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Skill Challenges: Threat or Menace?

This has been bugging me a while, so I’m finally going to rant about it and get it out of my system.

Skill Challenges are what D&D 4e has in place of roleplaying.  And no, I’m not really kidding.  As a method of injecting some pseudo-RP in a tabletop miniatures skirmish game, they make perfect sense: a series of discrete, finite dice rolls so you can get quickly get past the RP and on with the real business of pushing minis around, and to provide some meta-game tension to the “boring” process of thinking of solutions to problems and playing them out.  As an aid to actual RP, they discourage what you want to encourage (creativity, experimentation, thinking as the character), and encourage what you want to discourage (meta-gaming and thinking inside the box).  I think it’s particularly telling that as originally released, even after all the playtesting 4e got, the Skill Challenge numbers were utterly broken and had to be rewritten and released as errata.

The basic mechanism is that you take something that would otherwise be RPed out and replace it with a Skill Challenge of a particular difficulty: you need to score N successes before M failures (N >M in most of the examples I’ve seen) or you fail.  N and M, and the difficulty of the skill rolls (DC in D&D terms) are determined by the difficulty of the Skill Challenge.  The Challenge will then list the Skills that can be applied and their DCs (at least in terms of easy, moderate, and hard), as well as how many successes (or failures) a check is worth towards completing the Skill Challenge (default 1).  Typically the list of allowed Skill checks, or even whether they can undertake a Skill Challenge, won’t be shared with the players, which is where people get fooled into thinking that this is somehow a form of RP instead of a replacement for it.  The process of discovering whether there’s a Skill Challenge and what Skills are allowed is superficially similar to the discussion you might have around the table of plans and approaches to try, but there’s a world of difference under the hood.

What’s wrong with that?

  • The biggest thing is the “Before M failures” rule.  That changes it from an abstraction to a mini-game.  The difference is that an abstraction simplifies things by ignoring irrelevant (hopefully) features to focus on getting reasonable outcomes, mini-games introduce features that have no counterpart in what you’re modeling and no purpose other than to make the mechanics of what you’re doing game-able.  In D&D hit points are an abstraction…they ignore things like exactly how or where you were hit (or even whether you were hit and actually wounded or just battered, bruised and tuckered out) to focus on the potential outcomes after a certain amount of battle: defeated, unharmed, victorious but weakened and less likely to win the next battle.  The fact that they’re a very high-level abstraction has caused a lot of complaint over the years, and prompted countless attempts to fix them or replace them with a different abstraction, but at least they don’t introduce extra new complications in the form of how do you massage your hit-points to use them most efficiently.  The Skill Check failures rule doesn’t represent anything in the game world (if you’re trying to track goblins through the woods, it doesn’t suddenly become impossible because your companion back in town failed to remember some detail about local politics), it’s just an artificial mechanism to introduce tension and limit the number of things the players can try. Arbitrarily limiting the number of things the players can try is bad. If they’re not expending resources or up against a deadline, cutting off their creativity is the last thing you want to be doing in an RPG, even if it makes perfect sense in a board game.
  • The fact that it’s a mini-game encourages/requires meta-gaming.  The order in which you try the tests is crucial, so rather than leading off with the skills that are the most relevant to the task you’re trying to accomplish you have to lead off with the skills you’re best at.  It’s the codification of the old joke Q: If your keys are over there, why are you looking here?  A: Because the light’s better here.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s something your character would attempt, what matters is how good the character is at it and the fact that if he fails he can screw up the Challenge for the entire party.
  • It discourages improvisation.   Dividing the world into things for which there are Skill Challenges and things for which there aren’t pushes the players towards the courses of action for which there are Skill Challenges and discourages them from trying things for which there aren’t (this is true even if the GM is willing and able to generate Skill Challenges on the fly).   Also, because Skill Challenges are defined in terms of making skill rolls you’re discouraged from thinking outside the box and substituting a non-skill roll approach to the same task (e.g. if you can make a Climbing roll to gain a success by getting to the top of a tree and spotting something, you ought to be able to do the same thing with an innate or spell-given ability to fly, or to send your flying familiar aloft.  The GM could just rule those as successes, but that doesn’t seem to be the way Challenges are designed.  The point isn’t the tasks you need to accomplish, it’s whether you make the required rolls).  Finally, by providing a list of approved skills and their uses to count towards the Challenge, it discourages using substitutes (e.g. if the Challenge calls for intimidating someone, what about persuading, bribing or seducing them instead?) or trying oddball or long-shot things.
  • By reducing everything to a series of die-rolls it eliminates any of the back-and-forth and progressive discovery and reasoning that are the essence of role playing.  This is an old complaint along the lines of if characters can just roll Diplomacy, then what’s the point of playing out conversations?  But it’s as valid now as it was then…if your game allows you to substitute skill rolls for interacting with NPCs and making actual deductions based on your knowledge instead of using them as a supplement or a fall-back if you get stuck, then you’re devaluing roleplaying.  Now 4e has made devaluing roleplaying one of its key components.

