Category: theory

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Fluid Combat Rounds Rules

  • Crunch Fetish

    Szilard posted an insanely complicated set of D&D 3.0 rules for a less turn-based approach to combat.

I can’t imagine actually using those rules (even if they weren’t D&D 3.0 oriented), but it did make me ponder whether there was some way to do the bookkeeping for them that would make it less cumbersome.  The answer is not that I could see (too many fiddly bits), but it gave me an idea so cunning you could put whiskers on it and call it a weasel…

Countless Moments

Each action is represented by a tile (a piece of cardboard or similar) that is 1 unit wide and a number of units long = how many moments the action takes up.  E.g.

  • Take a 5′ step forward or to the side: 1 unit.
  • Do nothing: 1 unit
  • Strike: 3 units
  • Cast a Spell: 5 units
  • Dive For Cover: 2 units
  • Step Back: 2 Units
  • Drop Prone: 1 unit
  • Stand from Prone: 1 unit
  • Run at double-pace: 5 units
  • Effects with duration (e.g. spells): N units (e.g. number of units determined by duration and scale, e.g.  a spell that lasted 3 turns would be 18 units if the scale was 6 moments to the turn).  These get their own tracks (one per effect), since they run in parallel with any other actions the characters take.
  • Bookkeeping (anything that the game rules require checking at the end of a “turn”, such as bleeding out, recovering endurance): N units, where N is the number of moments determined by the scale.  Again, this gets its own track (hopefully there’s only one…)

and so forth.  The GM would have a supply of 1 unit tiles to mark off moments.  Each player plays their intended actions by stacking their tiles one after another; they may be placed at any time at the end of the player’s current series of tiles.

Each moment the GM plays another 1 unit tile next to the players lines of tiles, and the actions that end in that moment are resolved.  Ties are resolved in initiative order (however that’s decided for the game…by Dex, by Init Bonus, by rolling). Past tiles are removed for recycling and the whole series can be slid backwards to make more room at the end.  There is no demarcation of turns, you just keep adding tiles to the end of the sequence and advancing until the combat is resolved.

Aborting

Any time before the action a tile represents is resolved, you may remove that tile (and any following tiles) and replace it with a new one, but the new one begins no earlier than the current moment–not when the original tile began.  Fill with Do Nothing actions if needed to keep the sequence in sync.  Since the point of  continuous action resolution instead of turn-based is to allow the players to react to events as they unfold, the GM should generally let the players fiddle with their upcoming actions freely; still, if it threatens to bog down the game (particularly if the players start getting involved in lengthy discussions of optimal sequencing) the GM should feel free to move things along by playing new moment tiles and resolving actions–if they player doesn’t currently have an action in the sequence treat that as Do Nothing, representing the player dithering.  You might also experiment with allowing the players to play as many new tiles as they want at the start of combat and when one of their actions has just completed, but only play a single tile followed by a mandatory Do Nothing tile after an Abort to represent the cost of changing your mind all the time.

Scaling

For converting durations, you have to pick a scale.  Generally you should make it so that a series of steps adds up to a normal move, e.g. 12 moments = 1 turn if characters can normally move 60′ a turn.  If you can usually move 1/2 move and attack, then an attack would be 6 units instead of 3, etc.

I don’t think I’m actually going to try this with any of our current games; it doesn’t really fit with Savage Worlds’ initiative and multi-action rules that well, and I don’t have any strong objections to the way turns play out in SW, but if anyone wants to give it a try I’d love to hear about it.

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In Praise of Randomization

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action. – Ian Fleming

Here’s two things about human beings:

  1. They are incredibly bad at randomizing
  2. They are incredibly good at recognizing patterns

The implication of the combination of these facts is that if you’re GMing a game and you think you’re introducing something that has no correlation with what’s gone before you’re probably wrong, and your players will probably notice.  In fact, even if you’re right, your players may well think there’s a correlation.

There are times when you can take advantage of this, and bask in the appreciation of your players who think you planned something diabolically intricate sessions in advance when actually they just constructed the pattern on the fly, but a lot of the time it can be a problem.  For one thing, it can make the players suspicious and paranoid.  Since a significant part of the game world always is out to get them, there’s usually plenty of fodder for this.  Paranoid players can turtle, or turn away (or turn on) NPCs that would otherwise be able to offer them resources and support that they’re going to need against the real threats, and they can slow the game to a crawl (such as when they examine and re-examine every ten feet of a corridor).  Unintended or spurious patterns can also lead the players on wild goose chases, pursuing lines of enquiry that you know are a dead end but are hard to block off without going meta–especially since it can be impossible for the players to distinguish between the world not containing the clues they’re looking for and an in-game adversary covering his tracks.  Sometimes the dog doesn’t bark in the night because there is no dog.

