Predicatability and Meaningful Choice

One of the principles that many people ascribe to Old School play is that player choices (and hence player 'skill') matters. A second principle is that balance - in the 'modern' RPG sense of providing only encounters that are designed to be 'won' by the PCs - is not desirable; in a sandbox game, some things that the PCs will encounter - by design or by chance - will be beyond their abilities. They might have to learn this lesson the hard way, but because the game is a sandbox, not a railroad[*1], the players have plenty of choices of other places to go and things to do.

The retroclones all have standard monster bestiaries and mechanized treasure tables, emulating the original systems. Even if the DM creates his own (variations on these) monsters, the lesson of these catalogues is that players can (and I don't mean by leafing through the monster listing and studying the treasure table) learn what the world created by the GM consists of - what rules it runs by - and therefore gain an ability to judge risk and reward. Sure, Orcs in your game might be called the Quezo'll, and their kings might be able to shoot laser beams from their crowns, but the players have the potential to learn the capabilities of the Quezo'll, get an idea of the size of their raiding parties, the treasure they carry, etc.

This is not about the game itself being predictable - in the sense of beaing boring or repetitive,  but that enough of the world is predictable so that players can make informed, meaningful decisions on the part of their PCs.

Several of the second generation OSR games - Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Dungeon Crawl Classics, for example - suggest that monsters should be unique. There should be nothing so passé as a standard bestiary; monster manuals[*2] reduce monsters down to dangerous animals, and humanoid monsters to evil humans with different coloured skin. I have tremendous sympathy with this point of view, but I worry as to the degree to which an inability to learn about the dangers of the world through actual play inhibits meaningful player choice. Meaningful player choice demands predictability. If the players have no idea what the possible consequences of an action are, what the risks are, or what the rewards might be, then they cannot take a meaningful action. Of course, as these are games of exploration and adventure, many aspects of the world must remain unknown, mysterious, and if magic plays a part, even contradictory. I guess my question is - to what degree is a degree of predictability in 'monsters' required for meaningful player choices in a game that, more often than not, involves fighting (or at least, encountering) monsters?

[1*] I have seen it argued that a sandbox is just a railroad with so many tracks that the players enjoy the illusion of freedom. Well, uh, sort of. For me, the point of a sandbox is not total player freedom, it is meaningful player CHOICE. It is the choices, and the consequences (including PC death and other negative, even catastrophic, consequences) of those choices, that make RPGs a game.

[*2] To be sure, the Ecology of... articles in Dragon, and the tone of the AD&D2e Monstrous Compendia did begin to make even the strangest monsters mundane.

Snow Day

Yay! School is closed. Aw... so is the nursery. So after making peanut butter biscuits with the toddler, I decided to chuck a few things in the blender:

And out poured:

In other news, it looks like the old TSR archives might be available again, sometime soon.

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. 

The Five Minute Work Day

There is some complaint that the resource management/attrition aspects of Old School games leads some dungeoneers to game the system by adopting the 'five minute workday'. Basically, once HP are low, magical resources and special abilities have been depleted, and the dangers of the unknown loom ever larger, the adventuring party retreats to a defensible room, barricades themselves inside, and heals, rests, and recuperates. This is the way you would play a C'RPG', so why not an RPG?

Well, there's nothing wrong with that as a tactic. But an RPG is judged/refereed/games mastered by a living, imaginative person, not dead lines of script. And that person is responsible for the behaviour of the rest of the world, including (but not limited to) the monsters of the underworld. There has been endless discussion of the way that intelligent, social monsters can disrupt these kinds of PC tactics. But even the most mindless of monsters can threaten a five minute workday routine; one word, ROMERO!

Since Night of the Living Dead re-animated the zombie as a horror staple, the standard scenario has seen surviving humans adopting the tactics of the 'five minute workday' and coming unstuck. Resources continue to dwindle. The sheer weight of of the undead on the barricades renders the defensible position a deathtrap. The horror, the horror, sends N/PCs insane (even if you don't have a sanity mechanic for PCs, they've brought henchmen and hirelings, no?). 

And even when the five minute workday is so well organised that it prodiuces something akin to the  moment of post-apocalyptic, post-scarcity utopia in Dawn of the Dead, there are always NPC parties interested in the same treasures. Some of those treasures are already in the PCs' possession...

 Murder-hobos ahoy!

Sleep well in the dungeon.

Experience, Charisma, and Glory

Some regard Charisma as a 'dump stat'. It is a bit difficult to have a 'dump stat' when you are playing 3d6 in order, but you know what I mean; STR 18 gives you a +3 bonus in melee combat, DEX 18 gives you a +3 bonus to AC, CON 18 gives you an extra 3 HP per level. Even modifiers provided by high INT and WIS can provide mechanical in benefits; extra spells, higher chances of knowing a language, bonuses to Saving Throws or adventuring skills, depending on your particular flavour of The Game. But CHA? CHA? CHA 18 should give you a bonus to NPC reaction rolls and an increased maximum number of henchmen. But these are small beer; how many modestly endowed PCs are maxing out on their henchmen allocation? And how many Old School GMs set aside roleplaying to randomly determine NPC reactions? Or remember to?

