Risus Sorcerers

Apropos of nothing at all, I was thinking about Risus this morning on the way to work and how you could use it to make magic systems in just about any game. Or, you could use it to create a game in which the characters are all uber-powerful archmage demigods who can bend reality to their very will. Sort of like Exalted or Nobilis, except good.

For those who don't know anything about Risus, a brief precis: characters are created with four attributes, ranked 4, 3, 2, and 1. These numbers represent the size of the dice pool (in d6) for the relevant attribute. Attributes can be anything, though usually a noun-phrase is preferred: e.g. "Tough guy", "Poet", "Womanizer", "Slimy courtesan", etc. The beauty of the system is that it models physical and social combat very simply and effectively, before the Burning Wheel or Dogs in the Vineyard guys were twinkles in their respective fathers' eyes. Basically, it boils down to rolling the dice pool for a chosen attribute, with whoever scores highest whittling away the dice pool of their opponent until they have none left, whereupon the winner decides the fate of the loser. (It could be "I blast his face off with a fireball" if it's magical combat, or it could be "I win the argument and convince the King to let me marry his daughter" in a social combat.)

I have two ideas for a Risus-based magic system:

1. Characters begin with 4 "schools of magic" attributes, a la Warhammer, Magic: The Gathering, Elements, etc. They can make up their own or choose from a big "I'm the DM and these are the magic schools in my game world" list. So you might start off with Fire 4, Earth 3, Water 2 and Air 1 (say). This is in addition to the standard 4 attributes that a Risus character gets. The DM might set restrictions on what kind of stuff a player can do with that given magical school (green magic is for healing, blue magic is protective, yellow magic is to do with time, that sort of thing) or they might limit it only to player creativity.
2. Characters just have one "magic" attribute from among their four, allowing them to do literally anything they choose with their innate magical ability.

PCs would be able to cast spells as and when the situation requires, narrating what they do - for example, "I cast an earth spell and open up a chasm beneath the feet of the orcs!" or "I cast an air spell and summon a breeze to blow our ship safely to port!", or "I use my magic to blast the blacksmith's sanity and turn him into a gibbering moron!" The fun comes in coming up with interesting descriptions for how you use your magic ("I cast a fireball" is okay, "I summon a demon from the plane of fire to burn out the eyes of my enemies" is better.) Spells would go off without a hitch unless it came down to magical combat, in which case dice pools would come into play. Or, for the slightly less uber-powered game, the DM might assign target numbers depending on how ambitious the player is being: casting a fireball might have a difficulty of 5, but summoning an Efreet from the plane of fire to lay waste to an entire army might have a difficulty of 22.

The style of campaign it would support is, of course, one in which the characters are already extremely powerful at the beginning - able to smite mere mortals with impunity. The only genuine limit on what they can do is what the players can think of. As with Amber Diceless, the assumption from the start is that PCs can beat an ordinary human, and can only be challenged by mightily powerful opponents. Or each other. Usually, I prefer my campaigns to be more low-level and "gritty". Still, could be a lot of fun for a Very High Fantasy game of adventuring archmages.

Sex and The Risus

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Man on Wire and the Never to be Played Games

On the subject of games that I would be running in an ideal world but never will, we just finished watching Man on Wire. (The life of a married man on a Saturday night in the biggest and most exciting city on earth, ah, glory days. At least I had a few G&Ts.) In case you don't know it, you should. In case you haven't seen it, do so immediately. It's the story of Philippe Petit, the man who in 1974 walked on a tightrope between the Twin Towers in New York.


The genius of Man on Wire is that it's presented almost like a Heist movie. Petit and his gang made scale models of the Twin Towers, sneaked inside on numerous occasions, made fake IDs for themselves, took aerial shots by helicopter, observed the comings and goings inside and outside the building for hours at a time. Because the event was technically a criminal act, it required meticulous planning. In the end it went off without a hitch.

So my never-to-be-played idea is this. The PCs are a bunch of thrill seekers, performance artists, extreme sportsmen and general glory hunters. (Rogues, if you will.) They exist to pull off heists just like Petit's, planning and executing daredevil stunts to impress onlookers, bring beauty to the world, pick up chicks and/or self-aggrandize. The cities and extreme environments of the world, from Tokyo to Everest, are their sandbox.

