Cinematic Combat: Replacing Passion with Intuition

GM: "There's an orc guarding this storeroom. He's armed with a shield and a battleaxe."

Player 1: "I attack him with my sword."

GM: "Roll to hit."

P1: "Ugh, 12."

GM: "That misses. He retaliates, attacking you with his axe. He...um...misses, too. Next round?"

*Shudder.*

People are probably familiar with this type of exchange. It's what combat tends to devolve into after the first few (or even one) round of combat. An exchange of blows, followed by another and another. Like a round of Rock'em Sock'em robots. Except more dull, because even if you're using miniatures, all they do is stand there while you constantly lament how much your dice hate you.

This is something I've dealt with on a continuous basis when running combat games, and it's a drag. Combat becomes a slog, players who aren't up start yawning and checking their phones. The only interesting thing happens when you strike the killing blow, and all of a sudden, "You plunge your sword into the orc's trachea, and he falls to the floor, gurgling and drowning in his own blood."

Now, I'm not objecting to GMs providing flavor text to combat, it's the natural first step to something better, something more interesting than a static boxing match.

I've been playing, for this last year, in a long-running Pendragon game, and being immersed in this system means I've had plenty of time to think about its pros and cons. One of the most highly-touted pros is the combat system. Standard knights deal about 5d6 damage with a regular swing of a sword, and double that if they manage to Crit, which happens a lot more frequently than 5% of the time with the Passion mechanic in play.

Game Mechanic Blurb: Pendragon is a d20-based system, where skills, attributes, traits, and passions are (generally) rated between 1 and 20. You succeed when you roll below your skill, fail when you roll above it, fumble if you roll a 20, and crit if you roll exactly your skill. HOWEVER, this is only the base mechanic of Pendragon, because there are ways to increase your skills above 20. The most common (temporary) way to increase a skill above 20 is with a successful Passion roll, which adds 10 to a single skill for the duration you need it for. And for any skill above 20, the critical threat range is increased by however many points it is above 20, and fumbles become impossible. So, say, your base Sword skill is 15. Under normal circumstances, you would succeed on a roll of a 1-14, fail on a roll of 16-19, fumble on a roll of 20, and crit on a roll of 15. However, if you successfully impassion your character's sword skill, it gains a temporary 10 points and becomes a 25-rating skill. This means that you succeed on a roll of 1-14, never fail, never fumble, and crit on a roll of 15-20. Or perhaps you crit your passion, gaining 20 points in your sword skill, bringing it to a 35. You now succeed on a roll of 1-4, and crit on a roll of 5-20. Suddenly it becomes quite easy to get double damage, doesn't it?

What does this mean? Basically, it means that combat has the high chance of moving speedily along with Pendragon. It's an unlikely and unusual situation for a player to be squaring off for multiple rounds against the same foe. This past week was the first time in ages that it took us more than one or two rounds to dispatch our foes, due to a series of hefty penalties, and instead of creating a depressing slog, we were more engaged than ever, because it was an unusual situation.

So, looking at a system already has mechanics to move combat along speedily, why do anything more? Well, Pendragon is a system where you're supposed to mow through enemies like a scythe. It's also super deadly in the fact that some enemies may also gain bonuses from their passions, and mow through you.

But where does the cinematic flavor come in? How about just before the GM tells you that you stab an orc in the throat? What if, rather than attempting to gain bonuses from a Passion, there was instead a substituted mechanic called Intuition? Instead of thinking really hard about who your player characters are striking their next blow to protect, or how much this really hate this one asshole and his entire culture, the PC discerns the fighting style of his opponent the orc, or realize that his foe's bulky armor prevents him from defending effectively against overhead attacks, or that certain predatory animals have difficulty sensing danger above them.

Try this:

GM: "There's an orc guarding this storeroom. He's armed with a shield and a battleaxe. Is there an Intuition you can utilize?"

