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Oct 21, 2013 - 12:36 AM
Pt. 5: Setting and Tone
As you've probably noticed, a lot of the mechanics in the game are all steering toward storytelling. There are plenty of reasons people play RPGs, but the best RPG recollections are always about what happened to the characters rather than the numbers. Numbers may be referred to in the telling, but only as a means to get to "We decided to X, but then Y, Z, Q and P! I tried to M but then Bob fell out of the boat. Then explosions!"

So here's something I'm going to try. The events of the game will be a story within the context of the game. These events already happened in the world, and you're just recounting them. And when I say "you" I don't mean your character. Or, well, your character, but not the one with the hit points and the inventory and all.

You play storytellers, and the storytellers tell a story about your characters. In the past tense. Does this make sense? I hope this makes sense.

This does two things! By divorcing the player from over-identification with the PC, the player is less likely to call foul when bad things happen to the PC. She probably likes the PC and wants the PC to succeed, but the PC isn't her. The PC is merely a hero from a long time ago that did their best and maybe didn't make it. When we establish that YOU ARE NOT YOUR PC, this weakens the desire to make unreasonable use of player knowledge.

And because you're not your PC, your PC can die. Ok, yes, your PC can die in any game but practically speaking a lot of GMs will avoid dropping that hammer. Why? Because being dead sucks, because effectively it means you don't get to play anymore. Yeah, you can write up a new guy and the GM will try to work him in somehow but it feels very artificial to have new cast members show up mid-episode and try to act like a regular, doesn't it? Besides, depending on the system and the level you're playing at, you might not even have your guy prepared until the next week's session.

So, when your PC dies, there are now multiple GMs. The authority of the GM is now shared between multiple people at least for the rest of the session, or maybe until you "get back to town" and recruit more help, whatever shape that ends up taking. Maybe not everybody wants to help GM, but I'm putting so much in the hands of players that GMing shouldn't really be the onerous task it's often seen as.

Obviously as a game designer I can't really mandate seating arrangements, but the idea of a player narrating his PC's death and then quietly moving to the other side of the table, symbolically abandoning the other players and taking up against them — that's some theatrical business right there.

So, if the players are playing storytellers, then the game (and the metagame, where the PCs live) takes place in a setting where oral tradition is important, where history and legend are passed down grandmother to mother to daughter around the fire. Now, that could be your sort of standard Dark Ages Not-Europe with the goblins and the magic missile and the whole Standard Tolkienian Fantasy Just-Add-Water kit, and I've certainly used that context for all my examples to this point, but it's kind of well-worn, isn't it? Besides, Gamma World has taught me that "a grenade", however mundane, is intrinsically more interesting than Scroll of Minor Explosion. This isn't to say that magic doesn't have a place, but that place should be reserved for numinous (and often subtle) acts rather than "I set people on fire". If you see some dude obviously Casting A Spell, that should be a Big Deal, fight or flight, We Need To Warn People moment.

So if we mostly want to mangle people with physical force, we want a good variety of ways for that to happen. The best way to add variety to your List Of Ways To Die is to escalate technology. At the low end of the scale you've got "Animal Bite, Disease, Malnutrition, Fell Off A Cliff" and then at the high end of the scale you've got things like "Disintegration Beam, Teleportation Accident, Malfunctioning Robot". We want to get as many weird, horrible death agents as possible. But escalating technology has a problem: you're also escalating medical technology. A world with atomic weapons also has the tetanus vaccine, rendering rusty swords relatively less threatening. So here's what we do: we provide access to advanced technology sparingly. And when I say "advanced" I mean anything that would be out of place in, say, pre-Colombian North America.

I say "North America" because if you're going to minimize the impact of magic you might as well go ahead and put your game on Earth. It saves you a lot of time you'd otherwise have to spend making up place names. Of course, it doesn't actually take place in the pre-Colombian period because then how do we get all these laser guns? Time machines? Pfft. No, let's stick our barely-subsisting tech-poor protagonists in the distant future. Like, really really distant. Say 50,000 years-ish, just in time for an approaching ice age to drive their settlements southward so they can discover some weird old shit. Or maybe the weird shit has been around all along, and the changing climate is making them desperate enough to make use of it even though they know a lot of it is bad news. (You only really need one scavenging party to return covered in weeping sores to move a once-promising site into the DON'T column.) And when I say "weird shit" this includes the openly amoral machinations of the supernatural along with the occasional unexploded nuke.

Of course, even the best technology doesn't hold together in working order for tens of thousands of years. But hey, magic (or sufficiently advanced technology, if you like). Stasis field, temporal rift, alternate reality whatever. Maybe the pre-collapse civilizations took measures to preserve their stuff. Someone has to go check that stuff out, and find the things that are useful.

(And when I say "civilizations", the plural is intentional, since 50,000 years is plenty of time for humanity to make multiple abortive attempts at re-establishing itself.)

Not everyone will come back. Maybe no one will come back. But the ice is coming, and the beasts of the forest grow bolder by the day, and the pale men that dwell in the caves will notice our weakness soon and we will be lost. We must do something. We have to try.

And those that are lost in the trying... let us remember them.

Originally Posted by Stephen Vincent Benét (By The Waters of Babylon)
The north and the west and the south are good hunting ground, but it is forbidden to go east. It is forbidden to go to any of the Dead Places except to search for metal and then he who touches the metal must be a priest or the son of a priest. Afterwards, both the man and the metal must be purified. These are the rules and the laws; they are well made. It is forbidden to cross the great river and look upon the place that was the Place of the Gods—this is most strictly forbidden. We do not even say its name though we know its name. It is there that spirits live, and demons—it is there that there are the ashes of the Great Burning. These things are forbidden—they have been forbidden since the beginning of time.


