How I Roll, or, What Is the Point of Stats in D&D?

On G+, Courtney C was posting his reasons for disliking the mechanism some DMs use of rolling under a Stat to determine success at a miscellaneous task. As time goes on I also dislike that mechanism more and more, though perhaps for different reasons. They're as follows:

1. Most tasks don't really boil down to a single Stat. Think, for instance, of climbing a sheer wall. Is that DEX because it requires agility, STR because climbing requires you to support your own body weight, CON because it requires you to be fit, or INT or WIS because it requires you to think about where handholds are and apply climbing know-how? Roll-under-a-Stat, then, seems a little reductive.

2. It puts emphasis on thinking about Stats, which isn't as bad as obsessing over skills, but still can be restrictive ("I won't bother attempting difficult task Y because my character's Stat X is crap").

3. I think I would find myself using it as a lazy shorthand to stop me thinking carefully about PC actions in the game: "Oh, you want to negotiate with the guards? Roll CHA."

I prefer nowadays a method which I think is more intuitive and more humanist (!). That method is as follows:

• Player says their PC might do something
• DM considers the situation in general (including the Stats of the PC) and assigns a target number for success between 1 and 6
• DM tells the PC what this number is
• PC decides whether to go ahead or not and has a small amount of negotiation

Let's use an example: Bob the Builder is a PC and he wants to get some item of treasure which lies at the other side of a moat that is filled with killer crocodiles. There are vines hanging down from trees which overhang the moat. Bob's owner decides he's going to try to swing, Tarzan-like, across the moat on one of these vines. The DM thinks for a bit: intrinsically, the task is relatively difficult but not immensely so - we've all played on rope swings as kids. Bob the Builder has a STR of 15, a DEX of 9, and a CON of 12, so the DM reasons he's in pretty good shape. He says, "You can do that if you get a 3 or more on a d6. Otherwise you fall into the moat. Want to go ahead?" The player can then say yes or no. He can also, if he thinks the number is egregious or the DM is overlooking something, negotiate. Let's imagine the DM forgets that Bob the Builder has a STR of 15 and puts the target number at 4. The player howls in outrage: "But Bob has a STR of 15!" The DM relents and makes it 3, and so forth.

Now, this is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, but there's an antidote to that.

So, then, what's the point in Stats, exactly? In the noisms school of D&D, there are three reasons for their existence:

A. Stats provide flavour and a role playing guide. They stop PCs just being another PC. Why does this guy have STR 6? Is he just a scrawny weakling or does he have some debilitating disease? Why does he have DEX 4? Is he blind? etc.

B. Stats help you decide which class to be if you're rolling 3d6 in order and seeing what happens. 

C. Stats are something to take into consideration when checking for success. To refer back to the example above, Bob's STR, DEX, CON etc. are relevant considerations. They're just not the only ones.

Shameless Behaviour, Tarragon, and Yoon-Suin

Nate interviewed me about Yoon-Suin on A Gaming Podcast About Nothing. I know I said I wasn't going to post about the podcast on this blog more than once; I lied. 

You can hear the episode here: http://agamingpodcastaboutnothing.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/a-gaming-podcast-about-nothing-episode_11.html

It's an attempt to explain what the whole Yoon-Suin thing is all about - in a concise 30 minute conversation. The conversation also ranges over random encounter tables, the philosophy of randomness, and tarragon.  

On Reaching Into the Subconscious Mind

Patrick asks whether the mind can be a kind of random generator. I know what he means. All DMs do it, or something like it, when they're creating NPCs or events on the fly. You pause for a moment and something comes to you; God knows from where - it springs into your mind from the depths of your brain and sometimes the results are surprising.

One thing I sometimes do for fun is sit in front of my computer, try to completely blank my mind, and then just start writing sentences - channelling my subconcious directly onto the keyboard. I'm going to try it now:

"There is a man lying on the floor and there is a keyboard and a monkey in the room."

But you see there the problem: I just blanked my mind and started typing. But the word 'keyboard' came to me, evidently because I had just written it in the previous sentence. Keyboards were present in my unconscious mind. And when I tried to come up with something 'at random', keyboards are part of what came out. Oddly, when I wrote the sentence, the image of a musical keyboard - a Casio keyboard - flashed into my brain, rather than a computer one. The unconscious works in strange ways.

