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Karma Points, or Payback is a Botch

There’s a discussion over at Robertson Games about using Luck points or the like to reduce the impact of a series of bad rolls resulting in character death.  I’m not a big fan of them, preferring explicit script immunity if the game isn’t going to just let the dice fall where they may.  I totally get why not every game needs to challenge the players and have character death or significant defeat be a live option, or at least give the players veto power to avoid stupid or anticlimactic deaths, but I think that Luck Points in the sense of a small finite resource than can be spent to reroll or force a roll to a certain outcome aren’t an adequate response.  On the one hand, they’re too little: they don’t actually guarantee that unacceptable outcomes never occur.  Eventually the party runs out of do-overs, and then they’re stuck even if another unacceptable outcome occurs.   On the other hand, they do too much, since the players will almost certainly come to consider their presence (or absence if they’re running low) when evaluating their options.  If you don’t want a TPK when the party foolishly attacks a sleeping dragon they happen across while on some unrelated quest, giving them Luck Points may actually encourage them to attack it; in effect Luck Points subsidize them making game-mechanically foolish choices.

Generally I prefer that the GM and players either agree in advance that they have script immunity, or they take up situations where a run of bad luck has derailed the game or killed a character on a case-by-case basis, deciding whether to live with the outcome or retcon it as an extraordinary measure.   I’ve long felt it to be a mistake to roll for something if you’re not willing to abide by the roll; if I really don’t want characters to die as a result of bad rolls in combat, I take the option off the table, for instance by making less than 0 HP mean incapacitated, fate to be determined.   It occurs to me, though, that it might be possible to craft a mechanic that answers my objections.

Suppose instead of a pre-figured supply of Luck Points which could be used to overrule or reroll a bad situation, you had an unlimited supply…but each time you invoked the rule you gained one Karma Point.  The GM could then spend one Karma Point to overrule or force a reroll some time down the line, negating some good result you had rolled.  That clearly solves the problem of a finite supply just kicking the can of reckoning down the road, giving the players a form of script immunity when it was just notably bad luck that screwed them over.  It might also address the problem of the players counting on their immunity to let them try dumb things, since they would know it would cause them potentially serious trouble down the line.  Yes, they could know in advance that whatever happens they can survive the dragon’s first breath attack…but at the risk of turning an otherwise easy situation later on into a fiasco.  It wouldn’t anwer for players who really need script immunity so their fun isn’t all bashed out of shape by random die rolls, but it might do for players who were generally interested/willing to subject their character’s fate to the dice but wanted some measure of veto power over extremely inopportune rolls.

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Huzzah! It is Mine!

Starships & Spacemen (via RPGNow.com) that is.  This was one of the earliest SF roleplaying games, and I remember enjoying the heck out of it with my brothers and sister.  It was basically an unlicensed Star Trek game, with the PCs serving as crew on a “Confederation” starship.  Classes represented various branches of the service, and there were various races that were analogs of the races of Star Trek: the logical emotionless Taurans, the telepathic Andromedans, the space-mercenary Rigelians, or the boring old Humans.

I was tempted to pick up Space Opera while I was at it, but my recollection of that was that it was so complex that by the time we had finished rolling up characters we had pretty much exhausted our interest in the game.  I think we made it through a couple of sessions before giving up and going back to Traveller.

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Chgowiz Quiz

These were the answers I gave:

Blogger: Chgowiz’s Old Guy RPG Blog – Post a Comment

I play in three different groups, which meet with varying frequency, one of which has rotating referees, so my answers are somewhat complicated.

1. What are you doing with an original edition/retroclone D&D?

I’m a player in an AD&D+homebrew campaign, and I GM two retroclone-inspired homebrew campaigns, and play in a 3rd edition campaign that’s switching to a homebrew 3e variant.

2. What type of roleplaying game were you playing (or are still playing) before you became interested/involved in an original edition/retroclone?

So I’ve always played in one AD&D campaign, and one 3 campaign

3. If you were playing 3E, why did you decide to investigate/play an original edition game or retroclone?

I still play in a heavily 3e inspired campaign, though I mostly hate the mechanics.

