprisingly lacks Clerics in any capacity.  Wizards have access to healing and to armor, so it doesn’t really present any problems as far as traditional FRP adventuring goes, but it might come as a bit of a shock to people who like the role.  You could easily use specialist Healers as clerics, but I kind of favor the idea that even if the setting has priests, that’s a profession, not a class. If I do any work on a T&T-specific setting, I’ll just make it that some priests are Warriors, some Wizards, most are Citizens.  Whatever their formal training is, they use their abilities to further the goals of their church and god(s).

The Specialist class(es) mostly seem an afterthought, to fill out traditional FRP roles like Ranger and Healer, but they seem like they’d be interesting to play.  The restrictions on the non-magical Specialists of having to roll triples and get over 15 in the primary attribute to qualify will make them rare, and I can see how if you really want to play a Ranger you might chafe at them…though it seems quite in the spirit of T&T to sweet-talk the GM into letting you.  If it’s conceivable that you can start as a Dragon, you can probably start as a Ranger if you really want.  The Leader specialist seems very, very broken to me unless you’re running a combat-only game with barely any interaction with NPCs, but if the GM just cuts back on the “no matter how far-fetched or difficult the task or the lie” it’s probably quite fun.  I’d also probably house-rule that it just doesn’t work on other PCs… I’ve been down the route where a character with high Persuade just pushes the rest of the group around, and even with my far-from-power-gamer players, it got to be too much.  Even the player who was doing the Persuading eventually asked for the power to be toned down.

The Kindred rules seem like a munchkin’s dream if you have a lax GM, but since I’m used to running games where the players aren’t given any points or budget but just told to make characters at about a certain level of power, I don’t have much of a problem with it.  There doesn’t seem to be any mechanical reason at all to play a human (unlike the D&D 3e or Savage Worlds bribe of an extra Feat/Edge for human “versatility”), but I’m fine with that.  People should play according to concept, rather than mechanical advantage.  T&T gives most starting non-human characters a leg up, but it’s the equivalent of starting at a higher level, which means facing greater challenges and having slower advancement.  It does appear to me that T&T is reasonably lenient about party mix…because of the way combat works, it looks like you can get away with being the sole 1st level character in a party of 4th level types without being suicidal or useless.

Talents are probably my favorite idea from the character generation.  They hit the sweet spot between needless complexity and fiddly accounting of systems with narrow skills, point buys and formulas, and strict class systems where what you know how to do is the same as any member of your class by definition.  Every level you get a new Talent.  Easy to think about, easy to do.  The only thing that bugs me slightly is that you could pick something to be a defining Talent for your character and roll 1 on a 1d6, making your character barely any better than an untalented person (though simply having the Talent can let you call for a roll against your good stat where the GM might have asked for a save against some weak stat or disallowed it entirely).  I might house-rule that if you take the same Talent twice, you get to reroll the add-on.

I also quite like the “everything is a Saving Roll” core mechanic.  While I appreciate the theoretical possibilities opened up by having different subsystems appropriate to different tasks, in the end I usually go for the easy-to-remember and easy-to-adjudicate universal die roll.  You can always rule in more elaborate home-brew subsystems to handle specific things like tracking ammo or overland chases if you find the extra overhead pays off, and I much prefer that to the opposite approach where the game offers an encyclopedic set of complex interlocking rules and dares you to scratch some of them off in order to pare it down to a playable core.

I also like the extensive weapon lists… there are some real surprises hidden in there.  For instance, the kris prevents any magic third level or lower from operating within 5′ of the blade, and prevent the wielder from using any magic at all.  The in-game explanation involves meteoric iron and special magical forging techniques, but just that such things exist and can be easily purchased provides some real flavor for the world.

I’d rate the character creation in Tunnels & Trolls a solid A.  The very fact that it has die-rolls and classes makes it a no-go for some people, but I’m not one of them, and I think there are more than enough knobs to fiddle with that players can generate unique, interesting and playable characters from the beginning.  Add that it’s really quick, taking hardly more time than a 3d6 in order Basic D&D character, and it’s a winner.

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Tunnels & Trolls: Chargen

At first, the mechanics seem fairly standard.  You have 8 Attributes: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Speed, Intelligence, Wizardry, Luck, and Charisma.  (Wizardry is apparently new in 7+…previously Magic used Strength, which meant that powerful Wizards were also amazingly strong.)  You roll 3d6 for each Attribute…and here you run into the first somewhat unusual thing: if you roll triples, you reroll and add.  So a beginning character has a minimum of 4, and no real maximum, though scores higher than 20 will be rare.  When Russell rolled up a sample character, he got a 20 for STR right off the bat.

