The 20' By 20' Room

My Bruce Baugh's My D&D Year

Posted by Jim Henley on September 23, 2006 at 08:06 PM

One of the more enjoyable blogojournospheric endeavors to follow right now is Bruce Baugh's series, "My D&D Year," which as of today is up to 20 entries with approximately, one assumes, 360 or so pending. Bruce is using Rules Cyclopedia D&D, which can be had in PDF for a mere six bucks from RPGNow. He inspired me to buy it, if not to try to run it. And he's got me thinking of fast, easy and fun hacks to go with a dungeon-crawling game.

1. Frex, a la Dogs in the Vineyard, it should be possible to generate stats for an NPC fairly quickly if you roll eight dice at once and read them off in order three at a time. For instance, a roll of 6-1-4-3-5-5-4-1 could become

Str = 6 + 1 + 4 = 11
Dex = 1 + 4 + 3 = 8
Con = 4 + 3 + 5 = 12
Int = 3 + 5 + 5 = 13
Wis = 5 + 5 + 4 = 14
Cha = 5 + 4 + 1 = 10

and you're done with that part.

2. An alternate attribute method for chargen:
a. Each player rolls makes six (unassigned) attribute rolls and records them in a list, using the attribute rolling method of your choice (3d6, 4d6 keep 3, 2d6+6, roll 8 3d6 and drop the worst two, roll 4d20 and keep the second highest etc.)
b. Put all the lists on the table for examination. If there are four players - A, B, C, D - you have four lists.
c. The group chooses one list by consensus - for example, list C.
d. Each player uses the chosen list (C in our example) to assign attributes, placing the numbers where they will.

With the number of niches most OGL fantasy games have to fill, you shouldn't end up with most characters having the same scores in the same attributes. People will put them where it makes sense for their planned character class. The method would work especially well, I think, with Castles & Crusades "primes" system.

3. Reading my Rules Cyclopedia reminded me of the tradeoff between provisioning and mobility - do you want to load yourself down with a long list of dungeon-crawling or camping gear and leave little space for treasure little hope for quick movement or do you want to go light but risk being out of spikes or rope or 10' poles or whatever.

I don't really like the shopping and itemizing, but I like the tradeoff. So, as a house rule, how about turning Encumbrance into a kind of gadget pool? You've got your weapons and armor specified. That leaves you with a certain free carrying capacity in coins or whatever. You just say, I'm taking X coin worth of spelunking gear, paying some amount of money the Gm agrees is appropriate. Then when you need a spike or an extra torch or whatever, you roll d20 against the difficulty class of the item (preassigned); your mod is how much nonspecified Encumbrance you took on. (+1 per 50 coins? per 100? Whatever.)

Bruce has also got me thinking of my abandoned fantasy heartbreaker again. It'll run on the "Few20 Fantasy" system, which will be OGLish but designed for small play groups with limited playing time. Right now the Big Idea is that you roll Initiative, Attack and Defense as d20 plus mods - all at once. You match off dice after they're rolled, a la that famous gunslinger game we've already mentioned once in this post.

Good posts by Rob Donoghue

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on September 22, 2006 at 03:34 PM

Rob Donoghue has been on fire lately. Here's a link to a post about how to structure campaigns, and here's another cool post about story, experience, and how they mix and don't in gaming.

More Kids, More Roleplaying

Posted by Jim Henley on September 22, 2006 at 07:24 AM

John Kim reports from the children's room at ConQuest. Very interesting stuff, especially John's experience that age has a lot more to do with how kids approach a game than gender does. This fits with my instincts about The Princes' Kingdom, though the coincidence of my own children's age/gender divide (older boy and younger girl) made me shy of being too sure about my conclusions heretofore.

How Much XP For a Blow Job?

Posted by peaseblossom on September 19, 2006 at 03:14 PM

I think that people just have to realize when they're playing with a married couple that, no matter how hard they try, the nature of their relationship is going to intrude on the game in any number of ways.

