Titanic Lesson Plan

In order that my game world / PC graveyard doesn't meander off into boring quasi-historical mundanity, I thought I'd best make sure that I was clear in my own head what I am pinching from my influences when thinking about Hammerstein! I'm doing this in order to keep my imagination active and on message. Here's the lessons that I am taking from the first ten Fighting Fantasy books.

1. The [under]world has dungeons, lots of them. They are more than mere monster lairs, filled with a rich variety, including things that *appear* to make little sense - old dwarfs playing cards, random benches for weary travellers, ferrymen, and animated tools. [Warlock of Firetop Mountain] However, even though evil wizards build towers and populate them with a strange array of creatures and objects, there is a 'dungeon ecology', but it the rationale for and interaction between elements of the dungeon is fantastical rather than mundane [Citadel of Chaos].

 

2. The wilderness should be full of encounters that are mini-adventures in themselves. Stop thinking about mundane ecologies and economics - these forests are full of adventure. Indeed, the wilderness can be structured like a non-linear dungeon [Forest of Doom and Scorpion Swamp].

3.The 'world' can be small because travel is perilous. This peril is fantastical rather than grim.  Bandits should NOT make up the majority of random wilderness encounters [Forest of Doom and Scorpion Swamp].

4.The 'world' is geographically small; tropical islands are a short journey from temperate grasslands, and from there you can reach the icy mountains. All manner of adventures can be crammed into a small space. Mundane distance is not the problem - the fantastic is [Forest of Doom, Island of the Lizard King, and Caverns of the Snow Witch].

5. Pay no attention to real medieval settlement patterns. Civilisation exists as pockets of light amid the fantastical peril. Culture can vary tremendously within a short distance - European inspired fantasy can sit alongside fantastical names inspired by a trip to Thailand [Deathtrap Dungeon].

6. Urban life is no less fantastically adventuresome than the wilderness. Cities are great big dangerous dungeons. If you want a quiet life, live in a modest sized town. [City of Thieves].

7. The big bads of the game world are magically powerful. They cannot be defeated simply by saying 'I ht him with my sword', but require a quest in order to identify and exploit his weakness. Unicorn tattoos are optional [City of Thieves].

8. This world contains famous professional adventurers. Adventurers (that survive) are rock stars [Deathtrap Dungeon].

9. Horror is as good a source of inspiration as its sibling genre, sword and sorcery [House of Hell].    

10. Sci-fi gaming, despite all its promise, doesn't hold my imagination in the way fantasy gaming does [Starship Traveller].

Plenary: Forget subtlety - exaggerate! Don't drain the magic, the fantastic, and the adventure from the world by thinking about 'realism'.

[Addendum: an indiegogo campaign for a new edition of Blacksand? That is well worth £30]

Kill the 1%

A/D&D isn’t a game about scraping a living through mundane paid employment, or attempting to run a small business. It shouldn’t even intrude on the play, in the way that scrabbling for a few coins might form part of a WFRP game, or mixing adventuring with management of the clan stead might be the yearly rhythm of a game of RuneQuest. But the standard economics of a game system paint a picture of the implied world, and in A/D&D’s case, the economics of the implied game world are not just a case of massive salaries for a few and grinding poverty for the majority, but something much stranger than that. In A/D&D, gold IS experience, and for a character to gain any kind of power he or she must accumulate (through robbery, mainly) treasure to the value of hundreds of thousands of times the average monthly wage. To get to second level, a Fighter must win, by trickery, combat, or stealth, more or less 2,000GP. If he or she had instead served as an average footman, it would take them over 2,000 months – just over 166 years – to save that amount of money. More, much more than that – as 1GP a month is what the 1e DMG suggests is the cost to the hiring character – including housing and feeding – not the gold received by the footman. Given that 4 weeks of standard rations are 12GP… er, whatever, we can assume that the footman is able to set aside far less than 1GP per month. So an adventurer who achieves anything has already accumulated, or had pass through their hands, a fantastic amount of wealth by comparison to the average person in the implied game world.