4. If you were playing 4E, why did you decide to investigate/play an original edition game or retroclone?

Don’t play 4e

5. What attracted you to investigate/play an original edition/retroclone D&D?

Always played in one, decided to GM one in honor of Gary Gygax when he died, and decided to continue it w/more homebrew rules.

6. How did you learn about the original editions/retroclones?

The one GM has always had AD&D 1e books, learned about retroclones when searching the web for original edition for Gygax tribute game.

To elaborate a little more:

My friend Mac has always been running an AD&D plus houserules campaign for the past twenty-seven years or so, and I’ve been a player for the past…elevenish?  Russell was a player in the same campaign back in college, though he only gets to play now when he’s visiting.

After Gary Gygax died I wanted to GM an homage game for my other group, which I did (though I used Mentzer’s Basic, so technically not Gary’s actual rules).  I was hoping to turn that game into a “back-up” game for when we didn’t have a quorum of our regular group, something that happens a bit more frequently now that so many of the players have young children.  I wasn’t very satisfied with how it went, mostly because I wasn’t fully back in the mind-set of “rulings not rules.”

I shelved the idea of actually running some kind of retro-clone for a while, but when Mac’s kids started playing D&D we discussed my running a game for them sometimes, because she didn’t want them to develop the bad habit of thinking there was only one way to play D&D based on the way she ran it.  At that point I’d read a lot more of the old school renaissance blogs and thought more about what I liked and disliked about D&D in the old says, so I set out to create house rules that would let me run something along the lines of what Mac was doing (straight ahead dungeon bashing) but that I’d be comfortable with.  I’ve been describing what’s been going on in that game as they explore Amityville Mike’s Stonehell in this blog.

I’ve also started to use that homebrew and setting as the backup game in the regular Rambling Bumblers group.

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Quick Thoughts on Risus

We tried Risus for the first time last Sunday, for another round of the episodic space horror game I run when the mood hits me.  Even though Risus is officially a humorous game (Risus being Latin for laughter), it’s still a reasonably good fit.  Humor and horror have a good deal in common as far as RPGs go: they both de-emphasize realism and tactical play in favor of evoking certain emotional responses, and are well-served by games with simple resolution that emphasize description over game mechanics.

I think the experiment was largely successful, but there are some things that I want to do differently when we resume the game in two weeks.  In particular, I want to encourage the players to be more assertive over the applicability of their Cliches.    There was a bit too much “mother may I?” in our session, with the players asking whether their Cliches cover certain actions they want to take, and too much peering at the super-simple character sheets as if an appropriate Cliche would suddenly jump out at them.  Does Deep-Space Scoutship Captain cover firing a pistol?  It does if you say so, Captain.

As GM I think I need to be more generous with setting target numbers according to the Cliche being used.  I’m used to setting a target and then everybody just sees if they can beat it, but Risus doesn’t exactly work that way.  Making a tricky pistol shot should probably be something like TN 10 for Deep-Space Scoutship Captain, and only 7 for Gold-Medallist Pistol Champion.

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Hand-waving Dungeon Travel

The party that’s been exploring Stonehell has reached a point where getting back to the yet-unexplored part of the dungeon and then out again is taking too much of the play-session, at least if I roll for wandering monsters as they travel and restock the likely places like the Orc’s guard-post.  In the old days, we used to freeze time in-between sessions… the party wouldn’t overnight in the dungeon, but we’d break in the middle of things and resume there next time.  This was pretty much a necessity when you were squeezing a few minutes play in at lunch-time or in study hall, but it carried over into our Friday night games as well.

I’m a little reluctant to go that route with the current game, preferring the party to start and end outside the dungeon–both because the line-up of characters changes when one kid or the other has a sleep-over or Elyssa is away performing or something, and because even if we froze, so far every session at least one character has been knocked around enough to require rest and recuperation even if nobody except Revenge has been injured  beyond the ability of one of Horatia’s miracles to revive.  So I’m considering just hand-waving their entrances and exits unless they’ve got monsters in hot pursuit.  For one thing, now that most of them are second level and considering the damage they’ve caused, the number of times the Orcs’ morale checks have sent them fleeing, and the psychological warfare they’ve been employing (they’ve actually taken the time to gut many of the Orcs they’ve killed in order to reinforce the impression that Horatia’s god regularly does this to their opponents)  it would be fairly easy to justify the Orcs starting to give them a wide berth.