What the game would need to really make it work is two things:

1) Mechanics for making stunts at least a little tense. You can't get much more bathetic than a long drawn-out break-into-the-twin-towers sequence followed by "Roll 14 or more on a d20 to walk the wire."

2) Mechanics for garnering glory/attention or whatever you want to call it. What motivates the PCs in this game is accruing fame and attention, so there need to be awards which cover it, with mechanical effects in game. If you pull of a truly world-shattering stunt like the Twin Tower Wire, it will surely give you a boost in confidence and charisma and a warm glow which will have some sort of effect on future success or failure.

Some bastardized form of Risus with extra bells and whistles, maybe.

There's Klingons off the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow...

I've been on a big Star Trek trip recently after many years of shunning it. I was a huge Next Generation fan first time around (I was the perfect age for it, being about 10 or 11) but could never get into DS9, actively disliked Voyager (has there ever been a less charismatic set of actors gathered together in one place? except for the doctor), and by the time Enterprise came along, just wasn't interested anymore.

Then for some reason late last year I got a hankering to watch some Trek and picked up Seasons 3 and 4 of NextGen on DVD. Now I'm hooked again. There has never been such an imperfectly perfect TV series, and I doubt there ever will be again.

Naturally this has me thinking about the age-old problem which has haunted gamerdom for generations. I believe Marcel Proust put it best:

"In his younger days a man dreams of possessing a Star Trek role playing game which he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a Star Trek role playing game may be enough to make him fall in love with it."

Or; why are we satisfied with substandard Trek role playing games, dammit?

It is my firm belief that the ultimate tool for Star Trek role playing is Risus. This is because, let's face it, Trek is fundamentally about things which can't be covered by rules - i.e. morality, logic puzzles, exploration and weird aliens with funny heads. That's the essence of the show in my opinion. Working out how much damage a phaser does, exactly how much a Klingon can lift, or how quickly a ship flying at Warp 4 can get to Tau Ceti Alpha Gamma 6 from Beta Delta Centauri Alpha entirely misses the point. What you need is a rules-lite system that doesn't get in the way of the derring-do, the exploration, and the debates over the Prime Directive and whether androids are sentient - which is the heart of the series. (That doesn't mean the game has to be turned into a comedy, mark you - Risus works surprisingly well as a 'serious' rules-lite system too.)

The thing about Risus is that it can be easily used to emulate 'social combat' - way better than any Forge game ever could. And as a heavy element of Star Trek is social combat, it seems a perfect fit. Think of Picard (Interstellar Diplomat 3) debating with Gowron (Raging Klingon 4) over whether or not to go to war. Or Riker (Spacefaring Casanova 4) trying to seduce that sexy genderless alien (Genderless Alien 3) who just came aboard. See?

Barking Alien has some good posts about this too, in which he talks about how to run a Star Trek campaign (or 'series'). Take a look.

No I am not a 'Furry', but I do like mice with swords

I just wanted to make my non-'Furry'ness absolutely clear. I do, however, have an odd liking for animal fantasy. I was just the right age - about 11 - to enjoy the Redwall series in its early heyday (I stopped after about the fifth or sixth book; there are now nineteen, apparently) and ever since then I've had a fondness for that weirdest of fantasy genres. I recently tried to reread the first Redwall book and couldn't get into it - it was written pre-Harry Potter, i.e. in the days when books for adolescents really were books for adolescents. But I think Duncton Wood has stood the test of time for grown-ups - being very dark and bloody, and very strange, as befits a book about sentient moles. (Give it a try before sniggering.)

Anyway, it seems that the Burning [X] crowd's newish game Mouse Guard has been set up to scratch that particular itch. It's apparently based on a comic (which as you might know I absolutely don't read - unless you're talking about Garfield, Dilbert, Asterix or Tintin). I'm not a big fan of the whole Burning Wheel thing, though I have flirted with the game and own its original iteration. I do however like the look of Mouse Guard, and might actually make a purchase - especially since this is specifically sold as a simplified version of BW.