Currently Playing: Paper Mario - Dry-Dry Ruins Are Full Of Gadgets

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Oct 17, 2013 - 06:43 PM
Pt. 4: Cunning Stunts!
What is a stunt? In the context of most tabletop RPGs, a "stunt" is usually any action that isn't explicitly covered by the rules, normally something fairly cinematic or "over the top". Some systems provide "stunting rules" to attempt a blanket compensation for this, but in practice these rules are usually pretty bland and result in stunt actions being objectively bad ideas relative to "normal" actions.

"I'll jump onto the banquet table, swing from the chandelier, and kick the orc into the fireplace!"

"Ok, roll Athletics to climb onto the table."

"It's like waist-high, but fine. 14."

"Ok, now another Athletics check to jump up to the chandelier."

"...sure. 12."

"Roll Dexterity to grab the chandelier in midair."

"...what? Ugh. 18."

"Ok, make an unarmed attack roll vs. the orc's Reflex."

"Ok, here we go! 20! Orc flambé!"

"Nice job. The orc takes... 3 fire damage!"

"The hell? I could have done more than that with my sling!"

"Acrobatics check to avoid tumbling into the fireplace yourself."

This is an extreme example, but in the vast majority of systems doing cool creative things is badly handicapped relative to "I stab it with my sword. Again." A few systems (like Exalted, for instance), massively encourage stunting to the point where you'd be an idiot to ever stop stunting at any time. Which sounds sort of neat on a surface level, but the sense of being compelled to do something crazy and cinematic every single turn might wear a bit thin. It would for me.

There's a happy medium, of course. You want to encourage creativity, but you don't want to make it effectively mandatory at all times. HOW DO? A stunt is, in essence, something that might not work; in exchange, it should also offer results better than not stunting if it does work. This is the essential tension: I want to jump over Springfield Gorge, but I don't want to fall short and hit every rock on the way down. These are the stakes: what the character wants vs the things that can go wrong. We attach stunts not to number-dickery, but to narrative events.

Let's use Conway's attempted orc kick to illustrate.

GOAL: Propel orc into fire, effectively removing it from combat. If it works, the orc won't get near the rest of the party with that rusty saber (to say nothing of the duchess. For what she's paying, the least we can do is keep her kidneys on the right side of her skin).

RISKS: The orc might notice what I'm doing. I don't think he's too bright, but if he sees me coming all he has to do is put that filthy blade between me and him. My momentum would mean all sorts of bad news for me. On top of that, there's a chance I might tumble in after him.

We don't regard "fail to climb onto table" or "fail to jump six inches in order to grab chandelier" as legitimate Risks, partly because that's boring and partly because there are no interesting consequences to failure. If you fail to climb, then what? You just stand there? That's not interesting for you or for the DM.

So we have a Goal and two Risks. This is still a little shaky, but here's my working system: roll once for the Goal, and then again for each risk: 3d20. Borrow dice from your neighbors or just keep track of the numbers, whatever. Once you have your three results, find the median result. Say Conway rolls 7, 13, 16: the 13 is the one that matters. His stunt attempt is a 13. As it stands the system has 8 skills*; the most appropriate skill for this stunt is Athlete. Let's say Conway's character has a 12 in Athlete; 13 is enough to succeed. The orc gets extra crispy, and Conway tumbles away from the fireplace none the worse for wear. Hurray!

Let's say, though, that Conway's median result was 10. That's short of his Athlete skill, so something Goes Wrong. We'll let Conway decide whether he'd rather be sliced or roasted. If his median result was 7, (that is, 5 less than his Athlete score) both things would Go Wrong. (If his median result had somehow been 2, not only does Conway bear all that abuse but the orc doesn't even get burned! But that's pretty unlikely, I think you'll agree).

This may seem a little unfair to Conway. All that hurt lying in store and all the DM stands to lose is one little orc. But it's not all bad news. Conway might have some good luck in store. When you establish the Goal and the Risks (and this is something the player and the DM should do collaboratively, ideally without either of you being a jerk about it) you can also establish Long Shots: unlikely happy events that may result from the stunt.

Conway thinks of two Long Shots that might help him. First, the orc might drop his sword as he tumbles into the fire, rather than the sword going into the fireplace with him. Then Conway would have a spare blade, which means one more dinner guest that can fight back once the doors give way. Second, the orc might kick up enough ash while he's being horribly burned. Second, the impact might send an unusually large plume of soot up the chimney, alerting some of the more attentive guards that something is afoot.

(Ok I'm reaching a little on that last one.)

Much like the Risks, beating your relevant Skill gets you 1 Long Shot. Beating it by 5 gets you 2 Long Shots. (+10 would get him 3, but he hasn't defined 3 Long Shots and how the hell is he supposed to get a median roll of 22? Characters with better skills can't call as many Long Shots, but they have a much better chance of succeeding in general.) Since we're adding more variables to the stunt, we'll add more dice. Conway rolls 5d20. He may get maimed, but he might just call in the cavalry.

6. 7. 10. 14. 19.

Don't be such a baby, Conway. It's just a little tetanus.

Another side benefit of stunting is that a stunt (pass or fail) can make you noteworthy, earning you an Epithet. Conway The Cruel-Footed might not get invited to too many more dinner parties, but a reputation for mercilessness can open doors. Conway The Lockjawed will mostly inspire pity, but pity has its uses.

