On Bathos

I think what I appreciate most in D&D is bathos: perhaps the overwhelming narrative characteristic of the game, insofar as it has any such characteristics. Random encounter tables, rolling dice in the open, taking results as they come, and resolute avoidance of illusionism or pallete-shifting of any kind - all of these elements of 'old school' D&D play contribute to the development of the bathetic.

People who like "narrative" games and prefer things to make "dramatic sense" usually miss this. 

An example of bathos from last night's game: Eki Ulele had just survived the most difficult and bloody encounter the party had yet had, in which 8 bandits and 2 hireling retainers had died and one of the PCs dying. He had been through, in many ways, his toughest moment. He had faced down the bandit leader and bluffed him into retreat, then survived a nerve-wracking chase through a pitch black forest, with no weapons or magic and only flasks of oil to aid him. He had led the opposition away from his wounded friends, buying them time to escape.

He survived all this, and if I was interested in trying to develop the "plot" of the campaign, as if it was a story, this would have been a defining episode for his character - the making of him. He would have gone on to better things, and grown as a person because of what happened to him at the bandit lair. Or perhaps he would have died bravely in one final showdown with the bandit leader, going out in a blaze of glory, remembered for ever more.

But the dice said otherwise: the next day he got an unlucky result and had a wilderness encounter; he got an unluckier result when it turned out to be giant bees; and an even unluckier result when he failed his surprise roll. He died a meaningless and ignoble death alone in the forest, stung to death by mindless insects. Bathos.

Yet this has its own narrative sense. Bathos and absurdity are proud and important traditions in drama and comedy. They may not be "emotionally satisfying", but they have their own value. The next time somebody makes out that you should fiddle or ignore dice rolls in the name of maintaining some sort of narrative consistency, remind them of this: "I prefer it bathetic, darling".

D&D my Cyberpunk; or, Hit points? We don't need no stinking hit points!

Some of the comments on yesterday's post got me thinking. It would be perfectly possible to run a game of D&D and using its core themes (bunch of adventurers seeking glory, wealth, fame and fortune through exploring ancient tombs and ruins and hexcrawling) in a setting with more up-to-date technology - taking inspiration from, say, the American Wild West, Brazil in the era of the bandeirantes, the exploration of Australia's interior by whites, the Russian conquest of Siberia, Livingstone's journeys in to "darkest Africa", and so on - but with dragons - were it not for the fact that D&D as a system just doesn't model guns very well. You can explain away the fact that 9th level characters have so many hit points by abstraction in a normal game of D&D, but the abstraction gets stretched to breaking point once it comes to bullets (this is part of the reason why I loathed my experience playing d20 Modern, despite perfectly good DM and players).

There is a simple solution to this, of course: as characters gain levels they don't gain hit points. A 9th-level character has the same number he started out with. (The DM might want to be generous and give starting characters max hit points for their class.) So an ambush of 9th-level characters by shotgun wielding goblins would retain the sense of fear and danger that a real gunfight would have, and make things suitably concrete.

Another thought occurs, however: Cyberpunk 2020 is a surprisingly robust and effective generic system if you want something that is easier to learn than GURPS while retaining a decent level of grit and crunch. I know this because I ran a WWII-era zombie game with it and thought it worked very effectively. (The only complaint would be that dice rolls are irritating and fiddly when it comes to damage - if you get hit by a 7.62mmx54mmR round you have to roll and add up 6d6+2 damage, which is clearly enough to render an unarmoured target dead in almost all cases but not quite enough to justify saying 'a hit is a kill', so in big gun fights you are constantly rolling and totalling up fistfuls of d6s.)

I also think that, the more 'modern' ones D&D becomes, the more it needs to have skills. In a low-technology world, people are not particularly specialised, because adventuring skills are not hard to learn: everybody can swim, use a rope, climb, pick locks, look for secret doors, etc. But the more technologically advanced a society becomes, the more career-type skills become necessary - it's more plausible to imagine somebody would have to sacrifice learning other skills in order to become a train driver, or astronomer, or demolitions expert, or whatever. A system that wants to model this would have to have a skill system, and Cyberpunk 2020 has a simple and reasonably effective one.

You would probably need to have some sort of wealth-for-XP mechanic on top of it, of course, but that would be easy to cobble together. As characters gained levels they would become more skilful, and the magic-users would get to use more powerful spells, but their basic physicality - their attributes and hit points - would remain the same and they would be as frail as ever in combat. I think this would be an interesting marriage between adventuresome exploration and hijinks and the constant risk of sudden death.

Noisms' Verfremdungseffekt

I was going to post about druids, but then got sidetracked by other things. I'm all creativity-ed out every day at the moment due to working on my thesis (yeah, I know, "first world problems" - I despise that meme, but there is a grain of deep Truth in it), so that will have to wait for the time being. Fortunately, although I am creativity-ed out, that doesn't stop me pontificating in a meandering fashion about whatever happens to wander across my field of vision.

Today, it's this, a thread about prep. The basic gist of the original post is the realisation the poster has come across that prep isn't really for him; I identify strongly with this, in that - as I've posted on several occasions - I like to blitz preparation before the start of a campaign and set it up in such a way that it more-or-less runs itself once it has started. It is helpful to imagine a campaign as being a large, circular rock sitting on the edge of a somewhat steep slope, with me, Wily Coyote-like, fashioning a lever out of a large tree branch (the prep) which I then use to shove the rock into movement and let it be carried by its own momentum to a messy, destructive and unexpected end.

But shortly into the thread there is this post, which set me thinking:

The 'Illusion of Preparedness' is critical for immersion; allowing the players to see where things are improvised or changed reminds them to think outside the setting, removing them forcibly from immersion. Whenever the players can see the hand of the GM, even when the GM needs to change things in their favor; it removes them from the immersed position. The ability to keep the information flow even and consistent to the players, and to keep the divide between prepared information and newly created information invisible is a critical GM ability.

I've thought about it a lot, and the less I think I agree with it. Or, perhaps to put it more accurately, the less I think I can envisage it.

First, I don't know about you other DMs out there reading this, but I'm surely not alone in that I make mistakes all the fucking time, which just means that, sometimes, I have to backtrack to make changes. Example: in last week's session my group were walking from a village to the nearby city, and they said something like "when we're an hour from the town, we'll send X ahead to let them know we're coming" and for some reason I interpreted that to mean an hour after leaving the village, rather than an hour before arriving at the city, which it turned out was what they'd meant - and they let me know this with howls of indignation and anguish when it became important later on. This forced me to retcon things a bit and fiddle around with what was happening. So DMs are only human, and we make errors of judgement; expecting the players to never see any seams is more than a little unrealistic.

Secondly, I'm not entirely sure how well a DM can mask "newly created information" and keep it indistinguishable from prepared information in reality - unless we're talking about Al Pacino. A game in which players have real agency is always going to throw up a billion situations in which the DM just doesn't have a ready-made answer, and while he can makes guesses and riff on his setting if he knows it well enough, it's difficult to do that and fool the players with any consistency.

And thirdly, I'm dubious about lying to the players anyway. Maybe my DMing style is incredibly Brechtian without me really realising it, but I'm going behind the fourth wall all the time when I run a game. I leaf through rulebooks and my folders, I roll all my dice in the open, I have NPCs make tongue-in-cheek and self-aware remarks, I involve my players in decision-making, I sometimes ask them their opinions on what would happen in the situation at hand. I think this adds to the fun of playing a game, even if it isn't immersive and probably actively works against immersion. It might not make the players feel invested in what is going on at a personal level, but I think it makes them feel invested in the game as a game.

Which isn't to say that developing a very deep, detailed setting isn't its own reward, and nor is it to say that players get much more out of a campaign if the setting seems coherent, interesting, and alive. It's just to say that a lot of what gets talked about in game forums often sounds idealistic and quixotic to me, and I'm intrigued to know how close to those ideals other DMs' games become.

What Winston Churchill would have said to Gary Gygax

Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general, the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.

This is a famous Winston Churchill quote, which I think can be profitably applied to D&D, further to the whole combat as sport versus combat as war thing; with just a few changes in terminology, we get the maxim:

D&D is won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the player, the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.

A good maxim to live by. Good play is about cunning and careful manipulation of resources (be they mundane or magical), and the environment, to achieve maximum success with the minimum amount of death. Avoiding combat where possible, and, when necessary, using resources and the environment to bring maximum force to bear where the enemy is weak. Using the dungeon and wilderness to your advantage, in getting the maximum amount of gold and experience you can. Carefully marshalling equipment, using it when it is needed, improvising where necessary, making good logistical choices.

It is also about bringing snacks and, preferably, beer.

Rules and Rulings

All this talk about rules versus rulings and Mother-May-I? and what have you reminds me of the legal realists, particularly Jerome Frank.

Jerome Frank, writing in the 1930s and 1940s, was of the opinion that legal rules are essentially fictional. He was not a postmodernist; his scepticism came from a solid grounding in reality and was based on the premise that no court ever makes a decision based on the "real" facts - the decision often happens months or years after the event, it often relies on suspect eyewitness testimony, and judges and juries are fallible and biased.

Rather than being based on a clear understanding of the facts, then, court decisions are instead merely a manifestation of what individual judges consider to be just and proper in that particular instance, taking into account the impact on society, with the judge paying lip service to the rules after the event. The decision-making process, in fact, is the reverse of what a textbook will tell you, according to Frank. That is, in almost all cases, the judge first makes a decision based on his own idea of what he thinks would be just, and then he searches for a rule to fit it to afterwards.

This was not a problem for Frank, and indeed it was something he thought a mature legal system should embrace. He said:

We want judges who, thus viewing and employing all rules as fictions, will appreciate that, as rules are fictions 'intended for the sake of justice', it is not to be endured that they shall work injustice in any particular case...

In other words, Frank was of the belief that in a mature legal system, the fictional veneer of predictability and robustness that rules provide is valuable, but actually all that really matters is that judges make the just decision in any given case. Applying a rule "correctly" ought never to result in an injustice. Judges, basically, ought to be free to make any decision they deem proper, unconstrained by the need for "legal clarity" or undue respect for rules and principles that have no real basis in reality.

Something similar can be said, in my view, about the role of the GM in a traditional game. I'll use Monte Cook's example as my own:

Say you've got a special weapon (magic or tech, doesn't matter) that makes foes all itchy so they are distracted. In a tightly written ruleset, the designer defines not only the effect, but what (if anything) can counter the effect. Maybe it would state that if the victim suffers a -3 penalty on all actions for the next ten turns unless he spends two consecutive turns and makes a new successful resistance roll, in which case the effect ends. In a GM-logic ruleset, you would write it entirely differently. You would explain what's going on in the situation, and let the GM handle the rest. So it would say that the victim is covered in an itchy and irritating powder and suffers a -3 penalty for the next ten turns while the powder was on his flesh and clothes. Then it would be up to the player to say, "I want to clean the itching powder off." And the GM says, "okay, if you take two turns, and make a new resistance roll, you can get it off." The advantage in the latter case is, the player could also say, "I'm going to jump in this nearby pool of water," and the GM is free to say, "Okay, that washes it off immediately." Or the player might say, "I use the water in my canteen to wash it off," and the GM might say, "Okay, that still takes two turns, but the roll is automatic now." Or the victim's mage friend might conjure a wind to blow the powder off. Or whatever.

The "tightly written ruleset" is the kind of approach that Jerome Frank argued was meaningless and self-defeating: maybe in a very limited set of circumstances it is possible to create rules which will always apply in the same way in all situations, but those rules are rare and in the majority of cases the rule will not be directly relatable to the "facts", which do not really exist in any event. It is better to recognise that, generally speaking, in most situations, the GM will make a decision based on what he or she thinks is best or most appropriate, and may then retro-fit a rule to that decision afterwards. The process for making the itching-powder decision would go:

GM thinks about what would happen if the player tried what he was trying -> GM makes a ruling -> a fictional rule is stated. (Fictional in the sense that no rule is really "real".)

The next time itching powder is used, the same process is followed. It may be that the GM makes the same ruling as before, but he shouldn't feel bound to, because the circumstances may be a little different (this time, it's raining, so the powder can be cleaned of automatically in just one turn of action, or something). He should just decide based on what he thinks is appropriate.

Frank would say we should embrace this if we want to have a mature approach to role playing. Unfortunately, not everybody does.

Noisms' Reactivity Spectrum

People seem to have misunderstood yesterday's post, or misconstrued it, or not read it properly. Alternatively, it was poorly worded, although personally I doubt that. Here's something that will simplify. May I present:

Clear?

No? I'll explain. On the left hand side of the spectrum are campaigns where the DM is totally reactive. This can be synonymous with player freedom, although this is a somewhat grey area and the mapping is not perfect. It is certainly synonymous with "front loaded prep" (i.e., the further left you go, the more the prep is weighted towards the period before the campaign actually kicks off).

The further you go towards the left, the more the players are driving the game; they choose what they want to do and where they want to go, and the DM just reacts to them. At the extreme left are the most sandboxy sandbox games, often using D&D or similar: the DM creates the world, or an area of the world, and it sits waiting for the players to appear and start doing whatever they want to do - going down dungeons, hexcrawling, interacting with the NPCs, whatever. (A lot of story games are also at the extreme left.) Another way of putting it is that here, the way events unfold tends to originate in the players. The dungeon does not come to them; they go to the dungeon. The hexes do not come to them; they go to the hexes. (In Soviet Russia, hex crawls on YOU.)

The further you move towards the right, the more the DM is driving the game and the more the players are reacting to it. This does not mean that the further you go towards the right the more the game resembles a rail road: rail roads do not feature on the the spectrum because they are not actually games.

Here, the players will have freedom, but their freedom tends to be constrained by what goes on in the world - in particular, it is constrained by the fact that events do not have an origin internal to the players, but external to them.That is, the further right you go, the less the players are the engine and the more they cede initiative. A superhero game would tend to be more towards the right, even if notionally it is "sandboxy" and there is no predetermined plot or end point; this is because superheroes tend to have to react to conflict that has an external origin. Superman does not hatch plots to fuck over Lex Luthor - the action originates externally to him. He has the freedom to foil Lex's plots in whatever fashion he likes, but still, he is not the one with the initiative.

The Samurai Sandbox leans towards the right. It is not all the way to the right; I would put it just slightly to the left of the "players partially reactive" line. This is because, in the Samurai Sandbox game, even if the players have very vague, very open, very ill-defined mission statements, the conflict they have to deal with is still largely of external origin.

To illustrate, let's use my "keep the peace in Tosa province" mission. This is a very broad goal which can be interpreted in any manner of ways, and certainly won't result in DM rail roading. But nevertheless, the game is still going to be one in which the players are reacting to events, conflicts and circumstances which originate externally. This is because you can't keep the peace if there is nothing threatening it (well, you can do, but it would be a rather dull affair); and because the players are the ones keep the peace, this means the threats have to have an external origin (bandits, wolves, ghosts, spirits, yakuza, Mongolian invaders, internal strife, whatever). The players are going to be in large part reactive.

They are not totally reactive of course - and any group of players worth their salt will be partially active and will still drive the game along in many other ways with their plots and schemes. But still, the majority of what happens in the game is going to arise outside of player action.

There is nothing wrong with this, of course, and there is no value judgement on Noisms' Reactivity Spectrum. However, as I alluded to at the beginning of the entry, the further right you go on the spectrum the more prep is likely to be evenly distributed from session to session, and the more prep is going to be involved. Not only does the DM have to create the set up before the campaign begins. He also has to keep coming up with many, and varied, threats, and he has to make the threats change and respond correspondingly as the players react to them. The campaign may be very fun, fulfilling, exciting and all the rest, but it is going to require considerably more work than the "pure" rogueish sandbox will to run.

Samurai Sandbox

In a fit of nostalgia (I miss living in Japan) I bought Bushido the other day. I haven't had time to read it yet (although I did abuse my office printing access by printing it all out and treasury-tagging it into booklet form). But I have had time to ponder one of the great imponderables: How do you run a samurai sandbox game?

Other people more intelligent and verbose than me have written before about what you might call the "Superman Sandbox" problem. This goes, roughly, as follows: Superheroes are by definition reactive. They stop crime. This means that superhero games aren't a good fit for player-driven, sandbox play - at least, not readily. It's difficult for players to be the engine of the game when they are mostly just waiting around for somebody bad to do something horrible so they can stop it. And it is difficult to prevent that sort of game turning into a big fat exercise in teat-sucking in which the GM is just dollopping out missions for the players to take on. What does Superman do in the downtime while he is waiting for Lex Luthor to come up with his next hare-brained scheme? He mopes around Lois Lane and rings his parents. Great session, guys. Let's fast- forward to the good bit.

You can, of course, run a superhero game in which the players are not just waiting around for the bad guy to do something bad, and in which they use their powers towards ends that are not necessarily all about stopping bad guys... But then, you're not really playing a superhero game anymore, are you? You are betraying the genre.

Samurai games have a similar sort of same problem, to a lesser degree. Of course, if your players are going to be yakuza types, or perhaps ronin, they are free to do whatever they want. But if you want to do things properly and run a game in which the players are samurai, this means they have to be the retainers of some lord or other, which makes it difficult for them to be free to pursue their own goals in a way that makes sense "within the fiction". They have to wait around to be ordered to do things. Or you have to betray the genre in some way and allow them a level of freedom they should not really have.

You might argue, and it is a fair argument, that the samurai game does not require the lord to be sending his retainers on missions all the time. It doesn't have to be so GM-centric. The lord might just give the PCs the responsibility for doing certain things, within the scope of which the players have all the freedom they want. "Keep the peace in Tosa province" is an ambiguous mission statement which the players can interpret in all manner of different ways, given a varied set of conflicts which the GM has dreamed up going on within the province.

But at the very least this still requires you to, as Zak puts it, design conflicts. You can't just do the ordinary kind of sandbox setup you would use for a game of D&D or Cyberpunk 2020 or whatever, drawing maps and creating lists of NPCs and interesting locales and then just set the players loose in it. Why? In D&D, that kind of setup works because you know the PCs have absolute liberty to do what they want, and you as the DM only have to react to them and ensure your setting reacts appropriately. In our "Keep the peace in Tosa province" scenario, you would be required to add an extra layer - the potential threats to the peace. This is hard work, because you don't have any idea how the players are going to deal with those threats, or in what order. They aren't just doing the rather predictable things that rogueish PCs will do in a game of D&D (delve into dungeons, go hex crawling, etc.). They are thinking of complex ways to resolve complex problems. And this puts a lot of pressure on the GM to be able to improvise and maintain a high level of preparation and thought, session after session.

To put it more simply, once you've done the setup for a D&D sandbox game, each session more or less writes itself. The players are doing things off their own bat and the DM is reacting. But in a samurai sandbox game, each session is something of a mystery (or, let's say, what is going to happen in the next session but one is a mystery). You, the DM, are creating things the players are reacting to, and they have many more potential reactions than you can really anticipate. To put it even more simply and reduce it ad absurdum, it is the difference between:

A: There is a dungeon. The players explore it. (D&D)
B: There are a group of bandits in the South-Western tip of Tosa province. The players...try to kill them? Arrest them? Go looking for more help? Decide to spy on them? Agree to turn a blind eye in return for a bribe? (Bushido)

One is relatively simple for the DM to deal with; the other is relatively complex.

Big is Beautiful

It's long been my view that TSR-era D&D, taken as a whole, is the most brilliant game there is. No - I don't mean the system is brilliant: it isn't. No sensible person would design a game that way nowadays, knowing what we now know about game design, which has undoubtedly got better since 1974.

D&D's brilliance comes from the fact that, plain and simply, it has the biggest "brain trust" of any game system on the planet. Like Manchester United, who can draw on football playing talent worldwide, or like the USA, which can siphon off the intelligent and talented multitudes from every corner of the globe, D&D has for decades been the biggest game around, and that means that it can draw on more creativity, talent and innovation than any other system.

The perfect example of this is, of course, the OSR and what is going on nowadays on Google+ (mainly, it has to be said, thanks to this guy more than anybody else). There are hundreds of extremely talented, thoughtful, entertaining and clever gamers pooling their ideas daily on teh internets, and the dead giveaway is that almost (though not entirely) all of it feeds into one game - D&D.

Far from seeing this as a bad thing, I embrace it. Perhaps if I wasn't interested in its own peculiar and idosyncratic take on the fantasy genre I would bemoan D&D's dominance. But I love it, so I don't.

D&D, you are the bestest game in the whole wide world.

The Luck (Stat) in the Head

As long-term readers of this blog may know, I spent probably more of my formative years playing Cyberpunk 2020 than any other game. Cyberpunk 2020 is a kind of messed up system, very much "of its time", but one of its great qualities is its Luck stat, which is at least as systemically important as any of the others (Intelligence, Reflexes, etc.). Naturally, the tendency for beginner players and GMs is to treat Luck like a dump stat - give it 2 points, the minimum required, and use your points to improve your other skills. This is because Luck in the core rules is pretty useless - you just spend Luck points to get bonuses to rolls. Zzz.

I gradually developed a more expansive approach to Luck - so much so that anybody who treated it like a dump stat would be a fool, a fool I tell you. Luck in my Cyberpunk 2020 games became, essentially, a primitive form of FATE point, giving the players a kind of control over the narrative: if a player asks me something and I don't know the answer and feel like making one up would be arbitrary on my part ("Is there a CCTV camera nearby?", "Is there a stapler in the office?", "Is there a taxi passing by?") I have them roll a d10. If the result is less than their luck, they get the answer they wanted. If not, they don't. I might also use luck if I can't think of a way to resolve something (there's a car crash and the players didn't decide in advance who was in the passenger seat - they all roll a d10 and add their luck and the lowest is the unfortunate one who gets thrown through the windscreen).

I've always liked this approach, because it makes me feel like it aids my objectivity (I'm neither giving players what they want nor deliberately refusing them what they want) and I enjoy the thought that luck is an actual 'thing' that has real-world effects; there's not only an element of luck in the things that you do as a player (rolling dice to see if you succeed), there's also an actual, almost physical phenomenon in the world which shapes the destinies of the people in it. And because it tends only to be used for things that are relatively trivial ("Is there a taxi nearby?") but which could literally be the hinge between life and death, it feels true as an accurate reflection of the rather random nature of life. 

Do We Need Villains?

On this podcast Zak is asked what his favourite villain is. There is then some discussion of what makes a good villain, and the interviewer postulates that in a game, "the villain is the plot"; or, if I understood him correctly, a game is all about how the players react to what the villain does.

That's all very strange to me, and it got me thinking about villains in my games: in short, there aren't any. It's just not how I set things up. I start off with a big list of NPCs and they have their own motivations, goals and relationships, and some of them are very bad, but none of them are really villains in the narrative sense. They're not opposed to the PCs unless the PCs do something to piss them off or go out of their way to set themselves up in opposition to them. (In fact, in D&D in particular, the notion of a Big Bad Evil Guy never made any sense to me: this is a world where there are 20th level Lawful Good paladins, gold dragons, and kirin running about the place, right? So why would any BBEG even care about what this gang of 1st level no-hopers is doing? And why would those no-hopers have to get involved in the first place?)

But that's just in short; in practice, of course, villains emerge spontaneously through play, because if there's anything players are good at, it's doing things that piss off powerful NPCs. Once the game begins and the PCs are doing what they do, it is more or less inevitable that some NPC or other(s) will end up being "the villain" by default. This is as true of dungeoneering-type fantasy games ("Oh, we just pissed off the evil wizard") as it is of cyberpunk-type games ("Oh, we just pissed off the sinister faceless megacorp") as it is of SF ("Oh, we just pissed off those aliens"). In other words, villainy is something that comes about from the game, not something that is there from the start. It's bottom-up, not top-down.

That got me thinking further: is it, perhaps, inherent in role playing games there has to be a villain somewhere? That if there is not a villain from the start, ultimately the actions of the players will necessitate one emerging, unless they literally sit around doing nothing all day? Can there be any genuine interest without a villain existing at least as a corollary?

How to Get the Players to Stop Being Selfish

I don't normally read the RPG.net columns (I have no idea what qualifies the people who write them to say anything authoritative about anything in the world, ever), but for some reason I decided to read today's. It is called How to Get the Players to Play More In-Character, and it strikes me as the perfect example of something that I've never really been able to understand: the idea that the GM in a gaming group has the responsibility for fiddling around at the margins, trying to come up with ways to incentivise things that should be basic requirements for gaming. Like he is the dad and the players are a gang of 8 year olds who haven't yet developed the rudiments of maturity. This all feeds back to something I've written about before, but why is it that for so many people the basic assumption is that it's the GM's job to cajole the players into just properly participating in the game?

To spin the question another way, why is nobody writing a column entitled "How to stop pissing off your GM and the other players at the table by completely failing to find the shred of human social skills required to realise that you are being a hindrance to the enjoyment of others?" You could call it HSPYGOPTCFCSHSSRRYBHEO, or something.

The Platonic DM

The people at Story Games have been going OSR-crazy, it seems. There are at least half a dozen threads about either the OSR generally or OSR games on the top page. (Although to be fair, it seems one of them was Zak baiting the site's denizens.) This one asks what makes an old school game old school - what are the mechanics? - and it inspired me to give a response:

GM neutrality is the bedrock on which old school play is founded. The GM is objective arbitrator, referee, judge. He is neither against the players nor for them. He presents them with the world they interact with, and he provides the consequences for their actions.

I elaborated a bit further:

No human being can be totally neutral, but he can try. That's really what it's about.

There will always be some level of illusionism, because in giving the players freedom they'll go where you don't expect, so you have to just make shit up (NPCs, locations, etc.). You try to do this as "neutrally" as possible by thinking to yourself, "Okay, in this game world, what would happen? What would be here?" Not what would be "fun", not what would be a challenge, not what would kill your players, not what would make a good story... but what would happen.

Random generators help a lot to keep you honest. Roll the dice and go with the results, and don't ever fudge. 

That's what I think it's all about, really. If I was listing DMing best principles, or drafting a manifesto, there would probably only be three points:

• Try as hard as you can to be neutral.
• Think about what would happen, not what would be fun, what would be a challenge, what would kill your players, or what would make a good story. Just what would happen.
• Use lots of random generators to keep yourself honest.

None of these points are actually realizable 100% of the time. We are human beings, and human beings are flawed. But you can try as hard as you can, and you'll get better at it. (As Zeb Cook put it, you need to "Take the time and effort to become not just a good DM, but a brilliant one." A big element of that is training yourself to be neutral. At least as far as my own DMing preferences go.)

The platonic DM is, basically, a deistic God who is utterly objective and dispassionate. And being a deistic God is not really such a bad thing to aspire to.

GHOST/ECHO, Dice Strategy and Negotiation

We spent the evening playing a one-shot of GHOST/ECHO. (This was an episode in my group's shared world, which we have given the banal but accurate description "To The Stars", and which I have posted about here and Patrick has posted about here.) We had fun with it and came up with something that was serious and ridiculous in equal measure, in fitting with the setting as a whole. I think I can characterise my group's style as being full of great, sometimes profound, setting ideas but unable to take actual play very seriously at all. I think that combination works well.

In any case, GHOST/ECHO is a minimalist game par excellence - it fits on two sides of A4 paper, on which nary a centimetre is wasted, and it has only one, simple mechanic, which can be boiled down as follows:

If you want to do something in any kind of situation of conflict, challenge, or difficulty, roll 2d6. Then assign one die to the "danger" and one die to the "goal". High is good and low is bad. So if you get 6 and 5, you could assign the 6 to the "danger" (meaning you escape harm) and the 5 to the "goal" (meaning you succeed); if you get 3 and 4 you can assign the 3 to the danger (meaning you take some harm and the danger remains) and 4 to the "goal" (meaning you have a partial success), and so on. It gets most interesting when you get 6 and 1, obviously.

What I like about this is that it forces you to make choices - to strategize - with your dice rolls. In some situations you might want to sacrifice success to escape harm, whereas in others you might want to succeed so much that you take whatever harm is coming your way. You have to be tactical with your luck. I like that mixture of decision-making and randomness. You can't govern the dice results and they force you to make tough choices, but you do get a choice.

Because it's so abstract, it also forces you to make everything up as you go along. "Harm" and "success" can mean almost anything you want to construe them to mean, and will probably end up being dictated by GM fiat - although the players can offer their own suggestions and perhaps negotiate. This makes the game a bit like what I imagine MAR Barker's Perfected Games Rules to have operated like in practice, though of course in a slightly more complicated fashion. Yet more evidence for the fact that if you scratch a story-gamer you will find an Old School Revivalist and vice versa - they just don't know it yet.

The game itself encourages a make-it-up-as-you-go-along, by having only the most thinly described implicit setting, which is essentially constructed of keywords that you give your own meanings to. Whether you appreciate this or not is, of course, a matter of "YMMV" - as I believe the kids put it. We tend to roll with that sort of thing because we're laid back about rules and fiat, but I understand not everybody necessarily feels that way.

In any case, it's free and takes about 2 minutes to read. Can't say fairer than that, now, can you?

The Contents of Hexes

A few days ago I posted a selection of grabs from google maps, indicating how large a 1-mile hex actually is, and the kind of things that you might find in one. Then Chris responded, to the effect that (and I'm putting words into his mouth here) 1-mile hexes are all very well, but they are perhaps too granular - it's a heck of a lot of work to map out a setting at the 1-mile level. He posits an "emergent exploring rule" for 6-mile hexes, wherein you simply discover more things in a 6-mile hex the more time you spend exploring it and the more guidance/information you have about it.

The commenters immediately provide solutions, which are pretty good. Myrystyr's one seems like the best:

A generalised X-in-dY check per Z-time-period, mayhap? Default 2/1d6 per day - 1/ for stumbling-about blind luck, 3/ or 4/ for guides, clues, or character types with better search capability - and up to 3 or 4 times per day for potentially feature-rich locales... And, roll two different-coloured d6 at the same time, 1 the feature check and 1 the encounter check.

I like the elegant simplicity of this, and I think you can add some other modifiers: the chance would increase or decrease depending on terrain (lower for a forest, higher for plains), demographics (lower for empty wilderness, higher for settled), and so on.