Really though I'm not sure that there isn't anything about animal fantasy that couldn't be based on a free game like Risus or, heck, Swords & Wizardry. (I think I wrote recently about an idea for insectoid-animal-fantasy using S&W? I can't be bothered to find the post.) Really all you need is the suspension of disbelief and a willingness not to snigger, and to replace 'elf' and 'dwarf' and 'human' with things like 'mouse', 'rat' or 'otter'. A project worth thinking about, perhaps. We already have Ruins & Ronin and Fantasy Wild West. Why not Mice & Mazes? Lagomorphs & Labryinths? Hyraxes & Hydras? No takers?

Risus Asterix

Apropos of nothing.

Asterix

Indomitable Gaul: 4
Master of Timing: 3
Bottomless Belly: 2
Charismatic Leader: 1



Obelix

Indomitable Gaul: 4
Big Boned: 3
Good at Latin: 2
Menhir-smith: 1



Getafix

Wisest Druid in the Forest of Carnutes: 4
Brewer of Potions: 3
Phlegmatic Old Fart: 2
Indomitable Gaul: 1



Vitalstatistix

Indomitable Gaul: 4
Not Afraid of Anything Except the Sky Falling On His Head: 3
Skilled Browbeater: 2
Shield-riding: 1



Julius Caesar

Eternal Optimist: 4
Schemer of Schemes: 3
Quipper in Latin: 2
Impossibly Straight Teeth: 1

Zangband, ToME, and the Roguelikes

A week or so ago, a meme about gaming influences was floating around. I cited five straight off the bat without really thinking too long; it's clear I was being an idiot because I completely left out Zangband, my favourite Angband variant and also my favourite ever computer game. (It's about the only game I've never become bored with, in fact - I first started playing it at about 14 and haven't stopped since.) Zangband is now no longer being developed, but it has evolved into Tales of Middle Earth (ToME), which is just as good, anyway. If you've never played any of these games, I truly envy you. As with people who've never read Viriconium, or who've never seen The Insider, I'm incredibly jealous that you have the chance to come to the games fresh and discover the wonders contained therein, whereas for a jaded old hand like me they no longer hold any surprises.

What are Zangband and ToME? Well, they're Roguelikes: Games in which you take on the role of a character traveling around dungeons killing things and taking treasure. What distinguishes them from just about any other genre of computer game is a kind of beautiful simplicity which masks great complexity. Picture an @ sign (that's you) moving around a randomly-generated dungeon killing 'o's (orcs) 'T's (Trolls) and 'd's (dragons) and you'll be able to get a rough idea of what game play involves. But what you won't appreciate until you actually play is just how much is going on, and how realistic and powerful the game engine is. (Get hit by a fireball, and your scrolls and spell books might be destroyed by the fire; eat the wrong kind of mushroom and you'll see hallucinations; throw a potion of sleep at a gang of orcs and it will act like a sleep-causing grenade).

The best thing about Zangband is its 'everything including the kitchen sink' approach. There's no purity of vision involved, unless "let's put in whatever the hell we want" counts as such. In this respect it's very much like older versions of D&D. The central theme is based around Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, but the game incorporates elements from everything from H. P. Lovecraft to the computer game Doom: It's a game where high-level characters at the lower depths of the dungeon can expect to be challenged by Colours from Outer Space, Star-Spawn of Cthulu, Warriors of the Dawn and rocket-firing Cyberdemons, and where you might end up clearing a room of Uruk-hai one moment before having to kill a pack of Sheriff Lobos the next. It's a game where one of the deadliest enemies in the upper echelons of the dungeon is called The Disembodied Hand That Strangled People; a game where you'll have to kill Calvin and Hobbes to get lower than dungeon level 10, and a game where an Ancient Red Dragon is scary, but Barney the Dinosaur is scarier still.

I didn't used to appreciate this kind of cross-genre weirdness outside of computer games. Role playing was always a serious business for me, whether I was playing AD&D, Shadowrun, Werewolf: The Apocalypse or Traveler. To a large extent, it still is. But nowadays I'm more willing to entertain the idea that the 'everything including the kitchen sink' approach can add a new level of creativity, interest and fun to a game. In a way it's a big part of the influence on my OzCthulu game - where I'm mixing stone-age gaming with Call of Cthulu. In another it's at the root of the attraction I hold for Risus, which allows genre-mixing like no other game. But I suppose its main effect is in the sheer, riotous enjoyment that it brings across in its reckless, mad creativity. The desire to put in everything that the designers liked, regardless of whether it would 'fit', is infectious. I definitely plan to start mixing up my genres with my D&D games sometime soon.

d12s and a Statement of Intent

d12s never get the love, do they? d20s have a whole system named after them; d10s are the weapon of choice for the World of Darkness games, ORE, Chaosium's Basic Role Playing and many others; even d8s have some uses in AD&D, but for some reason all d12s ever get is the dregs from the table. You want to work out the damage of a two-handed sword? Okay, the d12 is your man, but that's about all he's good for.