As characters progress, their Attributes get higher and higher; in fact, that’s the basic advancement in the game.  Your level is determined by how high the stats relevant to your class are…to be a 9th level fighter means to have one of your STR, LUCK, DEX or SPD in the 90-99 range. (Again, this seems to be a change from previous versions where going up a level gave you points to spend on stats, so they were correlated but not equivalent.)  Since there are no real rules for how much various attributes mean (such as how much a Strength of 90 can lift compared to Strength of 15), you’re free to interpret the attributes as you see fit, but it strikes me on the whole better for a setting where because of magical enhancement or whatever powerful characters are capable of literally super-human feats.

Speaking of super-human, this leads into the next thing that strikes me as quite unusual compared to most of the games I’ve played:  Selecting a race (called Kindred in T&T) modifies your Attributes by a multiplier.  So, for instance, Dwarves get to double their STR and CON, while multiplying LUCK by 0.67.  Love the two-decimal precision.  Height and Weight also get adjusted, but they have no mechanical effect.  So, Russell decided to make his character a Dwarf, which meant his starting STR was 40, which automatically makes him 4th level from the git-go.  That actually seems like it would work reasonably well, assuming that you have him face challenges appropriate for a 4th level character.

There are more playable races than I’ve seen in a game since, well, Monsters! Monsters!  In addition to the usual suspects (common kindred) of Human, Dwarf, Elf, Fairy, Hobb(it), and Leprechaun (!), there are stats for 32 rare kindred ranging from Balrukh (Balrog?) to Vampire, with stops in-between for various fantasy staples like Dragon, Ghouls, and six kinds of Trolls, as well as instructions for how to stat up new ones if you can convince the GM to let you play, say, an Angel (actual example).  The purpose of the Rare Kindred charts seems to be as helpful guidelines for statting monsters as NPCs, and not just to let players try to sweet-talk the GM into letting them run a character with 10 times normal STR, 7 times normal CON, 2 x DEX, 5 x CHR, and 4 x WIZ (but only 0.5 LK… poor thing).

The character’s combat ability, called variously Adds, Combat Adds or Personal Adds, is the the number of points above 12 in each of STR, DEX, SPD, or LK, minus the number of points below 9 for the same stats.  CA could be negative if you have low enough stats.  Warriors get to add their level, as well.  So Russell’s dwarf had +28 for STR, +8 for CON, -2 for Luck, +4 for Level = 38.

There are no figured stats.  CON is your hit points.  WIZ is your magic points.  Weapons and armor will have STR and DEX minimums.  Spells have Level, INT, and DEX minimums.  The core mechanic, outside of combat, is the Saving Roll.  You roll 2d6 (doubles reroll and add) and add the appropriate Attribute to beat a target number.  The target starts at 20 for Level 1 Saving Rolls, and increases by 5 per level (2 = 25, 3 = 30, etc).  You also get to add your Level in, but only if you would otherwise fail.  So far I haven’t found any reason you don’t just add your level in and compare, though I can imagine if there’s ever a roll-off of Saving Rolls it could make a difference.

There six Types (classes) of characters: Citizen (your basic NPC type, no bonuses and half the usual adds, and need to make saving rolls on both INT and DEX to cast a spell), Warriors (any weapons or armor, no spells, add level to combat adds, double the protection from armor), Rogues (actually Rogue Wizards, any weapons, armor or magic, and a special Roguery Talent that lets them use the best of Luck, Charisma or Intelligence for any save against any of the three, they also get 1 free 1st level spell but have to obtain new ones through play–the Wizard’s guild won’t sell them to Rogues), Wizards (any armor, no weapons greater than 2d6 damage, start with all 1st level spells and can buy new ones from Wizard’s guild as they level up, get a discount on the WIZ points a spell costs when it’s lower than their level, and can use a spell focus such as a wand or ring for further discounts), Paragons (a combo of Warrior and Wizard, but only available to characters that have 12 or greater in every stat prior to Kindred modifiers) and finally Specialists, of which there are three varieties, each with a particular qualification requirement: Magic Specialists need to have rolled 15 or higher in WIZ and choose one of the 4 schools of magic (Combat, Cosmic, Metabolic and Conjuring) and get all those spells for free and cast at half the WIZ cost but are forbidden spells fromt he other schools; Rangers need to have rolled triples in DEX and gotten a score >= 15 (likely if they rolled triples in the first place) and are master archers…they only have to make a Level 1 Save to hit any target in range of their bow; Leaders require a natural triple and score >= 15 on CHA, and only need a Level 1 Save vs CHA to persuade any one of anything.  That last seems pretty broken to me, but in the hands of the right GM and with a player who didn’t insist on pushing it I could imagine it being fun.