Player 1: "I roll my Tactics: Hand-to-Hand...14, success."

GM: "You gauge that with the bulk of his weapon, it's unlikely the orc will be able to utilize it well in extreme close quarters. His use of a shield indicates that he will fight more defensively, and will likely not make the first move. What's your action?"

Player1: "Alright, I charge forward and slam into his defense, forcing him back against the storeroom door, wrench the shield down, and stab, aiming high. With Intuition, my Sword skill is now a 26, and I roll a 16: a crit! 49 damage!"

GM: "The orc fails his roll outright, so your tactic works, the shield drops enough for you to force the end of your blade into his throat with a satisfying crunch. The orc gurgles and slides to the floor, dropping his axe with a clatter."

Now, this sounds like a lot of work, and to be honest, it likely will be the first few times you try it. However, make sure you include your players in this mechanic. Chances are they'll jump at the chance to do something other than stand toe to toe and wail on something for hours on end.

Prehistory Fantasy Setting

I've been lax in posting on the blog, I blame my own laziness, my wanting to hang out with a good gaming buddy before she leaves Santa Fe forever, and my own laziness. And anime, and videogames.

Regardless, when I've made time to write gaming stuff, I've focused on a few themes, all of which I've discussed as campaign pipe dreams in my talks on the Unabashed Gaming podcast, but today I'm going to try to word-dump about the game that intrigues me the most about writing/running:

Paleolithic D&D, or more specifically, Prehistory Fantasy Setting. Because there's no way in hell I can mesh this setting with traditional D&D.

What initially drew me to this concept was the realization that players who engage in fantasy roleplaying tend to know all the tropes. They read through the supplemental material, and if you throw a floating many-eyeballed creature at them, they instinctively know it's a Beholder. And that line between player knowledge and character knowledge is super thin, because in the D&D world, a lot of it has been explored and recorded.

Now, looking at my more embraced roots with Call of Cthulhu, even if your players know what a Shoggoth is, their characters have no idea what this protoplasmic mass of bubbles flooding its way toward them is. They don't know what a night-gaunt is. Maybe it's a vampire, or a gargoyle. Or a demon! Call of Cthulhu is all about describing what creatures look like, using sweeping generalities, because characters are not sticking around to draw detailed anatomies of them, unless they're Richard Upton Pickman, and fuck you no one is playing Richard Upton Pickman.

Regardless, this line of thought (coupled with a few sessions spent playing the world-building game Dawn of Worlds) brought me into thinking about the origins of races in D&D, and how they tried to survive in their earliest days. I decided it would be interesting to try to take a party through a hypothetical wooly mammoth hunt, or an encounter with a migrating family of sabertooth tigers. Taking the concept of assigned quests to be exactly that; journeys into the unknown, encountering unfamiliar sites, sounds, and creatures, and returning back to their homes with new stories, trophies, and scars.

I won't get into the minutiae on this post, but I'll drop some future post ideas here for my own personal use later on. Topics such as:

-Which system to use/base this setting off of?
-What fantasy races to include, what unconventional fantasy races to use?
-Whether to incorporate interaction between the fantasy races, or should xenophobia prevail?
-How to incorporate migration, agriculture, etc.
-Whether to include civilizations that are (somewhat) more advanced than those of the player characters.
-Ideas for the types of quests players would embark upon.

Hopefully I'll return to these concepts later.

For now, I'm out.

Grinding to a Halt: Battle Maps

With my recent uptick in presenting audio RPG enjoyment to the masses, I’ve also come across a few stumbling blocks pertaining to the hobby, necessitating occasional bouts of serious audio editing. This has occasionally been warranted by a player ordering a pizza on mic, and henceforth potentially giving out his credit card number to the internet or, more frequently, the constant segments of dead air accompanied by miniature play with battle maps.

