Tag: D&D

Dungeons & Dragons

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D&D Alignment

Advanced Gaming & Theory: Pet Peeve: Detect Alignment

I THINK THAT EVERY body has a “pet-peeve” or something that bugs them about a game system itself. For me, that pet-peeve was largely spells used for detecting alignment. Now, this stems from playing the game incorrectly when our group was still learning, and not detecting our error, thus never fixing it. But this spell still bugs me to this day. It just seems like one of those things which was put into the game to make the Dungeon Masters life miserable.

Tim Ripper goes on to talk about how he deals with alignment, basically by neutering it. NPCs and PCs don’t actually know their own alignment, good characters can do bad things and vice-versa, the Detect Alignment spell is basically useless: easily fooled, obvious when it’s cast, considered a hostile act or even a prelude to an attack, and so forth.

But I have to ask, why have alignments in your game, then? What’s the point if they’re secret even from the players, you have to nerf certain spells to keep them that way, and even the GM can’t use them as a guide to behavior? I think it’s far simpler to just remove it from the game, which is pretty much what we did back in the day. Trying to keep alignment in the game without making it actually useful or having noticeable game-world consequences strikes me as more trouble than it’s worth.

Generally, there seem to me to be two and a half standard fruitful approaches to really using D&D alignment as part of the game world without running into the problems of having players run around casting Detect Alignment and short-circuiting any kind of real moral reasoning or thinking about the motives of the NPCs.

Approach 1 is that Alignments are sides in a cosmic war. Your alignment says which side you are on in the war, and nothing more. There can be honorable, maybe even admirable people and creatures on the Chaotic side, though perhaps few and far between, just as there can be complete rat-bastards on the Lawful side. Your alignment in particular says nothing about how you treat people in petty day-to-day things, whether you lie, cheat, give to charity, keep your word,  and so forth. Alignment detection spells detect which side’s uniform you’re wearing, as it were.  This was easier to pull off without confusing modern sensibilities when the alignments are just Chaos and Law, instead of the two-axis AD&D Law vs. Chaos and Good vs. Evil, but is still possible.

A subset of approach 1 (the “and a half”) is that humans and most other creatures don’t even really count in the cosmic war. Only supernatural entities and magic actually have concrete alignment, and that’s what spells detect. Ordinary mortals might have tendencies, but they’re really weak stuff compared to the real thing, and don’t register even when they’re conscious allegiances.

Approach 2 is that alignments are the Gods’ eye-view score card of your behavior: how the Gods view your actions according to their moral lights.  This makes Alignment, though perfectly concrete and detectable, more like having a prison record or past citations and medals for good works.  “Past record is no guarantee of future performance.”  Still, you’d have to be willfully stupid to ignore the evidence that alignment offers when deciding whether to put someone in a position of trust.  None of this namby-pamby alignment detections exists, but there are social taboos against using it guff.   You want a position of trust, you submit to the alignment check, just as today you submit to a background check in any kind of sensitive position.

What you don’t want to do, in my opinion, is make alignment exist, but be useless.  Either figure out the ways it plays out in the game world and deal with it (perhaps just giving up the cliche of the vizier “secretly” being evil), or strike it from the books and say that in your game world people steer by whatever their own personal moral compass is… different religions and philosophies advocate different things but there is no one universal measure, magical or otherwise, that can be applied.  Keeping it but figuring out all kinds of reasons that nobody does or should do the obvious things given its existence just magnifies its flaws.

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Thinking of the Children

I’m going to be running a game for my friend Mac and her three children (ages 7 through 12) in the near future.  She’s been playing D&D with them for a few months now, and I’ve been a player for some of the sessions.  When I mentioned that even though I sometimes had a hankering to run the kind of dungeon-crawlish games that she runs, none of my regular players was into them,  she suggested that I should run for them sometimes.  Among other things, she’d like them to have experience with GMs other than her, so they don’t become one of “those kind” of players who insist that there’s only one right way to play, coincidentally the way their first GM ran things.

