A critical hit with the ugly stick

In Magic World, a BRP game, characters have an Appearance (APP) characteristic. As with any characteristic, if, by magic, ageing, disease, or wounds, the characteristic is reduced to zero, death follows shortly. But just how does a character 'ugly away'?

This is a pressing question. In the our new campaign, a Magic World game set in Allansia, the players have rolled a particularly ugly bunch of PCs. Forget the good, the bad, and the ugly, we have the ugly, the ugly, and the ugly. As these players are particularly reckless, I can envisage (en-visage, geddit?!) an early-campaign Major Wound stripping them of 1d3 points of APP, leaving them hovering at the door of death by disfigurement. But what does this mean? 

Well, it means that the player characters perhaps ought to head to the Salamonis School of Decorum and Ettiquette for some APP training. And it means I should have used Elric! characteristic generation, which I remember as being 2d6+6 right down the line. But in terms of being reduced to zero APP, I see two options. 

Option one is to interpret a Major Wound that reduces APP to zero as a catastrophic fatal wound (sword through face kind of thing) regardless of remaining HP. "Yes, I know your character still has just under half his HP remaining, but that sword stroke chopped his face clean off. Sorry." 

Option two is the Call of Cthulhu solution. Having APP reduced to zero causes permanent destruction of the character's personality, and control of the character passes into the hands of the Referee. The character is 'dead' as a player character. Incidentally, it is not the ugliness itself that causes this, but the damage to the character's sense of self.

Are there any other ways of explaining character 'death' through APP loss? Have you ever had a character 'die' through ugliness in your game?

Player Character Suffering ≠ Player Suffering

Or, a few more thought on the ‘pathetic aesthetic’.

The pathetic aesthetic is not about making players suffer. It is not about the machismo of endurance. Players are not player characters, obviously. A game that evokes the pathetic aesthetic will involve player characters enduring – if they are lucky – possibly catastrophic negative consequences. The players do not endure these consequences, they are playing the game whether their characters are ‘succeeding’ or ‘failing’. A player does not ‘lose’ when his or her character fails, it is simply more play.

Playing a gaming is not work. But some games can make play feel like work. And while play leaves behind nothing but the experience of play, work should leave behind something more tangible. If gaming feels like work, it would only be natural to feel cheated if your character suffers a catastrophic negative consequence that would undo hours of work, and would require hours of work to rectify, if it is even possible. Hours of play cannot be undone, those hours are their own reward.

Computer games can often feel like work. Consider Grand Theft Auto IV. A great computer game; terrific environments to explore, full of humour, and some pretty sharp social commentary too. When I started playing GTA:IV I drove cautiously, careful not to attract the attention of the police, and I tried to play smart to keep my character alive. But the consequence of being caught, or killed, was not that your character suffered any permanent negative effects (death, prison, disability etc.) but simply that you needed to play though parts of the same game again – whether the recover the money and equipment that you had lost, or to replay the same mission. Again and again. Player character failure is not meaningful to the/in the world of the player character; it demands that the player endure.

If a tabletop RPG treats failure in this way, as something that can simply be erased through more gaming, then failure is something that the players endure and gaming can start to become work. Failure, and the real risk of failure in the pathetic aesthetic is about the consequences of such failures having real, lasting effects on the player character. Their failures, and the consequences of their failure, should be meaningful – in the sense that they have a real effect on the character and his or her world – and while some failure will be dramatically meaningful, by the fact that the player characters are protagonists (not heroes), the fact that the game involves random elements and valorises player agency demands that many of these failures will be 'pathetic'.

 

It is that it is the very fact that failure in games that embrace the pathetic aesthetic always has the potential for catastrophic permanent consequences is part of what makes failure a fun part of play, not a speedbump to be overcome through work.      

Admonitions

I recently got myself a copy of Dungeon Crawl Classics - a replacement for my duplicate gift that the people at IGUK were very good about. I might post a review at some point, but I will say several things.

1) The game has atmosphere. To quote Russ Abbot, 'what an atmosphere!' The writing, the art, and the rules all combine to produce a unique, distinctive vibe - all without relying on encyclopedic setting information. There are flavours of older editions of D&D in there, and not a little WFRP1e, but DCC is very definitely its own thing.

2) The rules for magic, which take up half the book, are the best that I have yet seen. They appear to make concrete the idea that magic is powerful, but is a dangerous, corrupting force. Something like this is what the WFRP1e setting promised but the rules failed to deliver.

3) Critical Hits! Yes, we've got kneecap smashing, head cleaving action built into the game, with different tables for the different classes/levels, and separate tables for monsters and dragons.

4) A non-'mechanical' experience system. XP are not won by getting gold of killing monsters, but by engaging in adventuring activity - mortal combat most of the time, but other kinds of activity might also provide an XP or two. XP rewards are tied to the power of the PCs - so a difficult encounter, which might result in a fatality, for example, is worth 3 points - and the XP intervals between levels grows wider as PCs grow more powerful.