You see my point, though, which is that your brain can produce unexpected, surprising, and interesting results when you free-associate, or when you try deliberately to void your mind of all influences and just give yourself free reign to blaaaaaaaah. But these results are not necessarily as unexpected as you might think: the things that are in your brain are there for a reason, because they've been taken in and processed. This means they're always imminent, in the background. You're not coming up with things at random - you're reaching into your mind and pulling something out. You may be reaching blind, but it's not quite the same thing.

In the same way, the NPCs and situations that you come up with on the fly may be spontaneous and surprising and unexpected, but I bet if you really thought about it you would find similarities with people (real or fictional) that are known to you or at least seen, or situations that you have been in or heard about or read about.

Now, you might say the same thing about random tables that you, yourself, have created. If you've written up a d100 table, let's say, then everything in it has come from your mind. So when you roll a d100 and consult that table, you're not really getting totally unexpected results, because you know what's in the table, and after all everything there is from your mind, so what's the difference?

I think the difference is that the result on the d100 table is not contingent on recent input. When reaching into your subconcious mind on the fly to pull out an NPC, let's say, you are probably going to be - unintentionally - generating an NPC on your mind who is influenced by what has happened in the last 10 seconds, last 10 minutes, last 10 days. It might not be immediately apparent what that influence is; it might only be at the level of a Casio keyboard because the word keyboard cropped up a while earlier. But there will be something. On a d100 table, on the other hand, the results will be disconnected from recent input and will therefore have more of a capacity to be genuinely weird and surprising, genuinely dislocated from the situation, and thus genuinely more potent and with more potential for being interesting.

Thoughts on Yoda and The Great Sin

On G+ the world and his wife are talking about "Star Wars Day", which is apparently a thing that people do. Don't worry if you can't guess why it's May the 4th. It took ages for me to work it out too.

So I thought I'd write about Star Wars. Specifically, Yoda. I hate the prequels to Star Wars in the sort of mild way that I hate, say, rice pudding; if faced with the prospect of watching one I will probably pull a 'yuck' face, but I don't froth at the mouth the way some Star Wars fans do. I honestly think that the prequels, for me, were like Star Wars antibodies. Once they'd been introduced to my system I became able to see the entire franchise for what it really is: two really good films, an enjoyable kids film, and three shit ones. Hitherto I was a huge fan; afterwards I maintain a cordial relationship. It's like an amicable divorce. In the same way that you might not mind the thought of getting back into bed with your ex wife or husband but it would come wrapped up in too much bullshit to be worth it, I wouldn't mind being a fan again except for the fact that it would mean accepting notions like General Grievous and Count Dooku are good names for baddies or somebody thought that "I don't like sand. It's coarse and irritating and it gets everywhere. Everything here is soft and smooth," is something that an actual human being would use as a chat-up line, let alone one that would work.

But in some way I do still have a bit of bile and vitriol left for George Lucas when it comes to Yoda. Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back was such a great character. I say it unashamedly: the scenes with Yoda in that film are some of my favourite scenes in cinema. The combination of Irvin Kershner's unfussy, calm directing, Mark Hamill's understated acting, John Williams' gorgeous score, and Frank Oz's puppetry is more or less perfect. It's easy to be sniffy about the pseudo-Buddhist nonsense that Yoda is spouting, but the character and his situation have so much charm that you just don't care.

In the prequels, George Lucas takes Empire's good-natured, humble, peace-loving, grammatically-confused SF version of Kermit the Frog and transforms him into a vicious, mean-spirited, aggressive little prick with a god complex. Worse than that, though, he commits what I often think of as The Great Sin of genre fiction: giving the audience what they want.

In Empire the presentation of Yoda's power is perfectly judged. When you watch it for the first time, you are first shown a slightly annoying, but amusing, clown character, who then transforms into a wise old teacher. You gradually get the sense that this little fellow is more than he seems, but you still aren't quite sure about him - until the moment when he shows Luke what using the force is really all about by moving the X-Wing. In common with everything else in the film, it's executed brilliantly: from the way the score builds and swells, to Mark Hamill's reaction, to Yoda's killer closing line. But, for a moment of great grandeur and climax, it's also nicely understated. All Yoda has done is move a starship. He hasn't killed anyone, blown anything up, or done anything fancy-dan. He's helped out his young student and given him a valuable lesson. That's all.