I’m not quite sure what I want to run, though.  Mac has been running what she calls D&D pretty much the same way, in the same setting, for almost 27 years now, but with house rules so extensive that it scarcely seems like D&D sometimes (e.g. rolling 3d6 lower than Dex to hit, armor doing damage reduction only, magic via a spell-point system, clerics using a different seemingly ad-hoc system, etc).  That’s what the kids and I have been playing, but I wouldn’t be able to run it even if I wanted to since so much of it seems to exist only in her head.  I gave the two elder children their own copies of one of the retro-clones for Christmas (Basic Fantasy Roleplaying Game, not to be confused with the Chaosium Basic Roleplaying) and the younger of the two has actually been using it, more or less, to create dungeons and play with his friends.  He’s already added a new Body Builder class to the game though I’m not sure anybody he’s played with has yet met its rather stringent stat requirements….

So my first thought was to run that, since the rules are sort of familiar to them, and I would rather spend my time playing the game than explaining the difference between the rules they have (or their mom uses) and the rules I’m using.  My second thought, though, is to use Tunnels & Trolls, since I’d kind of like to try GMing that…. but I know that there’s some stuff about it (particularly the very abstract combat) that may be just too different from what they’re used to.  Mac basically uses a blow-by-blow accounting of combat, with turns lasting a couple of seconds, if that.  So my third thoughts have to do with either swiping a couple of things I really like from T&T and putting it into BFRPG, or vice-versa.  One thing I always get hung up on is that I don’t really like the magic system in the retro-clones.  Magic as ammo loads just doesn’t thrill me, unless you go full out Vance with it as depicted in the Dying Earth… but then you have to tweak both the spells and the MU’s combat capabilities anyway.  And Mac hates Vancean magic almost as much as she hates point-buy systems where you can design a character that’s practically a super-hero from the outset.

And finally, my fourth thoughts are to go ahead and finish the retro homebrew that I was working on, which would finally give me an old-school inspired system that really fits the way I’d like to play as well as players who will be happy to play it….  as usual with me when I start a project I ping-pong back and forth, unable to settle on any one option. I have a couple of weeks, at least, before we’d first play, so I don’t have to decide tonight, but I should decide soon and start working on a dungeon for them.

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We Belong Dead: Monsters That Should Never Be

GROGNARDIA: My Least Favorite Monsters beat me to it, but here’s a list of my 10 monsters that I never want to use or see in a campaign:

  1. Ear Seekers.  Despite my abiding affection for things like the Rust Monster, Ear Seekers cross the line between challenging the player and punishing smart play.  Even if the dungeon is stocked by a mad arch-mage intentionally seeking to thwart explorers, this kind of thing is just a reason not to play.  Whether to risk listening at the door is not the kind of decision that a GM wants to emphasize.
  2. Drow. I tried to read R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt trilogy, I really did.
  3. Krenshar. A big cat that can peel the skin of its face back, so that… what?  I’m not getting it, either in evolutionary or mad wizard design terms.
  4. Troglodytes.  Why did cavemen become some wierd lizard creature?  And why aren’t lizard men and reptilian kobolds enough?
  5. Tarentella. (a spider that has a bite that not only causes the victim to dance, but makes onlookers save vs. dancing)  Even I have a limit to the pun-inspired game features I can take.
  6. Girallon.  To be honest, I’ve never actually seen or heard of these used, but adding an extra pair of arms to a gorilla and calling it a new monster was not anybody’s finest day.
  7. Deathbringer.  Now they’re not even trying.
  8. Gem Dragons.  Scraped right past the bottom of the barrel there.
  9. Jermlaines.  What purpose do these serve that kobolds don’t do better?
  10. Forest Sloth.  So…it’s a sloth.  With lightning fast reflexes, that can move along the ground or climb through the trees faster than a human can run.  Why exactly is it a sloth, again?  So that when the GM just says the name instead of describing what the characters see, they can get fooled for a moment into thinking they’re facing something slow?