I recently wrote this in an email, in response to a fellow player in a game (that my husband gms) who brought up an issue he was having with said game.  Now, as it turns out, the issue that he had was pretty reasonable, and I (think I) responded pretty reasonably, and everything turned out (as far as I know) fine; but, it, of course, raised the spectre of 'you get special treatment because you're the gm's girlfriend' in my mind, so here we are.

I've been gaming officially for sixteen years (I say officially, because my brother and I used to play pseudo-D&D with a geeky babysitter long before then (ask my mom - she's still mad about the pot lid we used as a shield and somehow lost in the backyard)).  For, I'd say ten of those years, I've been the gm's girlfriend off and on, and now I'm often the gm's wife (er, in the sense that he's often the gm, not that I'm sometimes not his wife).  In that time I've had several accusations along those lines aimed at me, and seen countless similar examples in online forums and the like (the apotheosis of these being the supposed 'queen bee' phenomenon).

Telling someone (or implying it, or complaining about it to a third party) that she gets special treatment from the gm because they're romantically involved is as adolescent as it is sexist.

It's adolescent behavior because you are blaming someone else for your feelings of hurt, anger, whatever.  Own up to those feelings and have a real, honest conversation with the people you think are involved.  That's how adults do it.

It's sexist because it is a charge most often levelled at women (or girl) gamers, and is predicated on the idea that women (or girls) are unable to play at a level equal to men and thus must resort to 'cheating' to succeed.  It's also a way to protest what is sometimes (I've no idea how often, but probably fairly) a female incursion into a previously all-male space.

In my sixteen years of experience, I have played in games with women gms and their boyfriend players, and have never heard of anyone complaining of favoritism or unfair advantage being taken.  Ditto games with men gms and their boyfriend players.  Hell, I have been the gm's girlfriend, and been accused of being 'gm's favorite', even though the gm had a very real, male, favorite at the time (by which I mean everyone openly acknowledged and accepted this behavior).

When you use the gm's girlfriend excuse, what you're saying to me is that you don't think I can play the game effectively, you think that I'm a slut, and that I'm willing to trade on my relationship just to make myself look good.  In the context of a roleplaying game.  You're probably also jealous of the attention I'm getting from the gm outside of the game.

Now, with all of that said: if you're in a romantic relationship outside of the game, of course that's going to affect things that happen in the game.  The same is true of any social relationship, whether you're best friends or jealous rivals.  In a good game, hopefully this is acknowledged and accomodated in your social contract somehow, perhaps by agreeing to minimize those effects, or maybe you'll even use the game to comment on or play with your relationships.  Completely ignoring or failing to anticipate them, though, is pretty boneheaded.

Finally, do you really believe anyone would trade real life sexual favors for in-game advancement?  Really?

Jonathan Walton's Anathema

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on September 15, 2006 at 03:31 PM

Over at his personal blog, Jonathan Walton has been cooking up a homebrew freeform version of Exalted, called Anathema.

I'm posting a translation of a PC I played below the cut....

Continue reading "Jonathan Walton's Anathema"

Snakes on the Plains

Posted by Rob on September 14, 2006 at 08:11 PM

(Crossposted to my LiveJournal, comments welcome either place.)

I can't tell you how long I've been waiting for Lions on the Precipice, Jonathan Walton's notional Dogs in the Vineyard expansion. I'm still waiting, but in the meantime, this emo snippet of alterna-reverse Dogs occurred to me. I started out by thinking about that gloriously stupid bit of early D&D laser-sharking, the Anti-Paladin. Then I found myself actually sympathizing with these guys. (Oh, but if you've heard me mumbling about my "Dogs heartbreaker" lately, this isn't it.)

A Land of Thorns and Vice
The shopkeeper from Back East? He ain't perfect, but at least he don't put on airs like he's never done no wrong.

The Town Steward lives in the bottle and dreams about girls below marrying age. Sister Fidelia wishes her husband were Steward, and pride bakes her dry heart like the summer sun. And Brother Virgil has kilt his shrewish wife a dozen times in his head. Is he righteous just because he's too cowardly to go through with it?