That’s where using genuine sources of randomness such dice come in.  E.g., if you have and regularly use random encounter tables to make your world seem alive and bustling, then you have much less risk that the players will conclude they’re being spied on by beggars just because beggars are a bit of local color that always seems to pop into your mind when you’re improvising.  They might still be inclined that way because of a series of unfortunate dice rolls…but if the players know you’re rolling randomly on tables, they’re much more likely to take it the way a real inhabitant of the world would: coincidence, not enemy action.  The tables are important so that you’re just using the randomizer to pick from a distribution that makes sense for the setting; you’re not trying to thwart all pattern in the setting, you’re trying to emphasize the true patterns and mitigate the purely coincidental ones.  The key to remember is that the players have hardly any interactions with the world (including simple descriptions of what they perceive) compared to the characters, so they tend to grossly overestimate the representativeness of the interactions they do have.

Finally, no discussion of randomization in RPGs would be complete without touching on random character generation.  While it’s probably obvious that random character generation, just like randomizing on encounter tables, increases the representativeness of the characters as part of the population, it’s not as clear that’s desirable.  After all, a character picked at random from the population of the setting may not have a single adventure during his or her entire life (and probably likes it that way).  For a long time I was strongly against random character generation.  Not only should players be able to play what they want, but the very fact that they’re expected to go on an adventure (barring certain kinds of everyday-people-thrust-into-peril scenarios where I tended to hand out pregens anyway) ought to be a strong enough filter to justify deterministic character generation.

I’m much less dogmatic about it now, in part because I’ve been a player for the past seven years in a campaign where the GM insists on rolling the six D&D stats in order 3d6 each, no swapping or adjusting (not even racial adjustments or 2-for-1 prime requisite adjustments, so actually more strict than Basic D&D), and I’ve come to appreciate two features of random chargen even without the fun and complication of a lifepath system.  First of all, it really does make you play characters that you wouldn’t consider otherwise and that can make things fresher and present an added challenge.  You might not want to get too attached to that 5 Dex fighter, but while he lasts it really can be fun trying to make the most of him.  Second, it makes being particularly good at something rare, worth treasuring, and a genuine stand-out in the setting.  Mechanically, an 18 STR is the same in a 3d6 in order as in a 4d6 drop low and arrange, but in one you really are the strongest person you are likely to meet in the campaign, in the other you’re maybe one-in-ten Fighters (unless they’ve gone the Dex route), one-in-three who’s 17+.  Random chargen is still not my default preference, but it definitely has its plusses.

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Desirable Generic RPG Qualities

Here’s a blast from the past, something I wrote ten years ago on what I was looking for in a generic RPG system.  I still agree with a good bit of it, though some of it I’m less certain about, and about one particular issue I think I was just wrong.

Subject: Desirable Generic RPG Qualities

Date: 1998/09/22

Based on some of the recent discussion, here are some of my thoughts on qualities that I would like in generic RPG rules, broken down into the categories:

  • Character Generation
  • Character Advancement
  • Task Resolution

Desirable Qualities by Category

Character Generation

Descriptive

It should be possible to go from a description of what the character is capable of to a codification of the character in game terms, without the system requiring modifications to the character to fit certain genres, power levels or preconceptions of the game designer as to what combinations/levels of ability/backgrounds are permissible. It should be possible to describe the character as it is now, without having to reconstruct the development or career path of the character up to this point (if you want to that’s a different story entirely).

Straightforward

Should have few, if any, subtle emergent properties. The obvious way to build a character should be just as useful/efficient as a more complex way. Character building expertise, rather than character description, shouldn’t be rewarded.

Utility priced

In a point-build system, prices should be based on relative utility of a power/level of skill/attribute, not based on rarity. Thus total points should represent how effective the character will be in the setting, not how unusual (although it’s reasonable to increase the price if rarity itself increases the utility, e.g. possession of psychic powers in a setting where nobody else knows they exist).

Concrete

Levels of ability should have specific measures, so that it is possible to work backwards from real-world descriptions to ability levels. E.g. if you know that you want the character to be as strong as a weightlifter, and that a weightlifter can lift 1000 lbs, then it should be possible to work out in game terms what STR is required to lift 1000 lbs.