The next step is to pick your initial Talent.  Talents (also apparently new in 7+) are what T&T has instead of skills.  Talents are a really broad class of things that you can get a Saving Roll to attempt, such as Thievery, Swordplay, Acrobatics, or so forth.  You can make them wide or narrow, but there’s no advantage for defining a talent narrowly, so Ken St. Andre explicitly advises players to define them broadly, while suggesting that GMs give NPCs fairly narrow ones.  When you pick a Talent, you choose which Attribute it’s based on, and the talent is that Attribute + 1d6.  E.g. you might have Thievery DEX +3 or Persuasion CHA +2.  The bonus you roll never changes as your attribute changes, but you get to pick a new Talent every level.  Combat talents never figure into your Combat Adds, but can be used in combat to attempt some feat of derring-do such as disarming an opponent that isn’t directly covered by the fairly abstract combat rules.

Finally, you roll or assign your height and weight (modified by the Kindred charts), write down such things as eye and hair color, roll 3d6 x 10 for gold, select your additional languages (1 per point of INT over 12), and hit the equipment lists, which are unbelievably extensive when it comes to weapons.  I haven’t seen such extensive charts since I played RoleMaster, and the polearm list looks like something Gary Gygax came up with.  Fortunately there is a 14-page (!!) glossary of what the weapons are, because half of them I’ve never heard of.  Armor can be bought piece-meal or as suits, and there’s a table of guns (excuse me, Gunnes) that cover various primitive black-powder weapons appropriate to medieval warfare.

And now you have a character, and are ready to adventure.  There’s also a point-pool method of character creation, but since that doesn’t allow for Kindred modifiers I can’t imagine it’s that popular.

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Tunnels & Trolls v7.5 First Impressions

Since Scott at the super-cool World of Thool has settled on Tunnels and Trolls as the game system for the setting, I’ve been kind of curious about it.  T&T is one of the first RPGs ever in the wake of D&D (first published the year after the original D&D came out), and has had a loyal fan-following every since.  I never played it way back when, though I did play a couple sessions of Monsters! Monsters!, a version of T&T where you played the monsters instead of the heroes.  So because I expressed an interest, my friend Russell gave me Tunnels & Trolls v7.5 for my recent birthday.  At the same time he picked up a copy of v5.5 for his nephew, which let me at least glance through the earlier version for comparison.

Here’s the blurb for the boxed 7.5 set:

Fiery Dragon Productions : Tunnels and Trolls v7.5

Tunnels & Trolls v7.5

The most jam packed edition of Tunnels & Trolls ever to be released in one box. Includes the following items:

  • Version 7.5 of the rules [additional equipment and combat examples previous found only in PDF format as well as a new treasure generator by Ken St. Andre, and a Trollworld chronology]. Page count increased from 120 to 174!
  • A gm-based adventure ‘Hot Pursuit’
  • A solo adventure ‘Strange Destinies’
  • A color world map of Kaball for gm’s to use as a campaign base
  • A monstrous compendium, containing over 70 monsters
  • A spell compendium with many dozens of new spells
  • Special Edition Monsters & Magic book from 7.0 for completeness
  • Die-cut monster and PC counters mounted on 50pt cardstock
  • Several blank character sheets, easy to copy
  • 4 DICE!

The boxed version is quite nice, and I like the digest-sized spiral bound rule book and supplements, which fit neatly into my coat pocket.  The dice are cute, and quite readable.  The pad of character sheets seems like a bit of a waste.  T&T characters fit quite neatly on a 3 x 5 card, and there aren’t any formulas or game-aids that the character sheets serve as a reminder of.