My thanks to Ed Bonny, Jeff Grubb, Rich Redman, Skip Williams, and Steve Winter, without whose Monster Manual II this list would have had to stop at number 5.

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Monsters I Have Loved

Following the lead of Monsters and Manuals: Top 10 Monsters, here are my Top Ten D&D Monsters, in no particular order:

  1. Gelatinous Cube:  I love these guys.  They’re creepy as all get-out, particularly when they’ve got a partially digested skeleton or something suspended in them, they’re not so dangerous as to be unfair and they’re the perfect accoutrement for that oubliette….
  2. Purple Worm:  It’s a worm big enough to swallow you whole.  It can come at you through the dungeon wall. And it’s purple.  What’s not to love?
  3. Umber Hulk: I just like the look of them, back in AD&D 1e.  Mandibles are scary.  The 3rd edition version just looks like a bug missing some legs. I can take or leave the Confusing gaze.
  4. Cockatrice: Stoning is an awesome ability, but I’m not a huge fan of gaze weapons, so I like this guy better than the basilisk.  Did I ever tell you about the time I used Telekinesis to hurl a black pudding at a cockatrice?
  5. Troll:  One troll on the wall, on the wall, one troll on the wall,
    if one of those trolls should happen to fall, Two trolls on the wall on the wall….
  6. Green Slime: it’s a horrible way to go, and a really useful weapon against other monsters.
  7. Golem: they come in a wide variety, and they can stand there century after century waiting to bash in the head of the next adventurer to come through the door.
  8. Liche:  I never actually used these that often, but the fear of them was so strong that I once had an orc with a couple of faintly glowing gems held in front of its eyes bluff a party into retreating by advancing on them from the down the dark corridor.  For the rest of the campaign, players would tease each other by making a holding gems in front of their eyes gesture and saying “Run away! Run away!  I’m a liche!”
  9. Balrog: for some reason Balrogs, and not dragons, were the ultimate bad-ass monster in D&D to me.
  10. Dinosaurs: Breathes there the man with soul so dead
    Who never to himself hath said,
    “I’m fighting a dinosaur! With a Sword! Coooooool!”
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Ad Vance: To a More Vancian Magic

The tomes which held Turjan’s sorcery lay on a long table of black steel or were thrust helter-skelter into shelves. These were volumes compiled by many wizards of the past, untidy folios collected by the Sage, leather-bound librams setting forth the syllables of a hundred powerful spells, so cogent that Turjan’s brain could know but four at a time.

Turjan found a musty portfolio, turned the pages to the spell the Sage had shown him, the Call to the Violent Cloud. He stared down at the characters and they burned with an urgent power, pressing off the page as if frantic to leave the dark solitude of the book.

Turjan closed the book, forcing the spell back into oblivion. He robed himself with a short blue cape, tucked a blade into his belt, fitted the amulet holding Laccodel’s Rune to his wrist. Then he sat down and from a journal he chose the spells he would take with him.  What dangers he might meet he could not know, so he selected three spells of general application: The Excellent Prismatic Spray, Phandaal’s Mantle of Stealth, and the Spell of the Slow Hour.

– The Dying Earth, Jack Vance (c) 1950

In RPGs people generally refer to “Vancian” magic to mean the “fire and forget” aspect of spells that Gygax and Arneson copied from The Dying Earth (as well as the notion that one spell = one effect, rather than, say, a range of similarly themed ones).  Each time you want to cast a spell, you have to “memorize” it anew.  It’s a bizarre notion, and one of the first things that subsequent systems tended to toss overboard.  Even if you want to limit the number of times per day somebody can cast a spell, doing it by making you forget how to cast it afterward is regarded as somewhere between strange and stupid.  Even later editions of D&D replaced “memorization” with “preparation.”  What’s often overlooked is that the idea of having to struggle to hold a spell in your mind and having it vanish once its been unleashed is meant to be bizarre, and to make the magic of the Dying Earth seem weird and other-worldly.  These weren’t super-powers, or psionic abilities that other pulp characters might have acquired…spells in the Dying Earth operated by rules that had nothing to do with physics, even science fiction physics.