Fine-Grained

The system should be capable of making fine distinctions between similar skills/attributes/powers, without requiring them where unnecessary. E.g. it should be possible to build a character who is particularly good at endurance sports, without being particularly resistant to disease, without requiring every character to separately determine how good they are at endurance tasks and disease resistance.

Wide Ranged

The system should be able to handle a wide range of power levels and genres without breaking, even when the power levels are mixed in a single setting, and without rendering characters’ abilities at one end of the scale indistinguishable from each other or irrelevant.

Deterministic

(possibly w/optional random generation, but if so random generation should only come up with characters that are legal under deterministic generation)

Simple

The process of building a basic character should be short enough that you don’t have to cut corners to create an average (or even skilled) NPC, and require little math or extensive consultations of the rules. A spread-sheet or character generation program should be sheer overkill.

Character advancement

Exists

There should be a way to improve characters over the course of play

Preservative of niches

The system should preserve the relative rank order of specific abilities among characters, presuming equal initial talent and equal attention to advancement. I.e. if one character starts out more stealthy than another, or a better shot, it shouldn’t be possible for the less skilled character to overtake the more skilled one by accumulating equal experience, unless the more skilled one neglects to advance that skill, or was deliberately bought as less naturally talented at it.

Insensitive to timing

The system shouldn’t distinguish between character that have advanced through experience and characters that are simply created as being more experienced. Order that abilities are acquired/improved shouldn’t make a difference to outcome (possible exeption: abilities that improve the learning of new abilities).

Equivalent to training

Although for some fields, experience attainable through the school of hard knocks ought to translate to experience from adventuring, for many abilities non-adventuring time spent training or on the job ought to be treated equivalently, and the system should provide for it. E.g. it should be perfectly possible to design a bright NPC high-school student, calculate how much experience she would get from attending college, entering graduate school, completing her PhD, and spending twenty years as a professor, apply it to the character, and arrive at an expert in the field. (It should also be possible to simply buy an NPC as that in the first place, but that’s an issue for character generation.)

Task Resolution

Adjustable level of detail

Ideally it should be possible to fill out interpretations of rules results to as much detail as is desirable, while not requiring that you generate more detail than you want at the moment. For instance, when determining hit location the rules should allow for anywhere from straight success/failure down to “you hit his left index finger” depending upon circumstances.

Concrete

Gives results that can be interpreted in quantitative game-world terms. E.g. an attempt to throw an object as far as you can should return results that can be interpreted as a specific distance (whether it’s 1 meter, 1 kilometer, or 1 light-year), not “that was really far, but just short of extremely far”.

Robust

gives reasonable results at all power levels and combinations of power levels handles unlikely cases as well as likely ones.

Easy to extrapolate

‘Nuff said

Intuitive

It should be easy to intuit the probabilities of any simple course of action, given familiarity with the game system. (I.e. the player shouldn’t have to be an expert mathematician, or perform an elaborate calculation, in order to get a good sense of the chances of success that a character ought to be able to tell at a glance, such as whether a particular ditch can be easily jumped.) The system should have few, if any, strongly counter-intuitive properties (such as novices being just as good at defense as experts), and any such should be clearly labeled and justified.

Simple

Shouldn’t involve more math than the players can easily do in their heads, shouldn’t involve looking up rules except for the occasional truly obscure case (which ought to be easily interpolated from known cases anyway), shouldn’t take a long time even when doing simple math (e.g. adding 20d6 is, to my taste, too much)

Unified mechanic

To such an extent as is possible. Since different types of tasks sometimes require different levels of detail (even if the requirement is merely the desire of the players to have more detail), there may well be a limit to just how unified the mechanics can be and still satisfy.

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Fluffy Crunch and Crunchy Fluff

Matthew Conway recently wrote Fluff and Crunch Are Dead To Me, about how he’s grown to hate the terms, but I see them as getting at something.  To me, anyway, Crunch is all the mechanics of the game: you roll this, and subtract that number from this other thing, if the result is 0 or less, the creature is dead, and so forth.  Fluff is all the stuff that doesn’t touch the mechanics at all, and could be freely swapped with any other fluff without changing the in-game result.  To take a concrete example, if you know the HERO game system:  that an attack is 6d6 Energy Blast, Armor-Piercing, 1/2 End Cost, Activate 14- is all Crunch.  It tells you everything mechanical you need to know to resolve the attack, and absolutely nothing at all about what the attack is or how it appears to the characters.   The fact that it’s a bolt of flame, or darting daggers of ice, or even a pack of pink bunnies that materialize, savage the target, and disappear is pure Fluff, flavor without any substance.