I was thinking about this today, while more generally mulling over dice and their many virtues. I don't think it's remarked upon often enough just how fun rolling dice is. For starters, there is a real tactile pleasure in picking up a fistful of them - d10s are my favourite for this, which is one of the reasons I like ORE - and just chucking them across the table. The weight of them, and the noise they make, patterpatterpatter - it's great. Secondly, as we all know, pleasure is really all about anticipation, whether it's looking forward to a nice big slap-up meal, kick-off at a football match, or building up to "the big night" after the first couple of dates with a new girl- or boy-friend. Now, rolling eight d10s isn't quite as good as the build up to sex, I admit, but it almost is: those few moments from the time the dice have left your hand to the time they come to rest flip all the same sorts of buttons. They just don't flip them quite as hard. Even the potential for disappointment is accurately emulated.

I seem to have digressed. I was talking about d12s, wasn't I? So anyway, yes, I was thinking about rolling dice today and decided, what the heck, I was in Shinjuku, so why not swing by The Yellow Submarine and get a handful? So get them I did; I am now the proud owner of ten new d12s, all sparkling and smelling of newness. The next question is what to do with them.

As you know if you've been keeping up, my new idea is a project I've taken to calling "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." It's basically a fantasy campaign which takes Mallory, MacDonald, Dunsany, White and Wolfe as its starting points rather than Tolkien and Moorcock; "fantastical fantasy," as I like to put it. I'd basically been thinking about running it in using a bastardized form of Risus, but this new brood of baby d12s I'm now parent to have started whispering "Use us! Use us!" in very insistent tones, and I don't think I'll be able to resist them much longer.

So here it is: a Statement of Intent. I'm going to write a new game system entirely based on d12s, for use with my Sir Gawain and the Green Knight setting. If I'm feeling lazy I'll probably just rewire Risus for use with d12s rather than d6s. But if my creative juices are pumping I might very well take a crack at coming up with something Brand New. Watch this space.

Genre Emulating Mechanics: Risus and Burning Wheel

There's some fascinating stuff here about genre emulation.

I'm all about genre in the sense that I like my games to have a clearly defined one - be it Sword & Sorcery or Space Opera or Cyberpunk - and to remain within its bounds. (Genre-busting has never interested me in the slightest.) But until now I've never given a huge amount of thought to how mechanics support genre - there have just been mechanics I've liked and mechanics I haven't, and I've taken the ones I've liked and tried to crowbar them into different genres depending on my mood. To wit: I once ran a game, for example, which mixed Lovecraftian horror with Australian Aboriginal mythology, but used 1st edition AD&D mechanics to do so.

Needless to say that sort of thing is pretty unsatisfactory, and if it is to work it requires a lot of effort that I frankly don't have time or inclination for anymore. Risus - and I suppose other games like FATE and SOTC - strike me as a better alternative, because their core mechanics (Cliche in Risus, Aspects in FATE and SOTC) are so amenable to genre and to what genre is trying to do. This is especially true of Risus. That is to say: genre is cliche, and as that game's mechanics revolve entirely around cliche it should be a perfect fit.

(For example, if you want to play a Superhero game with Risus, you can emulate the genre very easily by giving characters cliches such as "Evil Genius", "Stronger than 10 tigers", "Well brought up small-town boy", "Snazzy suit", or "Reluctant hero." (Hooks also help you do this.) If on the other hand you want a swashbuckling pirate game, you can come up with cliches like "Rope-swinger par excellence", "Looks good in a cod piece" or "Bloodthirsty maniac".)