Let me preface the rest of this post by saying that I heartily enjoy battle maps, both as a player and a GM, and in games which employ them I find that my immersion level absolutely increases due to the additional visual stimulus. However, this is not the case for listeners of actual plays, unless there happens to also be a camera present and recording. For listeners, even listeners who happened to be there, the visual aid is gone, replaced by players either actively voicing their enjoyment of the visual aids, or staring dumbly at them; neither adding to the roleplaying in general or to the voices in the recording for the actual play.

I find that the extra stimulus for the players ends up slowing their reaction times and creativity, because they are busy converting what is shown on a table in front of them into three dimensions, rather than working from a constant mental narrative. There is also the difficulty in some players making the full transition into three living, breathing, dimensions, and thus are stuck in what I am going to call the Chess Mentality, where pieces can only move in certain ways and act in certain ways.

This is, of course, partially to be expected in games where combat mechanics work through very structured rulesets, where x number of feet translates into y number of squares. However, this thought process tends to ignore the z axis entirely. Players assume the roles of their static, plastic (occasionally metal), posed figures, rather than using them as a stepping stone for their own roleplaying. Eventually this thought process became the norm, and we began designing games with that concept in mind, creating imaginative terms, powers, feats, and skills for jumping over an enemy or running up the side of a wall, rather than having a player ask a question like “What if I were to slide between the giant’s legs and try to end up on his back side?”

As stated above, don’t take this to mean that I dislike miniature combat or battle maps. They do offer wonderful visuals for players, good reference points for hand-drawn maps, dimensions, etc., but I’m curious to see what a combination one could manage with a part imagination part map game, where you draw maps, but to a smaller scale than the players’ miniatures, so that they can have an idea of how they are moving, and where they are going, but at the same time not just be moving pieces along a board game.

I hope to test out this theory sometime. Hopefully it’ll cut down on some of my audio trimming time.

March Madness OGBC: Day 23

"What is the most broken game that you tried and were unable to play?"

Oh Dungeons & Dragons...how amusing that you're here, and today, and I'm smiling.

I suppose I should qualify this by saying that it was one game of D&D that I found too broken to play, and the reason behind its brokenness had nothing to do with the system's mechanics.

It more or less had to do with the idiotic way the GM tried to implement every D&D system in existence for a new gaming store demo. And such was my introduction to Santa Fe's only gaming store. It's also one of the reasons I've never gone back.

Things began with my early arrival, eagerly awaiting CharGen. I'd signed up on their Facebook page to play, but noted that they hadn't provided a system for their game of D&D. Therefore, I took the liberty of printing out 3.5, 4.0, and Pathfinder character sheets. You know, just in case. Imagine my befuddlement upon appearing and being told that the game was being run for all systems of D&D.

Note that this statement is utterly different than saying that the system didn't matter for the game being run.

The resultant party consisted of a 4e rogue, a Pathfinder monk, and I think a 2e fighter? I must have blocked out most of the game, or simply no longer remember, because I left the table after a half hour trying to reconcile the varying types of skill challenges each player was using against the next. There was no plot. There was a tavern, I think. And an arrest.

And the rogue was a dickbag, which is actually pretty standard for a prepubescent playing a rogue.

So yeah, utterly broken game...fucking Realm.

March Madness OGBC: Day 5

"What other old school game should have become as big as D&D but didn’t? Why do you think so?"

To be honest, as a new inductee to the RPG genre, I haven't had the experience with older RPGs that many of my contemporary bloggers have; however, the above question doesn't specify old school roleplaying game- it just says game.

And so I'm calling back to my childhood and HeroQuest.

HeroQuest is basically the reason I'm into roleplaying games today. It featured adventurers delving into dungeons and ruined keeps to accomplish simple quests and escape with loot. Characters were carried over, and each player received a character sheet for their trouble, so I naturally spent every second I wasn't playing HeroQuest reading through the DM's booklet and checking out equipment tables, magic spells, and dungeon setups.