Now, neatly separating things into Crunch and Fluff is a huge convenience to the game designers, who can on the one hand say “Hey, I don’t need to write any special rules for Ice Daggers versus Fireballs, an Energy Blast is an Energy Blast is an Energy Blast…take some advantages or limitations if you want it to have a different mechanical effect”  and on the other can say “Here’s an adventure you can use for any system whatsoever, just plug in your favorite mechanics and go.” It’s also a convenience for the player and GM insofar as it makes the rules streamlined and elegant and lets them use this or that material with their favorite system.

But… it’s not a pure win… at least for players who are interested in having the rules closely track the game description and story.  See, unless you’re approaching it as a board-game, almost everything that actually interests the players is at the level of description.  What they want to do is toss their Fireball at the bad-guy and see the fur fly (or singe); rolling the 6d6 and subtracting the target’s Energy Defense divided by 2 while ticking off 3 endurance spent is just a means to the end, and the end is telling them what happens next when they throw that fireball.  But when the game designer has severed the link between mechanics and description, which is what designating them as crunch and fluff is mostly about, that can make the interface…mushy and undefined.  In extreme cases (cough 4e cough) the player can lose the sense that they know what’s actually happening in the game world to cause the mechanical effect, or worse know that the description is just “flavor text” and ought to be ignored lest it give you the wrong impression of what ought to be possible in the game world.  A clean separation of crunch and fluff makes it impossible to reason from the level of description.

So what players often would prefer…you’re way ahead of me here, I’m sure…is a less clean separation, what I call “fluffy crunch” and “crunchy fluff.”   Fluffy Crunch would consist of making every bit of crunch have a visible, comprehensible description-level corresponding bit of fluff.  You don’t just Soak a wound, you desperately twist out of the way so that it just grazes you.

Crunchy Fluff is making sure all the description-level stuff gets reflected appropriately in the mechanics:  If your super-power lets you created Ice Daggers out of nothing, you darned well should be able to create one and use it to cool your drink, or ice-down a twisted ankle.   No saying the rules don’t support that that just because the crunch description doesn’t allocate a +1/256th advantage “Can be used to cool physical objects in a non-violent fashion.”  Your ice daggers might get a bonus (or a minus) versus fiery creatures, or be easier to generate in artic conditions and harder in the middle of the Sahara, but in any case shouldn’t be indistinguishable from your companion’s Laser Pistol.

Crunchy Fluff also comes about from making the mechanics support the details of the setting.  If vampires in your setting are unable to enter a dwelling without an invitation, it helps to support that with actual mechanics: is it an absolute prohibition?  Can a sufficiently powerful vampire overcome it?  If so, how?  A Will roll?  Or is it something that the vampire can do, but it will have consequences.  Will it take damage for every turn it remains uninvited?  Can an invitation be revoked?  If it can, can the occupant just say the words, or does the occupant have to engage in some kind of test of wills?  This kind of tuning the rules to reinforce the description of the setting is an important way of making it feel like the setting has “heft”…that the adventure that the players are on couldn’t just be “re-skinned” (to use a computer gaming phrase) with the vampires being replaced with killer androids or cattle rustlers and nothing else but the fluff changing.

If you try to write something as pure Fluff, that can be applied to any setting, those are the kinds of things that can come back to bite you, no pun intended.  If the adventure assumes that vampires can’t enter a dwelling without an invitation period, but the system mechanics say that any sufficiently powerful vampire can…and the adventure has a vampire that’s supposed to be one of the most powerful in the world….

In any case the rules should be used to support the description that’s the heart of play.  Fluffy Crunch is there to give the mechanics a reason and a description; a neat mechanic is not self-justifying, even if it does give the player something extra to think about in terms of winning the board game.  Crunchy Fluff makes the descriptive level of play have consequences as well as consistency.  Both are important to a satisfying RPG, and IMO both are preferable to designs where one is divorced from the other.

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How to Railroad Your Players

Don’t.

Figure out some other way of advancing the scenario, or at least what path it will take if the players succeed instead of failing.

If you absolutely feel that you have to, then:

For my money, the best way of handling this is openly telling the players that the outcome of the scene is required by the plot.  If you’re going to railroad the players then telling them about it will usually defuse any resentment and may even get their active cooperation. You may even be able to give them a free hand to describe how they fail.