The game is…interesting. I’ll have to see what it’s like in actual play, but there are several things that strike me quite favorably…as well as a few that I think could be a bit problematic.  In particular, I can see why it’s been a success as a solitaire game and for play-by-post, while perhaps being a bit harder to GM well face-to-face without some software assistance (even if it’s just a programmable calculator or dice-rolling program).  The combat system is straightforward, but the numbers can get large.

The rules are written in a conversational tone, and Ken St. Andre isn’t shy about giving advice or opinions.  “Combat,” he says in the introduction to that section, “is the true heart of any fantasy role-playing game.”  “Players should, as much as it is easily possible, role-play their characters.  Try not to think of yourself as an Olympian god moving little chessmen around a mapboard, but instead be Snargblat the Goblin Thief who joined these adventurers at the last moment.”  The game is entertaining to read, not at all like a technical manual or assembly instructions.

I’ll be looking at it in more detail in subsequent posts, more or less the way Nathan Mahney of Save or Die! has been going over OD&D, though perhaps not quite so thoroughly.

update: DriveThruRPG.com currently has the PDF version (contains everything in that box except the dice) for the unbelievably good price of $11.25  (compared to $35 for the physical boxed set) as part of their GM day sale through March 8th.  I was just planning on linking so people could take a look, but I ended up buying it just so I’d have the PDFs to carry around on my netbook….

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Procession of the Psychopomp

Game Summary for 2/22/09, a somewhat abbreviated due to the presence of Rock Band

The Party (Idariel 7, Twonkey, Josepi, and Stan McStan ) made its way back from the SludgeWorks, with their captured Zombot-ratipede corpse and a bunch of the Thaumivorous Ghost-Moths that they had discovered.  They boarded the platform and were being winched back up to level 1, when they noticed a bunch of commotion in the Web, with G-Nome couriers racing back and forth on their rocket-skates. This triggered their paranoia pretty badly, as they became convinced they were about to be ambushed, but they made it back to Barbis Boltbiter’s Adventure Emporium (No Adventure Too Dangerous! No Fee Too Big!)  safely. After collecting their fee for investigating the Zombot Infestation, they began discussing cashing in on the Moths with Barbis.  As a Dwarf of honor, he insisted that they would have to negotiate with the owner of the Sludge Works, Lord Shadrach (one of the few non-Elf, non-Dwarf Lords of Infrastructure).  Somewhat surprisingly, the party saw his point. Before they got too far, however, one of Barbis’ nephews burst in with the news that a huge black blimp had docked at the Zep (the zeppelin docks), bearing the Psychopomp of Anathem, and there was going to be a procession.

The Psychopomp of Anathem is the ruler of the city of Anathem, a city that New Ark City had been at war with up until recently (a few game sessions ago) where they practiced the forbidden arts of Necrotech.  Josepi announced that there was no way he would buy that there was no connection between the Zombots they’d been encountering and the situation with Anathem. The party decided to go check out the procession.

They used their connections to find a second floor window above an apothecary from which they could watch the procession route from the Zep to the Palace of Instrumentality, where the Lord of Infrastructure meet.  The parade route was packed with people, trying to get a glimpse of the mysterious Psychopomp.

First came the music, a Heavy Metal dirge. Then came the marching guards, seven-foot-tall cadaverous humanoids in tattered gray cloaks, indistinguishable save for the slight variations in the black patterns on their ivory masks, rifles over their shoulders.  Following them was the Psychopomps float, drawn by a pair of Zombie Mammoths.  Occupying the rear of the float was a steam calliope, from which the music wailed.  In the center of the float, supported on iron bars, was the Psychopomp itself…a grey metal sphere, 10 feet in diameter, bound in loops of darker metal. Nobody knows whether it is a machine intelligence, a sentient artifact, or is there something else, something organic, encased inside.

Kneeling around the Psychopomp were pairs of figures, one set each of the Precursor races, Human, Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Orc, Dryad and Satyr…all attractive and richly dressed in elaborate robes and jewels, several wearing crowns, and all chained by their necks to the Psychopomp’s float.  Their eyelids have been sewed shut.

Behind the Psychopomp’s float, row after row of iron-collared human soldiers bearing spears.

Just then, as the party was discussing “Why aren’t we at war with these guys any more?” a small figure skidded from one of the cables that make up the web, and tumbled to the street in front of the stamping feet of the Zombie Mammoths. It was a G-Nome girl, with small goat-horns and little cupid wings, who had slipped as she was racing by….