Let’s take a look at actual play, by someone wildly enthusiastic about Skill Challenges (note, I’m not criticizing Emptythreat15 or his GM at all; they had a lot of fun, which is what counts, but I’m arguing that they could have just as much fun and more often with a system that doesn’t get in the way of what they’re trying to do):

  • A Brand New Nail-Biter: Skill Challenge « Dice Monkey

    • My male dwarf normally gets decent initiative; however, my female is cursed to having initiative rolls of less than 10. So my dwarf waded into combat with the hideous dogs and I thought to myself, ‘I wonder if we could improve the attitude of that boar and have it help us out…we don’t have Handle Animal anymore…but hell, maybe the DM will think of something suitable’.

      So my turn came around, and I explain to the DM that I want to undergo a skill challenge to improve the attitude of the boar, and what do you know, the skill challenge “Taming The Beast” was listed in the rules for the adventure. Sweet.

That right there is enough to make a grown man weep.  The player comes up with a really neat idea, and what’s he excited about?  The module gives him permission to try it.

This was turning out to be no easy task though. 4 successes before 2 failures? This thing was just built for failure. Fortunately for me though, I was allowed to use the better of my Heal or Nature checks. Asking a cleric to make a Heal check is like asking a clown to make a balloon giraffe, so I was pretty excited. Much to my chagrin, my clerics +11 Heal modifier does very little when you roll a 2 on a d20. One failure already. Not good.

The next two rounds, a 15 and 16 consecutively, making 26 and 27 Heal checks, and successful ones at that. The next turn, two have a bit of a safety net, her brother, the paladin, came over and aided her on her checks, giving her a +2. She made the next check with a roll of 10, and spent an action point for her last skill check, rolling a 10 once again. The boar was calm, and finally, so was I.

So what’s wrong with this picture?  Practically everything, though at least this is a situation where it’s conceivable that botched attempts could make the plan impossible to carry out (fiddle with the wounds unsuccessfully long enough and the boar could be too enraged to befriend even if you eventually get it right) .  Note the way the player meta-games which skills to apply, and when to get the second character involved.  Note also how the player was channeled into a solution that involved making skill rolls, even with two characters that have magical healing abilities that would have made perfect sense in terms of game-world and genre logic to use at that point.  I’d also be inclined to hold it against the system that what seems to drive the tension is the roles themselves, rather than, say, the fact that a fight is raging all around them and they’re spending time fiddling around with the caged animal while their companions are fighting for their lives.

Now imagine playing out the same scene without being anchored down by the Skill Challenge system.  There’s nothing they accomplished that couldn’t have been done by straight role-playing, unless you just don’t trust the GM.  The only difference (besides the fact that the player might have made different choices about whether to involve the second character or use magical healing without the meta-game considerations) is that the task would be open-ended…the player would have an additional decision to make if the first two turns didn’t succeed about whether to continue (and perhaps up the stakes by using special abilities) or give it up and help with the fight.  All the Skill Challenge system does here is dumb it down.

Let’s look at another example, this one a bit more elaborate, and told from the point of view of a GM designing a Skill Challenge.  Again, I’m not meaning to disparage what At Will wrote, on the contrary I’m using this as an example because I think it’s a good Skill Challenge, that would be better if you dumped the whole Skill Challenge mechanic.

You have to go read it, because otherwise I’d end up quoting the whole thing.

So, now that you’ve read it, here’s what’s wrong.   There is, as I believe is typical, no justification whatsoever for the mechanism itself.  There’s just no earthly reason that failing to remember something about the history of the area, or to have a flash of insight, should have any bearing at all on whether you can intimidate a child into telling you what you want to know.  But if you try and fail at those two things as well as using Diplomacy on the villagers, you’ve got no reason to talk to the child…it becomes impossible for you to get information out of him.  The fact that Intimidate is the only skill usable on the child is another failing, in my book…it doesn’t matter if one of the characters is the motherly sort with oodles of Charisma and Persuasion or a spell like Charm Person (or whatever the 4e equivalent is)…that approach is something you can’t even attempt.  In the comments At Will makes it clearer that he’d allow you to use appropriate magic to bypass some or all of the Challenge or to roleplay some of the encounters (but he’d make whether that accomplishes anything contingent on the die-roll…all the talk is just window-dressing), but what advantage is there to even using the Challenge mechanic then?

Here’s how the Old School would do it (in this case, Old School refers to all the way back to 3.5):

Kobolds have kidnapped a group of children from the village the PCs are currently in.  The players must gather information to find out who did it, and find their way to the location in order to rescue the children before the kobolds can sacrifice them to a dragon.

If you talk to the villagers, they don’t know much, but they know that they miss their children and when they went missing.  They were out in the fields…; Someone does report that they thought they saw more children than normal playing for a while…

One child who is still in the village seems to know something. The child doesn’t want to confess because he’s afraid they might come after him if he tells someone, but if the adventurers can persuade or intimidate him somehow he saw some creatures that look like small dragon-people.