But then you read a post like this and you think, hang on, these fellows could be onto something:

An example [of how Risus isn't perfect for genre emulation] could be Cold War spying - you could use Risus and cliches would help create a specific mood of betrayal and cloak-and-dagger, but you're still not getting the direct mechanical oomph that a Trust mechanic like Cold City uses supplies - in that game, the more Trust in each other you have, the more effective you are, but at the same time the more vulnerable to betrayal. Everyone also has Hidden Agendas which give bonus dice too, so you have a system-supported tension between trusting one another and betraying one another to achieve your agendas.

You could end up with exactly the same amount of double-dealing and subterfuge in a Risus game, complete with secret agendas, but with Cold City you not only have player expectation and the flavour of the traits/cliches pointing you in that direction, you've also got the system nudging you towards those kinds of outcomes and stories.

Coincidentally, I was listening to an old Godzilla Gaming Podcast today in which the guys interviewed Luke Crane, creator of the highly successful Burning Wheel family of games. He spoke very forcefully about the future of RPGs and made it clear that he believes (to paraphrase) that said future will involve games "which do a specific thing, but do it very well" - i.e. games that take a rather narrow concept (politicking in Heian era Japan, to use the example of his new game, Blossoms are falling) but which allow you to do that concept to the max. (He said at one point in the interview that Blossoms are falling allows you to be, say, a Regent trying to manipulate a child emperor and competing for influence against a retired emperor, and that such a situation won't come about by accident or in spite of the rules - it will come about because that sort of thing is what the game is designed for.)

This is heady stuff, and makes me wonder about the value of my relentless attempts to fit the square peg of AD&D/Classic D&D into the round holes of Aboriginal Lovecraft, Amazon Exploration, Pacific Island Myth and Arthurian Legend. Should I not be designing specific rulesets to support those 'genres' rather than relying on existent but unsuitable mechanics?

Probably. And yet there's still a part of me that keeps whispering, "It isn't about the system, it's about the setting, the DM and the players," because broadly speaking that is what I think, fundamentally. What does the system matter, at the end of the day, if the DM and players are all singing from the same hymn sheet regarding what they want the game to be? And I worry that increased genre-emulating-mechanics will result in greater balkanization in the role playing community - because who wants to learn a brand new set of mechanics every time they take up a slightly different game?

Still, food for thought. Let's get those Risus rules whirring into action and see what we can come up with vis-a-vis Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and go from there.

Risus! Or: Knights! And Wizards!

Why is it that nobody has ever told me about Risus before? I've seen the name bandied about on the internet, of course, mostly at therpgsite and on Jeff Rients' blog, but why is it that none of my gaming friends has ever grabbed me physically, by the lapels, and yelled in my face "You've never played Risus before? What are you, stark raving mental or something!?"? With their veins sticking out on their forehead. And slobbering a little.

I've just downloaded it, and it puts the very phrase "insanely brilliant" into a whole new light.

Of course, comedy gaming isn't my thing, but as you're probably aware, pseudo-intellectual literary wankiness most certainly is. So as soon as I started leafing through the .pdf my brain got to working and came out with: The Wizard Knight, but ROLE PLAYING.

I love The Wizard Knight, and I love Gene Wolfe. First things first, if you haven't read that book but have read a lot of Gene Wolfe, it's important to say that it isn't anything like The Book of the New Sun apart from being brilliantly good. The Wizard Knight is fantastical fantasy in the finest tradition of Lord Dunsany, T. H. White, Thomas Malory, Chaucer and George MacDonald, but with a very Wolfeian twist and a fine smattering of Norse mythology. There are no orcs here; it's all about knights who fall in love with faeries, fight giants and dragons, and never refuse a challenge to a duel or a request to rescue a fair maiden - just like Gawain and Lancelot. It's all larger than life, and concieved of in a universe of seven realms, from the pits of hell where the dragons and giants come from, to the heavens themselves where the Valfather lives.

This is just made for a Risus game, I feel. Not entirely the same as The Wizard Knight, of course. But a game where all the characters are writ large and their challenges are rogue knights, evil enchantresses, giants, ogres, gryphons, dryad temptresses and vile dragons. Travel to hell to fight wyverns! Outwit villainous hags who've charmed you with their magick! Swear oaths to never rest until the manticore is slain! Fight hour-long duels knee deep in the icy waters of mountain rivers, only stopping to trade insults! Seduce elven queens! Quest for the love of maidens!

You get the idea. Possibly. If you don't, I really feel this picture just sums it up: