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.

Food and Drink have a Special Significance

I was involved in a forum thread on Japanese RPGs recently, and this naturally lead me to look up the Japanese wikipedia page for RPGs, or "TRPGs" as they are called over there. (This, oddly, is not an abbreviation of Table Top RPG, but of Table Talk RPG. As is often the case with loan words from English to Japanese, it turns out that it's not so much a loan word as word that has been borrowed in an inappropriate or unnatural fashion, at least to native English speakers' eyes.) 

Anyway, the most interesting section on the page is "TRPG中における飲食", or "Food and drink in TRPGs". Here's a rough translation:

In TRPGs, food and drink, focusing around snacks, have a special significance. Having food and drink while playing the game with friends lets you enjoy the flavours while livening up the conversation, and is another element of the fun involved. In Mishio Fukuzawa's "New Fortune Quest Replay" [whatever that is], snacks and drinks are listed in the book as "necessary items". Other TRPG books don't go so far as to say they are necessary, but many recommend them. 

In replay books [basically a sort of novelization of a game session - yes, really] there is not usually a commentary, so there is also no commentary on snacks, but in the Sword World replay "[Title Untranslatable Because I Can't Be Arsed, it's Something Like 'Rhapsody of the Marauders']", there is some out-of-character commentary by the players regarding snacks, such as "I'm going out to get some juice", or "I want some ramen". 

TRPGs are played with a number of people, and take a few hours, so food and drink is also used to alleviate the hard work. It is desirable for all participants, including the GM, to prepare and manage the food. If this is not observed, the other participants will likely judge the offender unfavourably and be unsatisfied. It is usual for all the individual participants to to bring stuff, because expecting one person to bear the burden of providing food and drink is rather onerous. 

It is important to watch out during play that food and drink do not become a hindrance, especially when using a board or maps and so on. For instance, drink might be spilled and ruin a character sheet. It can also get on ones hands and make them smell. When the game approaches a meal time, it is usual to have a break for a while and then start again afterwards.  

During online sessions there is no chance the other players will take your snacks, so you can enjoy them in comfort. However, you also can't take other players' snacks either.

Those Japanese, eh?

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. 

Let's Stat Up People Appearing In Old Paintings

See that guy in the foreground, on our left? Who is he? And if you were statting him up for the game of your choice, what would his stats be?

Zonal Combat

What do you say we lighten things up around here and talk about abstract mapping?

Diaspora has an interesting approach to combat, which would work equally well with D&D - indeed any game system you can think of with a bit of tinkering. I've been tinkering with it. It goes something like this:

When combat looks likely, the DM draws a map, and then divides it up into zones. Zones are not a grid, and do not represent strict distance. Rather, they represent a combination of space, ease of travel, view, and time to pass through. Thus, an open field might be one zone, but a nearby cottage with three rooms might be made up of three separate zones, because the time it takes to sprint across the open field is the same as the amount of time it would take to move between rooms cluttered with furniture. Likewise, a thick forest full of boulders might be divided up into three zones, whereas an area of light woodland of the same "size" might just be one zone - representing the speed with which one can move through each area.

With me so far?

If there are borders between zones (a hedge, a wall, a ditch, a door) these have numerical ratings indicating how long it takes to pass through them. So a hedge might have a rating of "2", indicating that it takes 2 "zones" worth of effort to cross over. (You can climb over in the same amount of time it would take to cross 2 zones.) This is called the "pass value". 

Pass values can change if there is a doorway. If there is a doorway, the pass value is 0 - unless the door is shut, in which case it costs "zones" to open it, indicated by a number, called the "opening value". (A wall would cost 2 "zones" to climb over, so it has a pass value of 2, but it has a gate which would cost "1" zone to open, or an opening value of 1. So the hedge has a pass value of 2/1.) 

Each turn, the player gets one zone of movement and an action. The zone of movement might consist in eroding pass value (e.g. getting half way over a hedge with a pass value of 2), or opening a doorway (e.g. eroding an opening value from 1 to 0.) The action would be the usual sort of thing (cast a spell, attack, whatever). Or he can give up the action to make two zones' worth of movement.

A turn is however long it would take to cross a zone. This means that combat can scale up and scale down to suit the situation. A fight taking place in an area covering a square mile of countryside, or taking place in a few rooms in a hotel reception, would follow exactly the same pattern - it's just that the zones would represent different levels of abstraction. The zones in the former would probably be bigger by area on average, and a turn would be longer (maybe two minutes in the former as opposed to around 10 seconds in the latter). But the rules are exactly the same. Only two things would really change. First, the larger the zones and the longer the turns, the more abstract attack rolls (the attack roll would represent a period of maneuvering and trading blows), and the smaller the zones and shorter the turns, the less abstract attack rolls would become (the attack roll would represent literal single attacks). The other thing that would change would be pass value. A hedge separating two open fields, each about 100 square yards and represented by a zone each, would perhaps have to have a higher pass value than a hedge separating two small gardens of 10 square yards each.

Example:

Here, the open spaces are fields and easier to cross than the woodland areas, so their zones are spatially larger. The stream and hedges have a PV (pass value) of 2. The barn in the middle is its own zone, full of bales of hay. Red lines indicate zonal boundaries; green lines are hedges; blue is the stream; the black line is a road.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess and the Virtues of A5

I've been playing a bit of Lamentations of the Flame Princess [Grindhouse Edition] these last two weeks, and I have to say, I'm impressed: the game is intuitive, easy to use, retains basically all what makes D&D, D&D...in fact, I'll go out on a limb and say it's what D&D 4th edition always should have been and what D&D 5th edition should be. (If I have a complaint, it's that the art feels like it's trying too hard to be shocking in places, though if that's your only complaint about a game...)

But that's not even the best thing about it. No, the best thing about it is that the rulebooks are in fucking A5. If there ever was a way in which God intended rulebooks to be set out, it would be A5 format paperback. Easy to flick through, light, will fit in a man-bag or brief case, and way more readable in bed or on a train than clunky A4 hardbacks. For that alone, James Edward Raggi IV, I salute you.

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.

Creation by Question

I ran a first session of Diaspora today; it was entirely comprised of setting- and character generation, which went well - so far, the system looks interesting, and I can't wait to get it started and see how it works in practice.

What struck me while playing is that it's important for lots of questions to be asked during the game. That sounds like a banal observation, but it isn't: I'm not talking about the necessary sort of questions that players have to ask ("Where is the exit?" "What are the orcs carrying?" etc.) but questions which spur the questionee to think, and thereby create.

For instance, I was describing one of the worlds, in one of the systems we were creating, as being a water world, populated by Melnibonean-esque decadent epicureans. One of the players cut in, "Do they live on the surface in big floating cities, or under the water, or what?" And I was forced to think, "Well, where do they live?" And in answering the question more detail was added to the setting: creation by question in action.

There is a lot of power in this, and it applies not just during shared setting-creation type games like Diaspora: it applies in any kind of game - I'm reminded of a Yoon-Suin session I ran online in which one of the players asked whether hijras existed, and I had to think, "Well, do they?" The answer was yes, and another detail was added to the world. But it just as frequently happens during character generation too: "My character is about six feet, built like a brick-shit house, and he's carrying a glaive." "What does the glaive look like?" "Well....It's engraved with runic patterns." "What do they mean?" "Er...he doesn't know, it's a family heirloom and it's a mystery." And so on: questions have power.

I think this comes from the fact that, like using random generators, questions spur creativity through restricting the options. It is the same adage that I've used before: give a man a paper and pencil and say "write a story" and he'll take 10 times as long to come up with something than he would if you'd said "write a story about a murder", and it'll probably be 10 times less interesting. Likewise, saying to somebody "Come up with a world" is a thoroughly different proposition to saying to him: "What is the geography of your world like? Is there a desert? What kind of people live there? Are they warlike? Do they do drugs?" By restricting his creativity, you give it legs.

D&D: Enabling Amorality Since 1974

I played in Patrick's weekly LOTFP game on Wednesday. (There's an actual play here.) The highlight of the night was probably Patrick's off-the-cuff "Don't you die on me, man!" rule: if you are willing to shout "Don't you die on me, man!" at the top of your voice while stabilising somebody on negative hit points, you automatically succeed. It only works if you play in public, though.

But I digress. What I really wanted to talk about was amorality, and how D&D in particular (but role playing games in general) facilitate it. It really was remarkable how, literally within 10 minutes of joining the game, my character had conspired to loot a crypt, burgle a church, and murder an innocent old woman in cold blood for the crime of being a witness to our theft - and that such goings-on were treated as an almost mundane event within the context of the game (although the DM, to his credit, did disapprove of our awful behaviour regarding the old woman). That could almost be a motto for D&D, I think: the mundanity of amorality.

Let me make a few things clear before I proceed: first, I don't think this is a bad thing. Secondly, I'm well aware that D&D doesn't have to be played this way, often isn't, and perhaps shouldn't. And thirdly, I use the term "amorality" advisedly - what I am talking about is not so much evil or badness but merely the absence of ethical thought: a total deliberate abandonment of moral sentiments, almost nihilistic in its scope.

D&D enables amoral behaviour: that is my contention. It allows you to give voice and effect to actions and beliefs that you would never exercise in real life - in other words, to give free reign to your id without that pesky super-ego getting in the way. In this respect it is rather like Grand Theft Auto, or Grand Theft Auto is rather like D&D: it is a sandbox in which being bad has no real consequence, and your inner demons can come out and play.

There are, however, limits. There are behaviours and beliefs that are not even acceptable to air within the context of a game of D&D (probably rightly, in my opinion); there are lines that oughtn't to be crossed. And the laws of the jungle - a kind of quid pro quo altruism - intervenes too: players help each other in the hope and expectation the favour will be returned. So, despite the fact that my character partook in the murder of an old woman without a second thought, he was kind to the lantern-girl he hired to join the party in entering the dungeon, and assigned one of his dogs to protect her. When the idiotic fighter (complete with irritating 17-year-old player) ran off and fell down a pit trap, the rest of us helped him out because he'd sacrificed material gain in order to find us healing earlier that day. There are moral rules, of a kind.

This suggests that morality enters D&D alongside the "real world", when that intervenes. Player-characters tend to behave better towards one another than to NPCs, because what happens to them matters in the real world: they have players who are real people and who are really invested in them. And likewise, player-characters tend to behave well towards in-game children and animals, because cruelty to children and animals is so utterly unacceptable in our society that it cannot be seen as anything other than abhorrent and evil even in the context of make-believe. (Rightly, I might add.) This is also true "at the margins": rape and torture are likewise so unacceptable in our society that they can generally only be seen as evil in-game, again probably rightly.

Otherwise, all bets are usually off. As I said, I don't particularly see this as a bad thing: it is probably a sign of good mental health that you are able to let your id loose and reign it in at will. The capacity to switch off one's own capacity for moral thought is probably an indication that, otherwise, one's moral compass points in the right direction.

If this entry has been somewhat rambling, it is because it's been 3 weeks since I blogged, and my blogging muscles are atrophied. Bear with me: I'm like a footballer returning from a hamstring injury, or a Carlos Tevez-esque lay-off - I can't quite do the full 90 minutes yet, and need a 60th-minute substitution.