Which is why, in D&D, awarding XP for GP spent on carousing and conspicuous consumption are a great idea, but they do tie the game both to a very particular playstyle and idea of ‘the adventurer’. But the rewards of adventuring are also why the early levels of D&D should be a meatgrinder, eating up PCs nearly as fast as they are created. If the rewards for being a pretty mediocre adventurer are so high, only very real fear of death (and very real actual death) should keep anyone in the implied game world at a forge, working in a field, or even soldering in an army that might have to fight dragons and giants! Kill the 1%!

Let them eat Lembas

For the sandbox game that is on the horizon – I can see it, but it is no closer than it was yesterday – before I settled on WFRP’s colourful career system I had been toying with systems that have mechanically determined advancement. It does, after all, say to the players, ‘You go out and pursue your characters’ goals and the game will reward you. I’m not going to give you 200 EP just for turning up.’ But mechanically determined advancement rewards certain ways of playing, and if these don’t mesh with the goals of the PCs… well. Alternatively, I’ve always been taken by earlier BRP-based systems of experience checks against skills used [successfully], but later games built on the BRP engine seem to favour a number of player allocated improvement rolls per adventure. Maybe an option would be to play a game with no character [ability] advancement at all – such as Traveller – with character advancement entirely in terms of the achievement of goals, the accumulation of political, social, economic or military power, or simply reaching their next birthday.

RPG isn't working

As unemployment edges toward 3 million and we all face significant cuts in our standard of living over the next few years at least, I thought I’d escape to fantasy. But it is difficult to earn a living there, too. Over the next few posts I’ll consider the ways in which a few RPGs deal with living expenses, and ways of earning a living that aren’t glorified murder and robbery. Some of the economies implied by the equipment and price lists and suggested wages simply do not work.

Of course, unemployment rocketed after the Tories won this election. The Saatchi's should be shot in front of their families (Top Gear defence invoked).

I’ll start with Mongoose’s ‘new’ bargain ruleset, Legend. Legend uses silver and copper pieces as the standard units of currency, with 10cp=1sp.

On page 111 we have a list of food and lodging for those on the road, i.e. short term lodgings, whether a flop house or a private room, and food bought in inns and taverns, or from street vendors. These range from 3cp a day for poor standard, through 1sp 5cp for average, to 7sp a day for superior food and lodging.

According to the table on page 85 of Legend, jobs such as Temple Assistant, Librarian, or working in the Militia, for example, can all be expected to earn you about 2sp a day (some of these come with free food and / or lodging), making it perfectly possible to maintain a decent standard of living even if you rely on more expensive short-term rented lodging and buy food in inns and taverns. It would be impossible to maintain a ‘superior’ standard of living through the kinds of employment listed here (except by being a lucky gambler or a good burglar). Some of the jobs, of course, pay far less – a manual labourer can only expect 3cp per day. Nevertheless, it is possible to see how people maintain some kind of standard of living according to the implied economy.

However, page 85 of Legend also has a table suggesting that PCs should spend a proportion of their ‘personal wealth’ to maintain a certain standard of living, ranging from 10% for ‘subsistence’ to 100% or more for ‘ostentatious’. The preceding page notes that ‘the terms used are relative to the amount of money the Adventurer has available: ‘luxury’ to someone with only a few silvers in their purse might be taking a bath once a week. To someone with several thousand, it might be taking a bath in asses milk every day.’ While I get that wealth is relative, I don’t get how an Adventurer, whose personal wealth will fluctuate much more than a regular person, can maintain what they might call ‘luxury’ simply by spending 80% of their personal wealth. After a successful raid they might have hundreds of silver pieces, AND after a spell of lean pickings, when they are grubbing in their purse to find a handful of copper pieces. Even if it did make sense to say that a person who only knew a nearly empty purse would see their 80% living a luxury, to suggest that an Adventurer would makes little sense.

And that is before we ask whether personal wealth includes loot, or just the income from employment in spells of ‘down time’. Because, if it includes loot, 1000sp stolen from the Sherriff’s strongbox will maintain a ‘luxurious’ standard of living for an indefinite period of downtime for the price of 800sp. This is true whether the downtime is a month of so of carousing between raids, or a year long spell of semi-retirement until the heat has died down.

I expect that some of this will be expanded in the forthcoming equipment guide, Arms of Legend. But until then, Legend has a system that allows PCs to spend months in downtime between perilous adventures, taking part in an abstract, but still sensible economy.