Stan McStan started desperately slapping together a robot, knowing that there was no way he could finish in time.  Twonky contemplated jumping from the window, only to conclude that he would crush more people than rescuing the kid would save.  Idariel and Josepi stared helplessly.

The mammoth’s foot descended, then stopped in mid-air.  Kneeling beneath the foot, holding it up with one hand, was a figure completely swathed in bandages, wearing a red, hooded cloak.  The other mammoth, being just a zombie, obliviously tried to continue forward, and the float started to swerve.  The Corpse Guards turned, raising their enormous rifles. The figure scooped up the G-Nome girl and darted from beneath the foot, the mammoth stumbling then continuing onward.  Red-cloak deposited the girl at the side of the road, just at the edge of the crowd, as the Guard leveled their rifles.

By this point Stan had snapped together a hawkbot, and sent it winging towards the scene, with instructions to interpose itself between the riflemen and Red-cloak (and the crowd), international incident be damned.  Before the riflemen actually opened fire, there was a sonic boom, glass rattling and cracking in most of the nearby windows and the rifleman were knocked from their feet…the first row of riflemen’s weapons all snapped in half, and Red-cloak was gone.

Stan recalled his hawkbot before (he hoped) it could be observed by any of the Psychopomp’s minions. It was at this point that he noticed some wetness on his upper lip… his nose was bleeding. Nobody else suffered this (they all made their vigor rolls), and he shook his fist at the Psychopomp and muttered something about “Keep out of my head!”  Eventually, after a bunch of men in the livery of the Lords of Infrastructure showed up and had earnest discussions with the Psychopomp’s servants, the procession straightened itself out and made its way out of sight towards the Palace of Instrumentality.

The rest of the session was spent discussing what the Red-cloaked figure could possibly have been, whether they should try and find the G-nome girl, who they saw had been grabbed up by her mother, why the sudden peace with Anathem, and what the connection might be between the zombots and the Psychopomp.

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Awesome!:The Storytelling Game

This is my attempt at a (possibly) playable game in a single blog post.

Awesome!: The Storytelling Game

Awesome! is a game of telling a story about just how awesome your characters are, and how they kick ass and take names accomplishing mighty feats of derring-do, blockbuster action movie style!  For Awesome! characters, the question is not whether they succeed, only how awesome their success is.  Players take turns narrating the awesome exploits of their characters, ceding control of the narrative only when they’ve run out of their current supply of Awesome! (or when they’ve failed to live up to their awesome potential and delivered some lame narration).

Beginning The Game

The players choose one player to be the Director for the upcoming scene.  For the first scene, they can choose randomly, or simply pick the most awesome player in the room.  Subsequent scenes will be Directed by whichever player whose turn it was when the scene ended.  It is the Directors job to set the scene, and to control all the antagonists and provide the challenges that the characters must surmount.  It is not the Director’s job to thwart the characters or make them look silly, but to help them to achieve the highest levels of awesomeness they can.  The Director briefly describes the scenario for the players (“You are all martial artists gathered on a remote island to determine the Best of the Best” or “You are super-spies working for a mysterious agency.”) so they can create their characters.

Creating Characters

Starting with the player to the Director’s left and going clockwise, each player briefly describes their character in a sentence or two.  (“Chow Yang is the son of the disgraced former master of the Tiger Fist Dojo, determined to clear his father’s name and restore his style to prominence.”  “Rhode Island Red is a mountain of a man, and the roughest, toughest, biker in the world.” etc).  Then the player to that player’s right adds one detail that makes the character particularly awesome (e.g. “Chow Yang is master of The Roaring Tiger move.” or “Red’s Hog, Betty-Lou, can drive straight through a brick wall without slowing down.”).  Next the player to the left adds one Weakness.  (“Red can’t resist a drink.”  “Agent X always helps a lady in distress, even if he knows it’s a trap.”)  Continue around the table until everyone has a character, including the Director, who will need a character if there are subsequent scenes.

Characters have only one Stat, called Awesome!  Each player starts the game with Awesome! of 20.