Somebody who knows this area and its history will know that this area has not seen too many hard times, but goblins and kobolds can always be a menace. Goblins haven’t been seen around this area for some time…

Examining the tracks in the field, and near some of the houses,  reveals that fairly small creatures kidnapped these children, and they headed North out of the forest.  Appropriate knowledge will further reveal that  creatures are most likely kobolds judging by the tracks.  Appropriate knowledge recalls that kobolds favor mountainous terrain.

Gaining a good overview of the territory (by climbing up to a advantageous spot high among the trees, flight, clairvoyance) grants a good view of the terrain, and suggests three areas that the kidnappers might have gone: a mountain slope, a ravine to the South, or into the dense center of the forest.

And so forth.  Essentially, all the work that went into devising the Skill Challenge is valuable, and can indicate the kinds of information that you can get by talking to the various people and examining the scene.   What’s the matter with Skill Challenges is the mechanism itself, not the putting extra thought and care into how various skills and abilities can be used in the scenario.  You want to strip out extraneous requirements that only specific skills be used (except perhaps noting things that could give a particular approach an advantage, such as so-and-so being a coward and easily intimidated), and beef it up with additional information so that they players themselves can reason about the information they uncovered (the combination of the tracks heading North out of the forest and the overview of the area showing only one likely place to the North, or the overview revealing the mountain and the knowledge check revealing that kobolds like mountains).  You don’t want to artificially prolong it, by requiring a certain number of dice rolls before they can proceed–if they think they’ve figured out that it was kobolds and they’re likely to be in the mountains, by all means let them head for the mountains to take a look around.  You also don’t want to cut them short by saying, oops, you’ve failed, no point in trying to gather more information or recall anything further.  You most emphatically do not want to discourage them trying oddball or long-shot approaches by penalizing them if they fail.  If you want to put them under time pressure, then attach amounts of time that it takes to try different things, and let them decide which they are willing to spend time on and whether they can split the tasks up more efficiently, don’t just arbitrarily rule that failing to recall a fact about kobolds chews up just as much of the day (moves them closer to failure) as canvassing the neighborhood and talking to all the farmers.   For role-playing purposes you can easily get everything that is good about them, and avoid most of the bad, by dropping the Skill Challenge mechanic altogether and just using the list as a guideline to the kinds of things the players can roleplay out.

Skill Challenges take what was a reasonable idea, of examining a situation and making note of all the obvious (and some less obvious) ways that you could use certain skills to obtain information, advance your agenda, or solve a problem and formalizes it into a mini-game that basically piths all that was good and fun about roleplaying to fit it within the framework of a board-game.  The entire Skill Challenge system of collective accomplishment and punishment pushes the players more strongly than ever before into treating the party as a Borg collective of drones with various specializations controlled by a hive-mind, rather than a group of individuals with their own psychologies and approaches to life.  Think about it. There is simply nothing in-character that could be said by one character to another as to why he shouldn’t attempt to recall what he learned about kobolds until some other character elsewhere has either succeeded or failed in picking a lock or climbing a tree (or vice-versa).  Skill Challenges make ordinary role-play harmful to the party, and for no reason at all other than it to satisfy the arbitrary strictures imposed by the mechanics.  If nothing else, keeping the Skill Challenges and dropping the “before M failures” clause would be a step back towards making them at least compatible with role-playing.

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Bait and Switch

This month, the RPG Blog Carnival topic is “Transitions and Transformations,” so I’d like to talk a little about Baiting and Switching campaign premises in RPGs.  The basic idea, seductive in its simplicity, is that you emulate a common staple of fantastic fiction where the protagonists find themselves in a setting or situation that is a radical change from their everyday lives and for which they are unprepared (as when a group of children find a strange world in the back of the wardrobe in the house they’re staying in, or a dying prospector is astrally transported to Mars) by having the players prepare characters as if they were going to play in a particular setting (e.g. the Old West), and part-way through the first session plop them in a new one (Barsoom).  In one swell foop you short-circuit any temptation to meta-gaming in the character build process, eliminating any difficulty over professors, reporters and nurses curiously well-versed in the handling of shotguns and dynamite in your Call of Cthulhu game, and you present the players with the exact psychological experience that the characters have of being gobsmacked when their plans for their lives are turned upside-down.  That’s a pretty rare thing to be able to accomplish in an RPG, so it’s quite tempting.

I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking that I’m going to warn you against doing it, because the risks are too great.  The players might not like the new premise that they didn’t buy into; they may have built characters that have rich connections with the original premise and are reduced to hollow shells in the new one or may have an obsessive motivation to return to the original; if the characters aren’t built with the setting in mind they may be ineffective to the point of not being fun to play; if any characters are lost the switch in premise might make it impossible to neatly add new ones, etc.  In essence you’re playing a trick on the players, and what they might have cheerfully agreed to if you’d presented it openly they may end up resenting when it’s forced upon them, ruining a perfectly good campaign for a brief moment of epiphany when they realize what the game is really about.

Let me tell you, though, that when it works, it’s beautiful, and can cause great awe and glee around the table.  To me, that’s worth the risk.