Looking back, I probably spent more time learning how to play HeroQuest than actually playing it, and looking for it today on Amazon makes me sad it never saw a larger audience, because there's no way in hell I'm paying 400 bucks for it now.

I think the reason HeroQuest failed was because it was filling a niche that didn't really need any more filling. Anyone who was interested in playing that type of game was probably already playing D&D, and therefore didn't really see the point in dumbing down their experience. Hopefully a good number of people used it as a springboard for their eventual run in tabletop RPGs, but at the time of its release, when someone said 'board game', everyone else thought Monopoly. Which sucks.

Monopoly sucks, guys.

The Drunken Duck: Your First Session

"You convene in the Drunken Duck..."

In many iterations of your games, the characters your players create will most likely very little, if not absolutely nothing, in common with the other PCs. Your city campaign may very well have a woodland hermit, a mercenary knight, an itinerant bard, a streetwise pickpocket, and a princess in disguise composing the adventuring party, and the most common way to have them all get into bed together- not literally, unless that's what your campaign is about, and if so...giggity- is to throw them into a crowded tavern where the only empty seats around a table are (surprise) with the rest of the soon to be group!

A common occurrence five minutes after each player character has consumed at least one ale.

Now, there are a variety of reasons why this can make sense; partially because of alcohol's tendency to break down social barriers and foster camaraderie between total strangers which, when combined with a sudden outbreak of taproom hostilities, can enable a quick plot-line that railroads players into cooperating with each other, despite their characters' lack of mutual familiarity. Now, this is a tried and true method of sticking characters together at the start of a game. Unfortunately, it's also a trope, which is both why it works so much and also why it occasionally doesn't. Because a trope is only effective when it is acknowledged and accepted, it is subject to a variety of fail states.

-Perhaps you have a character that isn't feeling particularly sociable, like the Woodland Hermit, and thus decides to subvert the bar room meeting by finding a quieter locale.
-Maybe one of the characters is a local to the city, and has her own spot reserved at the bar counter, putting her on the outskirts of the ensuing chaos, giving her the option to simply dodge the rail-roady team-building exercise you have planned. The Streetwise Pickpocket is the most likely candidate for this particular derailing gambit.
-There's also the possibility of getting a brand new player in the game, who is inexperienced not only in-game, but out of game as well, and thus fails to recognize this setup. The Princess in Disguise, unwise in the way of campaign tactics, simply buys a room at the inn and takes an early night in.

Now, there are a variety of different ways a GM can angle CharGen so that they can dodge the tavern meet up or, if they have their hearts set on it for nostalgic/plot purposes, hedge their bets enough to ensure characters have actual reasons to sit together. I'll list a few off, with amusing mission names because I feel like it.

Tactic 1: Operation Venn Diagram
In character creation, have each player create a relationship with one or two other players' characters. They can be as simple or complex as players like, but the end results substantially increase the quality of your roleplaying. Creating connections allows players to create backstory for their characters, even if its simplistic, it gives them a jumping off point to think about their characters' motives, history, and possibly momentary aspirations.

-Perhaps the Itinerant Bard encountered the Woodland Hermit's shack and regaled him with enough stories of the outside world that the hermit decided to see what has changed since he left society behind.
-A long time ago, the Streetwise Pickpocket and Itinerant Bard ran confidence scams in another city, but were forced to vacate and go their separate ways some years ago.
-The Princess in Disguise hired the Mercenary Knight to escort her to this city. She has fled her home in search of her uncle, who abdicated the throne years ago and turned to the life of a Woodland Hermit.
-The Mercenary Knight has secretly discovered the Princess in Disguise's true identity and doesn't wish to leave her service, and thus must discover a way to lengthen their contract without spilling the beans. He has also had run-ins with the Streetwise Pickpocket previously, and it seems like the unscrupulous thief has also realized who his employer really is.

This kind of cooperative storytelling is my favorite for CharGen, as it gives the GM various plot hooks to integrate into his overall machinations, along with allowing players to create bits of story that run alongside the overarching plot of the game.

