Archive for July, 2012

The Gaping Wound, Part 1

Posted: 30 July 2012 in Game Structure
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In my current estimation, Hit Points are the greatest single failing for Dungeons and Dragons.

That’s maybe a strong statement to start this off with. Hit points serve a vital (heh) role in Dungeons and Dragons, or really any system that has violent conflict as a key component and chooses to use them.  When our characters take damage in-game, they feel pain.  Presumably they also suffer wounds, and generally can tell when The Reaper looms near.  As players, we don’t have that same visceral connection, and Hit Points are one way to address the disconnect.  It answers the question, “how close am I to death?”

I think there are a number of complaints that can be levied against any system that tries to answer that question.  How aware are we of our own vitality? How much information should a player have about the wounds they’ve suffered?  What’s too much information, and what’s too little? I don’t think Hit Points are a perfect solution, or necessarily the right solution for everyone, but I do think they can be a “good enough” solution, and I think that character’s vitality is an important enough component that erring on the side of “too much information” is excusable.

Not all hit point systems are treated equally.  World of Darkness uses a Hit Point system where characters generally have between 6 and 10 Hit Points, where a single attack can do massive amounts of damage (one good shot is likely to kill mortal characters), and the effects and recovery vary based on the type of damage inflicted.  Palladium has a kind of “hybrid” hit point system, with vital HP wrapped in a sheath of “SDC” points that emulate toughness.  SDC represents superficial harm and heals quickly, HP represents serious wounds and heals slowly.  WoD hit points are essentially static, and there are penalties levied to actions if the character has suffered severe injury; systems like Palladium and D&D increase hit points through leveling, and don’t levy penalties for taking damage.

The Complaints

Most recently the topic of hit points in D&D came up with Dr. Gentleman, who has a post on the topic at his blog.  In his post, I believe he makes four claims:

  1. Hit Point systems lead to Nickle & Dime combat — hit him more than he hits you.
  2. This is unrealistic — real injury comes from properly applied force, not repeated lesser trauma, and an attack that fails to kill a character outright won’t kill him with repeated application.
  3. Strike placement is generally not considered in these systems — at best, a called-shot gives a bonus to damage.
  4. Hit Point systems are too abstract — what does “5 damage” mean? Especially if a character’s hit points increase?

My intent here isn’t to spar with Dr. Gentleman; I think he makes some valid points.  I’m using his article merely as a convenient framework to organize my thoughts.  In general, though, I think his points either confuse design of the system with implementation of the system (some DMs apply or describe the system poorly) or miss the point of the system (to give a player feedback that mirror’s his character’s experience) or actually criticize some other (possibly related) mechanics (such as damage or healing).  The major point, though, and the one that encapsulates where I feel D&D fails is Point 4 — what is the relationship between damage, healing, hit points, and my character?

Minor Points

For Point 1, I think it’s important to recognize what’s going on in the system.  Hit Points measure how close the character is to death.  If your goal is to kill your opponent, then reducing their Hit Points to 0 before he does the same to you is the goal; at the most basic level this is going to be “hit him more than he hits you,” but that’s something of a straw-man — the same can be said of actual combat.  The actual complaint is that Hit Points don’t model any kind of alternate goal, but you might as well say that a barometer can’t tell you how hot it is outside.  Point 1 is looking for a different tool, perhaps a system for tracking injuries, and Hit points neither precludes nor is diminished by the use of such an additional system.  (There are a number of such systems out there, and I hope to address some in a future post, since it can be a useful tool in the right situations.)

Point 2 strikes me as simply false.  That is, yes, properly applied force does cause real injury, but so can repeated lesser trauma.  Punching a man in the face will hurt but rarely kill him outright; a sustained beating is likely to lead to severe injury and death, and while that’s occasionally due to a single critical strike, it can also be because our bodies aren’t designed to sustain repeated trauma.  Bones break, vessels burst, all sorts of things result from otherwise-minor trauma applied successively.  That being said, this point begins to hint at a larger issue, one I believe is about assumptions and expectations. How many paper-cuts does it take to kill someone?  The answer depends on how much hit point damage a paper cut deals, and I propose this: the hit point system as designed for D&D is not granular enough to account for minor damage, whether it’s paper cuts, mild bruising, or even (potentially) “merely a flesh wound.”

Point 3 is actually a complaint about how damage is handled, and the fact that the placement and severity of an attack is abstracted away in the roll to hit and the damage roll.  A properly places strike is represented by a high damage roll; a lesser strike is a lower roll (and thus less injury).  This is very similar to Point 1 (all HP measures is how close you are to death, not alternate goals) and Point 2 (D&D Hit Points, and combat rules in general, aren’t granular enough to model this level of detail).  The trick of a called shot dealing bonus damage is a common patch for targeting vulnerable areas, though I think it’s a weak (if often “good enough”) tool for the job.  The Rogue’s sneak attack/backstab feature essentially models the same thing, allowing the rogue to score extra damage when they have an opening because they can strike a vulnerable spot.  This is a complaint against the structures around hit points, rather than hit points themselves.

Point 4 I think is a real issue, and because of that it’ll need to be addressed at greater length in it’s own post (or posts, depending on how this discussion goes).

Part 2

Assumptions, Why I’m Playing

Posted: 30 July 2012 in Administrivia
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There are a bunch of reasons to play RPGs, and these reasons will color both how we approach the game and what we find satisfying.  I think it’s important to put down my own preferences, since that will color the problems I encounter and the solutions I choose to fix those problems.

I grew up on RPGs being all about story; I had a plot I wanted to run my players through, even if that plot was just “the players are heroes and the fight the bad guys and right wrongs.” I got burned out of that pretty quickly because it was a constant struggle for me to get the player’s do to “the right thing” and move the plot along. I recently discovered the OCR and read the Quick Primer to Old School Gaming, and though I agree with a number of the main points (Game Balance, Ming Vase, Moose Head) I eventually decided that I’m not “old school.”  This is mostly because I don’t agree with the idea that the focus should be on Player Skill rather than Character Ability; that’s a perfectly valid way to play, but it’s not what interests me.  It strikes me that the emphasis there is on Role-Playing Game, and I’m more interested is a Role-Playing Game.  For me, the character (and, by extension, the world he inhabits) is more important.

Saying that I want the emphasis to be on role-playing, though, brings a lot of baggage with it.  I don’t mean that I want to avoid rolling dice, that Combat is my enemy, that acting ability is key, or any thing else that’s attached to “role-players.” What’s important to me is that they player assumes an identity, is presented a situation, makes a decision based on who his character is, and experiences the consequences of his actions (leading to a new situation and further decisions).  This is the heart of role-playing, and all the other bits (rules, dice, acting, etc) facilitate that activity.

With that basic core established, there are lots of ways to do it.  You can have quality role-playing with pretty much any system, or no system at all.  You can use dice, cards, numerical stats, descriptive words — most of us have engaged in this sort of activity since we were kids laying Cops and Robbers (or whatever variation was popular with your group; my childhood was spent playing TMNT on the monkey bars).

Personally, I’m a crunchy sort of guy; I want a system that is consistent and “realistic enough” that I feel like it can model situations close to what I would expect in the real world.  My reasons for this are because I believe the rules should facilitate role-playing (making a decision based on your character), and so I want rules that help express the situation (and actions and consequences) in an understandable way. When the rules model the world, and that model resembles the reality we actually live in, it becomes easier to place ourselves in our character’s shoes.  When the rules are ‘realistic enough’ we can reason about our character’s actions the way we reason about our own actions, and when they’re consistent we can base our decisions on past experiences.