Second best is to present them with overwhelming force.  Yes, the rails will be visible, and you won’t get their buy-in, but you won’t waste their time lying to them about whether they’re really playing a scene where they can have an effect on the outcome, and they won’t waste any rare resources they might have in game trying to escape their fate.  You’ll also avoid poisoning the game further down the road, where they’ll wonder (with good reason) whether every failure or setback they experience–or even every success–was manipulated by the GM.  It’s not even like encountering overwhelming force is likely to be immersion-breaking, unless your PCs are nearly the most powerful entities in the setting; it’s common enough both in real life and fiction.  It’s only in games (and in my opinion not very good ones) where everything is automatically scaled to your abilities and every obstacle can be overcome.

Trying to slip one past them so they think that they’ve actually played the game and made important decisions when you’ve secretly removed any possibility of that is, ime, the number one thing that players hate, and yet GMs keep coming back to it.  Railroading is reviled by players, everybody knows that it’s reviled by players, everybody gives lip-service to the idea that you don’t want to be doing that to your players….but people still come up with scenarios that won’t work without it and try to devise cunning ways to hide it so the players won’t realize they’re being railroaded.  Because, you know, the resulting story would be so much cooler if it came out the way the GM envisioned it without any player input but with the players unwittingly playing their parts.

If you actually think the players will believe the story is cooler too, then put it to them openly.  If they think the point of the game is to make a satisfying and dramatic recap, they’ll be happy to cooperate.  If they disagree, then you’re doing them no service by lying to them to get the story you want.  And on the off chance they actually do think that it would be good if you sometimes disregarded their input to force the story in one direction or another, but they don’t want to know about it when it happens, then you can go back to worrying about how to camoflage your rails.

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When Failure Is Not An Option

Don’t make it an option.

Seriously.

Wandering the RPG blogosphere and forums, I’ve seen a lot of advice for GMs along the lines of “What to do when the party fails?”  The advice goes on to detail some clever or not so clever ways of preventing the module or entire campaign from going down in flames, but it’s almost always from the point of view of picking up the pieces once the party has failed to notice the clue, bypassed the room with the key, alienated the noble who’s the only one with the information they need, and so on.  Conspicuously absent, from my point of view, is a discussion of how the GM got the party in that pickle in the first place.  And it is the GM that got the party to the point where everything hinged on a single action, make no mistake.

You don’t want a single point of failure in your business processes, and you don’t want it in your RPG scenarios.  Unless, that is, you and your players are perfectly happy to fail (a possibility in some challenge-based games).

I’ve talked about “Scenario Breaker Rolls” in the past, so I won’t go into that again, but a botched die-roll isn’t the only way that the party can reach an impasse.

Take NPC interactions.  Too many GMs (and I’ve been guilty of this myself) make NPCs basically inert in social situations until the PCs prod them, and then decide how the NPCs react based on the PCs’ approach (plus or minus a die-roll).  Then they let the whole game get derailed when the PCs fumble the role-playing part of the interaction, perhaps by offering less deference to the King than the GM thinks the situation warrants.  That’s fine if there’s no problem for your game if the NPC declines to offer the quest after the PCs have insulted him and/or stolen from him, or you regard them ending up in the King’s dungeon as a good adventure hook.  If failure is going to be a big issue, then, as GM you should be taking charge and making sure that failure doesn’t occur.  Don’t make the NPC a surly and suspicious bugger if you need him to trust the PCs, no matter how neat you think it would be if the PCs were able to jolly him around through brilliant roleplaying.  Don’t put on your GM stone-face and wait for the PCs to start talking; have the NPC greet them with open arms and move the conversation along to where you need it to be (e.g. at least the announcement of the quest) before they open their mouths.  Yes, this steps on the role-playing opportunities of the situation, but you know what?  That’s what you get when you make an NPC a plot device.  You can have all the other NPCs interact in a more naturalistic fashion, or even that NPC in other situations, but during the portion of the adventure where you need that NPC to convey certain information or offer a particular deal to keep the PCs from hitting a brick wall, it’s a mistake to leave it up to the RP of the players if you think there’s any chance that they’ll screw it up.