Another complaint often leveled at “Vancian” D&D magic is that it’s too “prosaic”, or “not magical enough.”  You have your list of familiar special abilities, the number of times a day you can call on them, rules for their exact effects and chance of resisting them, etc.  I actually think that’s largely true, but the problem is not that D&D magic draws on Vance for inspiration, but that it doesn’t draw on Vance enough.  In the process of creating D&D Gygax and Arneson made spells too “war-gamey”…spells in D&D are in a lot of ways just another type of ammo you can equip your troops with, tracked just as if it were arrows, flasks of oil, or Greek fire.  What was lost, in my opinion, was some or all of the real weirdness of the magic of the Dying Earth.  I think that if you wanted some house rules to put the bizarreness back into magic, instead of looking at real world or fairy-tale magic, you could go back to the tales of the Dying Earth and start over from there.

1. First of all, spells are much rarer in the Dying Earth.  Turjan is one of the more powerful and famous sorcerers of the (admittedly decadent and less magically potent) age, and he can master only four spells at once.  In the second chapter, Mazirian the Magician, who managed to capture and hold Turjan prisoner, was capable of five.  So step one is to cut back on the number of spells.  I would suggest limiting a Magic User to 1 + their Int Bonus (however calculated for the edition).  Moreover, though there were once thousands of spells, only 100 are now extant, and a magician such as Mazirian, who has made it his life’s work to aquire them, has about 70 of them.

2. Spells in the Dying Earth are potent.  The Excellent Prismatic Spray was a death sentence: multicolored lines of fire streak in from every direction, transfixing the target and killing it…. Phandaal’s Gyrator spell can lift the target off the ground, holding it and spinning it as the magician wishes, and can be sped up until the victim just flies apart. If you didn’t have a counter to the spells (such as the amulet with Lacondel’s Rune that Turjan possesses), you have no hope of escaping or surviving.  The Call of the Violent Cloud can transport you in moments (albeit uncomfortable moments) all the way across the world, etc.  It may be that there are lesser spells that the magicians of the Dying Earth seldom bother with, but the ones they’re actually shown using are powerful indeed.  So steps two and three are to eliminate the notion of a saving throw against spells (though you probably want to keep it for things like magic from wands or traps), and to get rid of spells castable by level.  If you have a spell and you’re not at your limit, you can force that spell into your mind.

3. It doesn’t seem to be possible in Vance to use two “slots” on the same spell.  If the Excellent Prismatic Spray is the only offensive spell you have access to, you’ll have to round out the spells you memorize for your adventure with others that might be useful.

4. Memorized spells still take time to cast, enough time that, for instance, a character verbally threatened by somebody who knows the Excellent Prismatic Spray can successfully counter-threaten to push a handy button and drop the caster in a pit faster than the spell could be completed.  Pretty much all editions of D&D can handle this, as long as you assume that casting spells isn’t instant.

5. It is possible to screw up casting the spell, with bad results.  If you accidentally transpose a pair of “pervulsions”, the effect of the spell can be reversed, or go off on you instead of your intended target.  Professional magicians such as Turjan, Mazirian, and Ioucounu don’t seem to worry about this much, but it happened to Cugel the Clever twice in succession. If you want to retain the idea of spell levels, you could require a roll for attempting to cast a spell greater than your current level, with penalties for just how far beyond your current abilities it is.  The roll is made when you actually attempt to cast the spell, not when it’s first memorized.  Or you could only apply a rule for checking for spell failure if a non-magician attempts a magic spell, similar to the classic D&D rules for thieves attempting to use magic scrolls.

6. Spells are something that can only be acquired through adventure, or from a mentor.  There are no generally accessible libraries, or magic shops that will sell you a book or scroll of them, and while magicians can share their spells with their colleagues, they guard them jealously from their rivals.

