We Send Superheroes Now

Much has been said recently about the 'Tyranny of Fun' a perceived change in Dungeons & Dragons away from challenging and engaging players to simply giving them fun and making them cool. Y’see Dungeons & Dragons used to be all about the challenge, save or die effects, fiendish traps, confusing teleporters, it was up to the players (not the characters) to find a way around these obstacles to “Huge-Pile-of-Shiney-Stuff-#17”.

However over time we started to shift away from this simple ethos of survive and get rich. First came the power inflation, arguably an attempt at first to curb the raw killing power of Original Dungeons & Dragons, but ultimately a push in the direction of PCs as heroes rather than adventurers trying to survive. The challenges ended up being there to be overcome not through ingenuity but character skills and a d20 roll.

Arguably 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons pushes this further with characters able to heal themselves to a degree and all possessing a nigh on unlimited reserve of abilities for each encounter, turning heroes into superheroes capable of taking massive punishment and surviving. Gone are the save or die effects and most of the non-combat spells, D&D is now a game about kicking ass and doing cool things.

But is this good or is it bad?

By removing much of the challenge from the standard encounter 4th ed. is unlikely to see a party wiped out by a random encounter with wandering orcs, indeed from the carefully regimented encounter structure given in the Dungeon Master’s Guide it seems that most encounters will be road bumps along the way to the final encounter, simply serving to emphasise the characters as heroes. In this regard I don’t mind it. Sure most encounters can be broken in a few turns by my current (large and very co-ordinated) party and their super-powers; its fun and I don’t see that as being in some way counter-intuitive to the whole experience.

What I would say is that sometimes the encounters could use a little back-bone. Running ‘Keep on the Shadowfell’ with a decent sized group was relatively easy, but now with out +sized group even upping the numbers of monsters doesn’t help and I’ll now need to raise the levels on everything to keep it a challenge and perhaps this is where the Tyranny of Fun might have something. With their tough characters a well drilled group such as mine (despite their relative inexperience) characters are capable of felling much more powerful foes, meaning I need to introduce more potent enemies and traps to foil them; this causes monster inflation and I end up with a 4th level party who slay vampires when they’re bored; but if I don’t introduce more potent encounters then their boredom will increase.

This is my dilemma, I like 4th ed. in theory but sometimes it’s a little too easy, I can either start having them fight vampires or level up the goblins; and who wants to fight 7th level goblins?

WoAdWriMo

Jeff Rients has announced the Worldwide Adventure Writing Month a chance for all us budding adventure writers to drag out some ideas from the back of our minds and stretch our legs a little.

For myself, despite my attempts to write my own games system I am considering just running it under an already established system, in part because I hope that if I write it people might actually play the bloody thing. To this end I have a problem, which system to write for? The shortlist is:

Original Dungeons & Dragons- OD&D has been appealing to me recently. The system may be brutal by comparison to the more 'heroic' later editions but I am enamoured with the simplicity of it and the freedom that the DM has to interpret the attributes of characters and the adventure components in a way that is unique to the DM.

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition- A decent system and the 4th ed Dungeon Master's Guide is very helpful to DMs trying to make their own adventures. The problem is that 4th edition is very much system based, having a resolution system with skills for completing roleplaying encounters; which I'm not entirely sure I like. However 4th Edition is what my players are rolling with now and I am intimately familiar with its intricacies.

FUDGE- A good, simple and free to own system, I like FUDGE but I'm not entirely sure I want to run it.

So what's the answer? Well; 4th edition it seems. It would fit seamlessly onto my groups current adventures; sliding onto the end of the Keep on the Shadowfell by returning the characters to a city in which they can sell their ill gotten loot and become embroiled with some intrigue and a city based adventure. And so...

... It begins with a dead man in a tavern. Slumped face down over the side of his bed, a vial in his hand and a women swears through quaking lips his name is Pacobel the clown, jester and retainer to the late king...

Can you run a murder-mystery in 4th ed? I'm about to find out

Keep. It. Simple. Stupid.

I've been reading the rebuttal to FATAL, that old chestnut of the RPGnet community, and whilst I don't want to get into the minutiae of internet disagreements I did start to think about the way in which an amateur of RPG design can go wrong. There are several obvious rules that I think we all know, but it can be very easy to lose sight of those simple rules. Here I think are the obvious one and I write this not so much to educate (there are plenty of better resources and designers to listen to than me) but to remind myself of the things that I want to use to make my game:

Keep It Fun- Obvious really, the problem with this is that what people think is fun is dependant upon your source of origin. Plundering tombs of an ancient necromancer is fun for some people but for others role-playing a paranormal investigation with interesting NPCs is fun. Ultimately you’ve got to go with your gut, choose to make something that you yourself would like to play, and hope that the system that evolves from this appeals to those people who share your interest. I prefer fantasy style games so it’s unlikely I could sway the Vampire of Call of Cthulu guys, and I think trying to make an all singing all dancing universal system would ultimately weaken what I’m trying to do with the game. I guess this leads on to:

Stick to your Goals- It’s important to know where you’re going, to have a clear vision of what you want your game to achieve, but it can be easy to get sidetracked. I’ve been writing EasyType for a while now and I’ve dabbled with lots of other ideas in setting and tone before I actually got a group together to play the damned thing, but I remained true to what I wanted; an easy to play beer and pretzels (or tea and crumpets, I’m English don’t-you-know?) kind of game, and I’d like to think I’m achieving that.