One last thing: you needn't stunt alone. Conway would've had a better chance of pulling that off if his friend had thrown a plate to distract the orc. Your allies can aid your stunt in a way that protects them from consequences, or they can take on the risks along with you. (There's no practical reason for two people to swing on the chandelier, so let's say Conway's friend — let's call her Rooke — remains safely disengaged this time.) Rooke rolls a d20 of her own, keeping it separate from Conway's. If Rooke rolls high enough to beat her relevant skill (she's acting as a distraction, so she wants to Sneak) and it would help him, Conway can substitute the lowest number on his dice for the number on Rooke's die. She's rolled a 17, more than enough to beat Rooke's Sneak score of 10!

7. 10. 14. 17. 19.

Things were bad! But now they're good! For the next 30 seconds! If Rooke's little diversion had failed, there would be no direct mechanical consequences for her failure (though she's probably the next target of the orc's attention for better or for worse). On the other hand, Safe Assistance never merits epithets. History does not remember stagehands.

(The way this whole thing slots into the action economy of combat is still a little wibbly-wobbly.)

Oh! I was supposed to talk about diplomacy today. Well, diplomacy is, in essence a Negotiator skill stunt.

GOAL: Convince the cabbage merchant to let me hide in his wagon until the guards move on.

RISK: The cabbage merchant may announce my presence to everyone in earshot, making my capture all the more likely.

RISK: I may be blackmailed into buying an awful lot of cabbage.

LONG SHOT: I manage to stuff some free cabbage into my satchel the next time he turns his back. Damn, I'm hungry.

3. 3. 4. 5. If your stunt involves an even number of dice, treat the higher of the two median numbers as the result. Not that it helps here. Conway's Negotiator score is 14. With a -10 result, Conway agrees under duress to buy the entire wagon up front, only to have the merchant betray him after the transaction. And the cabbages are a rotten, slimy, inedible mess. It's gonna be a long night.

I should point out that you can back out of a stunt right up until the second the dice hit the table. It's easy for the DM to see a Risk that wasn't obvious to you, and players shouldn't be dicked around like that.

There's no point in doing skill tests outside the context of stunts, because it's meaningless unless something is at risk. Failed to unlock the door? Try again. And again. And again. Boring. Locked doors are sort of a boring obstacle anyway, but if you must have them then make failure mean something. Maybe you break your (lucky) picks (that you got from your dear departed uncle). Maybe the lock is fouled, meaning that not only are you not getting inside but also that it's obvious someone was trying to break in.

You may notice that success on skill checks, like attack rolls, are bound to the PC's skills and luck rather than numinous secrets held by the DM. All fine and good. But let's say there's something the DM straight-up doesn't want you to be able to do, something that would wreck everything. A two-bit sellsword just off the farm trying to assassinate the Skeleton King. A street-rat cutpurse picking the lock to the royal vaults. By the rules these things are technically possible (since the worst possible skill score is 20), but be reasonable. If the DM says "that's impossible for you", it's impossible. Respect the narrative. On the other hand, DMs, don't be a dick about this, nobody likes running into impassable plot doors.


WOW THIS WAS MEANDERING

I am aware that adding more and more dice to the stunt pool does not really do much to change the odds of success in and of itself. However, rolling a big fistful of dice is just aesthetically cool and helps stunts feel appropriately dramatic. Other parts of the PC class assemblies will do fun little things with the stunt dice to make the system a little more tactical. Some classes may reward big pools, others small pools. Some classes want to take a lot of Long Shots (this feels good for the Paladin). Maybe one class just really likes rolling 7s. You know, whatever.

* Scholar, Eccentric, Athlete, Tinker, Observer, Sneak, Negotiator, Survivor. If you were curious.


Currently Playing: Average White Band - Pick Up The Pieces

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Oct 15, 2013 - 08:14 PM
Pt. 3: Murder doesn't need to be complicated.
Where did we leave off? Right. Damage. Or, specifically, how doing 1 damage on every attack is sort of boring. So maybe it would be okay to have a method by which Stabface could sometimes do 2 damage! Or even 3? Well, let's not get too crazy.

The fun thing about working with the d20 (as opposed to, say, a fistful of d6) is how it breaks down into tidy 5% increments. Rolling a 1 is just as likely as rolling a 20, whereas with 3d6 you're massively more likely to roll 10 or 11 than you are to roll a 17. So let's work out some odds.

If Stabface hits on a 6 or better, he hits 75% of the time (and, obviously, misses 25% of the time).

So my plan, originally, was to have Stabface deal increasing damage as he surpassed that threshold of 6, scaling up in easily-remembered chunks of 5. 2 damage at 11, 3 damage at 16, maybe something super rad at 20.

There is a problem with this approach.

1-5: 25%
6-10: 25%
11-15: 25%
16-19: 20%
20: 5%

As you can see. the "double hit" (we will have a better term for this later) is just as likely as the "single hit". I kind of wanted the higher damage results to be increasingly unlikely. Maybe if we go with multiples of the target result:

1-5: 25%
6-11: 30%
12-17: 30%
18-19: 10%
20: 5%

NOPE. We're still in strong-hit-as-just-as-likely-as-weak-hit territory, and "brutal hit" is getting squeezed into total unlikelihood. Arguably it should be unlikely but do we only want it to be twice as likely as a crit? Hmm hmm. Plus also: using multiples becomes a problem later for other classes. If we have someone that hits on a 7, then getting a triple is impossible.

Well. Loath as I am the abandon the d20, what if we just... it's not a huge change, but what if we tried 2d10 instead?