I do think there’s a place for DM Fiat and Rulings (rather than Rules), but I think they should be used sparingly, and only to fill in the gaps where the rules don’t accurately model reality.  If your target is a mortal, a dagger to the throat should kill him, regardless of what damage rolls and hit points say.  That’s a gap in the rules and should be handled appropriately.  The same can and should be said in other places where the rules present non-intuitive results.  But if Rules are the result of consistent Rulings (which I believe they are), there is value in developing new rules to address these gaps when we can (to the extent that it makes sense).

Those “rules to address gaps” is what this blog is directed toward.  Since I know 3.X and Pathfinder that’s where most of my effort is focused currently, but I’m interested in discussing other systems as well (especially as I broaden my horizons).

Crit Die

Posted: 24 July 2012 in Toolbox
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As a follow-up to my quick note on combat, here’s the idea of the Crit/Fumble Die. I had a discussion about crits with my players, and where I like having a cit-confirmation system, they almost all preferred a natural-20-always-crits system.

My preference stems from the math and what we end up modeling.  With cit-confirmation, when you roll a 20 you get an auto-hit and then roll again to confirm, hitting the creatures AC again (doesn’t need to be another 20) means you get a critical hit.  This means that there’s always a 5% chance to hit your opponent (auto-hit on a natural 20), and additionally that 5% of all your hits are going to be criticals.  You’ll hit weaker enemies more, and thus get more crits on them, and tougher enemies will be hit less and have proportionally fewer crits.  I’m building a similar system for fumbles because I like using them, but “always fumble on a natural 1” just adds in too much chaos (5% of all your swings are dismal failures).

Counter-wise, a 20-always-crits system means that 5% of all your swings (not your hits) will be critical hits.  You will crit as much on strong enemies as you do on weak enemies, and if you have auto-hit on 20 as well you will *only* crit on tough enemies.  That means 95% of the time you can’t touch the guy, and the other 5% you’re landing devastating blows.  That just feels wrong.

But all my players see is that they roll a 20 and then I “rob” them of their crit when they fail to confirm.  And I can see the logic in that.  The Crit/Fumble die is my proposed solution, divorcing the “did I hit him” roll from the “did I crit him” roll.  Each attack rolls 2d20, with one designated as the hit-die and one as the crit-die.  If the hit-die beats the target’s AC, you hit and deal damage; if the hit-die is a natural 20, you auto-hit regardless of AC, but it has nothing to do with a critical strike.  If you hit and the crit-die is a 20 (regardless of what the hit-die was), then it’s a critical strike.  If you roll a 20 on the crit-die but miss with the hit-die, it was a good swing that just didn’t connect.  And of course, if you miss with the hit-die and the crit-die is a 1, you just fumbled and something bad happens.

You’ll have 5% of your hits be critical, 5% of you misses will be fumbles, and 5% of your attacks with be auto-hits and auto-misses.  But hopefully the perception that failing to confirm a crit “robs” the player of anything.

Quick Note on Combat

Posted: 24 July 2012 in Toolbox
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Dr. Gentleman has a series of posts about Combat that I’m trying (and mostly failing) to read.  This post isn’t really about anything I’ve read there, but it has Combat on my mind, and Gnome Stew just posted a little trick about color-coding your dice that I thought was neat, and all that reminded me of a trick of my own that I’d been meaning to mention.

People complain about the speed of combat a lot — roll d20 to hit, what did you get?, that hits now roll damage, what did you get?, describe results of the attack, next action.  With even a handful of players it gets bogged down quickly, especially if there are NPCs (enemies and/or allies) involved.  But it doesn’t have to be this way, really.

A simple trick that I’ve used, and that I’m surprised doesn’t get used more, is to chuck a handful of dice.  Instead of making each piece of the attack sequence a separate roll, grab a d20 and whatever damage dice you use and toss it in one throw.  If the d20 hits the AC damage is already on the table, and you haven’t wasted any real effort if you miss.  I’ve considered adding a Crit/Fumble die to the mix so that crits are confirmed in the same throw as well.  With a little color-coding, you can quickly see hit-die, damage-dice, backstab-dice, crit-die and so on.  It becomes a lot more roll-and-go, especially if DMs aren’t coy about monster ACs (which I don’t think they should be, in general). If people start thinking about their next action before it’s their turn (something my players need practise doing), it gets even smoother.

The Purpose Of This Blog

Posted: 24 July 2012 in Administrivia
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So it’s been a couple of months now, and I wanted to reiterate the purpose of this blog; partly because I have lots of new readers (I assume, since my daily pageviews are about double what they used to be), but mostly to remind myself what I’m trying to do.

So first, a little bit about what this blog is not.  Contrary to a number of my posts, it is not a blog for apologizing for Dungeons and Dragons. I find myself doing that a lot because (1) to address the topics this blog is about I need to set down what my assumptions are, and (2) there seem to be a lot of people who want to knock D&D over because of it’s flaws.  It is a flawed system (that’s a big part of the motivation of this blog), but I like it and feel that there are a lot of things it does very well.  I also know that I was anti-3.X for years because of misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the system, and I’m hoping to help others who may be in a similar spot.  If you don’t like D&D that’s fine, I don’t think you’re a flawed human being and I’m sure we can both find games we like and talk about general RPG elements we hold in common.  D&D isn’t even the only system I’ll talk about here, though it is one that I’m most familiar with and my go-to system (especially if you consider Pathfinder to be “D&D”).

Also, contrary to how some future posts may sound, this blog isn’t really about reviewing RPG products, particularly setting material or adventures.  There may be bits in both that I pull out and look at, and some products address the same things I’m interested in and might get something closer to a full review.

What this blog is about is the various gaming systems and structures, and the fact that many of the RPGs on the shelves are missing large pieces of what I feel should be included in an RPG system.  Specifically, I’m looking to make this a kind of “toolbox” for DMs to come and find the right tool for their campaign needs.  I’ve been DMing for years, and often felt like I was fighting with my players, my setting, and my system to make interesting things happen.  Reading through The Alexandrian, it struck me that missing game structures was at the heart of almost all my problems (with the tension of player agency being a close second).  I’m interested in talking about the hobby, discussing differing preferences and play-styles, and in general geeking-out about Role-Playing Games (fantasy and otherwise).

But in the end this should be a place I can go to find a system for falling damage, or a system for overland travel, or a system for diplomatic negotiations — and preferable a nice variety of each so that I can season my games to taste. And if others benefit from it too, so much the better.

Level 20: Realm of the Gods

Posted: 23 July 2012 in Game Structure
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The Preamble

In the comments on my post about Falling Damage, Brenden mentioned his mechanisms for making falling “always scary” but allowing good luck to save you from even extreme falls.  I liked the system but noted that I don’t think falling is always scary, because eventually the PCs are at near-god levels, and Superman isn’t afraid of falling off a building or two.  From there, Dr. Gentleman posted this:

I think the idea that higher-level characters in D&D are akin to demigods is one that makes the system make more sense (and actually makes me want to look at 3e again), but I don’t think that’s the intent of D&D. Heroes go on adventures, gain experience, skills, abilities, and treasure, but they’re still essentially human (elf, dwarf, or whatever). The idea that an exceptional person can gain experience and thereby become the equivalent of a demigod or superhero is not a basic assumption when it comes to D&D, which leads to a lot of complaints about realism. I think that’s a pretty fundamental difference in assumptions, and needs to be explicitly cleared up straight away in these types of discussions.