Turn Order

Play begins with the Director setting the scene in more detail.  Every scene should be devised around a set-piece action sequence.  It needn’t be a combat, though most of the time it probably will be, but it has to be something that provides scope for death-defying stunts, hair-raising escapades, and, if possible, explosions.  Big ones.  Investigation, travel, preparation and the like should all be handled in passing by the Director or inserted as a parenthetical aside by a Player…Players should never have to take an action or make a decision simply to advance the plot to the next action sequence.  Once the Director has set the scene, the player to the Director’s left begins her turn.  When her turn ends, the Director gets another turn to update the scene, detail the antagonists’ responses, up the stakes, and so forth.  When the Director is finished, the next Player moving clockwise takes her turn.  Play proceeds in this fashion, alternating between the Director and the next clockwise Player until the scene ends.

Taking A Turn

In Awesome! the character’s action always succeeds–that’s what it means to be awesome.  The only thing in question is just how much awesome you can cram into one turn. The player describes the awesome action that the character takes, including (if appropriate) what happens to any non-player characters as a result. The other players (excluding the Director) may, if they wish, vote whether the action is Awesome! or Lame!   They need not wait until the action is over, but they may not vote on the same action twice.  “Red punches the thug so hard he lands in the rolling chair and rolls back all the way across the room where the chair tips him out the window and he falls into the dumpster below.”  “Agent X jumps onto the back of the shark and using his spear-gun as a spur, rides the shark like a surf-board all the way back to the beach.”

Awesome!

If another player is particularly impressed, she can say “Awesome!” or give a thumbs up after a player takes an action.  This causes the player’s current Awesome! score to go up by one.

Totally Awesome!

If every other player voted Awesome! the player whose turn it was goes again immediately.

Lame!

If another player thinks that the action described was pedestrian or boring, she can say “Lame!” or hold their hand up in the shape of an L on their forehead.  This causes the player’s current Awesome! score to go down by 1.

Totally Lame

If every other player voted Lame! then the player’s turn ends immediately.

Abstention

Players do not have to vote one way or the other, and should probably reserve their kudos or jeers for particularly noteworthy actions.

No Consensus

Typically there will be no consensus, either because there were abstentions or because there was disagreement on the Awesomeness/Lameness of the character’s action.  The player then rolls a d20, and this becomes the character’s new Awesome! score.  If the roll is higher than the character’s current Awesome! score (after having been adjusted by the votes of the other players), then the player’s turn ends, and the narration moves on, first to the director, then to the next player clockwise.  If the roll is less than or equal to the character’s current Awesome! score, the player continues with the narration.

Signature Shtick

If the player incorporates the character’s signature shtick (as defined by the other player at during character creation) in the action, the player rolls 2d20 and keeps the one she prefers (generally the highest one that isn’t over the current Awesome! score, or simply the highest if they both would cause the turn to end, but if she wanted to end the turn for some other reason without tagging out or succumbing to weakness, it’s up to her).

Voluntarily Ending Your Turn

Players may voluntarily end their turns by either Tagging Out or Succumbing to Weakness

Tagging Out

A player may tag out to another player to continue the narration by describing a set-up for that player’s character (“I toss Maxie the gun.”) and indicating that player should continue (either verbally or by tapping their palm or the table in front of them).  In this case the Director does not get a turn before the next player.  A player may not tag another player if the Director has not had a turn since that player’s last turn (because that player tagged away): the Director must always be allowed a turn before a player can go again.  The character’s current Awesome! score remains in effect.

Succumbing to Weakness

A player may voluntarily narrate the character succumbing to the Weakness defined during character creation.  The player’s turn ends, and the character’s Awesome! score is reset to 20.

When to Roll

Players are encouraged to describe their actions elaborately and with panache, and it’s quite possible that one “action” can encompass a whole series of maneuvers, as in “Jackie grabs the mop and back-flips over the ninja behind him, then sweeps the mop handle around in a gigantic circle, knocking all six ninjas into the shelves, where they fall in a heap with the cans of paint falling on them and covering them head-to-foot in all the colors of the rainbow.”  How much is too much?  Generally speaking, the action should end when it’s logical and narratively satisfying to do so, usually after both an action by the character and a reaction by the antagonists.  Remember, every time an action ends there’s a chance that the player’s turn will end then and there, either by vote of the other players or by the roll of the die.  A player can have a sense of whether a follow-up action is likely, based on the current Awesome! score, but it’s never certain.  You probably don’t want to end with the mop handle sweeping the ninja’s legs out from under them, but not knowing whether they fall, flip and save themselves, or what.  On the other hand, if you’re going on and on, hogging the spotlight and preventing anybody else from displaying the awesomeness of their character, they may vote that it’s Lame! just to get you to stop.