Chris also suggests some other rules of thumb:

• Castles, cities and the like should all be in plain sight unless intentionally hidden away (like Gondolin or Derinkuyu). Heck, roads point you directly to most of them.
• Infamous lairs, ruins and dungeons should, of course, retain their "Here be dragons" hex map icons and easy-to-find status. The yokels can point out exactly in which direction the castle we don't go near lies.
• More obscure lairs, lost ruins, buried tombs and especially treasure map loot should require a bit of active hunting out by adventuring parties.

The main, immediately identifiable problem is that you now need some way of governing how many locales can be discovered in this way. The amount of "interesting stuff" in a hex has to be finite. But it is also variable. In my 1-mile hex examples, some have only one thing that you could make into a "locale", but some have several. This is a function, mostly, of how settled the area is, but it also introduces other factors. The more mountainous a region is, for instance, the more stuff you will get per hex on average, because each hex represents more land. (Hexes are "as the crow flies", whereas the land underneath is folded by hills and valleys, making it more packed with actual physical geography.)

What I would suggest is that, by default for a 6-mile hex, any settlement of more than 250 people, any castles or towers, and major geographical features like lakes, rives and mountains, are basically discoverable without the players doing much more than travel through the hex a few times.

You would then have a default of 3 'discoverable' things per 6-mile hex, modifiable by geography, level of settlement, history, and so on:

• One of these would be something that the players can find if they make an effort to explore. All it would require would be for them to say "we look around the area".
• Two of them would be 'secret', obscure, or lost things (a ruin, buried tomb, a secretive monster's lair, etc.) These would be near impossible to find by exploration without some level of guidance or inside knowledge. 

This would allow the players to discover stuff just by looking, but would also reward efforts they made to interact with locals to try to get information, and to risk random encounters by searching.

"Why 3 things per 6-mile hex? Isn't that too much?" I hear you cry.

The answer is: no. To illustrate, I'll use two of the 1-mile examples I put up a few days ago, zoomed out to 6-miles (ish; they're a bit smaller and probably more like 8 kilometres):

 

This is Canterbury. As you can see, there is not only the city itself, but two other large villages or small towns (Bridge and Sturry) plus a shitload of other hamlets, and plenty of woods as well as farmlands. In a densely settled area like this (probably much more densely settled than in medieval times, admittedly) you would need at the very least 3 adventuring locales not even mentioning Canterbury itself.

 

This is Tiree -a good chunk of the island. Note that there are 5 large bays to be found here, along with several smaller ones and a lot of little sheltered coves in the centre-right. There are four scattered farming villages, an airport, and 3 lochs. There are also some tiny islets here and there in the sea, too. Again, at least 3 adventuring locales needed.

But 3 is a default, and can be reduced. For example:

 

The mountains of Assynt. It's empty and devoid of settlement, though there is still plenty to interact with - 6 named lochs, plus lots of smaller ones, and a folded, rugged landscape concealing God Knows What. 3 adventuring locales might be inappropriate in such a landscape, because you don't want to be silly - not every lake has to have a Water in the Waters; not every mountain has to sit atop an ancient dwarven citadel. But perhaps it's also unrealistic to just say "it's an empty hex".

Of course, you wouldn't want your players to figure your system out. An alternative would be to randomise the number of adventuring locales in a 6-mile hex: d3-1 for sparse, d3 for average, d3+1 for settled, etc. Modified also by type of geography.

Being an Illustration of the Contents of 1-Mile Hexes Through Examination of Divers Locations in the British Isles

How much adventure is contained in a 1-mile hex? Usually, more than you would think, although it depends very much on the context. Here are a series of illustrations - screen grabs from google maps of various locations around the British Isles, each approximately 1 square mile (at rough and ready estimates).

This is Canterbury, an ancient town in the South East of England. Here, as you can see, 1 square mile is enough to contain the entire old town (the oval shape of roads in the centre of the map, bounded in the West by the yellow ring road and in the East by Broad Street and Lower Bridge Street). The old town was encircled by huge walls built during the Roman era and maintained throughout the Middle Ages (and still present in places today). It contains, amongst other things, one of the largest and most famous cathedrals in Britain, numerous other churches, the town hall, the old 15th century library, a vast number of pubs, shops and restaurants, and several museums. Outside of the old town are two railway stations, wooded areas, plenty of houses, recreation grounds, and a university. Clearly, in this 1-mile hex the question is not where adventure could be found, but where it couldn't be.

This is an area of quintessential English countryside, in Somerset. There is a small village in the North East corner - a row of houses along a road - and several farms. While it looks relatively empty, each of those fields is divided by a hedgerow, and the land is flat, making visibility difficult. Travelling across this area would be fraught with tension as, effectively, you would never be able to see more than about 100 yards in any direction at any time, and more often much less.

This is a wooded area in the Forest of Dean, in South Wales. This is, I think, what much of Western Europe would once have resembled - mostly forest, with tracks and roads criss-crossing it, and the occasional glade where trees have been cleared for grazing or firewood. Even though the area is small, it is easy to get lost and even easier to stumble across dangerous wild animals, nefarious forest denizens, and god knows what. The glades would be dangerous to cross, as you would be exposed and plainly visible to onlookers. Naturally, the forest could hide openings to tunnels, ruins, abandoned camps, dead travellers, and so on.

This is Coquet Island, off the coast of North East England. It contains the ruins of a medieval monastery and a lighthouse, and is a refuge for seabirds - there are 18,000 puffins living on it. Clearly, the monastery could be haunted, be the entrance to a dungeon, or whatever else, and the nesting seabirds don't have to be puffins - they could be something more valuable or dangerous.

A Loch, in the Highlands of Scotland. This is rough, barren landscape - not a tree to be seen anywhere, or a scrap of cover except for heather and the folds of the land itself. Here, encounters would take place at a distance, as parties would be able to see each other plainly at great distances. At the same time, adventuring parties cross the area would be completely exposed to, perhaps unexpected, aerial attack. The Loch itself is dark and forboding; does it contain a Watcher in the Waters, the spawn of some ancient god, a forgotten plesiosaur? 