Tactic 2: Operation In Media Res
Sometimes films and books begin in the midst of a pivotal scene. A robbery, a battle, an invasion; things are happening and there's little time for idle conversation or setup. This circumvents the "You meet in a tavern" trope entirely, establishing the idea that even if such an event did occur in the past, its events proceeded in such a way as to lead to the characters being together in their current situation. This type of first game requires a certain amount of GM input in terms of the current status quo and mutual character history, but sidesteps any possibility that any character could miss the bus.

It also allows for the implementation of in-game flashbacks, which have the potential to be interesting side-stories or paradox-generating nightmares. Or both. If I catch myself using in media res, I ignore the idea of flashbacks.

Tactic 3: Operation Plot it Out
This last option isn't exactly a method used to 'dodge' the tavern meet trope entirely; rather, it's a way to ensure it proceeds in the direction the GM wants it to. Essentially, the GM creates a reason for each character to be in the tavern. It differs from Operation Venn Diagram in the sense that the Game Master isn't creating character backstory, he's creating plot reasons for players to be where they are. Plot hooks, they're usually called. Everyone receives a letter of invitation, or a mutual friend asks them to come together for a job.

This method still has the potential to be derailed by determined players, because a) they're still meeting in a tavern and b) because, well, they're players; but if you put work into writing something instead of just throwing everyone into an enclosed space with copious amounts of alcohol, at least some of them might feel guilty taking things in a weird direction.

The operating word there, of course, is might. They're players, remember?

Understanding SIZ: Deconstructing BRP

"SIZ: The characteristic of Size represents the average of an Adventurer's height and weight. Can an Adventurer see over something, or squeeze through a small opening, or be seen in tall grass?"
- Magic World

"SIZ: Size determines your character's height, weight, and bulk. Normal factors like gluttony or rigid diet can increase or decrease you character's weight, and therefore affect their SIZ."
- Basic RolePlaying 2nd

"SIZ: The characteristic SIZ averages height and weight into one number. To see over something, to squeeze through a small opening, or even to judge whose head might be sticking up out of the grass, use Size."
- Call of Cthulhu 6th

I never thought about Size as an attribute before playing Call of Cthulhu. For other games, it is always determined by a range of heights and weights that you get to select from, occasionally rolling modifying dice to randomize your selection. However, in making a Dark Sun conversion for BRP, I've needed to go in-depth to consider how, exactly, SIZ should work as an attribute for variant races, while attempting to maintain balance.

Human:

Starting off with the most default of races, humans in BRP systems are described as having flat 3d6 rolls for most attributes, while having 2d6+6 rolls for their SIZ, generating values that run between 8 and 18, with a racial maximum of 21, according to Magic World. Judging from the SIZ charts included in BRP sourcebooks, that would give humans the range of 5', 80 lbs to 7' 6", 420 lbs (Magic World has a typo on pg. 13 for their SIZ chart). However, according to Call of Cthulhu and Magic World, we're supposed to take averages of each to determine size. Though seven and a half feet is pushing it pretty far for a human, it doesn't sound ridiculous, especially in a fantasy setting. We're expected to look at the human as a default value, but let's see how the other races stand up to this precedent.

Dwarf:

Dwarves generate a pretty short end of the stick, no pun intended, when rolling up in BRP. Their generation roll is a flat 2d6 (with the possibility to add 3 on top of that-gauging from the human's max height on top of dice rolls), giving them potential SIZ values of 2-15, meaning the smallest generated dwarf would be 13" tall and weigh 11 lbs, while the largest would be 6'4" tall and 300 lbs. (BRP Character SIZ Chart, pg. 26).