Again, let me emphasize that “screw it up” means ruin everybody’s enjoyment with a failure to get the information/come to terms…whenever “failure” can be just as fun and interesting for everybody as success, I strongly encourage GMs to let things fall out however the players direct it.  But even GMs who are strongly committed to open-ended games without any rails can reach a point where the decisions of the players to that point have committed them to a course of action, at which point game-breaking opportunity for failures can crop up.  My feeling is that unless you and your players are equally committed to challenge-based games,  even in an open-ended sandbox campaign it’s the GM’s responsibility to minimize the single-points of failure.  If the players have decided to solve a mystery, and successfully uncover the murderer, it’s a mistake to make it so the fact that they’ve antagonized the Chief of Police along the way turns the whole adventure into a failure; you either have to make the Chief honorable enough that given proof he’ll make the arrest anway, or there has to be somebody else they can turn the culprit over to and see justice done.

To sum up, fixing game-breaking errors is no substitute for not making them in the first place.  There are all kinds of techniques you can use to recover from error, and it’s good to have some of them in reserve, but your first line of defense should be designing your scenarios so that there just aren’t any places where the PCs could fail unless you are willing for them to fail.  You can’t generally make players happy to fail, and you can’t (IMO) make success inevitable without cheapening it, but I think you can and should make every effort so that even if they fail, the players regard it as time well spent; failures should never result in them saying “That was stupid. What a waste of time.” if you can possibly help it.

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One Thing I Miss About Classic D&D Magic

Is that magic spells and items are so clearly unsystematic and ad hoc that a GM really felt licensed to add anything he could possibly think of.  The only unifying principle was that more powerful spells should be higher level and the more powerful items rarer; other than that anything goes.  So our early D&D games were full of fabulous spells (often realized as bizarre dungeon effects that messing with this or that statue or altar would invoke), items, creature abilities…we let our imaginations run riot.

My strong impression, though maybe this was just a fault of mine and the people I tended to game with is that later systems tended towards either providing a toolkit to build spells (e.g. Fantasy Hero, Ars Magica, BESM) or a more-or-less exhaustive list of spells that you were expected to keep to (RoleMaster, etc).  The idea, laughable in the context of classic D&D, was that some effort had gone into thinking about the system of magic and balancing the effects, their costs to learn or cast, and so forth.  If you messed with it, you did so at the peril of throwing things out of balance or introducing a contradictory mechanic.  If the toolkit didn’t provide an appropriate base effect, or the cost of the modifiers needed to make it useful were completely out-of-whack (because those same modifiers applied to, say, a spell that did damage would make it devastating)…well, you were free to add or adjust it, but there was a definite impression that you were messing with something finely tuned that might not work as well or at all once you got done with hot-rodding it.

Eventually, there came systems where everything was defined more-or-less by the same mechanic (e.g. something like the PDQ System or Dogs in the Vineyard) , whether it was casting a spell or catching a fish, so questions of balance pretty much went out the window.  So did a lot of the sense that there was something special about magic…it’s a little hard to explain, because I’m not sure I completely understand my objection myself, but if a system is too abstract and rules-light I start to lose the sense that there’s anything about magic that’s any more unusual or mysterious than fixing an engine, because the player goes through the exact same steps with the same mechanic whether he’s casting a spell to summon a whirlwind and transport himself a thousand leagues or change the spark-plugs on his Chevy Nova.  There might be setting information that makes one possible and the other inconceivable, or modifiers applied, but there’s something that’s kind of flat and abstract about it.

The feeling I got from classic D&D was that half the fun for the DM was to make up wilder and wackier spells and items, either for the players to use or to be used against them.  Dave Hargrave’s Arduin Grimoire was a notable example of just how wacky it could get, but all the DMs I knew did the same kind of thing, albeit perhaps on a smaller scale. I actually had a long-running campaign in Arduin, that my brother still thinks is possibly the best–or at least most memorable and atmospheric–one I ran.

Nowadays I’m much more likely to feel justified just house-ruling the heck out of everything to get it to where I want it; but nowadays, I’m much less likely to even be GMing a published system.  One of the things I admire about Savage Worlds is that while it basically is a hybrid of the toolkit and grimoire approaches to magic systems, the advice to GMs (at least in the Fantasy World Builder’s Toolkit) is much more reminiscent of the anything goes feel of D&D.  So while spell that shoots a bolt that damages a target is the same whether it’s a blast of fire, a magic arrow, a summoned swarm of bees, there’s no attempt at making an accounting system for balancing the duration, range, area of effect, etc of spells against each other or some standard point cost. If you want to add a new spell, you’re advised to either just change the “trappings” of an existing spell and add new minor mechanical effects as appropriate (e.g. a bolt of fire might set things on fire in addition to the direct damage, a bolt of ice might slow them or cause a slippery patch on the floor), translate a spell from another game, or just create it from whole cloth.  You could certainly use the spell lists from SW and no more, but like old school D&D it cries out for and gives license to expansion in whatever direction your imagination takes you.