If you run dungeoneering expeditions, how do you handle this?  Do you let parties camp overnight in the dungeon?  Do you make sure there are shortcuts so they don’t have to traverse lots of explored areas?  Or do you just do what I’m contemplating and say, ok, twenty minutes later you’re back at the closed portcullis…what do you do now?

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Which Fantasy Writer Am I?

Interesting.  Not the writer I like best or identify with most, but not bad. I like all of Tolkien, Lovecraft and even Lewis better than I do Moorcock, and I loathe Miéville…but my fictional universes are probably a lot more like Moorcock than any of those three.


Your result for Which fantasy writer are you?…

Michael Moorcock (b. 1939)

11 High-Brow, 3 Violent, -5 Experimental and 31 Cynical!

Congratulations! You are High-Brow, Violent, Traditional and Cynical! These concepts are defined below.

Michael Moorcock is one of the most influential fantasy writers of all times, his impact rivalling that of Tolkien’s. Perhaps China Miéville described it best when he said: “I think we are all post-Moorcock.” Apart from being the editor of New Worlds twice in the 60s and 70s, thereby being instrumental in bringing on the so-called “new wave” of science fiction which changed all fantastic literature forever, Moorcock’s own work has been an inspiration to more recent writers. He is also known for not hiding or blunting his views on fiction which he regards as inferior, a trait which has lead him to apply harsh criticism on authors such as J R R Tolkien, C S Lewis an H P Lovecraft.

His most popular work are the Elric books. Elric was originally conceived as a sort of critical comment to or even parody of R E Howard’s Conan, but the character and his world soon grew to form a tragic and somewhat fatalistic drama. Elric’s world is, in turn, only a small part of the huge Multiverse, a set of stories from all sorts of worlds (including our own) which is forever locked in a struggle between the two powers of Law and Chaos. Whenever one of these powers is threatening to become too powerful, an incarnation of the Eternal Champion, a group of warriors possessing the same spirit, is forced to fight to maintain the delicate balance between the two. Moorcock has worked several of his heroes into this cycle of books, including Hawkmoon, Corum and, of course, Elric.

Moorcock’s stories are often stories about warriors, however reluctant they may be, and are usually explicitly violent, even if the purpose of all the hacking and slashing is to free humans and other beings from oppression and, ultimately, fear. There is little happiness, though, for those who are forced to do the fighting and all they can hope for is a short time of respite, sometimes in the town of Tanelorn, the only place in the multiverse that the eternal struggle between Law and Chaos can’t reach.

It should also be mentioned that, even though Moorcock has done quite some experimenting in his days, it can’t be ignored that a major part of his books are traditional adventure stories that become more than that by their inclusion into a grand vision. A little ironically , perhaps, for an author who has criticized the “world-building school” of fantasy, Moorcock achieves much of his popularity through building, if not a world, a world vision.

You are also a lot like China Miéville

If you want something more gentle, try Ursula K le Guin

If you’d like a challenge, try your exact opposite, Katharine Kerr

Your score

This is how to interpret your score: Your attitudes have been measured on four different scales, called 1) High-Brow vs. Low-Brow, 2) Violent vs. Peaceful, 3) Experimental vs. Traditional and 4) Cynical vs. Romantic. Imagine that when you were born, you were in a state of innocence, a tabula rasa who would have scored zero on each scale. Since then, a number of circumstances (including genetic, cultural and environmental factors) have pushed you towards either end of these scales. If you’re at 45 or -45 you would be almost entirely cynical, low-brow or whatever. The closer to zero you are, the less extreme your attitude. However, you should always be more of either (eg more romantic than cynical). Please note that even though High-Brow, Violent, Experimental and Cynical have positive numbers (1 through 45) and their opposites negative numbers (-1 through -45), this doesn’t mean that either quality is better. All attitudes have their positive and negative sides, as explained below.