Except that I think that this is the intent and, if a little buried, that it is fairly clear when you look for what the system ask for. (more…)

Making Magic

Posted: 23 July 2012 in Game Structure
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So I’m going to start off by saying that I’ve never quite understood the major complaints of Vancian magic.  And maybe it’s just that I’ve never seen them presented clearly, but a quick moment of googling before starting on this post didn’t help clear things up.

Protip: use Divination to help prepare tomorrow’s spells

As near as I can tell, Vancian casting is the sort where a Wizard has to prepare spells ahead of time, and one fired off he needs to take time to rest and ‘recharge his batteries.’  A common complaint seems to be that a Wizard has to predict what sorts of spells they’ll need at the beginning of the day and if they guess wrong, oh well.  That could be pretty frustrating, but as far as 3.X/Pathfinder goes (which seem to get the brunt of the complaints) that’s not actually the case.  From the SRD (emphasis mine):

When preparing spells for the day, a wizard can leave some of these spell slots open. Later during that day, she can repeat the preparation process as often as she likes, time and circumstances permitting. During these extra sessions of preparation, the wizard can fill these unused spell slots. She cannot, however, abandon a previously prepared spell to replace it with another one or fill a slot that is empty because she has cast a spell in the meantime. That sort of preparation requires a mind fresh from rest. Like the first session of the day, this preparation takes at least 15 minutes, and it takes longer if the wizard prepares more than one-quarter of her spells.

In many places, the text talks about “preparing spells for the day”, the need for 8 hours of rest followed by 1 hour of preparation, and so on, but the above text notes that a Wizard can leave some slots flexible for when they do know what they’re up against.  The Wizard still needs time to prepare, which is a key differentiators between them and spontaneous-casting Sorcerers, but it isn’t a “hope you guess right” situation.

Fire and Forget

Another common complaint seems to be that it doesn’t make sense* that a Wizard needs to re-memorize his spells each time he wants to cast them, that the memories of the spell are somehow ‘burned’ out of his mind as he casts.  I did see someone note that this is a pretty interesting thing to think about, and kind of creepy, that casting spells can actually rip thoughts out of your head, or that a spell is a kind of entity that moved out of the mage’s mind and in to the world when cast.  I agree that those are neat ideas, but I think they’re also unnecessary.

In many places, the rules talk about a Wizard needing to “memorize” spells, but they also use the term “preparation.”  In a lot of ways it seems more reasonable that a Wizard essentially half-casts his spells during preparation, leaving the final 3-second trigger to be completed when he actually intends to use the spell.  Under that interpretation it’s not that he forgets the spells he uses, but he has to set them up again.  And part of the measure of a mage is how many different spells he can “hold” in that half-cast state at a time (and total, in a day, before being sapped of energy).

Spell Slots vs Mana

The last complaint seems to be that spell slots don’t make sense.  This comes in two flavors: the one that argues that magic energy should recharge evenly over time, and the one that argues that you should be able to ‘fit’ more lower-level spells in a higher level spell slot.  I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with either of those systems, it’s just those aren’t the assumptions that D&D Magic makes.  it’s a fairly modular system, and you can pretty easily pull out Vancian magic and substitute any other system in it’s place without changing the rest of the game much t all.  But I think spell slots are just as reasonable as any other system.

In the D&D mechanics, magic doesn’t recharge evenly over time; accessing those energies is taxing, and a Wizard needs an extended period of light activity or sleep before he can recover, mentally and physically, to work magic again.  I’ve seen mana-point systems that work similarly, where mana won’t regenerate during combat, etc, and it’s really just a design choice.  You could easily have X spell slots recover over Y hours if you want and essentially have the same thing as mana.

The question of how many spells should ‘fit’ in a spell slot is a matter of what that slot represents.  If a spell slot is a quantum of energy, then I would agree that a slot which can power a 3rd Level spell should contain enough energy for several 1st Level spells.  Instead, I think spell slots represent the Wizard’s capacity, both in terms of how many half-spells he can hold at a time and how much casting he can perform in a day.  Higher level spells are restricted to the slots they ‘fit’ in because they’re harder to handle and maintain so the Wizard can only manage a couple at a time.  And regardless of the spells cast, he can only channel so much energy in a day before he’d tapped out, likely drained physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Final Comments

No system is going to satisfy everyone, because we all have slightly different goals and preferences.  I’m not saying that no one should dislike Vancian casting, but I am making the case that Vancian Magic is not less valid as a system than any of it’s competitors.

*While I do talk about the need for game systems to be realistic and “make sense” in order to facilitate role playing and decision making, there are limits — we’re talking about a world with dragons and demons walking the earth, and where a pinch of sulfur and a few hand motions makes a fireball; is it that much more difficult to accept that magic burns away memories as it’s cast?

Why Falling Damage Is Unrealistic

Posted: 19 July 2012 in House Rules
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Thanks to a post by Shortymonster I stumbled over to the Large Polyhedron Collider (A+ on the blog name), where he’s got a post about the Realities of Falling.  He sets out a few milestones: serious injuries occur from falling 25-30ft onto a hard surface, and death is very likely from a fall of 50-60 feet (onto a hard surface).  He goes on to talk about falling into soft surfaces (like deep water, or snow), and the differences landing orientation makes, and the kind of damage you can expect to do if you land on crates or a car or another person.

Because of this, I think we need to change the way falling damage is handled in D&D: as it is, it’s just too lethal to be realistic. (more…)

Assumptions: Rewards

Posted: 18 July 2012 in Game Structure
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I’ve been mulling over this post for a little bit now, but John Arcadian at Gnome Stew just made a post about running a no-character-advancement game which has spurred me to actually put pen to paper and say what I think.

The Gnome Stew post talks about the idea of playing a campaign where characters do not advance in level, or alternatively only advance during downtime between story arcs.  It lists a number of benefits to this approach, not the least of which, in my opinion, is eliminating the sense of “my character will be awesome at Level 5.”  Your character is awesome now.  John makes a few other good points and it’s worth a quick read; this post is more about the assumptions and expectations of rewards in D&D.

One of the trends that bothers me about D&D rewards is that it seems like the expected reward, from both players and DMs, is experience points.  When characters complete some goal — rescue the princess, kill the goblins, solve the puzzle — they might get some treasure, they may get some in-game renown, they could open up previously-inaccessible areas.  But across the board it’s expected that they’ll get Experience points.  The concern and the danger is that the difference in power from one level to the next is a bit more than most people expect, and the assumption of Experience-as-default-reward will tend to move you quickly up that scale.  If “regular people” are 1st or 2nd Level and “historical legends” are 4th and 5th Level, an assumption that has characters advancing to Herculean-tier power in a handful of adventures is problematic.

Because of this, I think that reigning in experience rewards in favor of gold, magic items, renown, and influence over the game world can lead to a richer (heh) gaming experience.  I almost always run my games with Pathfinder’s “slow progression” XP scale, which is about 150% of the standard scale, but even before reading the Gnome Stew post I’d considered removing XP rewards entirely and tying Level Advancement directly to story-arc milestones and accomplishments.  If going up in level means developing skills beyond a character’s professional peers, or at the mid- and high-end of the scale becoming more than human or even godlike, it makes sense to tether that to a pivotal moment when the character accomplishes some feat or destroys the Big Bad.  Hitting 4th Level because you killed your 47th Goblin just feels wrong.