Watching that scene, of course, the audience is given the awareness that, wow, Yoda must be an immensely powerful badass. But it's done so well that you don't need to be shown anything more. The message comes across perfectly. Yoda must be a mighty warrior. And Kershner has the taste, the class, to leave it at that. Let the audience imagine what they want. He's given a hint, knowing - crucially - that the power of suggestion will be more powerful than anything he could actually have put on the screen. The audience wants more, but Kershner knows that actually their imaginations will be more satisfactory than anything he can deliver.

But of course, Star Wars fans being what they are, they want to see more: they want to see what Yoda can do. And in Attack of the Clones (easily the worst of the prequels), George Lucas gives every 25-year-old Star Wars fan what they'd only previous dared to imagine: Yoda having a fight with lightsabers. In an act of sheer, barefaced fan service, we see the full shebang - Yoda getting out his lightsaber, shooting lightning bolts, and throwing boulders around. And it's fun...for a second. Until you realise that there is something awfully tawdry about the whole affair. Yoda was a calm, wise, peaceful little puppet in Empire, and he had a certain message - that you should try to transcend violence. That aggression and anger lead you down the path of ruin. Yet here he is, throwing his weight around in the most unseemly fashion. The fight with Count Dooku is like the moment you get a blowie off the hitherto untouchable school good girl: it's nice and everything, but at the same time you can't help but feel as if something important has been sadly diminished. Something that was pure in your mind has become forever sullied.

In giving the audience a view of Yoda's full power, the magic of what had hitherto only been hinted at and imagined completely dissipates. He falls from being a great and powerful being of myth into a silly little dancing green ninja with a shiny sword. And we all lose something as a result.

Angus McBride Ate My Hamster

When people talk about fantasy artists they often forget Angus McBride. That's what you get for not working on D&D, Fighting Fantasy or Warhammer, I suppose. It's a shame, because his work is simply beautiful. Expressive, detailed, dynamic, and gorgeously composed, but also strangely human and sympathetic - almost tender. Look at little Merry hidden away in the picture of Eowyn and the Witch-King, a tiny little figure who performs for us the role that all the halfings do in Tolkien's work - humanising what is taking place before us. Look the way the orc at the front-and-centre in the picture under that seems almost frantic, like he's being bustled along by the others a little too quickly for his liking; he's suddenly not quite as enthusiastic as he was a few moments ago. Look at the simple stark purity of Gandalf facing off against probable doom as the Witch-King approaches the gate, or the look of brute despair on the troll's face as he stumbles through the door in the Moria scene. This was a thoughtful artist - a man who knew how to tell a story with a single image.

It's surely no accident that he was also a great illustrator of historical scenes, mostly in the picture books about the Roman era that I used to read as a kid; he had to make those scenes come alive, and the skills were perfectly transferable to fantasy illustration. His historical stuff often has a surprisingly hard edge to it - he didn't shy away from the ugly side of history. It's exciting, but he didn't lose sight of the fact that everybody in his pictures is a person. It's an interesting contradiction: the pictures are thrilling but at the same time you feel sympathy for the people in them. It takes a special kind of skill to achieve that.

Competing with 200,000 years of creativity is difficult

The other day the RPG Pundit reviewed Isle of the Unknown; I don't have the book, although I have read through it, and my thoughts were somewhat similar - it's beautiful, but the content is simply not properly thought through.

The big problem with Isle of the Unknown for me was the monsters. As the Pundit puts it:

Every single creature is different, and usually a pastiche of various animals plus some weird quality. For example, a cat with metallic fur, immune to all mental attacks and ordinary weapons; it can see the invisible and has poisoned fangs. Or a bipedal frog the size of a man, who can fly and is immune to surprise, and has a slime spit. Or a bipedal skunk with bat-wings; where slaying it means the killer will later be pursued by its sire, who is a giant bat-winged skunk.  

So there's no rhyme or reason to it at all; no tribes, no reason for the monsters to be there, nothing. Its a menagerie of crap, and I'm sure its meant to be "weird fantasy" but I'd put it closer to "stupid fantasy". The monsters serve no purpose, make no sense, in many cases what they do isn't even predictable (nor unpredictable in a good way; they just do things you wouldn't ever be able to expect for no reason at all).

Or as a different reviewer put it a while back:

Although occasionally spiced with some interesting abilities, [the monsters] really are giant pigeons all the way down: Pick a random animal. Make it bigger than normal. Randomly determine the number of limbs it possesses. Now, randomly combine it with another animal; light it on fire; have it ooze pus; or give it a random spell-like ability. Ta-Da! You’ve re-created the vast majority of the monsters in this book.