A stretch of open coastline on the island of Tiree. Note the airstrip in the North West - not very D&D. There are some tiny hamlets in the West, but the main attraction is of course the bay: a perfect landing point for vessels. Traders, vikings, colonists, explorers?

This is the Southern edge of Loch Ness, in Scotland. Fort Augustus guards the canal which links Loch Ness to other waters further south and allows boats to travel all the way from Inverness, the only city worthy of the name North of Aberdeen, with Fort William, the other major settlement in the Highlands. Fort Augustus itself is small, but includes notable attractions, not to mention a series of locks which control river traffic on the canal. To the East is the rough coast of Loch Ness itself, forested and dangerous.

This is the true wilds of the Highlands, in Assynt, one of the most sparsely populated areas of Europe. This is harsh, remote, and unforgiving landscape, infested with midges, roamed by wolves, bears and who knows what else. In the South West is a deep forest of primeval Caledonian woodland; in the North East is a river with streams flowing downhill into boggy marshland in the North. Cross this wilderness at your peril.

If 1-mile hexes ever feel too small, or you find yourself leaving them blank on the map, think of this post and refer back to it in your mind, and give yourself a good sound spanking for ever having been so foolish.

Authenticity and Gamability and Gonzo, Oh My!

In the comments to yesterday's post, richard asks:

I find my tastes changing over time - I used to want authentick flavours, it didn't matter of what, really, but I wanted my Japan to be "really Japanese" and my medieval Europe to be "really medieval." Nowadays I've slid some distance from that position toward Xena - I want gonzo mashup more and find authentick a bit of a bore. Where do you find yourself on that scale?

The answer is: it depends. Slightly more detailed: I'm somewhere in the middle. Slightly more detailed yet: I can find virtues at various points of the spectrum, although too much gonzo makes me want to run for the hills.

I used to be more serious about setting. I actually put this down to lack of face-to-face game time. I'm not sure if this observation holds for everybody, but I think obsession with setting design is a kind of warped outgrowth from the mind of DMs who don't get the chance to actually play much. It was certainly true for me: I wasn't doing any face-to-face gaming (just lacklustre PBEMing and PBPing, which is generally quite lacklustre) and yet I wanted to - and I still enjoyed thinking about campaign worlds, drawing maps, creating bestiaries and NPCs, imagining trade routes and where resources would be found, dreaming up languages, and so on.

This also caused me to spend a lot of time and energy pursuing "authenticity"; the more time you have to think, the more you do think. I often thought about how to create a "really Japanese" game, for instance, given my experience living in the country and my interest in its history, and my utter loathing and disdain for the way in which RPG geeks approach the subject (which is either "samurai and ninja, cool!" or "anime, cool!"; there is not enough space in my head for my eyes to roll sufficiently far back to communicate how much I despise both Western anime fandom and samurai-wankery). 

Now I'm gaming quite a lot, and I'm also really busy, so my thinking time has been drastically reduced. This has both removed the urge to pursue authenticity, and also the opportunity. So while my setting design does not lean so far to the gonzo, it certainly doesn't involve chasing after the pipe dream of realism either. My main priorities are, simply, "What will I actually use?" and "What will be good for the game?"

But that said, too much gonzo doesn't really do it for me either. At a certain stage, it all feels like trying too hard to be irreverant. This leads us back to a post about humour that I wrote a few weeks ago. There's a strand of geekdom that repels me really quite strongly, and which others seem to find unaccountably attractive; it is the kind of straining towards "gonzo" that leads to inquisitors in Warhammer 40,000 with names like "Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau" and religions surrounding vast floating puddings or called "The Church of the Lucid Shirt Button". That kind of thing is so unfunny and uninteresting to me that I can't put it into words: it makes me want to bite my own fist for want of punching it through the face of anybody who would suggest otherwise. If that's what "gonzo mashup" means then no, thankyou, you may keep it, and also please fuck off and die.

If, on the other hand, "gonzo mashup" stretches to "this is a pseudo-oriental setting so I am going to borrow heavily from Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Mongolian and whatever other mythology because hey, life's too short and really, who cares?", then I am all for it.

The Hickman Revolution and the Frustrated Novelist

There's a post today on The Mule Abides about "the Hickman Revolution", or, as James Maliszewski put it in the Golden Age of his blog, How Dragonlance Ruined Everything. The theory here, for those who are unwilling to follow links for some reason, is that the Dragonlance series, and Tracy Hickman in particular, are in no small part responsible for the general slide in gaming style and gaming design from 'traditional' sandbox-style play towards GM-plot-driven obsession with 'story' and, basically, railroaded narrative. The 'smoking gun' is the introduction to Pharoah, in which Hickman sets out a manifesto of sorts for his own design philosophy:

1. A player objective more worthwhile than simply pillaging and killing. 
2. An intriguing story that is intricately woven into play itself. 
3. Dungeons with an architectural sense. 
4. An attainable and honorable end within one to two sessions playing time.

The Mule Abides and Grognardia deal with these issues eloquently, and how they are indicative of the (lamentable, to me) shift in RPG design philosophy which occurred during the 80s, so I won't cover them here - I provide all this by way of background.

What I would like to add is the missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to the shift towards GM-driven story - Hickman is not just a game designer. He is also a novelist. Indeed, I think that it's safe to say that he is primarily a novelist. And the four elements of his design manifesto are exactly the kind of thing that somebody who wants to be a novelist would want in a game: objectives (to drive the plot), and intriguing story, a world that makes sense, and closure/a happy ending.

They are not the kind of things that somebody who just wants to create role playing games would want in a game, which would be more like: objectives (to keep score), freedom (for players to pursue their own goals), challenging settings, and open-ended design. 

There is a reason why Hickman's approach chimed with many gamers, and why ultimately it came to dominate the hobby during the 80s, 90s and 00s before story/hipster/forge games and the OSR began to slay the beast: many, I would say perhaps the majority, of GMs are frustrated novelists, just like Tracy Hickman was. To them, there was an allure in the idea that they could create games which were not mere games (a frivolous pursuit) but which were also stories - it was an outlet for their desire to be writers, which they could not fulfil due to lack of talent, time, dedication or all three.