Of course, I’m not sure I care for a game with no character advancement, but that’s something that should be seasoned to taste.  As John says, if you start in the sweet spot, when your character is awesome and the situations you face and interesting and challenging, who needs character advancement?

D&D Next Petition

Posted: 17 July 2012 in The Hobby
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So Michael over at Neuroglyph Games has a post up about a petition to WotC to reconsider the path they’re taking with 5th Edition.  Unsurprisingly, he takes his cues from the Open Letter to WotC that was published a couple months ago, and his message is the same: 5e is unlikely to unite the market, and the market doesn’t need to be united.  We like our various rules systems at the best thing to do, for both WotC and Gamers, is to re-release the old systems, continue support for all rules sets, and release content that people will buy.  He notes that there’s loads of material for old systems that never got converted to newer rules sets, and new modules could be written and statted for use with all forms of the game.

There’s a Kickstarter up right now that I think shows a great model for this sort of thing: The Bestiary of the Curiously Odd is a Bestiary book that’s going to bee 200+ pages of monster descriptions and fluff, without any stats; then they’ll publish no less than 3 smaller statbooks, for Pathfinder, OSRIC, and Traveller rules systems.  They just tripled* the market for that bestiary for the cost of a couple small softcovers.  WotC could do the same thing — write up one book with the adventure descriptions and NPCs, and a series of statbooks so that the adventure could be run for 1e, 2e, 3e, 4e…  And with print-on-demand capabilities, you can even avoid a lot of the traditional costs that would be associated with storage, etc.

Michael’s petition is up on Change.org, and since I know a lot of my readers are non-US I want to point out the “outside the US” link on the form as well; I don’t know that it will get noticed by anyone at WotC or Hasbro, but I think it’s at least worth voicing our opinion.

On Charisma

Posted: 17 July 2012 in House Rules
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I touched on this a little bit in my post about Wisdom, but one of my biggest complaints about the D&D Attributes is the designer’s apparent confusion over what Charisma is.

A high Charisma gives you a bonus on Bluff, Disguise, Diplomacy, Handle Animal, Intimidate, Perform, and Use Magic Device.  It also gives you a bonus when determining the followers you can attract (per the Leadership feat), and Charisma is used on any check that involves influencing others.  It describes a character’s personal magnetism and ability to lead.  A low Charisma penalizes these same things, making it harder to intimidate, persuade, beguile, or lead others.  In pretty much very case, Charisma is treated as a character’s strength of personality, their confidence, and their assertiveness.

But when describing racial traits, Charisma isn’t about confidence and assertiveness, it’s about likeability.  Dwarves are “a bit gruff,” Goblins are “unpleasant,” and both get a penalty to Charisma.  They got it right with Aasimar and Halflings and Drow, who are “Confident,” “Strong-willed,” and “Manipulative” but they mess it up with Gnomes and Tieflings and Catfolk who are “Agreeable,” “Unnerving,” and “Sociable.” Orcs get a penalty for being “savage.”  Sure, it makes sense for getting a penalty to Diplomacy for being gruff or unnerving or savage, but why should the samehurt Intimidate?  I agree that Goblins should have a CHA penalty, but it’s because they’re spineless cowards not because they’re rude or ugly.  Do people really believe lies if you’re likable (or, would you really be likable if you were known for being able to tell lies)?  Does a Magic Device really care how sociable you are?

So here’s a quick run-down of how I would recast the Races’ attributes:

Asimar: +2 WIS, +2 CHA; Insightful and Confident
Drow: +2 DEX, +2 CHA, -2 CON; Nimble, Manipulative, and Delicate
Dwarves: +2 STR, +2 CON, -2 DEX; Strong but Stunted
Catfolk: +2 DEX, +2 CHA, -2 WIS; Agile, Self-assured, but lacking Common Sense
Gnomes: +2 CON, +2 WIS, -2 STR; Hardy, Wise, and Weak
Goblins: +4 DEX, -2 STR, -2 CHA; Quick, Weak, and Spineless (or alternately -2 WIS for Foolish)
Halflings: +2 DEX, +2 CHA, -2 STR; Nimble, Strong-willed, Weak
Orc: +4 STR, -2 INT, -2 WIS, -2 CHA; Strong, Dim, and Unfocused
Tiefling:+2 INT, +2 CHA; Intelligent and Manipulative

Quick NPCs

Posted: 16 July 2012 in Toolbox
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NPCs are the bread and butter of a DM’s toolkit; unless you’re running an adventure deep in the wilderness, your characters are going to run in to other people.  And if they have access to a settlement of any decent size, they may easily meet lots of people.  It’s possible to hand-wave this so they interact with nameless merchants and get rumors from faceless street urchins, but in a lot of cases that could lessen the game.  So lots of DMs put work into coming up with ways to make quick NPCs, and  thought I might add such a method to my Toolbox here.

Given my assumptions, almost everyone my characters meet with be Level 1 Commoners with average stats.  The few craftsmen may be Experts, men-at-arms will be Warriors, and the rare witch or holy man will be an Adept. Rulers and high society will be made up of mostly the same, with the top few actually being classed as Aristocrats (just because you’re high-born doesn’t mean you necessarily take that path).  In short, most random NPCs are probably going to be Commoners or Warriors.

When I’m actually statting an NPC, I like to use the Basic Array (13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8), but it’s probably best to assume that most people will have 10s across the board (it’s Average for a reason).  Conveniently, Commoners and Warriors both get 2+Int Skills, and have essentially the same class skills: Climb, Craft, Handle Animal, Profession, Ride, and Swim — Warriors add Intimidate and Commoners add Perception.  Pick two skills to get a +4 on and everything else is a +0 and you’re done.

Warriors are proficient with all weapons and armors, 5hp, and have a +1 BAB and +2 Fort.  Commoners are proficient with a single weapon and no armor, 3hp, and get no other bonuses.  You can usually ignore things like Feats and Traits for random NPCs (if they become important enough to care, you may just fully stat them between sessions).

If necessary, add a +1 bonus to the appropriate stats if you’re creating a non-human NPC (so elves get +1 in DEx and Dex-based skills, and +1 in Int an extra Skill).

What’s In A Name?

The biggest consideration (since stats are fairly straight-forward) is the character’s name; if you’re doing it off-the-cuff you’re likely to end up with something silly-sounding or “Bob.”  The best thing to do is generate a couple dozen names for Males, Females, and Surnames, and just mix-and-match as necessary (I could easily see a random table for putting together names, and you could vary the frequency of certain names if you think “Tomen” is a common name for halflings in your world).  I generally choose a style for each of my main races: dwarves have Norse-based names, halflings have Gaelic-based ones, and so on.

On Assumptions

An interesting consequence to these “average NPCs” is the fact that most people will easily die to a single sword thrust (the expected result of a Short Sword is 3 damage, 4 for a Long Sword; a Greatsword will fell even trained men-at-arms in one swing), and a creature that has a +2 to damage is essentially guaranteed to kill them if it hits.  This makes Orcs (with a +2 average STR mod) much more frightening to regular folks.

 

By The Law

Posted: 12 July 2012 in Game Structure
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This started as a reply to Brian’s comment on my last post, but quickly ballooned into something too big for a comment thread.  Brian said he likes my notions on the 3×3 Alignment (thanks, so do I) but he feels like there really needs to be consequences for breaking alignment — “If you’re a lawful good paladin and you strike down an enemy out of anger instead of in the name of your deity, there should be repercussions.”