My aim isn't to further put the boot into somebody else's creative efforts: It's more to observe that creating totally new and unique monsters is really hard. Why? Human beings have been creating monsters for about 200,000 years, and that means the monsters that still exist today in the human imagination are beings which have survived 200,000 years of mimetic evolution. These motherfuckers have been honed for generation after generation, out-competing all the other mythical beings that have been dreamed up by children, parents, grand-parents, witch-doctors and story-tellers, and which have subsequently fallen by the wayside and been lost in the mists of time. They are core archetypes (the dragon, the succubus, the sexual bloodsucker, the man-beast, the faerie, the people who live underground digging up treasure, the beautiful magical bird) which, over millennia, have been carefully perfected by unconscious selective processes: the more a new variation scares, amazes and interests us, the more likely it is to be passed down.

Monsters, in other words, are like roses, dogs, and cattle: they've evolved through unnatural selection. We have bred out of them everything boring and unappealing through aeons of repetitive story-telling showing tiny graduations of improvement. They're the peacock's tail: they are that way because we, like the peahen choosing the peacock with the most impressive tail, carefully pick out the monsters we find scary and keep them going, and cast the others aside.

It's tough to compete with that. A few rare exceptions - creatures created by RPG bestiarists or fantasy authors - suggest themselves: the beholder, the owl-bear, the displacer beast, the bulette, the mind-flayer. But of those, I think only the mind-flayer truly comes close to competing with the resonance which a vampire, a werewolf, a succubus, a phoenix, or a giant has in our psyche. Those things have been around forever because they work. Randomly throwing together a mixture of animals and abilities simply can't compete.

Maggie May Pt. II

It seems that my point in yesterday's post was misinterpreted - or, perhaps, I didn't communicate it very effectively (although frankly I think that's impossible to believe!). This lead us into a thicket of discussion, here and on G+, about RPGs versus computer games. That wasn't my intention. So I'll have a stab at further elaboration.

I prefer playing RPGs to playing computer games. They're better for a whole host of reasons we don't need to detail here - because, let's face it, if you're reading this blog you probably don't need a huge amount of convincing of that. On the other hand, for certain purposes, computer games are superior: it would not be humanly possible to run Football Manager as an RPG, for instance. You need a computer, with its massive memory capacity and its processing power, to run a simulation of that complexity.

But be that as it may, RPGs are not particularly successful in being a tool to achieve fun for most people. When people want to enjoy themselves in some pastime or distract themselves from boredom they typically want the path of least resistance to that goal. This is what I meant when I said that people are generally instrumentalist in their view of games: they want fun and they want the quickest and easiest way to get that fun. The format doesn't matter, in other words - it's the outcome. Maximum fun for least effort. Downloading a game off Steam is easier than mapping a dungeon and getting 4 people round to play through it with you. Crucially, it may not be quite as much fun in the long term (actually, it almost certainly won't be), but the fun to effort ratio is much more palatable. 

The same is true of other analogues. People want the path of least resistance to the music they like. The format doesn't really matter - they want the outcome of having music they like readily available. So mp3s on an iPod, or Spotify, are better than vinyl if you don't care about the format by which you're hearing your music. The same is true of books versus TV, beach holidays versus mountain climbing, etc.

Now, clearly this is only true for many people much of the time - it's never true for all people all the time. Lots of people prefer books to TV, hiking to sunbathing, vinyl to mp3s, letters to email, writing longhand to typing, and RPGs to video games. That can still be true while, in aggregate, the instrumentalist approach prevails.

For me, as somebody who prefers books to TV, hiking to sunbathing, and RPGs to video games, the format is important. I like the fact that RPGs are social, creative, and constantly create unexpected outcomes. And I also like the other elements of the format that I think are crucial - mapping, drawing things with pencils, fiddling with numbers, rolling dice otherwise randomising results. But in general the rest of the world doesn't feel that way. 

To that extent, I think I agree with Mike Mearls. But where I part company is on the solution: I don't expect the world to change, and I think that trying to force RPGs to ape video games is exceedingly foolish and pointless. I don't mind that RPGs are a niche within a niche within a niche. Though I expect I would think differently if I was employed by Wizards of the Coast to design the next edition of D&D. 

The morning sun when it's in your face really shows your age

So, at PAX East (whatever that is) various bigwigs, high-ups, grand poobahs and éminices grises got together to discuss What is Happening to Tabletop Role Playing Games?