High-Brow vs. Low-Brow

You received 11 points, making you more High-Brow than Low-Brow. Being high-browed in this context refers to being more fascinated with the sort of art that critics and scholars tend to favour, rather than the best-selling kind. At their best, high-brows are cultured, able to appreciate the finer nuances of literature and not content with simplifications. At their worst they are, well, snobs.

Violent vs. Peaceful

You received 3 points, making you more Violent than Peaceful. Please note that violent in this context does not mean that you, personally, are prone to violence. This scale is a measurement of a) if you are tolerant to violence in fiction and b) whether you see violence as a means that can be used to achieve a good end. If you are, and you do, then you are violent as defined here. At their best, violent people are the heroes who don’t hesitate to stop the villain threatening innocents by means of a good kick. At their worst, they are the villains themselves.
Experimental vs. Traditional

You received -5 points, making you more Traditional than Experimental. Your position on this scale indicates if you’re more likely to seek out the new and unexpected or if you are more comfortable with the familiar, especially in regards to culture. Note that traditional as defined here does not equal conservative, in the political sense. At their best, traditional people don’t change winning concepts, favouring storytelling over empty poses. At their worst, they are somewhat narrow-minded.

Cynical vs. Romantic

You received 31 points, making you more Cynical than Romantic. Your position on this scale indicates if you are more likely to be wary, suspicious and skeptical to people around you and the world at large, or if you are more likely to believe in grand schemes, happy endings and the basic goodness of humankind. It is by far the most vaguely defined scale, which is why you’ll find the sentence “you are also a lot like x” above. If you feel that your position on this scale is wrong, then you are probably more like author x. At their best, cynical people are able to see through lies and spot crucial flaws in plans and schemes. At their worst, they are overly negative, bringing everybody else down.

Author image by Catriona Sparks from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Michael_Moorcock.jpg Click for license info.


Take Which fantasy writer are you? at HelloQuizzy

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Exploring the Contested Corridors

Friday we had a good long session of the game with the kids, where they explored more of Amityville Mike’s Stonehell dungeon, in particular the 1C section: The Contested Corridors.  The game continues to go well, and much enjoyment is being had by all.  There was one more character death this time, Grace’s character Horatia, but a succesful dying prayer (natural 20) restored the character to life in a spectacular fashion, though much in need of rest and recuperation.  The party continues to be more and more impressed with Horatia’s make-believe god Horatio, which Grace plays to the hilt.  It will be interesting to see if they ever do figure out that the god she claims to be worshipping isn’t the one she’s actually devoted to.

They also leveled up, all except Charlie’s new character (replacing the deceased Revenge) and Elyssa’s new-to-the-campaign fighter, Biff.  Mostly that involved getting another dice worth of Stamina points, since nobody opted for trying to increase any stats, and choosing a new Talent, plus selecting new spells for the Mages.   I’ve replaced the specific effects of spells  like Magic Missile, Burning Hands, and Shocking Grasp with more generalized versions where when you learn the spell you pick the element (from a list of available elements) along the lines of Trappings in Savage Worlds.   Mac’s Rogue (Thief/Mage) decided to specialize in Electrical magic, in return for the vague promise of future benefits for having done so;  Tommy’s Mage decided to branch out, so he can now cast either the Ice or Poison versions of the two elemental spells he knows: dart and fan.

I had hoped to spend some time RPing the interaction with the Adventurer’s Guild and with Rowena the Healer, an NPC they just met and daughter of Contus the boat-man, who ferries them to the island with the dungeon as needed. But the kids were getting a little antsy, and needed some good hack-time.  One of the things I’ve found about GMing Stonehell is that there are really more empty rooms than the kids will put up with.  Part of that is Mike leaving plenty of space for GMs to insert their own stuff, and part that there’s a certain logic to not having everything cheek-by-jowl to everything else,  but I’ve been sliding more and more towards having something to do or think about in every room.   Some of the time I’m just shifting the location of a random encounter so that it’s either  in the room or comes upon them while they’re checking it out, but I’m also starting to just wing extra stuff, like the giant crab pretending to be a table, or the secret compartment beneath the broken statue containing a copper bracelet that grants immunity to the lightning that the trapped suits of armor cast.  I’ll be interested to see what they do with that, once they figure it out.