That’s not to say that there aren’t things you can do to minimize the risk.  Take, for example, the Escape From Tartarus game I ran.  You might want to read the recaps of Part 1 and Part 2 before going further.

I knew going into it that the bait and switch I was planning was tricky, so there were some things that I did  specifically to address that:

  • The game was planned as a one-shot, instead of a full campaign.  If things had gone badly the number of sessions ruined would be minimal (it ended up taking two sessions, but it was also apparent by the end of the first session that it was going to work).
  • The players were all given pre-gens.  This reduced their investment in the initial character concept (nobody spent two weeks working on a back-story that would be completely discarded), and allowed me to make sure that everybody had something they could do once the switch occurred.
  • Because I know my players well, I was able to tailor the pre-gens to their preferences, to the extent of having them be reminiscent of characters that they’d already played and enjoyed.
  • It was presented as “Here’s what I’m running this week.”  Slightly high-handed, but again reduced the players investment in the initial premise and eliminated any hint of breaking a promise to deliver them a game based on what had been previously agreed to.
  • The switch granted the characters a step up (in this case a big one) in importance and ability to exert an influence on the course of events.  It’s much better for player buy-in for the alleged madman to find out he’s Corwin, Prince of Amber than for Corwin, Prince of Amber to find out he’s actually a madman hallucinating in the loony-bin.
  • The shift left a goodly amount of continuity between pre and post.  In this case, the literal setting remained the same, while the power-level and style underwent a radical change (from gritty prison drama to super-agent adventure).  I think continuity helps: change the setting, keep the style; change the style, keep the setting; change both, at least keep the themes.  If you change everything, the players may feel that you’ve just switched games in the middle.

The Escape From Tartarus was one of the most succesful games I’ve run, and everybody had a really good time.  In fact, it’s one of the settings my players have indicated an interest in returning to some day.

I’ve run other Bait and Switch games, some wildly successful (The Midnight Special), some failures (The Irvine Effect) and I think the above hits upon the key points to make it work:  Minimize the Bait, by not letting the players get too invested in or put too much work into the initial set-up, and carefully target the switch so that the players can experience some sense of continuity and the switch leaves them in their comfort zone as to the kind of characters and situations they like to play, or places them there if that’s not where they started.  Done right, and it’ll be a game to remember.

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Elves & Espers: G-nomes

G-nomes are the descendants of pre-Apocalypse gnomes, and embrace genetic engineering with the same enthusiasm (and sometimes explosive results) as their ancestors embraced mechanisms and before that alchemy.  They use magical viruses to rewrite their own genetic codes to cosmetically alter their appearances and give themselves interesting and unusual animal parts and abilities. They are the size of gnomes (about the size of a human child) and are always humanoid, with large eyes, but sport a wide variety of fur, scales, feathers, or brightly colored skins, as well as accouterments like horns, claws, fangs, and so forth.

In New Ark City they’re often found as Web Runners, using their rocket-skates to traverse the cables that make up the web delivering messages hither and yon, or in similar professions where regard for one’s personal safety is regarded as a handicap.

G-Nome

Small (-1 Toughness)
Natural Weapons (Str+d6 with one, or Str+d4 with two) – G-Nomes may choose what natural weapons they have, and may choose to shed them and grow different ones, though the process takes a week during which they will have no usable natural weapon.
Attractive +2 CHA. G-Nomes may look bizarre, but they see no reason to be unattractive, and whatever look they adopt will be designed to be aesthetically pleasing
Low Light Vision.  Their large eyes give them low-light vision.

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Elves & Espers: Zombots

Zombots are corpses that have been infested with nanite colonies that grow mechanical linkages to make them lurch around in an unholy resemblance to life.   Zombots are hideous travesties, with wires and rods piercing their flesh, writhing under their skin and snaking around their bloody and decaying bodies, manipulating them like grotesque marionettes.  In settings where the Guts skill is used, encountering a Zombot requires a Guts check.

Zombots have no other drive than to create more Zombots and consume flesh and circuitry to sustain themselves, though forbidden Necrotech can be used to command them.  In its inactive form, the nanites are a grey dust (Zombot Dust) that is harmless unless it comes in contact with a corpse or an open wound.  A corpse will become a functioning zombot in 1d6 rounds; a living being will have to make a Vig roll every hour or suffer a Wound and once it becomes Incapacitated will rise as a zombot.  Zombots require flesh to function (it’s part of the programming of the nanites), so although fire won’t destroy the mechanical parts, if you burn away all the flesh, the Zombot is destroyed.  Zombots require a steady infusion of new flesh and circuitry to sustain their activity, and will always be on the prowl trying to consume; once a Zombot has killed a victim it will spend 1d4 rounds feasting, ignoring what else is going on unless it comes under attack. If it spends more than a day without being able to consume anything, it will go into hibernate mode, remaining motionless and emitting no energy readings until a victim gets within movement range (Pace).

When deciding what to attack, the Zombot will go first for the closest person who attacked it, next for the closest victim (choose randomly for equally distant targets); count all robots, computers, and sophisticated machinery as potential victims. Zombots will only employ ranged attacks (if the form has them) if it is not possible to close to melee.  Zombots will incorporate whatever weapons the victim was carrying into itself and use them.  Zombot infection, however, is only carried by natural weapons, not incorporated ones.