It's worth reading the transcript of the discussion between Ryan Dancey and Mike Mearls on EN World, because it's interesting, but I think it's just more of the same: the established order, who rely on RPGs for a living, panicking and trying to repackage something that is fundamentally old in character as something that is new.

What do I mean when I say that RPGs are fundamentally old in character? Partly I mean that they're from a predigital age, but really what I mean is that they've been superseded by technology at the instrumental level. RPGs have become like vinyl, like typewriters or antique fountain pens, and like board games and books are becoming: an inferior format for people who are instrumental about their entertainment.

What do I mean by that? If what you are interested in is being challenged, solving puzzles, engaging in tactical play - in other words, if you take an instrumental approach to games - then video games are better than RPGs. If what you are interested in is an entertaining narrative that will distract you from your boring life and help you relax after a hard day at work, then TV is better than a book. If what you want is to hear a lot of good pieces of music, then mp3s are better than vinyl. If what you want to do is write a letter, a laptop is better than a fountain pen. If what you want to do is communicate in a written form, an email is better than a letter. Etc.

But not everybody engages in everything in a purely instrumental way. People get attached to different technologies because of more ephemeral and emotional concerns. Vinyl is not a dead technology. People collect fountain pens and typewriters, because they like them. Some people still write letters because they prefer the personal touch and there is a nostalgic charm in doing so. Some people buy old vintage cars and spend hours doing them up. I know somebody whose hobby is to buy broken antique watches, fix them up, clean them and sell them - and who made enough to live off for 4 years of university. I know somebody else who was a semi-professional (a semi-professional!) scrabble player. In the morning sun Maggie May's face really showed her age, but Rod Stewart still wanted to shag her.

The extra games and entertainment options will distract people from RPGs if all they ever did was play RPGs for instrumentalist reasons. Arguably, that process is more or less complete anyway. But there will be people who don't play RPGs for instrumentalist reasons. And the format will go on.

I am utterly and completely comfortable with RPGs occupying a vinyl-esque niche. Mike Mearls and Ryan Dancey will want something more because their careers are to a certain extent wedded to there being this lumbering, near-dying arthritic beast called the RPG industry, but for the rest of us I think the message really ought to be: Keep calm and carry on.

The Whore of Podcastdom

A friend and I decided to do a gaming podcast, and we need to whore it around the internet. This is the only time I'll blog about it here.

The title is A Gaming Podcast About Nothing, for reasons which will quickly become apparent. Everything else you need to know is here. It takes us a little while to get warmed up. But it's funny. I promise.

S&W Insect Classes

Apropos of nothing, I was thinking about various old posts I wrote about animal fantasy. (See here, here and here. The link to Sean Rubin's website is broken; his blog is here. It is traditional at this stage for me to asset that IANAF, so let me make it clear: I Am Not A Furry. But I do like animals, and I like animal fantasy. ) It doesn't seem as though in these posts I covered a long-harboured ambition of mine, which is to produce an animal fantasy retro-clone but weird. By which I mean, forget mice. Or, rather, you can be an anthropomorphic mouse if you want, but why stop there? You should be thinking about being an anthropomorphic seagull. An anthropomorphic walrus. An anthropomorphic fucking cassowary. Or, what's wrong with anthropomorphic insects?

So here are some anthropomorphic insect classes for S&W:

The Moth
Hit Die: d6+1
Armour/Shield: Any
Weapons: Any
Abilities: Can Fly (120'); can cast spells as cleric
Advances/saving throws as cleric

The Cricket
Hit Die: d6+2
Armour/Shield: Any
Weapons: Any
Abilities: Can leap up to 100' by foregoing other actions; Has Fighting-Man multiple attacks
Advances/saving throws as Fighting-Man

The Beetle
Hit Die: d6+2
Armour/Shield: Any
Weapons: Any
Abilities: Can Fly (90'); has natural AC of 7
Advances/saving throws as Dwarf

The Cockroach
Hit Die: d6-1
Armour/Shield: None
Weapons: Dagger, staff, darts
Abilities: Can Fly (90') on reaching level 4; can cast spells as a Magic-User
Advances/saving throws as Magic-User

And so forth. Cockroaches are magic-users because fuck you, that's why. 'Bad guy' races are social insects which inhabit 'dungeons', like ants, termites, maybe also wasps and bees. Shrews are purple worms. Black birds are dragons.