Generally I agree, but I need to do a lot of unpacking to get at what I mean. There are a lot of things going on with that deceptively simple question.  First, yes, there should be repercussions for acting out of alignment; but there should be repercussions for any meaningful action, so this doesn’t really tell us much.  What I think Brian means, though, is that D&D has traditionally had mechanical and class-based penalties for breaking out of alignment, and this has traditionally meant that a Paladin can not lie for fear of losing their powers and being reduced to less-than-a-Fighter — how would I deal with that actuality?

I think that there are a few things going on here.  There’s how how Alignment affects a class, Alignment affects a character, and how Alignment affects the world.  I’ll address them in reverse order.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here: it gets long.

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On A Cubed Alignment

Posted: 12 July 2012 in Game Structure
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I like alignment systems.

I think the D&D Nine get a short shrift by most people, who’ve decided they don’t like a game that tells them what they can and can’t do.  (I think that’s a misunderstanding of the system.)  But there’s also the various Morality scales in White Wolf’s World of Darkness (Morality, Humanity, Clarity, etc); the Palladium Seven (two Good, two Selfish, and three Evil), though they strike me as much more prescriptive than D&D; and a variety of similar “this is how my character thinks and perceives the world” systems in other games.  I think they’re very useful tools for Role Playing and give a quick handle for internal and external conflicts.

One gripe I have with the D&D Nine is the choice of Good vs Evil as an axis.  It’s a reasonable choice to make, and like many things in D&D I’m pretty sure it developed organically over decades, but it seems to me that there’s a lot of baggage that comes with those terms.  After all, no one gets up in the morning and thinks “I’m going to be evil today” (with the possible exception of cosmic forces, I guess).  No one thinks of themselves as a bad person (even if they do bad things, it’s always justifiable, at least in their minds).  The catch, of course, is that the definition D&D gives these terms doesn’t line up with the baggage they come with — Good talks about putting the needs of others above your own needs, even to the point of risk to yourself; Evil talks about a willingness to hurt and enslave others if it is convenient or expedient, essentially putting your needs above anyone else’s.  It could be properly recast as “Altruistic vs Egoistic,” but that’s hardly as approachable as “Good vs Evil.” It’s also a lot less vague.

Yesterday, the Gassy Gnoll proposed that “Holy vs Unholy” should replace “Good vs Evil” and that it should be relative to the character, so what’s Holy for a follower of Pelor is very different from what’s Holy for a follower of Nerull.  Brendan commented that he liked the idea of Holy vs Unholy, but that it shouldn’t be relative, so Holy meant the same thing whether you followed Pelor or Nerull, it’s just Nerull’s followers oppose the Holy.  I don’t think that fixes the problems I have with Good vs Evil, and in fact it probably makes them worse, but it struck me that it could be an interesting addition to alignment, a Cubed Alignment instead of 3×3.

But what would that look like? What’s the difference between Lawful Good Holy and Lawful Good Unholy? Wait, scratch that.  Saying someone is Good Unholy or Evil Holy is going to quickly turn in to nonsense, so let’s start by replacing the current Good and Evil with Altruistic and Egoistic.  So what’s the difference between Lawful Altruistic Holy and Lawful Altruistic Unholy?  Can we even make sense of what this third axis could be?

Let’s look at the Axises we currently have, first.  In Law vs Chaos, Law represents order, honor, tradition, and authority; Chaos represents individualism, freedom, and impulse.  Neutral characters are neither particularly bound to honor or tradition, but also don’t chafe under it or feel a need to resist or rebel.  In Altruism vs Egoism, Altruism is about putting the needs of others before your own, even to the point of sacrifice; Egoism is about putting your needs above the needs of others, to the point of being callous or cruel.  Neutral characters try to be good neighbors, but generally are neither willing to sacrifice themselves nor victimize others.

So what about Holy vs Unholy? I’m honestly not really sure how we should cast the terms.  In some cases, Holy refers to association with or supporting the gods, and unholy would be anything aimed against them.  I don’t think that’s what we’re aiming for.  In other cases, Unholy is the same as wickedness, and Holy is some combination of Lawfulness and Altruism.  I don’t think that’s what we want either.  We could put it in terms of suffering, where Holy creatures strive to decrease suffering and Unholy creatures strive to increase it; or we could put it in vague terms like Good and Evil, or Light and Dark, where Unholy creatures strive for negative ends and Holy creatures strive for positive ends.  But the more I think of it, the less I feel it really adds anything.

Maybe I just need to give it more thought.  Anyone out there have ideas I might be missing?

Protect Us From Evil

Posted: 11 July 2012 in Game Structure
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There are a couple posts I read today about alignment, and since alignment is something I care about quite a bit, I wanted to toss my two cents in.

Alignment in 4th Edition

The first post is from the Dungeon’s Master, where he questions the importance of Alignment in 4th Edition.  He notes that 4E pared down the long-held Nine Alignments to five, and that two of those five are explicitly barred from Player Characters.  He goes on to note that there are no penalties to changing alignments, and that the alignments that remain are so broad and all-encompassing that it’s unlikely that a character would stray from them any ways.  He wonders if alignment even matters in 4th Edition.

To that I think I would respond that no, alignment doesn’t matter in 4th Edition.  That’s not to say that I think it can’t matter in a campaign using the 4E system — it can, and like the Dungeon’s Master I think it should — but it’s my opinion that 4th Edition has a drastically different perspective on what D&D is than it’s predecessors did, and that different perspective doesn’t care much about alignment.

D&D has grown and changed over the years; this becomes more and more apparent as I read up about Chainmail and OD&D compared to the 3.X that I was introduced to.  It was a war game that turned into an adventure game that became a role playing game.  And as a role playing game, alignment aid the player in getting into they’re character’s head.  It informs the player what their character’s morals and values are, and that should be used to inform the decisions and actions he makes.  Why must a Paladin be Lawful Good?  Because those are the values someone must hold before they would take up such a calling.  Why must a rogue be non-Good?  Because you can’t burglarize people on a regular basis and hold values focused on “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”  These aren’t straight-jackets or lists of things your character can’t do, they’re things your character wouldn’t do and the perspective he has on the world around him.  I believe the penalties associated with changing alignment in 1e and 2e are just ways of making the game care about alignment; they look like pretty ham-fisted ways from my point of view, but they’re the proverbial stick to encourage the player to consider his alignment before acting.

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On Religion

Posted: 10 July 2012 in GM Advice
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Shorty Monster has a post over on his blog about religion in role playing games.   His complaints are essentially three points: all fantasy games have the “same” gods, where “same” means that they follow similar “sphere of influence” styles; devotees of fantasy religions don’t behave the way devotees of real-world religions do, in that they are all “a homogenous lump” of identical personalities; and that fantasy religions are more-monolithic and less-fractured than real-world religions.

I think the the first point may be a valid observation, but I think it’s because each fantasy setting is trying to work off the same trope, ie, the Greek or Norse pantheons.  I don’t think that’s really a problem, the same way I don’t think ripping inspiration from other sources is a problem.  If it unnecessarily limits your choices then it’s a bad thing, but that’s true for any source of inspiration and can easily be fixed (by adding a new god, a new religion, or changing the way current gods and religions behave).