Working through the other character races also creates various discrepancies like this, especially with the Athasian Half-Giant, who is, according to the Monstrous Compendium II averages out to 10-12' tall and 1600 lbs. So, 144" and 1600 brings us way off the standard SIZ tables of BRP's Character SIZ chart, though extrapolating from where the chart leaves us off at roughly SIZ 73 height-wise and SIZ 365 for weight. This is obviously ridiculous in terms of balance, and doesn't take into consideration the declining ratio of heights and weights as one moves further and further up the SIZ charts.

Instead, let's look at the Giant entry for BRP. Giant SIZ is 24d6+48, averaging at 132; taking half that (Half-Giant, remember) brings us to 66, not far from the estimated 73 extrapolated from the SIZ chart. However, this still gives Half-Giant-sized characters a ridiculous advantage in combat encounters. But-according to the Creature index in BRP, giants are roughly 16 meters tall, twice the height of Athasian D&D giants, which max out at 25'. What does this mean? That we need to half the SIZ for Giants in our conversion to 66, quartering them for Half-Giants, bringing them to around SIZ 33, a much more forgiving number for player characters.

What does all this number crunching mean? Well, basically that random generation of SIZ might be good for a single-raced game, but for something multi-racial/species, you may want to invest in the concept of semi-static SIZ values, and modify them based on another dice roll, such as a damage bonus.

Funny that I've done just that with my working BRP conversion of Dark Sun, isn't it?

March Madness: Non-D&D OSR Challenge (Preview)

So I sadly missed 2/3 of the bus for the February D&D 28 Day Blog Hop, and to be honest, I likely wouldn't have much to say on a lot of the days for it, so instead I'm going to try to participate in the March Madness blog hop. Thirty days, thirty questions, all related to non-D&D game systems.

And since I seem to be writing a goodly number of my posts and scheduling their publications, hopefully I'll have a chance to do as many of these as possible. We'll see. Here's the list of questions for the month of March.

Feel free to join in, as well.

March Madness 31-Day Obscure Game Blogging Challenge

1 What was the first roleplaying game other than D&D you played? Was it before or after you had played D&D?

2 In what system was the first character you played in an RPG other than D&D? How was playing it different from playing a D&D character?

3 Which game had the least or most enjoyable character generation?

4 What other roleplaying author besides Gygax impressed you with their writing?

5 What other old school game should have become as big as D&D but didn’t? Why do you think so?

6 What non-D&D monster do you think is as iconic as D&D ones like hook horrors or flumphs, and why do you think so?

7 What fantasy RPG other than D&D have you enjoyed most? Why?

8 What spy RPG have you enjoyed most? Give details.

9 What superhero RPG have you enjoyed most? Why?

10 What science fiction RPG have you enjoyed most? Give details.

11 What post-apocalyptic RPG have you enjoyed most? Why?

12 What humorous RPG have you enjoyed most? Give details.

13 What horror RPG have you enjoyed most? Why?

14 What historical or cultural RPG have you enjoyed most? Give details.

15 What pseudo or alternate history RPG have you enjoyed most? Why?

16 Which RPG besides D&D has the best magic system? Give details.

17 Which RPG has the best high tech rules? Why?

18 What is the crunchiest RPG you have played? Was it enjoyable?

19 What is the fluffiest RPG you have played? Was it enjoyable?

20 Which setting have you enjoyed most? Why?

21 What is the narrowest genre RPG you have ever played? How was it?

22 What is the most gonzo kitchen sink RPG you ever played? How was it?

23 What is the most broken game that you tried and were unable to play?

24 What is the most broken game that you tried and loved to play, warts and all?

25 Which game has the sleekest, most modern engine?

26 What IP (=Intellectual Property, be it book, movie or comic) that doesn’t have an RPG deserves it? Why?

27 What RPG based on an IP did you enjoy most? Give details.

28 What free RPG did you enjoy most? Give details.

29 What OSR product have you enjoyed most? Explain how.

30 Which non-D&D supplemental product should everyone know about? Give details.

31 What out-of-print RPG would you most like to see back in publication? Why?