2-5: 10%
6-11: 45%
12-17: 39%
18-19: 5%
20: 1%

This is a little better! A "regular" hit is more likely than a "strong" hit, and... wait, shit, the odds of hitting are now 90%. Fuck. This was inevitable, of course. As you add more dice, the average result hews closer to the middle. There is an argument for minimizing the risk of missing (it goes like this: a turn on which you accomplish nothing is boring) but if you're going to do that then why not eliminate missing altogether? Well, what we'll do instead of that is just make things happen even when you miss. BUT THAT IS LATER.

WAIT.

We can use the attack roll AS the damage roll but INTERPRET IT DIFFERENTLY. So let's set some accuracy goals and then reassemble with our blueprints in mind.

So I could say, yeah, if we miss 25% of the time, then we do 1 damage 40% of the time, 2 damage 20% of the time, 3 damage 10%, 4 damage 5%. Fairly smooth curve.

1-5: Miss! (25%)
6-13: 1 damage (40%)
14-17: 2 damage (20%)
18-19 : 3 damage (10%)
20: 4 damage (05%)

(At this point there was a lengthy but entertaining Skype session wherein I consulted with someone who doesn't find math tedious, attempting to make this system more elegant. Unfortunately our design goals are, in some sense, at loggerheads: we want a single roll with a significant degree of complexity in the results, and we also want those results to be obvious in their interpretation. 2 out of 3 ain't bad. Not included: an experimental d6 methodology which was briefly lauded as perfect until I realized that it had no provision by which anyone could miss.)

So, the character sheets, when we reach that point, will have to include a tiny little chart to interpret the die roll. Not totally ideal, but players should memorize which numbers do what fairly quickly and it's still better than rolling and staring at the DM expectantly.

(And, when we start building other classes, they'll probably need their own charts. But the fighter is our baseline.)

Rad!

Ok, but there's another problem with damage. What if you do... too much? Our Xivort only has HP, what's the use if Stabface does 4 damage to him? Where's that damage going, man, just floating off uselessly to damage heaven?

NOPE

A recent game by the name of 13th Age has a solution, and I'm gonna steal it. (13th Age also swiped the idea from a game called Feng Shui so I don't feel bad about this.) If you've played 4E, you remember Minions: enemies with only 1 HP. Cannon fodder. Not telling players which enemies are minions is a HUUUUGE asshole maneuver since they could very well blow limited resources on this 1-HP crapsack. Feng Shui has an enemy type called "Mooks" which basically filled the same niche, and they found a solution: Mooks all share the same HP pool. So, instead of this:

"Crit! Wow, that's... 80 damage, dang."

"Nice, that's one of the 20 minions down."

"Pardon me while I fling myself down the stairs."


You get this:


"Crit! Wow, that's... 80 damage, dang."

"Nice, that's 80 of the... oh. Well. No more minions, I guess. And there were so many of them. So very many."

"I feel good about today's events. I hereby renounce my previous intention to pour tar inside your automobile."

You can rationalize this all sorts of ways. Maybe your theatrical circular sword swing caught a crapload of idiots that you weren't even focused on. Maybe your big-ass hammer shook up the place so badly that the swarm of rats is all stunned and effectively harmless. Or, ooh, here's a good one, your hammer just punched through a weak part of the floor, resulting in a collapse that sent all 20 of those guys on a trip to the basement. You can narrate this shit any old way and it's a lot more interesting and heroic then "I guess I just keep hacking away at this dead goblin for 20 minutes."

Plus it makes combat faster. Which is always a good goal.

But we can take it further. Why limit collective HP to mooks? Why not apply the concept to every enemy in the battle? Let's say our Xivort friend has 3 HP (because he does). Stabface swings! He rolls! 20! That's 4 damage, plus any riders we put on critical hits, tags on his weapon, etc. Where's that extra point of damage go? Why, into Xivort B, who was pretty silly in standing right behind the first Xivort. That's a good way to get the point of a sword in your face. Of course, not at all enemies will be standing next to each other, but fuck it. The Xivort's head comes clean off, goes flying, give Xivort B a good thump on the noggin. Easy-peasy and cool as shit in the retelling.

My desire for universality makes me want to apply this idea to PCs as well, but let's not. It's reasonably expected for players to get a little attached to PCs, so they shouldn't die due to mere surplus numbers. They should die because of their own incompetence.

Of course combat maneuvering isn't purely about damage. Positioning matters. I am firmly on the side of maps & minis combat over "let's just imaginitize in the wonderland of our minds", because your mental idea of what the scene "looks like" will never match the DM's 100%. There should be an objective referent. And you have an objective battlefield to maneuver in, it's fun to have ways to force the enemy around that battlefield, shove him into hazards, funnel them into chokepoints, etc. And in 4E most Fighter attacks have some kind of forced movement as a rider. That's good! But they all have goofy I WILL SHOUT THE NAME OF MY ATTACK LIKE IT'S STREET FIGHTER labels like Tide of Iron. That isn't necessary, and it added to the notion about 4E that "every class has spells". So instead of having a dedicated push attack, and a dedicated pull attack, and a dedicated trip attack, ad nauseum: why not this? You attack, and you pick from a list of riders like push/pull/trip. Mechanically the same but I TRIP HIM sounds a lot more natural than I WILL USE MY POWER OF PUSH A GUY.

Next time: DIPLOMACY! and how to fuck it up.