The other two points are really more about how devotees and religious organizations are played, rather than a problem with their foundation.  Shorty notes that not a lot of details are given about dogma or observances (though, looking up Greyhawk gods on Wikipedia gives you quite a bit of information) and complains that there isn’t enough to go on to portray a devout character.  That may be a fair point, but 1) I think a lot of it is left for the GM to fill out, because GMs tend to want to customize and build the setting to their own tastes (your mileage may vary as to whether that’s a sufficient excuse for leaving out material), and 2) I don’t think most fantasy gods or religions are based on strictly-ordered religions like modern real-world religions.  A character prays to Pelor because he wants a strong crop yield, not because Pelor imposes a certain moral paradigm.  A cleric devotes himself to Kord in order to embody strength and victory, not because Kord is the one true god.  And a cult leaves offerings for Nerull because they fear him, or wish to direct him towards their enemies, not because of… well, OK, I’m at a loss for what else might motivate them.

For my part there are two things that I’m concerned about in my fantasy religions: the problem of divine accessibility, and the problem of definitive orthodoxy.  They’re really both related to each other, but it’s the difference in how you approach the issue.

Why do Good Gods let Bad Things happen?

Putting other things aside, a common theme in fantasy setting (whether it’s RPGs or books or movies) is that the heroes have to go out and fight evil because they’re the only ones who can.  But if the gods actually exist, especially if they have great powers to act upon the world, then why don’t they just fix the problem?  If Pelor hates the undead so much, why doesn’t he just wipe them out with a miracle, instead of sending frail mortals to hunt them down and destroy them one-by-one?  If Moradin protects the dwarves, why doesn’t he smite the hobgoblin army that’s laying siege?

This can be handled in a number of ways.  Perhaps the god’s attention is elsewhere, addressing a greater threat like an Evil god working at cross purposes, and an unseen enemy who would overtake our heroes if not for the god’s interference.  Or maybe the god is hesitant to interact with the world directly because doing so would make him vulnerable to his enemies (sapping his energy, or forcing him into an assailable state), and so directing mortal agents is the safer (if less sure) method of influencing the world.  Perhaps Pelor can’t root out the undead because he has no power in dark places (though, if that’s the case, questions about the nature of clerics and divine magic come up), or perhaps in directing his power against the undead there would be innocents caught up in the destruction.  Superman doesn’t have to be the only one who lives in a world of cardboard.

How can we argue about the will of Zeus if we can just ask him directly?

Here’s the problem: if we can speak to the gods directly, and they can answer us directly, it is essentially impossible to have a difference of opinion on what that god wants us to do.  Two reasonable people can’t argue over whether killing cows offends Zeus or not if they can just ask him directly and get a clear yes or no.  And because of this, you can’t have different sects that worship the same god coming into conflict or working at cross purposes.  Any question or conflict internal to the church can be resolved by asking The Big Guy what takes priority. The Abrahamic/Judeo-Christians among us might point to the earliest days of their faith and note that just being able to talk to your god doesn’t prevent misunderstandings, but given time and opportunity those things can be cleared up: someone’s right and someone’s wrong, and it’s just a matter of asking the question.

This one is harder to fix, I think.  On the one hand, you could allow your gods to make inconsistent or conflicting statements, and you could even hand wave it by saying that he knows more than mortals and just has a hard time expressing all the nuance that occupies a god’s mind.  It strikes me that that would be a pretty difficult god to follow or put much faith in, because it essentially boils down to “we do not and can not know what he wants,” which is a sure path to agnosticism if nothing else.  Followers of such a god will probably find other gods to cling to.

Alternatively, you could restrict talking to the gods to just their clergy, and so lay people could have arguments among themselves just fine.  The trouble is that then “just ask Zeus” simple becomes “just ask Zeus’s priest,” and the best you can hope for is a wicked priest intentionally acting against his professed god.  And when 9 out of 10 clerics agree, the 10th one must be a filthy liar.  I really think that for fantasy religions to “work” in the sense of reasonable and committed devotees disagreeing with each other (especially to the point of conflict) the gods must be remote enough or vague enough that getting clear and simple answers is not clear or simple.

Good, Bad, I’m the one with the Holy Symbol

My preference is to have remote and disinterested (or preoccupied) gods. Maybe they live on Mount Olympus and even getting an audience with them is an epic quest.  Maybe they exist outside creation and can not directly interact with it for fear of annihilating it (or themselves).  Maybe they don’t even actually exist, and at best the gods are magical creatures like Elementals or Dragons and clerics are essentially sorcerers and witches.  It doesn’t really matter (unless I’m directly addressing the question with my campaign) because the gods don’t really matter to me.  They aren’t what I’m interested in.

The things that interest me in role-playing games are the characters (PCs and NPCs) and the societies and organizations they interact with.  In most cases what a character or group believes is is far more important (and interesting) than what is true.  So I tend to have the nature of the gods be an open question, because it’s not high on my list of priorities, and leaving it unanswered allows for a lot more variation in the religions and interactions available in my world.

Setting Up Systems

Posted: 9 July 2012 in GM Advice
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So I’ve been trying (and mostly failing) to prepare for a quick little hex-crawl game to run with my wife.  A big problem for me is, apparently, “information architecture” or “how do I know what I know?”  I thought I’d use some space here to talk about what my plans are, structurally.

I’m planning on using a six mile hex as the basis of my map, and I’ll plot geography based on Welsh Piper’s guidelines (though it’s a bit of a kludge since I’m not using their Atlas Hex, template for now).  The bulk of my hexcrawl system I’m going to be taking from The Alexandrian (though it seems to have stalled after the 7th entry); I’m planning on keeping the hex structure invisible to my players, and Justin has a good system for tracking progress over the grid, getting lost and getting found, sight lines, encounters and encounter distance, and so on.  I’ll be keying each hex to a ‘default location,’ and then building up encounter tables. (Of course, on a 180mi by 180mi map, that’s 800 to 900 unique locations to key…)    Justin hasn’t given us an example of his tables yet, and I may use some combination of the one-page encounters, multi-table encounters, and hand-keyed encounters I’ve mentioned before.

I’m using the time structure I mentioned before (with simple actions taking a minute and longer actions taking a turn, when it matters to track them). I’m going to have 4-week month (aligned with the cycle of the moon), 13 months in a year (for 364 days total).

I’m putting together a year of weather per Gnome Stew’s suggestion, and may be incorporating other systems from Dragon 137 and the Wilderness Survival Guide (both of which I’ve recently purchased).  I’ll probably use a tracking sheet not unlike the one that inspired Gnome Stew.

I feel like I’m still missing some structures that I need to account for, and this doesn’t get into the real meat of the setting (ie, the city-states and societies that will be the focus of the crawl).

Assumptions, Levels and Tiers

Posted: 6 July 2012 in Game Structure
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One of the biggest take-aways from Justin’s Calibrating Your Expectations is the meaning of levels.  He says that he began writing the post in part to address all the people who said that “D&D Can’t Do Conan” because making a Level 20 Barbarian gives you a guy who can do things the actual Conan never could.  Or “D&D Can’t Do Einstein” because a Level 20 Expert would have way too many hit points for a frail old math geek.  The argument he makes is that people are looking at Level the wrong way, and they’re expecting Level 20 (or Level 5, or Level 12) to mean something that it doesn’t.