The orcs continue to be a source of great amusement; making them comically stupid has worked out really well.  The highlight of the session was when Tommy (the youngest) managed to fool a big crowd of orcs who were attracted by the sounds of them fighting the giant crab by shouting through the door in orcish “They went the other way!”  It’ll also be fun when they meet the bogeys (shemped goblins) and find out that not all monsters are that gullible.

One thing they’re not very good about is running away when the odds aren’t good.  So far, it’s worked out ok for them, but so far they’ve been quite lucky with some of Horatia’s miracles.  On the other hand, at least one of the miracles wouldn’t have been necessary if they hadn’t been really unlucky with one of the orc’s damage rolls. I’m wondering if I should tweak the rules for extra damage hits slightly; I had thought that I made really bad hits rare enough, but now I’m not sure.

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Old School is a Perfectly Cromulent Term

“Old School” means doing things the way people used to do them.  It’s a relative term, since what’s Old School depends on what time you’re using as a reference.  Depending on when or who you’re talking about, electric typewriters could be newfangled inventions or unbearably old school, practically antique.  School also carries a slight connotation that something may be a conscious decision to identify with a like-minded group (as when one refers to “schools” of artists).  It’s perfectly objective, in the sense that for whatever you might be talking about, there really are facts about how something was done in the old days, and techniques and approaches that hadn’t been invented back then.  If somebody is doing something exactly the same way that it was done in the past, there’s no doubt or confusion in anybody’s mind when you say that they’re adhering to the old school.  That’s true whether they’re banging away on a vintage IBM Selectric, or rolling 3d6 “mud dice” in order for their stats.

Where it gets slightly more complicated is when you want to talk about something that isn’t itself strictly Old School, but is in the style of the Old School.  Stylistic decisions are not completely subjective, but do depend on picking out and highlighting certain aspects as salient.  Here you can get strong disagreement as to whether the aspects being emphasized are essential, or whether crucial aspects are being ignored, but it’s still not the case that anything goes.  You can write entire books about what the essential aspects of Impressionism are, and books disagreeing with those books, but it’s not just in the eye of the beholder. A photorealistic painting by Ralph Goings isn’t it.  Neither is the Mona Lisa.  View From The Dunes with Beach and Piers may be, but Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Red is definitely not.

When it comes to RPGs, because of their relatively short history Old School almost always refers to the period right at the beginning of the hobby.  Among a group of brand-new RPG players who’d never played anything except D&D 4e, you could refer to 3rd edition play without irony as Old School, but addressing a wider audience that includes people who were actually there at the start that’s a recipe for confusion; I’d recommend at least including a quick caveat.  Similarly, if you’re going to talk about how you’re playing 4e Old School-style, you probably should spell out what you mean and what aspects of Old School you’re picking up on and emphasizing in your play.  (For a humorous look at some of the possibly salient points identified with Old School Play, see Amityville Mike’s “Old School Question Finally Answered” chart.)

Does it matter?  Only insofar as words and communication matter. “Next phase, New Wave, dance craze, anyways, it’s still Rock’n’Roll to me” nevertheless presupposes there are things that are Rock’n’Roll and things that are not.  There is a sense in which Mozart and Metallica are much the same thing…but that sense is pretty limited.  It might help you if you’re asking where in the store you’ll find music CDs, but it’s not likely to be much use in trying to decide whether to buy the CD.  If someone told you “it’s all just music, man, stop trying to label it with your rigid definitions” you wouldn’t find that particularly helpful advice if you were trying to arrange with your friends to go to a concert.  And if they told you that you’re insistence that there was a difference and that you preferred one over the other was somehow wrongheaded or interfering with their enjoyment, and it’s all just feelings anyway, that’s just a round-about way of telling you to shut up.

Disagreements, even strong disagreements, about what are the essential aspects of a style and what aren’t are not evidence of time being wasted. They’re a learning exercise, at least as long as they don’t degenerate into a flame-war.  If you keep an open mind you can learn a lot about what’s important to you about a style when you’re discussing it with somebody who thinks you’re dead wrong–more than you ever learn from somebody who shares all your unspoken assumptions.  You might even change your mind.  If not, you might at least learn to sharpen those aspects that really do turn out to be essential to your appreciation of the style.  People who aren’t interested in what makes up a particular style, whether it’s Old School, New Wave, Impressionist, or whatever, are more than welcome not to join in that particular conversation.