Trafficking in Zombot dust (and all forms of Necrotech) is punishable by death in New Ark City.

Zombots

Zombots have stats as their living counterpart with the following exceptions:

Str: +2d Smt: Unintelligent Pace: -2.

Undead: +2 Toughness, +2 to recover from Shaken, No Called Shots, No Wound Penalties
Infectious: creatures bitten/clawed by Zombots must make a Vig roll every hour or suffer a wound, and will become Zombots after they’ve been Incapacitated
Regeneration none while active, Fast once killed
Weakness Fire, double damage, prevents regeneration

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Elves & Espers: Pigsies

Pigsies are flying porcine vermin. They are sentient, though they never direct their intelligence towards anything other than getting high, eating, crapping, and screwing.  They resemble pigs with butterfly wings (the dust from which is highly psychoactive) and human hands instead of front trotters, and wear rags for clothes.  They are generally armed with bows and spears, and bags of magical powder that they hurl at opponents.  They can chew their way into just about anything, and whatever they can’t eat or snort they break and befoul.  They stink to the high heavens.  They enjoy playing malicious tricks on people, but will usually stop short of outright murder, though if a blinded, hallucinating victim should fall to his death from a great height that would be hilarious.

Pigsie

Str d4 Agl d8 Spr d6 Smr d4 Vig d6
Parry 5  Tough 3 Pace 4/10
Size -2 (-2 to be hit, +2 to hit man-sized foes, -2 Tough-already accounted for)
Fight d8   Throw d6   Shoot d6  Taunt d8
Bow d4 +2 AP  Elf-shot d8 v. Smr or -2 to Trait Rolls (-4 on Raise) from hallucinations
Spear d4
Slumber Powder (1 use) Spr -2 in a Medium Burst or sleep for 1 minute
Blind Powder (1 use) d8 vs. Spr or -6 to Trait Rolls, Parry drops to 2 for 3 rounds

Pigsie Dust

Magically psychoactive dust from ground Pigsie wings, highly addictive.  Grants 2d10 extra Power Points for 1 hour, Vig -2 roll (cumulative if you take another dose before the first wears off) or accompanied by hallucinations (-2 to Trait Rolls for 1 hour); on a 1 on the Vigor die, you’ve become addicted  (gain the minor Hindrance.  If it happens again it becomes a major Hindrance.  Each time thereafter you lose a die off Smarts).  Addicts may take a maintenance dose that takes the edge off (doesn’t grant them extra PP, but doesn’t risk worsening the addiction).  Pigsie Dust is illegal in New Ark City (misdemeanor possession, felony distribution); you don’t want hallucinating magic users with power to burn running around the city.

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Pigsies! Why did it have to be Pigsies?!

Session Summary for 11/30/08: Elves & Espers

It’s been a long time since we’ve had a recap around these parts. Let’s fix that.

Sunday night’s session picked up from a previous adventure (undocumented, because Ye Olde Recapper wasn’t present). That session was the first in the Elves & Espers campaign, in which the previously introduced characters banded together and picked up their level-1 quest: Clear out the vermin in the basement. This session opened with our brave exterminators, plan in hand, setting out to accomplish that goal.

Continue reading “Pigsies! Why did it have to be Pigsies?!”

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Let’s Get Critical!

Critical hits are fun.  Players enjoy big, flashy unusually good events.  Some enjoy them so much that they play systems where they can narrate them right in, instead of waiting for the dice to serve them up, but that’s a topic for a different day.  This was driven home to me when I was running games with my home-brew.  It was a skill + roll system based around 2d6 but didn’t contain criticals, automatic hits, or fumbles.  Every time a 12 came up there was a murmur of excitement around the table, followed by a sigh of disappointment when the players realized that it wasn’t a critical hit–in fact, due to the slightly unusual way the dice were read*, a 12 was usually a failure.  After a couple of months I finally gave the players what they were looking for and made 12 a critical hit, giving max bonus and a special result on top, and the cycle of Woohoo!  Awwww…. was over.

Critical hits are one of the first things that DMs think of adding to an otherwise fairly abstract combat system like D&D, and some games became notorious for their critical hit charts.  Since they only get rolled once in a while, it’s possible to have a big chart with really detailed results without slowing things down much at all, and the chance of getting, say, a broken arm instead of just 8 hit points gave combat a grittier feel that a lot of players really appreciated.

The biggest problem with critical hits is that in combat heavy games there’s a built-in asymmetry between the PCs and the NPCs even if they’re using the same rules.   PCs get a lot of dice rolled against them during the course of a campaign–orders of magnitude more than any individual NPC that they might encounter–and depending on the system they may well get more rolls against them than they make even in an individual combat, between often being outnumbered by the monsters, many monsters getting multiple attacks per round (the infamous claw/claw/bite) and PCs usually having lots more hit points before they are rendered hors de combat (once you figure in magical healing).  That means that even really unlikely events will eventually hit the PCs, and on the whole the PCs will take more criticals than they dish out.  At which point the rules that were originally added to give the players some more WooHoo! end up serving up heaping helpings of Oh Crap! instead.  Insta-Kill crits are particularly unpleasant in this regard.  And, as commenter Scott said over on the post Making Critical Hits More Interesting at Inkwell Ideas “a smashed ankle matters very little to the NPC who’s going to die in a couple of rounds, but very much to the PC who’s going to suffer until he can get a heal cast.”