Third Person Vs. First Person Narration

Third person narration is more in the spirit of the game, but first person narration is perhaps more like a role-playing game and may be easier for players accustomed to RPGs.  On the other hand, narrating over-the-top awesomeness may strike some players as being unpleasantly like “power gaming”  if done in the first person. It’s more a matter of aesthetics than anything else.

The Director’s Turn

During the Director’s turn, the Director narrates any unfinished results from the players’ turns and the actions taken by the antagonists.  The Director is free to introduce new antagonists or complications to the situation, and is expected to do so to keep things exciting.  The Director does not have an Awesome! score, and may continue as long as necessary in order to provide fodder for the players’ next turns, but should bear in mind that the point of the game is for the players’ characters to be awesome, not for the Director to tell a story.  During the Director’s turn it is legitimate for the Director to incapacitate, sideline, or “kill” any character except for that of the player whose turn is about to commence, with the understanding that it will never actually result in the elimination of a PC unless the player has indicated that is acceptable or she has to leave the game; whatever the Director does to a PC has to be reversible by the time its that player’s turn again, up to and including the apparent death of the character; if the PC has not been restored to action by another player by that time, the player gets a free action (not requiring voting or a die roll) to restore the character to action.

The Bogus Rule

If all the players vote that a particular action by the Director is Bogus (by shouting Bogus or holding their noses), then the Director is obliged to retract that piece of narration and replace it with something more to the players’ taste.  If the players vote Bogus three times during the Director’s same turn, the game ends and everybody loses.

Player vs. Player

It may sometimes happen that PCs end up fighting each other because of the logic of the scenario (e.g. a martial arts contest) or because of one player’s narration (say, proposing an archery contest).  To keep the flow of the narrative, so that the players dueling don’t have to wait for their turn to come around again each time, resolution changes in the following way:  the first player announces a duel, and if the other player(s) accepts, each takes turns narrating a single action (the character’s action and the opposing character’s reaction).  Voting takes place as normal, and the first character whose turn ends (either because of rolling higher than the current Awesome! score or by votes of Lame!) loses the duel.   The winner of the duel gets one more (free) action to narrate the victory, and play passes to the Director, and then to the next clockwise player from the initiator of the duel who was not involved in the duel.  The Director does not get turns in between the actions of the dueling players.  It is the responsibility of the players to ensure that even as they are narrating their character (potentially) winning the duel, they don’t make the opposing player’s character seem weak; attempts to do so (e.g. by announcing their character one-punches the opponent) should be immediately voted Lame! by the other players.

Ending the Scene

The scene ends when a character has achieved the goal for the scenario, explicit or implicit, or defeated the last antagonist present, and the players all high-five each other.  If the conditions for ending a scene have been achieved, but one or more players withholds the high-five, then the current player’s turn ends (and the Awesome! score remains unchanged) and it becomes the Director’s turn immediately.  It is then up to the Director to introduce new antagonists or complications so the players can try to achieve a more satisfactory outcome.

Starting a New Scene

If the players wish to continue, the Directorship passes to whichever player whose turn it was when the prior scene ended.  It is up to this new Director to continue the story, using the same characters and basic set-up, but possibly taking it in a new direction.  It is also up to the new Director to narrate the introduction of the previous Director’s character (or re-introduction if the game has gone on that long) as well as possibly the sidelining of the new Director’s character.  Play proceeds clockwise from the new Director.

Ending the Game

The game ends by mutual agreement whenever the players are satisfied.

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Adventures in Arithmetic

Or: Why D&D 3.5 is no fun.

I love my friend Russell like a brother, and I’ll gladly play any game that he wants to GM, but I’m so looking forward to him switching systems some time in the near future as he’s planning to do.  As long as we’re not in combat, the game and setting are entertaining as all get-out, but as soon as we roll init…ugh.  There’s just no part of “You rolled a 13, plus 11 for your Attack Bonus, plus 1 for the prayer, minus 5 for the Combat Expertise, minus 5 for it being your second attack is 15…you hit!” that’s exciting.  It’s possible that if we played every week, instead of about once a month for half a year, that we’d get so used to the system–or learn to take notes that pre-figure all the standard options we usually choose in battle–that it would be mercifully quick.   But it still wouldn’t be very exciting, in my opinion.  It has all the panache and tension of doing SAT practice problems.  Continue that sort of thing for a half-hour or more, and I’d honestly rather that we went system-less.