7. Spells are strange.  The Call to the Violent Cloud doesn’t just whisk the caster to his destination, it summons a strange and malevolent (or at least indifferent) being to accomplish the task, that must be addressed carefully according to ritual:

All was quiet; then came a whisper of movement swelling to the roar of great winds. A wisp of white appeared and waxed to a pillar of boiling black smoke.  A voice deep and harsh issued from the turbulence.
“At your disturbing power is this instrument come: whence will you go?”
“Four directions, then One,” said Turjan, “Alive must I be brought to Embelyon.”
The cloud whirled down; far up and away he was snatched, flung head over heels into incalculable distance.  Four directions was he thrust, then one, and at last a great blow hurled him from the cloud, sprawled him into Embelyon.

(Note, by the way, that Embelyon is either another planet, or perhaps another dimension entirely, not just a far-off place on the Earth.)

8. Because magic is so limited in applicability, albeit powerful when applied, Vancian magic users are capable of fighting with a sword or by wrestling if they have to.  They’re no Conans, but they get by.  I’d keep the hit point and armor restrictions, but lift the ban on using swords and other one-handed weapons.

9. It’s never explicitly spelled out, but it seems that there is no particular limit on memorizing a new spell once one has been cast…neither casting the spells nor memorizing them is particularly taxing.  In their lairs, where they have all their spell books and time to memorize and cast at their leisure, magicians seem limited only by the relatively small (minutes perhaps?) amount of time it takes to memorize a spell.  It does seem that is it extremely difficult to create copies of existing spells.  While the magicians do eventually acquire them, and even teach them to each other if on friendly terms, it seems to be an unthinkable risk to carry an extra copy about in case of need.  They select the spells they venture forth with carefully, and husband them wisely if they can, but they never ever are seen to have a spare or even to have contemplated the possibility.

You can find spell name generators for Dying Earth-style spells here and here, as well as some additional discussion of Vancian magic, but while the name of the spell is an important part of its flavor, the thing you really want to concentrate on is that the effects be potent and memorable. With all due respect to one of my favorite bloggers, Dr Rotwang of I Waste the Buddha With My Crossbow, simply attaching Vancian names to existing D&D spells isn’t good enough. D&D spells are constructed with a war-gamer’s notion of balance, both against the abilities of other classes and the toughness of opponents. A Vancian version of Sleep, for instance, ought to at least cause the target to sleep forever, preserved and unchanging, until countered (much as the Spell of the Forlorn Encystment sinks the target deep within the Earth to remain alive and trapped, but unaging and undying, until the spell is broken, bringing them alive and blinking, with their clothes rotted to dust, to the surface once more). The spells in the Dying Earth are limited by whether there is a spell applicable to the situation (and whether you’ve memorized it), but where they do apply their effects tend to be absolute. Knocking out 2d8 hit dice of creatures until they waken naturally or are awakened by force is just weaksauce.

So, if you make all those changes to D&D magic, will Magic Users still be a playable class?  I think so.  At low levels, a spell like Sleep is an encounter-ender against a lot of foes anyway, just as at mid-levels Fireball can be.  What tends to happen in D&D is the number of truly potent spells (relative to the scope of the adventure) that a wizard can use during a single day remains fairly constant, while the scale of enemies ramps up…  what a truly Vancian system would tend to do is just get rid of all the minor spells that the wizard ends up with (often more than he’ll ever cast in a single day), and eliminate the process of “trading up” from Magic Missile to Fireball to Meteor Swarm (or whatever).  The problem, if there is one, would be that a beginning mage armed with the Excellent Prismatic Spray or something similar would be a threat against an ogre, or perhaps a dragon or other big nasty, possibly even including a much higher level character.  To the extent that this is a genuine problem, and not just blind allegiance to the leveling treadmill concept in D&D where everything scales up in power as the PCs do, you could certainly solve it by restricting the spells available to the PC magic users until they reached a level where you thought a single-target instant-kill spell was appropriate, or by giving special opponents abilities and items such as Laccondel’s Rune to counter it.  Personally, if I were to try this, I would try very hard to just live with it, and design my adventures so as not to assume that 1st level characters are ants compared to high level characters and monsters, and that under the right circumstances even the powerful can be threatened by the lowly.