I think it can be summed up as: when the system makes no attempt to balance spells against anything except a difficulty rating or fit them into any kind of taxonomy or  metaphysics, it’s clear you can just toss in anything you like.  When the system obviously has attempted more than just a list of really cool things you can do with magic and has put some thought and care into it, then as a GM you feel like you ought to be doing the same.   And sometimes I miss just saying, Ooh, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a spell that did X?  Let me write that down….

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Challenge-Based Gaming: Kicking The Dungeon Door Old School

Perhaps I should clarify what I mean by “Challenge-Based Gaming.”  After all, nearly anybody who plays an RPG can legitimately claim to be after some sort of challenge, whether it’s to cooperate with the other narrators to construct a satisfying story, to most accurately portray or experience the inner thoughts of their character, or just to carve through enough identical bags of hit-points with different skins to qualify for a level-up.  That’s not what I mean, though.  A challenge has to be something that can be failed.  Many, perhaps most, styles of RPG don’t and shouldn’t allow failure to accomplish the goal of the game as a real possibility; e.g. if you’re playing to construct a satisfying story then it’s a real problem if the game system will allow months of play to wind up in an unsatisfying story, and if the system is constructed to challenge you to complete a story despite it something is very wrong.

But Challenge-Based Games do exactly that: they are constructed to challenge you to accomplish your goal despite the system working against you.  This isn’t particularly uncommon for board games; Reiner Knizia’s Lord of the Rings game is a nice example, pitting the players cooperatively against the rules of the game, which will give Sauron the victory if they don’t destroy the ring before he corrupts the Ring-Bearer.

So when I talk about Challenge-Based Gaming, I’m talking about games where the Challenge of winning against the game is the whole (or at least biggest) point.  I’m talking about a style of gaming that pits the players against the game environment, with the GM acting as referee.  (As a historical aside, my crowd actually called the DM or GM “The Referee” for at least the first few years we were playing.)   The characters are tools that the players use to try to beat the scenario (almost always a dungeon, at least initially); the environment is a tool that the scenario-designer uses to try to beat the players; the GM is the scrupulously neutral referee between them.  There can be a bit of confusion here, because many GMs are their own scenario designers, but there really are two hats here: Referee and Designer.  When running the game the Referee is not supposed to be altering the environment or rules on the fly to thwart the players. Even if the players would put up with it, it’s just too easy.  On the other hand, the Designer is absolutely supposed to be creating an environment that’s going to be hard, but possible, for the players to defeat.  Again, even if the players would put up with it, making it impossible is too easy.  In a game system like D&D that has “save or die” as one of the central mechanics, TPK is never more than a few badly designed rooms away.

In fact, even perfectly fair fights (where fair is defined as 50-50 whether the PCs or the NPCs win) will inevitably crush the players as they’re repeated; that’s just the law of large numbers.   So the Designer’s real problem is to make PC victory both possible and the result of good play rather than chance.  It’s trivial to make challenges that the PCs could survive that are equivalent to spinning a roulette wheel; you can even control precisely how likely they are to “win.”

On the other hand, Challenge-Based games require the possibility that the players will lose.  In old school D&D it’s often said that there are no winners and losers, and that’s true in a sense.  Players can never lose the entire game–they can always roll up another character and have another go at it–but they can fail at a particular attempt and lose a character.  It’s a crucial part of Challenge-Based games that this is possible.  You could add a house rule to RK’s Lord of the Rings so that if Sauron ever overtakes the Ring Bearer on the corruption track, the players win, but would anyone ever want to play that?

There has been a fairly steady move away from Challenge-Based play in RPGs, for a lot of good reasons and some not-so-good ones, almost from the get-go.  I’m not sure that it’s even possible to reach the full potential of the RP part of an RPG in a Challenge-Based game; the challenge is perforce directed at the player, rather than the character…rolling to see if your 17 INT wizard solves the riddle just isn’t the same kind of experience as trying to solve the riddle yourself.  And a challenge-based game can’t reasonably demand that players firewall their knowledge from their character’s knowledge; it would be insane to expect players to get any enjoyment out of having character after character fall victim to the same trap just because the character can’t have any way of knowing it’s there.