Now me, well, I am comfortable enough with a Fellowship test, or the like, as in WFRP, to use some kind of CHA test to determine the success of a PC's attempt to inveigle their way into the Black Brotherhood, or persuade the Archgourmand of the Ogres that adventurers are poor, stringy, gristly meat. But even in those cases, it is the actions of the players, not the dice rolled for their PCs, that carry the most weight in determining the success or failure of their actions. The +3 to hit provided by STR 18 counts whether or not the player of the PC can actually lift a sword; the player simply says, 'I hit with my axe' and the GM says 'roll'. The effect of the +3 to NPC reaction rolls provided by CHA 18 is dependent on the ability of the players to put words in their PC's mouth.

Cha-, Cha-, Charisma eighteen, Russia's greatest love machine

Regardless, CHA can be made mechanically meaningful in an Old School game by making it every adventurer's Prime Requisite. And then some. A +1 bonus (CHA 13-15) = 10% extra XP, a +2 bonus (CHA 16-17) = 20% extra XP, and, naturally enough, a +3 bonus (CHA 18) = 30% extra XP. That is a lot of extra XP, but then someone with CHA 18 is a person that is more likely than most to turn the bare facts of their deeds into legend.

But then, for me, XP are not literally a measure of 'experience' - after all, what do PCs get XP for? Finding treasure, mostly. Sometimes killing stuff. And, if you are that way inclined, completing quest-like objectives. And accumulating this XP does what? Makes PCs better at fighting, others better at magic, and some better at sneaking about. The same experiences improve characters in different ways. Why? Because D&D is not a BRP game. D&D is a more abstract (and less 'realistic'). In my games, XP (and Levels) are measures of a PCs fame, glory, and legendary status - I've argued before, D&D [only?] makes sense when adventurers are 'rock stars' - though this 'legendary status' is only in part a social construction (boosted by carousing and conspicuous consumption too; you can buy 'charisma'), but is built into the physics of the game universe itself.

The idea of using the CHA modifier* to boost XP rewards comes from a number of sources: Mongoose RuneQuest II uses CHA to determine the number of improvement rolls that a PC gains per session/adventure, on the [dubious] basis that charisma helps PCs find tutors/training partners better than gold, or intelligence. Pendragon has a Glory statistic that is a combination of a Player Knight's repute and something more 'real'. Old School games have, since they were New School, awarded XP for carousing and the like (Chris Kutalik, of Hill Cantons, not only does this but increases PC Charisma scores as they level, looking at the relationship between CHA and level from the other end of the telescope [take one // take two // Hill Cantons Compendium]). But the tipping point came when I was reading some Pelinore stuff, and came across the Free/wo/men NPC class. "The level of a Freeman or Freewoman is not determined by experience points but by a combination of their wealth, age and influence". At first I though that NPC classes such as this are a great way of avoiding the situation in which every NPC of interest has an adventuring class and a few levels, or else is a fragile 0 level non-entity. But then I thought that the idea of levels relating to 'wealth, age and influence' might help us to think about what XP and levels are meant to/ought to represent. 

*I am all about the modifiers these days. I'd rather have a PC roll 1d6/2d6/xdy (whatever) and add their modifier to beat a target number, than roll 1d20/3d6/xd6 (whatever) to roll under the relevant statistic. Using d6 rolls to resolve adventuring tasks obviously owes a lot to the streamlined D&D rules found in Lamentations of the Flame Princess. 2d6, though, gives a probability curve, and Stars Without Number (via Traveller) provides an example of how to use this in an Old School context. Dyson Logos has a nifty conversion of B/X Thief skills to d6 and 2d6.  

A Finnish Sensibility?

I didn't know James Raggi had made a Christmas movie...

Well, he hasn't. But Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale seemed to have a very similar vibe to a Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure. Basically, the wholesome is subverted, ordinary enough people face off against a powerful, inhuman evil, and all for the sake of a few gold pieces. 

Perhaps not as good a Gremlins for Christmas horror, but certainly worth watching.

Biggest disappointment of Christmas 2012

It wasn't that the only boardgame I received was one that I already had (Elder Signs).

It wasn't that my copy of Blood of the Zombies had a drink spilled on it before I had a chance to read it.

It wasn't even that the kit bag that I asked for turned out to be a rucksack smaller than the one that I already have, too small for my judogi, never mind anything else.*

It was that THIS wasn't real!

Nice work, Zhu Bajiee [compliment]. Nice work, Zhu Bajiee [sarcasm born from dashed hopes].

However, Gygax Magazine is real. Despite the big names associated with Gygax Magazine, we will have to wait and see if it is better than Oubliette, Knockspell, Fight On!, or any of the other OSR magazines out there. 

*Yes, I am an ungrateful so-and-so.