5) Indeed, the first level interval, between levels 0 and 1, is just 10XP, which works out at 5 'typical' encounters (a challenge, but no fatalities or significant losses would be expected), is just one session's worth of adventure. And that is 'the funnel': four 0 level PCs per player, with the survivors achieving classed PC status and all the power and survivability that comes with that. Now, I'll no doubt run a funnel adventure at some point in the future, but doubt that such a bloodbath would be the best way to introduce my players to the real charm of DCC.

6) A chapter titled 'Skills'. That is two pages long, providing GM advice on handling non-combat activities - summed up as, largely Old School, based on player skill, but don't be afraid to roll some dice now and again.

But the first page of the 'Judge's Rules' contains Joseph Goodman's 'Admonitions', which, after the usual advice to house rule the game, are 'always roll your dice in public' and 'let the characters die if the dice so dictate it'. Over the past few weeks I have been idly looking advice on running fantasy RPGs from books published in the late 1980s and the 1990s, and that advice was the exact opposite; the standard instructions to the GM seemed to be that it didn't matter how much you fudged the dice or railroaded your PCs, just so long as the players didn't know and 'the plot' was preserved. So it is refreshing to read something that points out that the very essence of an RPG as a game comes from the idea of challenge, of the possibility of failure.

And with that in mind, I would like to point anyone who has not read it already towards Courtney Campbell's A Guide for New Dungeon Masters. New DM or not, it is still good advice. His articles on player agency are also very interesting. 

Caves of Mykonos – D&D TPK play report

So, before this session I was thinking about cutting the per level experience point requirements in half. Even when we do play regularly, we don’t play the kind of marathon sessions that D&D was seemingly designed for. Given that part of the fun of D&D is levelling up and experiencing the way that the game changes, I was thinking of ways to make this happen. And I decided that it was better to keep a core part of D&D – mechanical XP awards (for defeating monsters, getting gold), variable advancement rates (you’ve got to give the Thief something, and hobble that sword-swinging spell-cannon, the Elf), rather than adopt a bland, ‘okay, you’ve survived three sessions, level up everyone’.

Of course, it didn’t matter. Not one character got close to touching second level. The second session ended in a TPK.

5th of Highsummer

Mangloo and Hopkirk (played by S) were delayed on the road to Ubberhouses – they were gigging that night – but the party were joined by two brothers, Crash and Eddie, Fighters with serious personality problems (what was it D, CHR 6 and 7?). Together with Gandalf (a Magic-User played by A) and the survivors of the last expedition, Abraham and Mohammed (Clerics played by C), and Catrina (a Thief played by A), the party set off for the hermit’s caves.

About a mile from the cave entrance, they came across the naked, mutilated bodies of Sibelius and Bosch, staked out as ‘scarecrows’, with signs reading ‘PIZZ OFF’ and ‘TRESPASERS WILL BE MURDERINGED’. The party buried the bodies, before heading on to the caves.

Their passage through the caves was relatively easy. They skirted the home of the CARRION CRAWLERS, reasoning that you don’t find treasure in a trash heap (good reasoning, but the beasts might have brought back a body or two back to their lair…) and found a much reduced GOBLIN presence. The earlier expedition hadn’t been totally in vain.

They mistook the laughter and agony of gambling for torture, which was amusing, before they surprised some GOBLIN sentries. And they rolled well, killing the scattered, thinned out goblins here, and deeper in the caves, with the first volley from the bows or swing of the sword. It was all very easy. The party avoided what might well have been traps – deciding to leave a shrine to a mushroom god well alone – they didn’t even touch the idol – and staying out of a cave covered in mushrooms which contained the body of a knight in shining platemail. ‘Cool’, I thought, ‘my players were getting low-level D&D. It is a game of caution, of planning, of making sure that every fight is over quickly or isn’t fought at all, while at the same time maximising loot’. They didn’t find the 100GP promissory note under a bed from the Bank of Barton and Black, nor did they take the mirror decorated with gold leaf that I described, but they were making good progress.

Then I rolled a 1 on a d12. I had decided that, with the numbers thinned, the GOBLIN patrols would only return to the cave on a roll of a 1 on a d12, checked every turn. In other words, they would return once every two hours on average. This was probably too short an interval between visits to the lair, but, hey, the party could deal with it. The party heard the returning GOBLINS stumble across the bodies of their comrades, but instead of finding a defensible position or preparing an ambush, they pushed deeper into the dungeon! Hey. You do know you can hear the sound of GOBLINS back up those stairs, yes?

They ignored a wooden gate, reasoning that behind that could only be a monster, and instead opened a wooden, iron barred door. Faced with a corridor that ended in another wooden, iron barred door, they listened, and heard discordant fiddle music, laughter, screams and weeping singing, and the stamp of armoured feet. And then they opened the door.

They were face-to-face with Guthrag, a 3HD GOBLIN KING, and his 2HD GOBLIN bodyguard – as well as the Ubberhouses youths who had been Mykonos’ servants. Gandalf cast Sleep, which knocked out the elite GOBLINS but not the GOBLIN KING (I always allow a saving throw for Sleep, mindful that even quite large low-level PC parties are liable to be wiped out by a single 1st level NPC Magic User who wins the initiative roll.) Crash and Eddie charged the GOBLIN KING, while Gandalf and Catrina went to work slitting the throats of the sleeping GOBLINS. Abraham and Mohammed, with the foresight that would be benefited the party had they developed it a little earlier, picked up the GOBLIN KING’s makeshift throne and used it to barricade the door. STR tests coming up.