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Names and Language in Nonesuch

Anything the players want.  That’s what they do anyway, and I know from bitter experience that once I start in on listing appropriate names for cultures and races it’s just a short step to a naming language and then a full-blown death spiral into conlangs.  So Umbry, Auxi-lock, Revenge, Expendable 1401, Tomato, Hermia/Horatia, Caboose, Hurlon, Poden Persas, welcome to the Land of Nonesuch!  Hope you survive the experience!

Well, except for you Revenge, better luck next life.

One thing I haven’t really settled is how many languages there are and how many the characters know.  Originally I was allowing each character one extra language per INT bonus, so pretty much all the characters had one or none. Everybody in the kids’ game wanted Orc, because that was the first group of humanoid monsters they ran into, and they were fun to talk to.  Now I’m thinking that will be kind of dull when they run into other monsters, unless they speak common, and I’m also wondering if I’m taking too American a view of foreign languages.  In a setting where you’re exposed to them regularly, it probably shouldn’t be so hard to pick them up.  Maybe one extra spoken language per point of Int over 9, and one dead language per Int Bonus?  It would be something to do with Int for non-Mages, given the system doesn’t really emphasize skills.  And I want characters to be talking to the monsters, even the hostile ones, because that’s where the RP is.

Thoughts and suggestions?  How do you handle it in your games?

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Humanoid Monsters of Nonesuch

Here’s a sketch of the various humanoid monsters common to the Land of Nonesuch.  The goal is to make them, not unique, but distinctive and recognizable…if they’re mooks, they’re not generic interchangeable mooks.  On the other hand, I want to avoid the “in this world, Orcs are descended from flightless birds, and are the proud descendants of an ancient and cosmopolitan culture, more like feathery elves” that I’m sometimes prone to.  I want them to be reminiscent of common fantasy and folklore, if slightly skew. Some of these have already made an appearance in the kids’ game.

  • Orcs – magically evolved pigs (totally swiped from Grognardia’s Dwimmermount).  Evil, comically greedy, quarrelsome, and easy to trick.  The Three Stooges of humanoid monsters.
  • Kobolds – magically evolved dogs.  Neutral, generally traders and merchants in the dungeon economy (Rat on a Stick, anyone?), some actually live peacefully in some surface cities.  Something along the lines of Nessie from Too Many Curses or the kobolds from Suikoden.
  • Hobgoblins – mischievous house-sprites.  I know that I just got done saying I didn’t want this to be another “well, in my world” setting, but folklore trumps Tolkien and D&D here.  Good, although tricksy.  Puck is a hobgoblin.
  • Redcaps – these replace the D&D militaristic, organized, larger-sized goblin troopers.  Evil, sadistic buggers who dye their caps in human blood.  Iron boots, iron pikes, and faster than anybody can run away.
  • Goblins –  I’m really torn here.  On the one hand, I have this vision of them as these nasty, deformed little mushroom men out of Goya that use human corpses for compost.  On the other hand, I’m also attracted to the Labyrinth version of goblins (also one of the sources for the feel of this setting), with each one a unique Henson-esque critter.  I could combine the two, I suppose, or have them both be true in different parts of the setting.  Or I could split them into two different kinds of monsters and call one of them goblins and the other… I could call them wirry-cows, I suppose, which would be good folklore but be unintentionally silly to my players.  Ooh.  Bogeys would be a great name for the mushroom-type.
  • Bugbears – more the creepy bear in the woods sort than a generic bogeyman. Definitely not an oversized Hobgoblin war-leader out of Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance.
  • Trolls and Trollwives.  These guys.  The males are big and hairy, with huge noses and ears; the females are slight and beautiful.  Trolls are one of the PC races in the setting, though you have to roll really well to qualify.
  • Ogres and Giants – Haven’t really given a lot of thought to them yet.  Probably straight out of the Book of Wierd.