But I do know that just because it’s rare and not the current fashion doesn’t make it an illegitimate approach to gaming.  The “problem” that players of RK’s Lord of the Rings have that Sauron sometimes wins if they don’t play well can’t be solved by having a discussion around the table so they can drop the Watcher in the Water and replace it with something “fun.”

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The Dire Rust Monster

In the comments on my Rust Monsters: Not For the Wuss of Heart post, several people claimed that they disliked Rust Monsters because they didn’t represent any real challenge: once you knew the trick of dealing with them, it was just a tedious process of beating them to death with non-metal weapons.  I think that betrays a lack of imagination on where and when they might meet Rust Monsters, but for them I have created:

Dire Rust Monster
Armor Class: 2
Hit Dice: 5*
Move: 120′ (40′)
Attacks: 2 Claws/1 Club Tail/1 pair antenna
Damage: 1-8/1-8/1-8/special
No. Appearing: 1-4 (1-4)
Save As: Fighter: 3
Morale: 7
Treasure Type: Nil
Alignment: Neutral
XP Value: 400

Looking more like an ankylosaur with antenna than an armadillo, the Dire Rust Monster share with its lesser cousin a voracious appetite for metal.

The special antenna attack is the same as a Rust Monster: non-magical metal armor or weapons crumble to dust; magical metal armor or weapons lose a plus (10% per plus chance of resisting the effect), once it loses all its pluses the next hit crumbles it.  A successful hit on the monster with any type of weapon means the body was hit, and there is no ill-effect on the weapon.

Now it’s just as challenging as an Owl Bear (since it’s statted like an Owl Bear, except for its AC, a lower Morale and a different special ability, and a whopping XP bonus) and those who were bored by the original Rust Monster should be all eager to go up against it, right?

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Rust Monsters: Not for the Wuss of Heart

  • Save the Rust Monster

    • Some people are really pissed that Wizards of the Coast cut the Rust Monster from the new 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. This creature was one of the original, classic creepy creatures from the old school pre-AD&D days.

While we’re on the subject of Fear in RPGs, the Rust Monster represents a particularly pure instance of Challenge Fear.  The only threat that the Rust Monster represents is to your character’s efficacy.  An encounter with a Rust Monster challenges you to avoid or defeat it without risking your precious equipment, or to face subsequent encounters at less than full strength.

Players who think that isn’t fun are wusses.  Or, to put it slightly less pejoratively, are either seeking the illusion of challenge without the actual possibility of significant set-backs or shouldn’t be playing a challenge-based game.  Players who are interested in interacting with the world will roll with the punches: if that’s what the setting says happens, that’s what happens.  Players who are interested in creating an exciting story might actually seek those situations out: if John McClane has to run through broken glass in his bare feet, putting him at a disadvantage for the rest of the story-line, that’s great, it ups the tension.  Players who are genuinely interested in challenge might curse their luck, or their lack of foresight, but those are the breaks that make the game worth playing.  But players who complain that it’ll leave them at less than their recommended wealth-and-equipment amounts for characters of their level, throwing off the challenge ratings for level-appropriate encounters until the GM throws in enough loot to restore the balance….  well, I can’t help feeling that they’re playing not just the wrong system, but the wrong kind of system.

There are plenty of systems out there that are explicitly built around the notion that the PCs will triumph and kick ass, and play is about giving them the mechanics to describe how they kick ass in really cool and awesome ways (Feng Shui and Exalted come to mind, or in a different vein something like Amber).  Taking a system that in its essence is about all kinds of ways that PCs can fail (poisoned, turned to stone, level-drained, killed, polymorphed, etc.) and putting foam padding on all the dangerous bits is…lame.  Go too far in that direction and even sword wounds will just seal themselves right up after a few moments… oh, wait, that’s 4e Healing Surges.

Really, I can understand and enjoy styles of gaming where the only setbacks are player imposed or player veto-able.  But if players want that, they shouldn’t fool themselves about what they’re doing.  If losing your +2 Flaming Broadsword is going to ruin the campaign for you, getting rid of the Rust Monster isn’t nearly enough–the GM’ll have to get rid of thieves, Dispell Magic, really any kind of situation where you could be knocked unconscious and stripped of your possessions… You’d all be much better off with a system where having that flaming broadsword is part of your character schtick, with explicit script immunity.