What about Vancian magic in non-D&D systems?  I think most of the same principles apply, though the mechanics might differ slightly.  In Savage Worlds, getting a new spell “slot” might be an edge, with the limit that you can’t take the Edge more than once per Rank, while individual spells would be acquired by adventuring.  The Arcane Background would probably grant 1 slot and the knowledge of 3 initial spells and casting the spells wouldn’t require Power Points or a casting roll.  In some ways, adding this kind of magic is easy in almost any system (except perhaps ones like HERO, that expect exact cost-accounting for every aspect of every power), since the rules on how many times you can cast a spell are perfectly clear and the effects of each and every spell are sui generis.  As long as the GM is prepared to deal with the consequences of allowing a certain power in the game, there’s really no limit or constraints on what a spell might do.

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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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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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The Necessity of Random Encounters in D&D

The author goes on to list what he sees as the advantages and disadvantages of random encounters, but quite remarkably to my mind never actually mentions the real purposes of random encounters in terms of setting and game design.  So he lists Pros as being things like killing off annoying characters or filling time, and the Cons as serving no story purpose or throwing the wealth per level guidelines out of whack (and I need to rant about that some day).   No mention at all is made of anything relating to the setting, or verisimilitude, or even resource management.

The post seems to ignore the two most important features of random encounters: naturalism, and husbanding resources.  They’re the GM’s chief tool in presenting the setting as a world that actually contains stuff that isn’t there for the sole purpose of being part of the PCs story, and they are the game system’s primary reason the players can’t completely optimize their resources (particularly daily powers in D&D)–the chance of such an encounter is why players have to keep something in reserve.

(I’d like to get a bit of definition out of the way: by random encounters I mean any encounter that isn’t determined by story needs or the PCs’ direct actions.  It doesn’t necessarily literally have to have come about by rolling dice on a table, though that’s certainly an option, but it’s something that isn’t required as a plot-point of the story or because the PCs have decided to seek out, say, the chief of the palace guard and have an encounter with him.)

Naturalism is important, in my opinion, even if you’re running a story-oriented sort of game.  If the setting contains no features at all that aren’t independent of the needs of the story, then the world will lack all verisimilitude and feel flat and lifeless…if it doesn’t degenerate into parody.  The central joke of Knights of the Dinner Table, after all, is that the GM is stuck with three players out of four who refuse to see the world as containing any features that aren’t clues, prizes, antagonists or (rarely) allies.  If there’s a cow, it must be a magic cow and they capture it and drag it along; if there’s a gazebo it’s a hostile encounter.  But if you don’t have random encounters, then the players will be absolutely right in assuming that if the GM bothers to mention it, it must be significant.  The world will lack any depth.  This, btw, is the curse of many of the graphically intensive computer RPGs…players correctly assume that if something can be interacted with on-screen it must be significant, because the programming and art resources won’t be wasted on mere flavor.  But if the setting contains random encounters, and the players are aware of it, they are thrust in the much more realistic position of no longer knowing whether something they run into is there by chance or design.  They have to reason about the logic within the gameworld instead of logic about the story, which I think is not only much more satisfying, but makes for better stories.  If the players can correctly reason that the vizier is secretly the bad-guy, because viziers are always the bad-guys and besides, he has a goatee, the resulting story only works as a comedy.