Currently Playing: AVP 2000

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Oct 13, 2013 - 01:13 PM
Pt. 2: Ability Scores
Forgive me, again, for dwelling so heavily on D&D in general and 4E in particular, but it's very much the elephant in the room. Talking about RPGs without talking about D&D would just be an exercise in evasiveness. And, IMO, 4E is the best at what it does, and what it does is tactical personal-scale combat, which I find personally interesting because I'm basically a monster that likes seeing (fictional?) people get badly hurt. When we move to the other parts of the system we won't talk about 4E so much since 4E's approach to things that aren't murder is basically a theatrical shrug.

So, ability scores. D&D is hardly the only offender in this department, of course, but let's talk about how D&D handles them. The six core abilities is one of those lovely sacred cows that the license has held on to through all the shakeups: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma.

Strength makes you hit harder. Sometimes it makes you more accurate too.

Constitution gives you more health.

Dexterity makes you better at dodging, unless you wear the wrong kind of armor. It also makes your arrows more accurate (sure) or hurt more, for reasons.

Intelligence makes you real good at being a wizard. In some versions of the game it also dictates your competence with skill use (about which more later), making wizards, de facto, the skill monkeys.

Wisdom makes you better at prayin' to God and generally being devout. It also improves your willpower. Huh.

Charisma, uh. It. Like. It's not JUST your appearance, but um.. force of personality? Charisma is basically your dump stat unless you're a god-botherer or a bard. And that's fine, D&D is mostly a game about murder and not about socializing but it's funny to realize that most D&D characters are basically autistic.

Here's the thing: All this shit is superfluous. Let's refer to 4E again since it came the closest to figuring this out and then skittered away from the light because tradition! What sort of ability scores does Stabface, our archetypal 1st-level fighter, have?

18 STR

16 CON

10 DEX

10 INT

12 WIS

10 CHA

He's looking a little bit lopsided, I think, but he needs to be. Otherwise he'll have trouble stabbing things, because, as a fighter, his Strength is integral to his ability to stab things. Let's look, again, at the Xivort from last time: it has an Armor Class (AC) of 15. That's not a high bar, though, because Stabface adds 9 to all his attack rolls. Where does that come from?

+4 from his strength (Being swole makes Stabface intrinsically good at violence)

+3 from "proficiency" (Stabface knows how to use a sword)

+1 from "One-handed Weapon Talent" (Stabface is especially good with swords he can hold in one hand. You'd think having a free shield hand would be its own reward, but no. Have another +1)

+1 from "Heavy Blade Expertise". (Stabfaces likes his swords small enough for one hand, but doesn't want some tiny blade like a woman or elf might have).

So, altogether, +9 to Stabface for "Being a strong guy who likes having a longsword and practiced with it a little".

So he's got a shot! A good shot, in fact. Stabface only needs to roll a 6 on his d20 to hit that Xivort. That's not a coincidence. 4E's underlying math is predicated on the assumption that 6 will usually be a success. Sometimes you'll run into a "Soldier" that expects you to roll 8, or a "Brute" that will let you get by with only rolling a 4. Now, you don't necessarily have to make the same build decisions Stabface did. You could take different options, pick a different feat. But to do so would, intrinsically, make you worse at the game's core activity: murderin'.

So, tell you what. Why don't we throw out all those modifiers. Shit, let's throw out AC. This might be a little hasty, but I don't think so. Instead of adding all that shit up and then hoping for a 6, why don't we just say:

Stabface hits things if he rolls 6 or higher. Nice. Now, D&D's explanation for the relatively high hit chance of PCs is simply "these guys are so pro, look how pro they are". But two untrained idiots fighting each other are, if anything, more likely to get hurt. Any dumbass can swing a piece of metal, the training is what keeps you from getting killed doing it.

We dealt with Constitution last time. A reasonably optimized Fighter can take 4 hits, so Stabface has 4 HP. Sorted.

Dexterity. Dexterity sometimes tags in for Strength as the FIGHT GOOD stat, but with JUST ROLL SIX IDIOT we don't need it for that. Dexterity also determines your defenses; it can be a big part of your AC and your Reflex defense. Now, about Defenses: they slow shit down. Yup. Sorry. Fuck 'em. We've put accuracy in the hands of the attacker and I like it there. Whenever you have to ask the DM whether you hit, that's a waste of time. So we don't need Dexterity anymore.

Intelligence. If you're a spellcaster, INT will gladly cover for both a shitty STR and a shitty DEX. Buuuuut not with weapons. Being smart won't make you better at cudgeling somebody. So when we take a crack at determining what wizards need to roll during Violence Mode, they should probably have two numbers: a relatively high one for brawlin', and a lower one for bein' a wizard. And, other than its mechanical uselessness, having a statistic for smarts is kind of dumb. Roleplaying somebody smarter than yourself is a hell of a trick, and roleplaying someone dumber than yourself results in somebody's worst caveman impression 99% of the time. Fuck that.

Wisdom. It's Strength for Clerics! So, again, separate violence number for hitting people with sticks vs hitting people with God. Other than that, ehhhh. Whether or not you're devout should be a roleplaying matter.

Charisma. It's Strength for Warlocks and Bards! So, same deal.

Of course, ability scores have a second use: other than combat, they also contribute to SKILL CHECKS! But, again, if there's an ideal or expected ability score spread, there is, then, also an expected skill point spread. So, for starting characters, we can just figure roughly how good we want a neophyte fighter to be at, say, socializing or burglary or marathon running, and just give him that score in that skill. Then let the player move those points around a little, why the fuck not? 4E has a lot of skills. Every other edition has even more. Sometimes a lot more. We'll crack out our own skill list and system later, but we really don't need Ability Scores for skills to work. We don't need Ability Scores at all. They don't do anything.


So, just to keep track of our progress, here's what we know about Stabface:

He has 4 HP.