A second, lesser, problem is that with systems that keep criticals fairly abstract (say, by awarding double damage but no extra result beyond that) it’s possible to get a critical hit but follow it up with a disappointing roll for damage…the fact that you’ve done 2 points instead of the 1 you would have rolled is cold comfort, and in terms of the emotions that rolling dice have added to the experience, you’d probably be better off not having rolled a critical in the first place.  It becomes an artifact of the abstraction mechanism rather than a proxy for a game-world event; in the game-world it’s presumably not “My arrow hit him in the eye slit!….But it doesn’t seem to have slowed him down any….”  And if that’s at all a common result of rolling a critical, you have to start asking whether it’s really worth having them in the game.

So, my suggestions for treating critical hits in games like D&D are as follows:

  1. Have them be something PCs do to NPCs, not vice-versa.  Or, if symmetry between PCs and NPCs is important to you (so there’s no “PC glow”) then at least have the NPCs criticals do abstract damage, such as double damage, instead of rolling on a chart for specific results such as limb amputation.  Otherwise you have to be prepared for most PCs to die or suffer career-ending injuries a lot sooner than their toughness as measured in hitpoints and armor class would otherwise indicate.
  2. If you want to have PCs sometimes face the possibility of a long-term or crippling injury, tie it to something less common than a 1 in 20 shot critical hit.  One neat idea (borrowed from Savage Worlds) is tie it to the PC becoming incapacitated.  In D&D that would mean getting knocked down to zero HP.  Whenever the PC hits 0, then roll on the injury chart (possibly the same chart as the PCs have been dishing out to the NPCs); have the penalties for the injury persist even in the face of magical healing unless extra time and a Healing skill roll is made, or a more special-purpose spell (such as regenerate) is used.  If you just slap Cure Serious Wounds on somebody with a shattered ankle, they get the hitpoints back and can fight again, but the ankle has been healed crooked.
  3. If you’re using abstract damage criticals, either just award max damage for the dice (so a crit on a d8 weapon automatically does 8 points, which is about the expected value of rolling 2d8 anyway), or if you insist on rolling have a minimum of the expected value. E.g. Roll 1d8 and multiply by 2, but have it be 9 points minimum (2 * expected value of 4.5) so that you avoid the WooHoo! Awww phenomenon.

* instead of adding the two dice, you used whichever face was lower.  Doubles were zero.  This yielded results from 0 to +5, weighted towards the 0 end; this meant you always performed at least as well as your skill (a concept borrowed from CORPS) so you never had to roll for tasks with DC <= your skill, but you had a decent chance of getting slightly better than that up to a slim chance of getting much better.  But double-six counted as zero…bummer.   The revised version had double six count as a +5 and a special result.  It barely changed the expected value, but had a big impact on the excitement that players got from rolling.

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Conan Wore Armor, Dammit

  • The Recursion King: Continuous initiative

    • Recently, in our D&D sessions, I decided to resurrect the idea of a continuous initiative system. Continuous initiative means just that – it is continuous – and does not have a one person acting per combat round order.The order is determined by how high the initiative values are (like normal) but then instead of going back to square one after all have moved, the higher initiative combatants may be acting multiple times over low initiative value combatants. This fundamentally changes combat.

      Part of my reasoning in trying this out was because we have a number of house rules which we agree on (me as the referee and the players) and its fun to try new ideas out and see which ones stick. The other part is that if the players ever wanted to create a character like Conan the Barbarian, as it is, the game system would completely punish them for this choice.

This is a much simpler (and therefor probably workable) approach to the idea of continuous combat rounds that I talked about previously in Fluid Combat Rounds Rules, but that’s not what I want to talk about.  What I want to grouse about for a moment is the notion that in order to simulate Conan, you need rules that don’t penalize characters who go around in nothing more than a loin-cloth. Recursion King is hardly the first game designer to have that notion.  For instance Clint Black at Pinnacle Games proposed rules that he called Pecs and Pulchritude for giving people armor based on Toughness and penalizing their Parry scores for armor, even going so far as to name one of his example characters Konan.  [update: Clint objects that I make it sound like his intention was to mimic the Conan stories and that he failed, when that wasn’t his intention at all–his P&P optional rules were just intended to fulfill the request of a fan who was looking for suggestions on how to make gear count for less and character abilities count for more.] At one point it was even a common objection to D&D–armor was too important, so it wasn’t even a good simulation of its source material like Conan.

When it comes to the Conan stories, that’s just dead wrong.  Conan wore as much armor as he could afford given his circumstances (in terms of both personal wealth and what was available in the culture he found himself in), up to and including full plate (when taking the field as King).  Indeed, in the very first story he appeared in, his survival was attributed to the fact that he managed to don at least some armor before the assassins got to his sleeping quarters.  Even much earlier, when he had barely left Cimmeria, he wore a helmet while among the Aesir and a point was made both of it saving his life and how many other tribesmen might have survived fighting the Vanir raiders if they had taken similar precautions.  Robert Howard, and Conan, appreciated the value of armor.

Even in the movie with Arnold, which was shall we say extremely loosely based on the stories, Conan armors up when it comes time to have a big stand-up fight at the end instead of skulking around stealthily.

So where did the stupid notion of Conan fighting naked against guys equipped with chain or better come from?  I blame the comics by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor Smith.  Despite the fact that quite a few of the stories were close adaptations of the Howard stories, the depictions of Conan, particularly on the cover, tended to have him wearing barely anything at all.  Partly it’s because most of the comic stories are set very early in Conan’s career, when he’s a penniless theif or a pirate, rather than a mercenary captain or king, and partly because, well, half-naked muscular men is somehow an important selling point for action-adventure comics, for reasons that probably don’t bear too close examination.  It’s those pictures that seem to have been seared into the public consciousness, to the point where even in our hobby people who set out create rules to emulate the feel of Conan stories seem to think the first thing they need to do is make armor less important.

No, what you need to do to a system to make it suitable for Conan-style action isn’t to reduce the relative value of armor, but make it possible to survive battles while lightly armored as long as you’re facing lightly armored foes.  You want a career of piracy or being a desert raider to be possible, while still leaving the heavily armored Aquilonian knights kings of the battlefield.  That is something that D&D and the retro-clones could use some tweaking to adjust, since the armor means you get hit less abstraction makes its lack just too dangerous even against identically armed and armored opponents.  Possibly you could adjust the charts so that they reflected armor on a relative instead of absolute scale, but it’s getting late and I’m not sure I can specify exactly how that would work.  Still, I’m pretty sure that, at least as far as Conanism goes, what you don’t want to do is let the fighter wearing nothing hit so many extra times that his expected damage per round is the same or almost as the fighter in plate attacking him.

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Supporting the Old School

My copy of Labyrinth Lord arrived today from Amazon, and it looks nice. Labyrinth Lord, you’ll recall, is one of the retro-clone projects that attempts to recreate D&D free of copyright impediments by using only new text plus what’s been released as part of the OGL, and itself is an OGL Product. I have to admit, I have the PDF, as well as the PDFs of the Basic & Expert D&D that it’s based on, so there was no real reason for me to purchase it, except to show my support of the concept and reward Daniel Proctor, whose baby it is, for jumping through all the hoops necessary to get it carried by Amazon.

Unfortunately, I don’t know when I’ll get to play it, since I’m really the only fan of this stuff in my current gaming group. We played a couple of sessions of Basic D&D shortly after Gary Gygax died (I posted recaps earlier), and nobody was particularly enamored of the rules or the tone. Having had that experience and done a lot more reading and thinking about the retro movement since then, I could probably GM something a lot more to their taste while still nominally using the rules and the old school feel, but if I’m the only one who’s really fired up by the idea… my time is probably better spent prepping stuff that they’re clamoring to play.

Still, I might manage to sneak in a game or two some day with some unsuspecting relatives or something…

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Welcome to the Jungle! We Got Fun and Games

RPG Diehard talks about a sandbox session that Ripper X tried to run that went poorly:

  • RPG Diehard: Cautionary Tales from the Sandbox

    On paper, a complete wilderness adventure sounds great! Wandering around blind, not knowing where in the hell you are going, or really what you are looking for. In actual play, this was SLOW!!!! So slow that I was getting bored, and it was all the same thing. I thought that it would be fun, but plotting a coarse and deciding of where to go that day is frickin boring! I don’t know if it was my fault, or if I did something wrong, or what. I thought about it! I really did. How can I spice this up? But with such a large map to explore, I really couldn’t prep anything or describe a scene more clearer then what I was. I really didn’t want to spend too much time talking about a day where nothing happens. I did give the place a lot of sounds and smells, but the players weren’t all that interested, and I kept failing my random encounter checks.

    His post serves as a cautionary tale about what to avoid in a sandbox campaign. It seems Ripper X was a little too wedded to the sandbox concept and could probably have been a bit more liberal with his random encounters (as in, fudge the die rolls so they actually happen, or adjust the rules so you’re rolling more frequently) without infringing too much on the spirit of the game. Moreover, it’s important to note that sandbox games are defined by their lack of a linear plot — but not necessarily their lack of story. Time spent exploring should be time well spent; the PCs should learn something important about the area, uncover a villain or stumble across a previously unknown map feature.

I’ve got some more suggestions for making sandbox play work better, in addition to Diehard’s eminently sensible ones:

  1. The single most important thing you can ask yourself prior to running a Sandbox session is “What’s the PC’s agenda?”   Knowing that lets you know where to concentrate the bulk of your preparation.  It’s absolutely true that you can’t put enough initial work into a large-scale area to cover every contingency and every path the PCs might follow (some settings might evolve to that point over years of play, but it’s unrealistic to try to start there), but you really shouldn’t have to.  Why are the PCs exploring the Isle of Dread?  Are they searching for treasure?  If so, then give them a map, diary, or guide… some reason that they’d embark on this dangerous expedition with some hope of success. (I seem to recall that The Isle of Dread uses both of these.)   Decide what’s on the map or in the diary, and that will tell you what landmarks they’ll be looking for and where to put obstacles for them to deal with.  Feel free to change the published map by deleting or adding information to highlight obvious routes to explore or approaches to take (e.g. if there’s a native village on the map, mark them as “Friendly” if they are a place where the party can get further information about the island.)Are they castaways? Then you can assume that they’re going to be interested–at least initially–in the bare-bones stuff of survival: building or seeking shelter, acquiring food, and so forth.
  2. Change your understanding of encounters.  In a lot of games (D&D in particular) “random” encounters are combat encounters–they don’t necessarily turn out that way depending on the PC and the reaction table, but they have the potential; things that don’t pose a threat to the party are generally deemed unworthy of notice. The standard chance of encounter (e.g. 5-6 on a d6 per 3 hexes traversed or whatever) is geared towards that understanding.  But if you really want the characters to feel like they’re exploring without the feeling that each day brings nothing but MFJ* you need to provide more points of interest–and ideally decision points–than that.  You should be thinking in terms of # of Incidents (info/decision points) per day, say by rolling a d3 and saying they’ll hit that many things to ponder during the day’s explorations.  Roll an additional die to see if one of those encounters is a “wandering monster”, otherwise pick it off a list of things you’ve prepared.  Some things might include:
    • Spoor:  signs of one of the monsters from the chart for the area.  This might warn them of the presence of something particularly dangerous before they actually encounter it, or provide them with the opportunity to stock their larder.  A successful Tracking roll (or whatever, depending on system) can turn this into an encounter with that creature if they desire.
    • Vermin:  some non-dangerous but potentially annoying vermin (mosquitoes, leeches in the stream they’re trying to cross, etc).
    • Game: something they can eat if they can hunt or trap it.
    • The way is blocked: some natural feature that will require a skill roll or some role-playing to traverse; it could be a ravine, or a swiftly running stream, a gigantic fallen tree, a huge mound of stinging ants, or whatever.  They must either backtrack (costing them, say, 1 hex of movement for the day) or do something to get over it.
    • Notable Feature: some unusual feature of the local terrain that’s worth describing, or better yet interacting with.  E.g. A waterfall with a hidden grotto containing the bones of an adventurer and some treasure, a volcanic fumarole, a ravine with a rotting rope bridge, a road-side shrine to a long forgotten god.
    • Hazard: a feature that poses an active menace to the party as soon as they encounter it, e.g. quicksand, an erupting geyser, a dead-fall trap left by native hunters, etc.
    • Clue: something that points the party in the direction they need to go, or furthers their agenda in some way.  E.g. a trail blazed by prior adventurers, a short stretch of paved road indicating the direction of the Lost City, a brief glimpse through the clouds that usually shroud the mountain top of a tower, etc.
    • Setback: somebody gets sick (not seriously enough to be deadly) from some fruit or perhaps the water, some rations have turned moldy or been stolen by monkeys, some piece of equipment was lost through a hole in a pack (or maybe it’s those darn monkeys again), somebody twists their ankle and their pace is halved for 1d3 days.
    • Good Fortune: they discover something fortunate (not counting a clue), such as a medicinal plant that heals 1d3 of burn damage, or a small cache of adventuring equipment (some still usable) left by previous adventurers.
    • The Drums! The Drums: evidence that the party is not alone on the island, or even that they’re being watched.  Nothing like a little PC paranoia to up the tension.
    • and so on.  If you’re good at improvising, you can come up with this stuff off the top of your head, but given some prep time anybody should be able to review various stories and movies to come up with a fairly long list of incidents that can liven up an otherwise dull “No Wandering Encounter” day.

    The important thing to remember is that just because you’re trying to run a “sandbox” adventure where the players are free to follow their own agendas and you’re not going to hem them in or lead them by the nose doesn’t mean that as GM you don’t have the authority or responsibility to give them stuff to interact with in the world, even if it isn’t spelled out on the Encounter Tables in the module.  If anything, the opposite: if you’re going to make them play out day-to-day tasks like exploring a jungle, you have to make sure that the exploration itself is interesting.

That’s not to say that if you follow this advice, your Sandbox sessions will always go well.  Sometimes it just doesn’t work.  Either it’s not a good fit for the players, or the party, or it just doesn’t “gel” and the players flounder around ’til they’re begging to be gaffed with Ye Olde Plot Hooke.  At which point, I say Go For It.  If the only way to get things moving forward again and have the players start having fun in the session is for a crazed wizard to show up and Bamf them to a dungeon, so be it.  The Sandbox is a certain approach to empowering players to have fun, it’s not a substitute for it.

* More Fine Jungle