Be humble- Most of us, and by most I mean 99% of us, are not going to change the role-playing landscape with our homebrewed system, and that’s fine. However the one thing we should never do is announce ourselves as the second coming with a system that will cast all others and their followers into the sea for daring to defy the one true game. As far as I’m concerned it’s enough to make a competent system that is enjoyable to play, anything more than that is a bonus. Finally:

Keep. It. Simple. STUPID!- This is more a personal rule. Some people like complicated games with random hit locations and long critical hit charts, perhaps more complex rulings to make for realistic combat and the like. However for me this is a game and I want to play, and I wanted to make it for my friends who are pretty new to the whole gaming experience. I don’t mind adding some interesting flavour on top, but I must remember that for them simple is better than more crunchy, in-depth systems.

It’s easy to stray from these rules without thinking, you keep dreaming up cool stuff, crazy powers and weird monsters but every once in a while I want to look at these rules and ask myself ‘Did you get the basics right? Is it fun? Is it easy? Is it what you want to do?’ and if it ever isn’t I’ll have to pull it all down and start again, perhaps a little wiser than I was before.

Playing Easytype Chapter 1- The Ostensian Bazaar Incident

Long time no see.

Recently I started a new system and a new test group consisting of my girlfriend playing her cross dressing thief boy (Hitori) and his priestly guardian (Faud). We'd run a single session which found the dynamic duo in possession of a magical dwarven sword before we ended the session, the next time we added my girlfriend's buddy to the mix with her tiefling and had a long roleplaying encounter within the city of Ostensis where Hitori and Faud had gone to get the sword identified by Old Man Kilik.

This session was pretty low on actual mechanics, which was unfortunate since this group is in effect testing the rules in a controlled manner. However it was home to some of the best roleplaying I've ever gotten out of the group, with interesting characters popping up at every turn and possibly the best botched roll I have ever seen.

Let me set the scene, Kilik tells the party that they need to do something for him, taking from them the sword for analysis and asking a favour as repayment, to quiet the undead beneath Ostensis in the Nekumeth Cyst, however to gain entry they needed the find Brother Belubute, a local priest of Apeostis (A lawful deity and a group of Chaotic characters did not mix well) and he told them they would need to complete a ritual to teleport to the Cyst involving 7 fallow candles, 8 coins, a bar of silver and some drops of infernal blood.

The party hit the bazaar and they had the gold for what they needed, but being a chaotic lot they decided to follow the path of greed and steal the candles from a merchant. In broad daylight. In the middle of a busy bazaar. It's not as insane as it sounds.

Allow me to explain. Easytpe, the name of the new system I've been dabbling with works on a very simple system. You have a skill and a number in it from -1 to +3, Hitori being trained as a thief had a +0 and had snuck around using his stealth skill to blend into the crowd, so I gave him a +1 to his thievery attempt. Unfortunatly the dice were not with my girlfriend who proceeded to roll a 2 and was caught by not just the shop keeper but also the local guard. Running time had come.

With my usual party I could have expected this to devolve into a fight, a blokey lot we are and not adverse to rumbling with the guards, however these girls were little more crafty. Our friend decided she would start screaming "thief!", leading the guard to her and away from the actual thief, soon Faud did the same and Hitori slunk back into the crowd and blended in, sidled up to the merchant she'd just tried to steal from and slipped the candle off the counter. This time the roll was good and the party waltzed away with their prize.

This was a good session as I had done no planning for it, just come up with the setting and a couple of characters and some vague plot outline, the players really filled in the blanks and the system was unobtrusive and flexible, when dice were rolled there was no pause in the action and the flow was maintained. Furthermore my decision to not include social skills (relying instead upon players acting out their parts to a degree) was entirely justified when my girlfriend (playing androgenous crossdresser Hitori) attempted to seduce a merchant into giving them a deal on buying a silver candlestick, the roleplay was good (if a little creepy) and has laid down some good threads for future sessions.