He hits on a 6, and deals 1 damage.

And here's what we know about the Xivort Slasher, going by the same guidelines:

It has 3 HP.

It hits on a 9, and deals 1 damage.

(It may seem unfair for the Xivort, our monster archetype, to be objectively weaker than Stabface, our PC archetype. But then, it is probably unlikely for a Stabface vs Xivort fight to be 1-on-1.)

Having everybody always deal 1 damage is a little boring, and so is having every weapon be functionally identical. But adding a damage roll to every attack slows shit down again. But we can "roll for damage" without actually picking up another handful of dice. Next time!

Currently Playing: Caravan Palace - Dragons

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Oct 11, 2013 - 05:44 PM
A little exercise in wheel-reinventing, pt. 1
Two incidental things have coalesced in the last month or so:
  1. Replacement PCs for the forum Gamma World game have been, hmm, slow to appear, leaving me with no outlet to enforce arbitrary rules on make-believe people.

  2. The final public playtest materials for D&D Next were released, looking just as awful as the first packet of materials did and extinguishing any hope that the game will take a step forward instead of pandering to a rapidly-aging old guard of horrible grognards. Most of you have probably not been following these developments (who can blame you), but suffice to say one of their stated design goals is to make a game that "feels like D&D" (as opposed to a game that is good). This is unacceptably stupid for the largest publisher in the industry. It is stupid. Stupid.

Consequently, as one often does when confronted with a lump of charcoal where a steak is supposed to be, I said: "Shit, I could do better than this". So I've been taking some time and thinking about what is good about D&D and what is not good about D&D. And even in 4th Edition, the version of the game that will probably mark the game's last attempt to actually attract an audience beyond fedora-clad beardos, there are plenty of problems to be solved. So, fuck it. Let's make a game.

I know this is kind of a niche topic. Maybe less than a dozen of you on the board give a damn about tabletop RPGs at all, let alone the nitty-gritty of the underlying gears, but this is as much a way to organize my own thoughts as anything. Certainly your input is welcome, but if I don't get much input I won't precisely be shocked. And on the other side, if some of this stuff is obvious to you, forgive me.

What's the first problem with D&D? Well, probably numbers. The game has always been chockablock with pointless numbers going up and down thanks to 45 different arbitrary modifiers, and those numbers keep getting more and more inflated as you gain levels. There is little functional distinction between a monster that hits a 20-HP fighter for 5 damage and a monster that hits a 100-HP fighter for 25 damage, but that is exactly the sort of thing we see as the game attempts to provide an illusion of growth. At the far end of the spectrum, 30th-level 4th Edition characters will find themselves hacking away at monsters that possess over a thousand hit points. This is inane.

Let's reduce these numbers to what they really mean. A 1st-level 4th Edition fighter has a minimum of 15 hit points, to which their Constitution score is added to find their total starting HP. Assuming that the fighter uses point buy for his ability scores instead of rolling, he'll probably put at least a 16 in Constitution. So let's say your typical fighter has 31 HP.

A Xivort Slasher, a typical 1st-level monster, does 1d6+5 damage with their short sword (assuming they hit, but attack rolls are a seperate bugbear we'll deal with later). On average, that's 8.5 damage per attack. Our fighter — let's call him Chopchop Stabface — can, then, absorb about 4 attacks from the aforementioned xivort. The Xivort Slasher is a "Skirmisher" type enemy, average in all respects. Therefore, the underlying math expects Stabface to absorb about 4 hits, give or take, before he keels over or resorts to some kind of healing.

Here's the question: what are all those hit points actually doing for us? If Stabface can stand tall in the face of only four attempts at experimental surgery, then in a very real sense Stabface has only 4 HP — and the Xivort only does 1 damage. Still with me? Rad. So let's just formalize that: a 1st-level fighter has 4 HP. That sounds awfully small suddenly, but we already know that it works.

Wait.

What the fuck is an HP?

Well, it's a unit of... being-able-to-fight-ishness. This doesn't tell us a whole lot. We know that HP doesn't represent actual physical chunks of your body, because in most RPGs you're just as dangerous at 1 HP as you are at 100 HP. If 99% of your body had been hacked away this would tend to cramp your style a little. HP makes a lot more sense as an abstraction: the essential will to continue fighting. This way, the guy who keeps going at 1 HP is a lot more plausible. He's tired, yeah, and he's bleeding from six places, but this is important god damn it, so he stays upright. His head is ringing, but he holds the line because somebody has to. This also explains things like 4E's Warlord, which grognards hated because he could "heal people by yelling at them". That would be dumb if that's what it was supposed to be, but the Warlord makes a lot more sense if you assume he isn't healing jack shit: what he's repairing with all his yelling is morale.

So instead of calling it "hit points", let's call it "Endurance". Either Stabface can endure more abuse from the Xivorts or he can't. Saying someone has "4 Endurance" is still very abstract, of course, but everyone understands that "endurance" is an abstract concept. In 4th Edition, Stabface has a built-in "Second Wind" he can use to get back 1/4 of his HP (that is to say, 1 point of Endurance). Stabface knows the stakes, and he can talk himself up a little bit even without Gunnery Sergeant Sledgehammer around to help.

Of course, the greatest morale in the world doesn't actually knit broken bones. And broken bones, or poisoning, or severe burns — these things can fuck up your adventuring career pretty severely. Getting badly hurt ought to matter in the long term, even if you can fight your way through it with sheer stubbornness. And that second wind? Well, maybe it shouldn't always be an objectively good idea to stay in a fight when you're getting your ass handed to you. We'll find a way to make these things matter, but that's later. There are more numbers to contend with.