Tracy Hickman turned out to be a decent story teller and writer, in actual fact (despite Dragonlance, the Death Gate Cycle, and so forth being terribly cliched and lightweight, the guy knows how to write). But the impact of his ideas, and those of others like him, on the hobby, have been rather negative, because all those frustrated-novelist GMs can't become writers too. Their desire to be novelists can only be channelled into their other imaginative activity - gaming - where they have a captive audience (their players) and a blank canvas (a 4 hour gaming session on a Saturday afternoon). This is the perfect storm for railroad-y, GM-led, story-obsessed play.

I feel bad for Tracy Hickman, as in our corner of the blogosphere his name seems to have become synonymous for "where it all went wrong". This is harsh, because he's obviously a very nice guy, and talented with it. This post is not to impugn him or his reputation. It's to lament the way in which D&D in particular has become a vehicle for so many people who really want to be doing something else than playing games: writing fantasy novels for a living. There is little that could be more detrimental to good gaming.

One Hour D&D

I've mostly stayed away from all the 5th D&D edition internet "blah". I learned my lesson from the 4th edition release. In fact, I've managed to almost entirely dodge finding anything out about the new edition whatsoever.

So this is the first article I've read from Mike Mearls on the matter, and in honour of that fact, I'll comment on it: I'm in favour of this "one hour D&D" idea.

One hour is perhaps a little short for me, but I get the point. My group meets once a week and plays from 6.30ish to 9ish. Two and a half hours. That's the sweet spot for me before my attention starts to wander. But it's also practical - we have lives, so 8 hour marathon sessions are not possible every week; but at the same time we want regularity to maintain momentum, so we want to squeak in sessions on a weekly basis. The two-and-a-half-hour evening session is perfect for our purposes. Designers should recognise that this is around the norm for a working adult or a kid who goes to school.

Let's get this straight: it's extremely unlikely I'll ever play 5th edition. I've got BECMI or OD&D if I want to scratch the D&D itch, and I highly doubt they'll create something simpler or quicker to play than either of them. But this is exactly the right approach if they want to target D&D at kids (who have short attention spans) and/or adults (who don't have a great deal of time). That may mean they do not satisfy the hard core nerds who are into systems, want lots of rules to get their teeth into, spend weeks on character generation, and masturbate over their copies of the Book of Nine Swords every night before they sleep - but luckily that vocal minority is tiny in material terms.

D&D as Straight Man

How do you like your whimsy? I prefer mine leaning towards the slightly melancholic, surreal, sardonic, and cruel. But there is whimsy of a blunter and more prosaic kind in D&D. From the Rules Cyclopedia, page 261, in the "Room Contents" advice section:

Trick Monster: This applies to any variation of a listed monster, such as: A two-headed giant ogre, a carrion crawler that walks upright and has paralyzing tentacles for arms, a wild bore (a shaggy man who tells long, dreary stories), a quartering (half-sized halfling), a Mouth Harpy (who can't sing but plays the harmonica), an Ogre Jelly (looks like an ogre, but . . .), and so forth.

I came across this last night while stocking one of the levels of Sangmenzhang, and it raised a wry smile, but I have to say my kind of D&D doesn't really tolerate this kind of thing. I get the joke, I get that not everything has to be po-faced in any RPG, but still, it's an incredibly unsubtle way of crowbarring humour into a game.

I have two objections. The first is the simple one: every single RPG session I've ever been involved in, as player or GM, has more laughter in it than serious moments at a ration approaching 2:1. This is achieved without anything substantively "funny" in the rules, set-up, or content of the game. It's just because that's the way gaming is - funny things happen, and when they don't, funny things can be said about the things that are happening. So actually, I've never felt any need to insert pre-planned jokes or make any self-conscious attempt at humour in the setup of a game or session. It happens organically anyway.

The second is more philosophical, and is that jokes and puns are a kind of Brechtian alienating device which distance the players from the game world. As soon as a Mouth Harpy makes an appearance, suddenly you're not even remotely inside your character's head - your willing suspension of disbelief has been shattered and you've been wrenched out of the Secondary World which has been created. This is not really conducive to what I enjoy about gaming.

What this boils down to, I think, is that good humour is generally about what the Japanese call the tsukkomi and the boke, or what we call the straight-man and comic: you need a sensible springboard for the jokes to bounce off. For me, whatever the game is you're playing, the game's contents have to take on the role of straight-man - they have to be relatively serious on the face of it for the jokes to riff on. Seriousness of content is the necessary foil for all manner of jokes, sarcasm and piss-taking - and the overall level of humour in fact suffers without it. That is, overt humour built-in to the game world undermines it: to borrow again from theatrical comedy, there is no-one "feeding" the lines, because the lines are all stupid jokes in the first place. 

Your Players Know You're Not God

One of the key elements of my GMing style, I've realised, is that I tend to involve the players in the decision-making process rather a lot, so while I'm the final arbiter, I'm always open to suggestions on rulings and ideas on how to handle things. For instance, let's say I'm GMing a game where the rulebook doesn't include anything on calculating damage from falling and one of the PCs is falling off something from a 30 foot height. I'm just as likely to say to the players as a whole, "What do you reckon? How damaging would that be?" and let them have some input into the final decision as I am to just say, "You take 1d20 damage" off the top of my head.

I'm also likely to draw on the players' expertise in decision-making processes too. My gaming groups include veterinarians, firearms experts, people with PhDs in mathematics, and computer scientists. It would be almost perverse not to draw on their knowledge to make decisions and rulings that are realistic and sensible. (The firearms expert in particular always comes in handy; "John, would a 12.7mm round penetrate the brick wall Andy's character is hiding behind?" "Yes.")

Reading around forums and watching other GMs, I realise that this isn't really the norm, or at least I do it more than most. I can't really understand why. I take the view that we're all adults, and my players know I'm not God - it's not like I'm shattering any illusions by revealing I don't know something or I could do with knowledgeable input.

It also seems to me that sessions always run smoothly when it feels as if everybody is pulling in the same direction. My GMing decisions are generally as objective as I can make them and I try to create a neutral game world with rational consequences, but it doesn't hurt for players to feel as if they have some input into the process of refereeing - it gives things an atmosphere of consensus and collegiality rather than of paternalism.

Let's face it - I'm also pretty lazy, and the more I can farm out and outsource to the players, the better.