While naturalism is valuable for pretty much any kind of system, resource management is peculiar to certain kinds of systems and settings…but is a particularly important part of D&D and its progeny.  If you have a system where resources are defined in terms of their availability per day, per encounter, etc, and are replenished by rest (rather than, say, going back to the store and buying more ammo) then it’s an essential part of the design that the players have to consider whether they’re likely to have to call on those resources at times not of their own choosing.  The random encounter is what balances the X times a day abilities against those that can be used continuously (such as swinging a sword).  If you take it away, either you have to add time pressure to every scenario (which can be quite a strain on verisimilitude) or you have to ramp everything up (or scale the resources back) to match the assumption that the party will always have its full resources and be willing to expend them all.

You could think that it needn’t truly be random, and that as GM you can just devise the encounters just so to make the party expend resources at precisely the right pace, but IMO you’d be wrong.  You’d be wrong because the players aren’t stupid, and they know the game, and they know that as GM you have infinite resources to throw against them, so they will reason that if you hit them with something when they’re particularly low on resources it’s because you’ve chosen to be unfair.  Which is true.  Without randomness whatever you do to them you’ve explicitly chosen to do.  But that means unless you’re willing to be a jerk and kill them just because you can (and good luck getting people to play with you once you’ve established that reputation), you had better not hit them with anything challenging when they’re low on resources–unless you’re also willing to cheat like mad so they come out on top despite it.  But if they know you won’t do that then they’ll be all the more likely to spend all the resources they’ve got and then turtle.

Openly and publicly using random encounters is the solution to that whole set of problems.  If they know that there’s a certain chance of random encounters per period depending on the environs, and some of them might be hostile, then it’s up to them to decide whether to hold something in reserve or chance it–and whether hunkering down in place to recover resources is worth the risk or even possible.  The GM doesn’t have to decide to punish or not punish them for recklessness or over-caution…the setting has certain known features and the players can roleplay whether and how much risk they want to take given the stakes and circumstances.

If you’re really considering whether you will eliminate random encounters in your game, what you really need to think about is how you intend to convey the texture of the setting and not give sense that the PCs are locked in The Matrix where everything is just an illusion for their benefit, and in a D&D-like game how you’re going to deal with the players wanting to blow all their resources in each encounter and then to sit around and recover them for the next encounter.  Random Encounters aren’t the only way to deal with either, but I think they’re one of the simplest and best approaches I’ve seen.

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It Takes a Thief

This is something I posted to Dragonsfoot a little while back that I wanted to have a record of, mostly because I could have sworn I had posted it here and just wasted a bunch of time searching for it in vain. It’s also relevant to JM’s (not me, some other JM) post To Catch A Thief, where he talks about Thieves in D&D mostly in answer to the really, really old school (pre-Greyhawk) objection that the problem with adding Thief as a character class in the first place is that it takes skills that everybody was assumed to have pre-Thief and makes it that character’s sole job.  My basic suggestion is that you can assume that everybody can still do all those things, but the Thief is the only one who gets a “saving throw” against screwing up so it makes sense to have the Thief try it if there’s one available.

It’s not that relevant to what we’re doing now, because I’ve replaced the D&D as filler campaign with the Haunted Realms, using Savage Worlds.

My players mostly feel that playing a low-level thief is not very fun, because almost all the special abilities (except climbing) are hopeless, if not suicidal, to even try.  E.g. Out of every 100 traps the party encounters, a 1st level thief will successfully disarm one.  It’ll go off on the thief 9 times, and the other 90 times, the party will have stood around while the thief accomplished nothing.

I could address that sort of thing by fudging die-rolls, but I prefer not to do that very often, since if I do it often enough to matter the players no longer really know what the rule is and if I don’t do it often enough to matter, then…well it doesn’t really matter.  And I could amend or replace it with house-rules, but again I’d prefer not to; if I go very far in that direction I might as well be playing one of my home-brews.

Ideally, then, what I’m looking for is way of letting the thief do cool, class-appropriate stuff, that doesn’t contradict the rules as written.  This ties in with some advice I saw (I forget whether it was here or in the ODD Guild) that by the time that dice are being rolled, the characters are in trouble…all the save or die stuff is fine, as long as you give the players enough leeway so that clever play can let them avoid being put in a save or die situation; the save becomes an escape from mistakes they made (or at least risks they knowingly took), not something that’s continually thrust upon them until they inevitably fail.