Next time: The empty meaninglessness of ability scores and the smoke-and-mirrors bullshit of to-hit rolls.

Currently Playing: The Knife - I Take Time

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May 27, 2013 - 06:27 AM
Monday/Tuesday


Shade begins the day with, apparently, the only food in the house: more burnt waffles. He regrets this decision immediately.



But no need to worry. This is a problem that can be solved by science.



The others slowly begin to rouse from their benchnaps and wander home. Some drive. Some are escorted by contemptible, incompetent taxi drivers who will get not a shilling from Tritoch this day!



His breakfast, too, is a revolting disappointment. Many will rue having crossed him.



Tritoch's day is brightened slightly when Hyde suddenly proposes marriage, but it's not to be: Tritoch will not be swayed from his dedication to polygamy.



Though the benches helped, in truth they were not very restful. Most of the house returns to bed to sleep away the afternoon. With little else to do, Shade visits the bookstore.



No sooner has he made his purchase than the clerk informs that infinite books can be had at the library. Surely this repository of eldritch tomes will hold the key to the Breakfast Problem. He sprints as fast as his legs will carry him. He sprints toward wisdom.



Once he gets there, though, he just spends hours reading "The Adventures of Raymundo".



Shorty awakes in the twilight hours to find the rest of the house still dozing. One can but guess if her attack of nausea is due to her steady diet of leftover waffles or the disorientation caused by constant texture pop-in.



(A brief aside: here's everything they found in dumpsters the night before. I'm not quite sure what to do with all of it.)



With the spectre of malnutrition hanging over them all, Shorty makes a plan. She'll go to the grocery and get some proper food.



In practice, she just buys a lot of apples and grapes.



One of the clerks, just ending his shift, follows her outside for a scintillating discussion of blue men.



But the blooming friendship dies on the vine when he creepily insists on discussing blue men's sleeping habits. That's their business.



Completely unable to discern her contempt, he goes in for the hug. Or just makes a poor attempt at doing the robot. Either way, Shorty is horrified.



Spotting a blue man down the street, she commiserates with him about the clerk's bad manners and ugly shoes.



Their shared contempt for sneakers lights a fire in their hearts. It's love.



Back at the ranch, Philia meanders outdoors and serenades the various captive beetles with a little melody.



Shade has learned nothing, and will probably need a bandage for that hand.



Shorty what are you... Shorty. Shorty stop that.



"Her songs... so beautiful in their awful dissonance. I could teach her, but it would spoil the delicate innocence of her total incompetence. I must watch her from afar, pantsless and ashamed", Hyde said, baldly. He continues to leer at her awkwardly as the sun rises.



When Shorty finally returns home, the confidence granted by her encounter with the blue man has faded away. She looks in the mirror and sees only a toilet.



Tired of eating waffles, Hyde makes something new. Something untried. A dish that will change everything about the way they eat. He makes pancakes.



Philia might be pregnant with some kind of squid demon. Maybe. Maybe not. It's probably fine.



Philia thought she was sick of waffles, sure, but you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone, am I right? She keeps her eyes locked on Dubble's plate until every last morsel of waffle has vanished.



Out on the balcony, OO continues work on his painting while Term asks him extremely tactless questions about evading the border patrol.



Tritoch goes out among the dumpsterites to greet them. These shall be his new subjects. His soldiers against the thoughtless horde of bad taxis and awful cooks that assault him daily.



Without consulting anyone else, Term calls a bunch of locals over for a party. If Hyde doesn't like it he can just deal with it, honey.



Everything's ready for the party: food, music, park benches that Shorty somehow brought home in her pocket. It's time to celebrate. A man doesn't get many chances in life to do the Crosswalk Boogie.



Alarmed by the prospect of strangers coming to eat her apples and grapes, Shorty quickly begins burying them in the yard.



The guests begin to arrive, and promptly begin jogging in circles in the driveway. That's what the kids are into these days. Philia plays them a little jogging music.



"My god, they're everywhere. Only... a few more... grapes... lettuce? When did I get lettuce? Bury the lettuce."



This insolent countertop is defying Tritoch's rightful rule. Who do you think you are, countertop? Nobody even puts anything on you, that's how useful you are.



Rychord spends most of his time at the party finding fat girls and saying catty things to them about their dancing.



OO's not feeling social, so he remains upstairs, putting the final touches on his masterwork.



Et c'est fini! The Back Of That Weird Girl's Head, estimated value: $14.



Temari and Shade share a dance, but it goes awry when he gets a little handsy. "Deal with it" is not an appropriate explanation for this sort of behavior.



The Loneliest Salmon, a portrait of the artist as a hungry man.



Placing greed before dignity, Lurker begins consorting with the future Lawn King. When he falls in battle, these beetles and dishwashers will all be hers.



As the afternoon wanes on, the party starts thinning out. Shorty's emergency caches remain undisturbed.



Lurker what are you doing—



Lurker that's not plugged in, you can't—



Oh god it's humming



Shadows lengthen as evening approaches. Temari keeps loitering around, uncomfortably close to the secret food cache.



Tritoch's attempts to bend the indoor appliances to his regal will go poorly.



Go home, Temari.



Shade attempts to drive her away with ungulate-based insults...



She responds only by caressing his "yeti-like, yet surprisingly silky" stubble.



Shade doesn't have to tolerate this kind of harassment. If someone tries to touch him in a place or in a way that makes him feel uncomfortable, that's no good. It's his body; no one has the right to touch him if he doesn't want them to.