That’s not to say that my current favorite system, Savage Worlds, is without flaw in this regard.  I think that on the whole modifiers are a bit less common and tend to be applied more homogeneously (e.g. the penalty for multiple actions in a round applies to every action in the round, so at least you only have to figure it once at the beginning), and there is an actual requirement that certain kinds of maneuvers (e.g. Tricks) get a description to justify them rather than a bare announcement of the attempt, but on the flip side the die-rolling has the possibility of being more complex with the open-ended rolls and I could see it falling into a similar if shallower rut of “let’s all do some arithmetic now!”  At least in Savage Worlds, I think I see how to speed things along in combat and making the combat more dynamic and descriptive; with D&D 3e, I honestly think that the more dynamic the combat gets in terms of options for the players, terrain, facing, environmental conditions, spells, maneuvers and abilities, the worse it becomes in terms of arithmetic as the bonuses and penalties come and go and fewer things can be pre-calculated.  I don’t really see much of a way to improve that without stripping player options; stacking mods on a roll of a d20 is pretty much the essence of the system.

The bottom line is that with 3e, I end up hoping that we don’t get into any combats, so that we can continue to have a fun time.   That’s probably less than optimal for D&D.

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What’s Normal in Savage Worlds?

Since this is never explicitly spelled-out in the core rulebooks as far as I can see, it’s probably worth a post.  (I originally worked this out in a comment thread that I doubt anybody but Russell is reading by now…)

The default assumption in Savage Worlds is that typical Joe or Jane Citizen characters have a d6 in each Attribute, and a d6 in each skill that’s relevant to their profession and daily life.  Character generation gives you enough points for a d6 in every stat, and you shouldn’t put a d4 in one unless you intend that your character be wimpier than an average adult at it.  You shouldn’t start with a d4 in a Skill unless it’s something the character hasn’t had much practice at up until now.

In the SW:Explorer’s Edition rulebook, the evidence for this is slim, but it’s there:  the Youth Hindrance and the Elderly Hindrance both represent less-than-physically fit adult specimens, and neither drops any Attribute below a d4.  An 8 year-old girl has a Strength at minimum of a d4, as does a 90 year-old grandmother; they could be stronger… even a lot stronger, but they can’t be weaker by the core rules.  There are Hindrances that can give you an effective die-roll even worse (e.g. Anemic, which subtracts 2 from many Vigor rolls), but d4 is the rock-bottom for an Attribute.

The Toolkits add more direct evidence: the “Typical Citizens” entries in both the Science Fiction and Fantasy toolkits have a d6 in each Attribute.  The Pulp toolkit doesn’t have a citizen entry, but has a fair number of everyday sort of archetypes such as Snitches, Typical Mechanics, Nosy Reporters (as distinct from Plucky Reporters) and they all fit the pattern of at least a d6 in every Attribute, with only notably stupid characters such as Thugs having a d4 Smarts, or notably young characters such as Wise-Ass Kid having a d4 Strength and Vigor.  Even Professors are assumed to have a d6 Strength and Vigor.

The Toolkits also provide the only real evidence of the assumptions about what’s a typical Skill level.  The SW:Ex core has few examples of normal people, and orcs and cannibal islanders are just different enough that while they might represent typical opposition to the heroes they aren’t necessarily indicative of what the random soda-jerk, janitor, or dung-spattered peasant is capable of.  Basically, Citizens in the SF and Fantasy Toolkits have at least a d6 in every skill that’s relevant to their daily lives, and a d4 in either Fighting or Shooting depending on the typical weapon of their culture (and Guts, if the setting uses it).  What they don’t have is very many skills: Notice, some Knowledge Skill representing their trade, and either Driving or Stealth, plus the aforementioned combat and Guts, and that’s it.

While the point-buy system encourages PCs to dabble in a lot of skills (adding a new Skill at d4 after character creation is as expensive as raising two other skills by a die type), it seems pretty clear from the supplementary material in the Toolkits that having merely a d4 in a Skill isn’t intended to represent a competent practitioner.  A random NPC that you meet who has that skill as his trade will likely have a d6 in it.  Now, because PCs are Wild Cards, their chance of success on a d4 plus the Wild Die is significantly better than the random Extra’s chance of success on a d6 (62% vs. 50%), but my interpretation would be that represents something like raw talent or luck, not training.