Justin makes the argument that pretty much everyone you’ve ever known would be a Level 1 character.  Really exceptional people might be Level 2 or Level 3.  Level 4 characters are some of the most talented and accomplished people in the world, and Level 5 characters are the people who get written about in history books.  From there he calls 6th level superhuman, a 10th Level character is challenging gods to contests of skill, and a 20th Level character is essentially a god themselves.  He bases his argument off of skill bonuses available at level 1 and DCs attached to certain activities.  But there are other clues, too.

A 5th Level character is taking on manticores, trolls, and young dragons; the exploits of Beowulf.  Heroes of Greek myth fought a minotaur (CR4), a hydra (CR4), and Medusa (CR7).  At Level 10 characters are fighting Greater Elementals and huge extra-planar spiders. Above level 15 characters a fighting high-level Angels and Demons, and when they reach level 20 they are literally beating up gods and taking their stuff.   Think that those who have made creatures higher than Level 20 are well-meaning but misguided, and I personally believe that Zeus himself can be built as a Level 20 creature. (It gets futzy when you’re talking about CR versus Level, though.)

The long and short of it is as Justin puts it at the end of his post: the 3.X system expects that you’ll move from one power level to an extremely different power level as you level up, but people expect there to be a much more uniform performance from Level 1 to Level 20.  They bend over backwards trying to make the system fit that expectation, so that a 20th Level character can be treated as King Arthur instead of as Thor.  (As an aside, this is precisely why the trend of D&D 5E worries me; they’re trying to flatten the playing scale so that a 20th Level character is still threatened by orcs.  You lose a lot of variety in what the system can model when you do that, and it isn’t necessary.)

And of course, these kind of expectations are really harmful to the game.  If you expect that Aragorn is Level 15 instead of Level 5, then that colors what sorts of adventures you can have at low levels.  You spend the first 5 (or more) Levels of D&D killing rats and goblins and bandits, instead of leading armies, storming castles, and fighting Nazghul.

Assumptions, Attributes and Classes

Posted: 5 July 2012 in Game Structure
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So I recently had a few conversations that shared a common theme: the assumptions you bring to D&D can drastically change the way you approach the system.  Some of these conversations were about game-world assumptions and while those can change the way you approach the game (a setting where all rogues are thieves is different from a setting where rogues are more likely bored noblemen or commissioned spies), that’s not what I’m interested in talking about right now.  I’d like to put out my assumptions on the Pathfinder/D&D 3.X system mechanics and what they mean.

As I’ve mentioned before, my perspective on D&D is strongly influenced by Justin Alexander’s Calibrating Your Expectations post; I highly recommend that you go read it to get the foundation I’m working from.  I’m going to try to not simply recreate Justin’s post, but he’s covered most of the bases pretty well.

The very first thing to recognize is that, at least the way they’re done today, Player-Characters are not only above average, but they generally approach the peak of mortal ability.  This can be seen in two aspects: Attributes and Class.

Attributes

As Justin notes, PCs use the “elite” array of 15,14,13,12,10,8 (which is the mathmatically expected result of 4d6-drop-lowest, which seems to be the fashion these days for random stats), and based on some statistics in the 3.0 DMG he concludes that this puts them in the top 5% of the population (as far as raw ability and natural talent goes).  Standard NPCs use the 13,12,11,10,9,8 array (this is the expected results of 3d6), and the theoretical “average person” would be 10,10,10,10,10,10 (I actually think that this NPC exists with fair frequency, since any given score describes a small range of ability).

It’s worth noting here that a score of 8 or 9 is “below average,” but that doesn’t mean it’s crippling disability.  I think this is easiest to show with INT, but it can be extended to other attributes.  In a lot of places (though I can’t remember if any were ‘official’) it’s been said that INTx10 gives you a rough idea of the character’s IQ score.  (Palladium Book’s RIFTS system states this explicitly).  “Normal” IQ is considered to be between 70 and 130.  The definition of “mental retardation” doesn’t kick in until below 70, but it’s only mild retardation if it’s above 50; these people can learn to live on their own and maintain a job.  Severe, “unable to function on their own” retardation is marked at 35 and below, and the D&D system marks INT 3 as the lower limit of sentient life.  A dim character has an IQ of 5 to 7; above 7 they might not be the smartest person in the room, but it’s unlikely anyone would notice.  Forrest Gump, I would guess, probably has an IQ of 5 or 6. At the same time, “genius” level IQ was originally set at 140, or INT 14.

I generally consider 18 to be the peak of natural human ability; above that there needs to be something beyond “natural” at work.  By the rules a human COULD roll an 18 and then apply their racial +2 to get a 20, but I generally consider this inappropriate.  I freely admit that this may just be my preference, but that’s most of what we’re talking about anyways.  Demi-humans can surpass the limit of 18, depending on how they’re measured on average versus humans (elves are smarter and more agile, orcs are stronger, etc).  I don’t consider this a double standard; humans are marked by adaptability and I feel that’s the appropriate use of their +2 bonus; demi-humans are noted for other things and as such are expected to surpass humans in certain ways.

Class

When people think about classes, they typically think about Fighters, Rogues, Clerics, Wizards and so on.  That’s reasonable because these are the classes that PCs typically have.  The problem is when people assume that all soldiers are Fighters, all thieves are Rogues, and all priests are Clerics. (Personally, I think a given priest is as likely to be a Rogue as a Cleric, but that may be a discussion for another time).  In fact, these PC classes represent a significant advantage in terms of training and skill above and beyond what’s available to most people.  Most people have NPC Classes — Adept, Aristocrat, Commoner, Expert, and Warrior — these are classes that most people don’t think about because they aren’t meant to represent adventurers.  In 3.X I think these classes are only listed in the DMG, and I’m pretty sure they were essentially ignored in 4E altogether. (I could be wrong on both counts.)  Rogues and Bards are PC-quality Experts, Fighters and Barbarians are PC-quality Warriors, Wizards and Clerics are PC-quality Adepts, and so on.  The PC classes represent a higher level of training, either because you had a better teacher or because you were able to better develop the skills you were given, or some similar situation.  In fact, depending on your world, most people are probably going to be Commoners, with Experts representing artisans, etc.

Conclusion

So, Player-Characters are naturally more gifted than most of the population, and then get better training than even their peers.  This already sets Player-Characters well above the norm, which in turn makes them capable of adventuring and (one hopes) becoming heroes.  But my main take-away is this: although the game may focus around PCs as our protagonists, the mechanics can not be calibrated to PCs as the baseline, because they simply are not baseline characters.  For the world to be consistent, PCs need to be recognized as above the norm and systems should assume average or slightly-above-average NPC-quality abilities.

I have more to say on my assumptions and understanding of the 3.X system (possibly a lot more), but I think this is a good stopping point for the time being.

Supporting Cast

Posted: 2 July 2012 in Game Structure
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The Professor doesn’t really run a game blog, per se, but the most recent post touches on an issue that I think is A Problem for RPGs, and especially endemic in 4th Edition D&D and probably in 5th Edition, too.

That post is about “support roles” and how there’s a push to “fix” them.  It mentions games like City of Heroes, Team Fortress 2, and then Dungeons and Dragons.  The idea if that there are “primary” classes and “support” classes, where primary classes are defined by their ability to “solo” the game, and support classes are more indirect and make their team mates “feel more awesome.”  These games, though, have tended towards balancing support classes so that they can make a better direct showing in combat, to the detriment of their ‘support’ abilities.