But a little violence won't drive Temari away. Long after the rest of the party guests have departed, after the legitimate residents of the house have retired to bed, Temari remains. Dancing. Eating pilfered salads.



Then vomiting up pilfered salads.



Go home, Temari.



Seriously.



Get outta here.



Go home!



GO HOME, TEMARI

Currently Playing: Just a few hundred thousand more hours of GoI, you know how I do

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May 17, 2013 - 01:21 PM
Sunday.
huakrkgrk


The day gets off to a great start when Dubble traps Tritoch in the bathroom for two hours by threatening him with a rolling pin.



The paperboy arrives, and loiters on the property for quite some time, staring dead-eyed into the distance.



Philia and Dubble's attempt to enjoy a little chess falls through when Tritoch beats them to the punch.



Dubble has a solution, though.



Hyde's attempt to bake pastries goes awry when the oven converts the food into a miasma of Sadness Gas.



This doesn't stop Invisible Shorty and Unstable Shade from tucking in, though.



Eventually, everybody gets in the car for a trip to the art museum. Do not question where the other six passengers are. Do not question it.



The art museum is a terrible place. The sight of a chair sends Tritoch into a giggling fit.



Shorty attempts some kind of awkward shoulder throw. The results are less than ideal.



I'm not an expert on museum etiquette but I think this is probably inappropriate.



"After 10,000 years I'm free!"



"Time to conquer the restroom."



It's getting late, but there's still time to catch a matinee showing of They Came With Tweezers. It's only a block away from the museum, so everybody sprints to the theatre. Except for Hyde, who calls a taxi. Because those shoes aren't cheap.



After the movie, Dubble tries to sell some his Patented Dumpster Sushi to Rychord. Rychord doesn't eat without his pants, though. It's a rule.



When Philia's impulsive dumpster dive behind the theatre uncovers an outdoor grill and a lump of meteoric iron, Tritoch starts putting together a business plan.



It's only a matter of time before her finds fail to satisfy him, however, and he takes the diving into his own hands. Perhaps more alarmingly, a queue is forming.



Meanwhile, OO fails to enslave Term into eternal servitude with his Super Happy Mind Powers.



Sensing that things were going to get weird, Shade gets back to the house. It takes a while, because some prankster has replaced his tires with octagons.



The rest of the group whiles away the night taking turns with the dumpsters. Several rare insect species are collected, as well as an office chair. Philia serenades them all with a lovely garbage song.



Hyde somehow teleports home, only to find no dumpsters there. His complaints are ceaseless.



Before long it's 6 goddamned AM, and everyone's starving and exhausted. Rather than go home, they all decide to nap on convenient benches.



Except for Shorty, who vomits and then passes out in a shrubbery.

Currently Playing: This game is 4 years old and it runs like shit on a 4-month-old PC

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May 14, 2013 - 12:26 PM
Saturday.
Kind of hungry


The meet's just started, and there's already a certain amount of tension. Shorty schemes about how best to transform Philia into a bench.



For his part, Dubble is haunted by the terrifying specter of death.



Hyde tries to comfort him with a little gardening talk...



But the conversation is cut short when Hyde realizes he's covered in beetles!



The cost of such a fine bed reduces Shade to tears, even without knowing about the radioactive waste Term has stashed beneath the pillows.



Once everyone's done being amazed by the existence of beds, OO tries his hand at a little portraiture. Maybe he's not the greatest artist. Maybe Philia isn't the easiest model to work with.



Shade realizes he forgot to have his mail forwarded. A cold, lonely week without the comforting embrace of pizza coupons.



Furious, he denounces Tritoch as some kind of blue... mud ball... thing. Guy. Lurker what are you doing, you're not in this LP. Get out of here.



Hyde, Philia, and Dubble slowly circle the house, desperately trying to play catch with one another but never quite managing to find each other.



Eventually the Mystery Of Catch is solved, and Lurker is left alone with no one but an empty mailbox to keep her company.



Shorty and Dubble express diametrically opposite reactions to Tritoch's invitation to chess.



Term agrees to play, but he isn't interested in penny ante. He'll play your chess game, but if he wins? Your grandmother's ashes.



After a long and hard-fought match, Tritoch shamefully resigns. His ancestors are disgraced. Shorty continues hanging around to shriek encouragingly as Term practices alone.



Stop eyeballing the UI elements, Shorty.



OO collides directly into Tritoch as he leaves the table.



He explains his clumsiness with a lengthy diatribe on matters astronomical. Tritoch seems to accept this.



Meanwhile: Hyde enjoys the Loneliest Salad.



His extremely subtle pouting eventually brings most folks to the table, though.



Attempts to distract Term and Shorty from the rigors of Chessmastery fail due to a poorly thought-out football analogy. No, Hyde. Tomatoes are not the "field goal of foods". What does that even mean?



Dubble has taken the last of the ranch dressing. Tritoch's heart shatters like delicate crystal.



Knowing that everyone saw his amazing portrait work, OO shares with them... the secrets of art. Secret 1: Get a brush.



Don't just shove the paint up your nose. That is not art.



Dishwashing is also not art. It is a science, cold and merciless. OO's delicate artist's heart cannot understand.



Term and Shorty end up eating alone as everyone else retires to bed. Term attempts to make small talk about politics, but Shorty just stares past him, indifferent. Thanks, Obama.



Currently Playing: Oh nothin' much

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Apr 29, 2013 - 02:56 PM
It's nearly May, and time for a pre-Meet tradition.

YouTube Video


Currently Playing: Heh!

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Mar 9, 2013 - 07:08 PM
I got two tickets to paradise.
YouTube Video



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