Watch how the townsfolk bow and scrape for a couple of green pups in colored coats. Watch the old sodbusters fall all over themselves to get one of God's Watchdogs to their dinner table, or into their daughter's beds. And why? Because they're scared of the night and the big old sky. And they're so grateful--pathetically grateful--for somebody else to take responsibility, to solve their problems for them, to tell them what to do. How much of being godly is just fear of getting caught? How can they call themselves the Faithful unless their faith's been put to the test? Brother and Sister Serpent, that's where you come in.

Continue reading "Snakes on the Plains"

The Princess' Kingdom

Posted by Jim Henley on September 11, 2006 at 07:53 AM

Carnation Island is my second TPK island (haven't published the first yet) designed especially with my daughter in mind. A few more male citizens crept in than I initially envisioned, because my son was playing too, but most of the authority figures are women or girls. I also tried to avoid the "softness" that Sydney Freedberg identified as common to DITV-derived play of members of what the US courts call "suspect classes."

Wild Talents

Posted by Rob on September 3, 2006 at 06:20 PM

Random fact of the day: Charles Fort (yes, that Charles Fort) was a game designer! Late in life, as his eyesight started to go, Fort packed away all his notes and books and devoted his energies to something called "Super-checkers," a game played with armies of hundreds of men on a board with thousands of squares. Fort used bits of cardboard with thumbtack handles for the men and a bolt of checkered cloth for the board. Yeah, because that would be great for your failing eyesight. At first, players moved just one man at a time, but Fort found that games could go on continuously for a week, so he changed the rules to allow movement en masse:

So let A start out, moving until B tells him to stop--say a hundred moves. Then B makes a hundred moves. A may want to make another hundred moves, but B, sizing up the situation, tells him to stop, say at thirty. Then perhaps occurs 'fighting,' at close quarters, one move at a time. But at any time, if either player wants to make a 'mass movement' that is a matter of obtaining permission from his opponent.

You don't have to be a Fortean to be amused by the image of this guy playing massive week-long games of checkers across his living room floor. In 1930, Fort wrote to his friend Tiffany Thayer:

Super-checkers is going to be a great success. I have met four more people who consider it preposterous.

That's going to be my criteria when I get into designing games, too.

All Roads Lead to Amber . . .

Posted by Jim Henley on September 2, 2006 at 11:46 PM

Reading Fred's Story Games thread on "What's Good About ADRP?" and thinking about the ways that the Elders can be used and abused in an Amber campaign, especially Rob Donoghue's remarks on respect and the power differential, including:

Well, for Amber, the part of me that wants the web to be a little more complex says that an NPC really is what they want and what they have (and perhaps what they _appear_ to want and have), and where those things intersect with players makes for rich, delicious play.

Amber is a bit weird in that sense, and varies from a lot of indie games in that it has strongly proactive NPCs, which is a bad thing in the forgotten realms, but for Amber, where players are _inside_ the circle rather than outside looking in, it's an essential part of flavor. To contrast, Dogs NPCs don't need to be important beyond their relationship to the Dogs. Amber NPCs need to be (or at least seem) more dynamic.

I find myself thinking that, actually, an Amber campaign could profit from adding a step between character creation and the first session of the campaign: a Dogs-style "What they want from the Youngers" list. But not "the Youngers" as a whole: a matrix listing what each elder wants from each PC. It could be anything from "Flora wants Brigit to be more ladylike" to "Bleys wants Alexander to help him conquer Amber" to "Corwin wants to keep Gustav from finding Yg."

Here's the mechanical effect I think the exercise assumes and promotes: The PCs have to have enough power relative to the Elders to be worth wanting something from.

Alexander's March, a Gameblog

Posted by Jere on September 1, 2006 at 10:22 PM

For Alexander's March, my group's new game (Peaseblossom posted some mechanics earlier) I've set up a blog. My goal is to write a gamemaster blog, talking about the game, the work that goes into it, and actual play. There are a lot of game design blogs out there, and a few character blogs, but I want to try doing it more from the week-to-week details of running a game.

You can find it here.