As I said in my (excruciatingly-long-in-hindsight) comment over there, this is appropriate for games like TF2 and CoH.  Those games have a somewhat static ecology to work with and a default engagement method — namely, “kill all of the things.”  Because of this, classes are measured by how well they can contribute to combat.  TF2 is a team game by default so there’s room for a bit more specialization (compare Heavy vs Sniper vs Engineer). MMOs like CoH and World of Warcraft assume team play (on some level) but don’t enforce it; players will occasionally not want or be able to find a group, and so either all classes can make some measure of progress alone or they risk a stale experience (and losing customers).

If we’re honest with ourselves, I think we’d have to admit that D&D began life with a similar default of “kill all of the things,” but at the time there was more emphasis on “and take their stuff,” than on the killing.  I’m told that OD&D gave out experience points for every piece of gold you found, which would encourage <i>avoiding</i> fights if it means (1) you could get (most of) the treasure any ways, and (2) it let you save resources so you could kill more things later (and take their stuff).  Regardless, D&D definitely grew from there to the point where, in D&D 3.X, combat may have been common and expected, but it wasn’t the only approach to the game.  Knowledge, skills, and personality could get you places that a sword and a strong arm couldn’t (depending on your DM and what kind of game you were playing). Characters don’t need to shine in combat so long as they can shine somewhere else, and I think that’s a great strength that tabletop RPGs have over (most) video games.  If the rogue or wizard was terrible in combat that was fine, because the fighter would be useless when a trap had to be disarmed or some ancient runes needed to be deciphered.  If the men-at-arms characters could handle the combat the others were free to hang back, and they’d get their spotlight with other challenges.

One of the most common complaints about 4E (in my experience) is hat it essentially threw away decades of legacy for the “new hotness” of MMOs.  Personally I think there’s some truth in that, but (1) I think it’s the natural result of forces that began acting long ago and (2) for what it was I don’t think they did a bad job.  The thing is that years before 4th Edition became a thing, D&D players and designers got caught up focusing on Combat and aiming for Balanced Encounters.  Fourth Edition really just codified that in the system; for better or worse, it’s something we did to ourselves.

To that point, though, I’d say it’s “for worse.”  Fourth and Fifth Edition both seem to assume that combat is the default method of engagement and everyone should contribute to it equally (or at least consistently).  It’s forcing a homogenization that I think is bad for the game and for the hobby. Tactical miniatures are fun games (I play Warhammer 40K myself, when I get a chance), but they’re different from RPGs and they satisfy different desires.  ‘Fixing’ the classes and the systems so that everyone acts like a Wizard and fights like a Fighter limits the hobby, and frankly other games do those things better already.

Broken Crafts

Posted: 2 July 2012 in Game Structure
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I decided to start this blog when it occurred to me (thanks in great part to Justin from The Alexandrian) that the majority of the difficulty and frustration I’d experienced as a GM was due to the fact that I didn’t have all the tools necessary to run a complete game.  The Hexcrawl was and remains the missing structure that I’m most interested in (mainly because exploration was the most interesting and least supported facet of the game), but there are also a number of broken structures that I want to repair or replace.  High on that list is the system for Crafting.

Here I’m talking about the Pathfinder/D&D3.X system for the Crafting Skill, since that’s the system I use.  Amusingly, Justin Alexander used the Craft Skill as a basis for his Calibrating Expectations post, which has been foundational to my paradigm shift.  And for the purposes of that article I think the system works out pretty well — as Justin demonstrates, a skilled Blacksmith performs roughly as would be expected under the system.  But when I looked closer at the skill (prompted by my desire to run a game where PCs started off as smiths, coopers, masons, and other Craft-based professions) it seemed to break down rather quickly.  In particular, it struck me that the system is such that, all else being equal, items with a higher DC are easier to craft.

Here’s how 3.X Crafting works: find the item’s price in Silver (where 1 gp = 10 sp), then find the item’s DC based on it’s type (a table is provided at the SRD).  Collect raw materials equal to 1/3 the cost of the finished product, then make a roll each week to determine progress on the project.  Failing by 4 or less is simply no progress; failing by 5 or more ruins the project and half of the raw materials (apparently regardless of how much progress you’ve made).  On a success, multiply the check result by the DC and record the number; it it’s equal to the cost-in-silver, you’re done; if it’s equal to 2 or 3 times the cost in silver, you’re done in half or one-third the time (etc).  If it’s below the cost-in-silver you make more checks in following weeks until you reach that threshold.

I like crunching numbers, and when I started chewing on this one it stopped making sense.  There are three components to the formula: the cost-in-silver, the creation DC, and the skill roll, or Success=Cost/(DC*Roll).  Given the timescale we’re working on (measured in weeks by default) it seems to me that you’re never going to need to do anything but Take 10, so everything here is actually a constant, not a variable.  So, let’s pick it apart.  If cost goes up and the rest is constant, then it takes longer to create the item — that seems reasonable.  If the roll (our Take 10 result) goes up and the rest is constant, it takes less time — so a more-skilled worker gets the job done faster; that makes sense, too.  But if the DC goes up — if it’s HARDER to create — and the rest stays constant, it takes LESS time.  That is: a simple item that costs 200 silver and has a DC of 5 will take more time (apparently 4 times as long) as a complex item that costs 200 silver and has a DC of 20.

Now, I’ll admit: there’s nothing published (that I’m aware of) that costs 20gp and would qualify as a simple item (the example given in the Skill table being a spoon).  And in fact, it seems that generally higher-DC items cost more gold, so the decrease in time from a high DC is probably offset by an increase in time from the cost.  But I can tell you that a Heavy Pick (12gp, DC 15) is likely to take less time to craft than a Morningstar (12gp, DC12).  Is it a big difference?  Does it make sense?  I don’t know.  But I do know that it’s counter-intuitive that higher DCs make for shorter crafting times.

On top of that, this system is completely different from the rules for crafting Magical items.  For magic items, it takes 1 day per 1000gp (or fraction thereof), and a single roll is made (usually Spellcraft) to determine success at the end of the process.  To compare, progressing by 1000gp in a day for Crafting an item would require a (Roll*DC)/7 equal to 10,000, or a DC 7000 if we assume a roll of 10 (requiring a bonus of +6990).  Since a lot of the magic item’s value has to do with magic and not crafting per se, maybe that makes sense.  But the systems aren’t even similar.

I haven’t found a good fix to this issue, and so far I haven’t had a strong motivation to work one up — players don’t generally want to spend time crafting items.  But I think that fact in itself is a god reason to want to get a better system in place, so that crafting things can be a desirable thing to do.

Drowning In Content

Posted: 2 July 2012 in Administrivia
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Just a quick update.  I got in to a bad habit with the blogs I read that I’m trying to dig myself out of.  There are a load of good D&D/RPG blogs out there, a handful of which are listed in my blogroll to the left there. I actually follow several dozen blogs, some that are more prolific than others, some that are more pertinent than others.  But I’m also trying to catch up on the archives of a bunch of these blogs, too, to help fuel the commentary and (most importantly) toolbox of game structures that I’m trying to build here.  At first  thought I could just flag things “to read” and get to them when time allowed, but that’s resulted in my being buried under an ever-increasing pile of posts to read.  I’m trying to dig myself out by breaking them up in different categories (GM Tips, Hobby Thoughs, 5th Edition, etc), but it’s slow going.  I’m hoping I don’t have to simply abandon these archives, but we’ll see if I can get it under control.

On that note, actually, if any of you know of good posts (especially posts about “here’s a system to address X”), I’m open for suggestions.