Crash and Eddie were extremely busy failing to hit the GOBLIN KING, who round after round hit men hiding behind shields and wearing chain mail. He had Sibelius’ bastard sword (lucky for them, for all the good it did, I ruled he was wielding it one-handed) and was wearing Bosch’s oversized chainmail. Nevertheless, on the balance of probabilities, Crash, Eddie, and later Catrina should have done more than scratch him. In the end, that was all they managed. Crash (or was it Eddie?) fell first, his arm smashed via the Death and Dismemberment table. Abraham and Mohammed failed their STR test, and six GOBLINS burst into the room, led by a mean looking 2HD boss. Gandalf read his Scroll of Magic Missile (a little present to keep a 1st level Classic D&D Magic User useful), which didn’t stop the 2HD boss charging straight at him. He lasted a couple of rounds before he dropped screaming, his leg shattered. Abraham was literally cut the pieces by the GOBLINS. And from then on, rolls on the Death and Dismemberment table ground the party down until… TPK. 

Why did the party press deeper into the dungeon, even as they knew of the danger behind them? D says this was good roleplaying – that was what Crash and Eddie would have done. I don’t buy this entirely – I say that as professional soldiers they would have known that getting outflanked and outnumbered by the enemy was a VERY BAD THING – but it is the players’ game. The decisions are theirs to make. A says that, in hinsight, she should have had one of her characters suggest caution, but trusted the decisions of D the player when she should have been questioning the actions of the characters Crash and Eddie, who had clearly been warped by the horrors of war. It was a shame that C’s sense to use have his characters use the environment didn’t come until they were already surrounded… 

As a final note, it seemed to me that the players didn’t many questions on behalf of their characters. On Saturday, we played Lamentations of the Flame Princess with A, her sister and brother-in-law. The players asked endless questions about how things looked, felt, sounded, or smelled. Perhaps I need to stress that a large part of playing a roleplaying game is asking what your character can see, hear, smell, feel, and also what your character knows of the game world, rather than relying on the first bare description provided by the GM as if it is the totality of the world. 

Question: If a party finds gold that a monster has added to its hoard by taking it from their dead companions, do they get the equivalent XP? I wouldn’t award XP for characters who loot the bodies of comrades who died in the same session. But at the other extreme, monster hoards must include a fair amount of treasure from dead adventurers. How long before it becomes XP-awardable? How different does the party composition need to be before it counts as treasure? These questions only matter at low levels, where the 100GP or so that an adventurer might carry into a dungeon makes a difference. So, judging by the play so far, it will always matter in this campaign!

Player Character Mortality

Is a good thing. 

Seriously.  I can’t imagine the point of playing a game that involved nominally lethal conflict in which there was an expectation that the player characters would not run a serious risk of death. Sure, certain campaign concepts might reduce the risk somewhat – the players might play the champions of the gods, for example, able to wade through normal men as if they were mere distractions. But if a player character goes up against a non-player character or monster of roughly equal power, the PC need be better equipped, or have chosen the ground, or engage in clever play, else his odds of winning that fight will be roughly fifty-fifty.

OSRBaron blames Dungeon Masters.

“You heard me right, Dungeon Masters. Plot intensive games where characters are tied so tightly to a plotline that their death in play could wreck an entire campaign are the fault of Dungeon Masters. Setting the campaign plots up to require characters to survive till the end of the campaign and not leaving an "out" in the over-arching story has lead to the creation of more and more safety nets for PCs.”

Erik Tenkar blames the elaborate character builds of later editions of D&D (and, implicitly, the complex, time consuming character creation of most modern RPGs).

“3x was the first time I saw players planning out their advancement 5, 10, even 15 levels in advance. It wasn't something I could comprehend, as just surviving to the next level was carrot enough for me. Was it the more complicated characters that 3x embodies that led to people assuming their characters were nigh immortal? Was the risk of character death significantly lowered starting with 3x? Was it the advent of computers assisting player record keeping that led to programs that allowed such planning to take place?”

And some of the blame has to go to computer games, including, but not limited to, CRPGs (and CRPGs are NOT roleplaying games). A key piece of strategy advice for any CRPG is ‘save early, save often’. This is the style of play that the designers assume will be employed. Sure, you could play ‘ironman’, and start from the beginning each time your character died, but even in a ‘sandbox’ such as Skyrim you’ll be seeing the same thing over and over again. In a real RPG, the experience of playing a new character can be genuinely novel, not simply a sullen retread through the levels until you got back to where you were before.  I quickly got bored of Skyrim – as I get bored of most CRPGs, after an initial surge of enthusiasm. There is simply no risk, or even an illusion of risk. When my Skyrim character enters the dungeon, my worry is not that he’ll die, it’s that he’ll ‘die’ and I’ll have to play through a section of the dungeon again. 

I wrote this post last week, but it is particularly appropriate now as tonight’s game ended in a TPK. I'm not a killer DM, I promise. More on that later.