Next session will be in the Nekumeth Cyst itself, an interesting localé that with enough time I'm sure the party will be able to get through and should set up the central thrust of our future story arcs, I will post more when we get around to it:

What we liked:

*Kilik, the old bastard
*The bazaar incident was awesome
*Scenario largely sandboxed

What we disliked:

*An absence of combat
*A bit short

What we learned:

*Sandboxing a game is entirely doable and Easytype is simple enough to allow it.

FIF and Dungeon Dive

Time to elucidate more upon the actual games Dice Junket is involved in making, of which details have been somewhat slim.

FIF is, at the moment at least, the name of our generic fantasy roleplaying game. The rules were penned by myself and are based in part upon White Wolf's Storyteller system. It operates based purely upon skills in which players have a number of dice. When attempting to complete a task they roll their dice and attempt to get a number of successes (3+ on a d6), success and failure being measured on whther they manage to make this roll.

It's been designed to be at once easy to play and easy to create scenarios for. Monster need very little planning and can be made on the fly along with traps and encounters with NPCs. It's designed to be a 'Beer & Pretzels' style game, one that can be picked up and thrashed by my friends with very little forwar planning.

Dungeon Dive is similar in principal but differs in execution. It's essentially a regression of FIF back to a single dice board game, with characters being simplified even further and put into a hack and slash kind of game, similar in principal to the old Warhammer Quest game. To this end it is my intention to use Pendraken's (http://www.pendraken.co.uk/fantasy.htm) line of fantasy 10mm miniatures and modular dungeon sets to create something a little more 'old school' and less roleplaying based.

More to come on both of these projects at later date.

Games or Simulations: A Ramble in G Major

Accepting that I have been making a game system that is essnetially for my friends, a group of novice gamers and CRPGers (a fine demographic from which I myself derived) I quite like the system I've created for them. Having said this my exploits and research around the net have raised one question for me that I feel is of crucial importance:

Is it alright to make a 'game'?

RPGs are not really games in the traditional sense in that typically they don't have a scenario for 'victory', there is success and failure but both are consummations of the game, the logical end points, neither is a victory or defeat in the face of a good scenario. Part of this is that most RPG (Wraith: The Oblivion aside) are geared towards a co-operative style of gameplay rather than competative gameplay like traditional tabletop or board games.

The idea is that a party comes together to complete an objective and that defines victory and all rules around that (Spells, movement, classes) are like Ludo rules, designed to extend the length of gameplay by putting restrictions (Often random, thanks to Uncle Gary) on what an individual can do.

'Rules light' systems such as FUDGE and even RISUS break this mould by allowing characters to be defined only by the limits of the player's imaginations and is often favoured by more 'story' orientated gamers.

So is one form superior?

I've been wrestling with this idea for a while and of course I can;t decide on an answer, if I could I would have already outlined it. Naturally we must consider what our parties want from an adventure and plan accordingly, but when making a system that you intend to push beyond the limits of the group it is important that a system has the flexibility and common sense to survive in the cut-throat world of RPG design.

So how does my beloved FIF stand up? Well FIF's problem, and perhaps it's strength, is that it is consciously a game. When drafting it I considered what my friends wanted; something simple to play, to make scenarios around (Our DM Mark is relatively inexperienced) and above all fun. I never set out to make a simulation the FATAL guys (although I'd rather not know what they were simulating) what I made was a game.

Alright admittedly my game, whilst having concessions to roleplaying, like the persuasion skill, is little more than a dungeon crawler. That's what my friends wanted and by jove I delivered a playable system, DM Mark added some (lots!) classes and all seems to be well for our new campaign, though in the background I intend to develope FIF into a fully fledged system with my own setting and even (le gasp!) a module eventually.

Just, y'know, patience. These things take time and testing and I still want to try OD&D at some point.

How to Make Friends and Influence Dice Rolls

I was, as I wrote the first draft of my RPG system, at a loss as to whether social skills should be included within the skills list. An omission would be possible though I eventually decided against it, knowing my group prefers to roll dice than spend time being verbose like a college drama class.

That said it can be argued that social skills (diplomacy, streetwise, haggle etc) do detract from the role playing element of an RPG by reducing something that could quite adequately be negotiated between a good player and GM to a random dice roll. Many systems emphasis a compromise, granting bonuses to well spoken players who enjoy getting into character and engaging with wordy banter, and this is entirely adequate for most games.

However when running a ‘role play’ I would be tempted to disregard the dice altogether, look across the table at the player and let them show me what they can do. A good group will often have a designated talker and they will come to the fore, typically I find talkers (bards usually) come to the fore naturally whilst the damage soaking fighters sit back and occasionally chirp in when the subject turns to swords and the like.

A group concerned with role playing will usually have already divided themselves up into the roles they want to serve and have chosen classes or skills appropriately, so this option becomes feasible. However if you do decide to do away with social skills be sure to reimburse the character appropriately, nobody deserves to spend levels on skills that can’t be used.