So here’s an approach I’m thinking of taking with Thief special abilities:

Find Traps: the player describes exactly what the thief is looking for, and automatically detects the trap if the player is looking for the right things.  It’s only if the player isn’t looking for the right things that you roll, in which case the chance is as listed that the thief notices the trap anyway.
The DM must be scrupulous in noting what will set the trap off or what the clues might be.  e.g. if the thief is looking for tripwires in the hallway, or tapping ahead with a 10′ pole, and there is a tripwire, the thief finds it.  If the trigger is a pressure plate and the thief only says he’s looking for tripwires, then roll to see if he notices the pressure plate anyway.

Disarm Traps: the player says what the thief is doing to disarm the trap, if it would work, it works automatically; if it wouldn’t, or would require great skill or dexterity to pull off, roll.  E.g. the thief has noticed a tiny hole in the door handle, such as a needle might come out of, and announces he’s blocking it with sliver of wood before he turns the handle.  If it was a needle trap, that just works. If it squirts gas or some other effect (e.g. a blade trap triggered by covering the hole), then roll vs. Disarm Traps to see if it worked.

Hide in Shadows: thieves can automatically hide if there’s actually something to hide behind; only roll against Hide in Shadows if there’s nothing but shadows to hide in.  If the thief is trying to move from place to place this requires a Hide in Shadows roll if there are gaps between the hiding places, otherwise it’s still automatic (though it may require a Move Silently check).

Move Silently: the check is only necessary against alert opponents. Surprised opponents or those that the DM rules aren’t paying much attention or are making noise themselves won’t automatically notice the thief, even if he fails the roll. The DM should still roll, so the thief remains uncertain about whether there are any alert opponents within hearing range.

Hear Noise: as written, but emphasis is on needing to roll only to hear relatively faint noises; ordinary conversation behind a door, for instance, would automatically be heard by any thief or demi-human listening at the door. A successful Hear Noise roll could reveal the substance of the conversation if the listener knows the language.

Pick Pockets: for picking a selected target’s pockets, the rules apply as written, however any thief can attempt the following:

Working the Crowd: the thief attempts to pick the pockets of targets of opportunity–people who are too distracted to notice the attempt and who appear to be carrying money in an accessible location. May only be attempted in a relatively crowded area, such as at a market. Roll against Pick Pockets once per hour. Success means you managed to gather some coin: roll 1d4 for a treasure from tables P-S (Treasure Carried). A Failure is only detected on a roll of 00.

The Bump: two thieves working together can work the crowd, deliberately trying to distract richer-looking targets, e.g. by one bumping into him while the other picks his pocket. Same as Working the Crowd, but roll 1d8 for a treasure from tables P-V. On an 8 at the DM’s discretion it’s a treasure from any of P-V, but it includes something that the owner is bound to come looking for (or will send someone to look for). The Bump, however, is more noticeable; if there are any guards or other busy-bodies who might be observing the area, for each hour after the first that the pair attempts The Bump, the chance of discovery goes up by 1%. i.e. 2nd hour discovery is on a 99-00, 3rd hour on a 98-00, etc. It’s still pretty safe, but as a way to make a living, it’ll eventually end up in trouble with the law.

Open Locks and Climb Walls (and Backstab!) are all interpreted pretty much as written. I’m tempted to try to come up with a more generous interpretation of Open Locks, or perhaps just label a fair number of locks “easy” (meaning no roll required as long as the thief has tools), but the consequences of failing to open a lock aren’t that dire, and the party can usually try to just break through the door or bash open the chest, which have their own drawbacks, making it worthwhile for the thief to at least attempt it.

Note that this whole way of looking at things owes a lot to Robert Fisher’s thoughts on thieves.

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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….