Character Generation: How Much is Too Much?

Here's a look at my game development woes. Complications like these are part of what makes adapting something simple like Swords and Wizardry or the Black Hack to a unique setting so appealing!

While the playtesting for my 3D System is going well, I have run into what might be a snag with the character generation section. The graduated success mechanic using 3D6 that relies on the interaction of six attributes and 12 skills has turned out to be intuitive and robust in play, but the system I created to generate those attributes and skills has me worried.

For a variety of reasons, I integrated the character generation with the setting. It worked well with the small playtest setting for the Archipelago in Island Crashers. Going through the process delivered the assumptions of the setting to new players without spamming them with text they didn't want to read. It took ten minutes to create a character rolling randomly and about twenty minutes to use the generation tables like a flow chart and choose everything.

For the Island Crashers playtest character generation takes up ten pages of a google document and 35 small tables on spreadsheets. The process of moving through them is intuitive and easy. Brand new players are having no trouble with it even though no one has taken the time to read the rules first. Each area of origin has its own background that informs the basics of the character. These areas also have unique tables with some starting careers more likely than others. The tables themselves tell the player a bit about where their character is from.

Good thing character generation only takes ten minutes!

I'll use a more familiar setting to make the idea clear. Say you were using this system to play in Robert E Howard's "Conan the Barbarian" setting of Hyboria. Characters from Conan's homeland of Cimmeria would have basic survival skills they learned growing up in an uncivilised area. They also would get a boost to their physical attributes because their life makes them harder than the civilised peoples. The possible starting careers for characters from Cimmeria would include things like blacksmiths, barbarians, hunters, bandits, leather-workers and maybe druids. The kingdom Conan eventually conquered, Aquilonia, would have a table of starting careers that includes nobles, merchants, soldiers, courtiers, servants, thieves, priests and wizards. A place of ancient corruption like Stygia would have a table of starting careers filled with sorcerers, priests, sages, slavers, thieves and slaves. The flavour of each of these lands is evident in the choices provided.

That's what I'm doing with my setting for the larger game that is using the working title of: "The Last World." The problem is the Archipelago is a small cluster of islands. Even Hyboria is only an area the size of Europe and the Mediterranean! The Last World is huge in comparison, with all kinds of different areas! These areas aren't heavily defined, with the implied setting leaving room to develop them through game play, but each country and some major cities have their own tables. I'm only about a third of the way through the character generation section for the places of origin and I already have 26 pages of briefs and tables in my document. The descriptions of the playable creatures document is another 9 pages long! I haven't even started on the tables of general career progressions. I'm worried about it being unwieldy, but I want players to be able to start as nearly any creature or culture they could encounter in the Last World and move through a plausible list of careers to create a viable character with a developed past and a list of useful equipment.

Shopping for equipment is the time-killer!

The point is to create characters similar in power to what you'd find in levels five through seven in OSR-type games. Like Traveller's character generation, the process creates a competent character with a background story that makes sense. I find the most fun in old school campaigns happens around those levels, but the early levels help define the character's development and flesh out their personality. That's another reason I make a ten minute game out of character generation. It delivers setting information to new players and creates a backstory for the character that will help a player choose how to play in a way that makes sense. It also anchors them to the world with their past.

In playtest it's worked well so far, but I'm worried all the flipping back and forth thought the tables in the larger setting will kill it. A PDF could be cross-linked/bookmarked, but using a book might become unwieldy. I was hoping to get this all into an A5 (digest size) hardcover!

So how much is too much? Does it matter that there are pile of pages to flip through as long as character generation stays around ten to fifteen minutes? Do the benefits outweigh the drawbacks in any event? I feel like the only way to find out is to finish it all and play using the full setting.



If any of this stuff intrigues you and you want to be part of the larger playtest for the #3DSystem , let me know!

Review: The Black Hack

To say that I'm late to the party with this review is a bit of an understatement. When The Black Hack Kickstarter funded back in February is was a mere blip on my social-media radar. I looked at it briefly, thought, "Ugh, a roll-under mechanic," and "Do I really need another retro clone?" then moved on. What I can say now with no reservation is it deserved a closer look.

As the year progressed multiple genre-Hacks using David Black's "The Black Hack" as a base cropped up. It wasn't until I saw what Mike Evans over at DIY RPG Productions was doing with his own sword, sorcery and super-science genre hack called Barbarians of the Ruined Earth that I decided I had to pay the Two US Dollars to get the PDF and find out what all the fuss was about.

I get it now! I understand not only why people love this version of tabletop fantasy role-playing, but also why it has spawned so many of its own hacks!

It is described as: "The most straightforward modern OSR compatible clone available."

It's a bold claim, but it has merit. The game fits comfortably into twenty A5 (half-letter-sized) pages, including the cover, acknowledgements page, Open Game Licence and character sheet. That means the game only uses sixteen pages to explain how to play.

With a core mechanic based on rolling under character statistics, the rules are clear and for the most part easy to understand. The writing is straightforward and economical. As a former journalist and a parent with little time to read rulebooks, I appreciate David Black's tight writing.

There is no art beyond the cover, but the layout and design is clean, with good use of white space and easy-to-use tables. It has two columns per page for most of the book. The typeface used for the body text is a standard serif font, offering no distractions or obstructions to reading. The headings and titles all use the distressed sans serif typeface you see on the cover. I like this particular choice as it embraces the "quick and dirty" nature of the rule system. The effective headings, bolded text and good use of white space makes it easy to reference the book for specific information despite the lack of page numbers.

The best use of white space is on the four pages of character class descriptions where each class gets its own page with a single column running down the middle of the page. This gives a special emphasis to these pages and leaves room to make notes around the text in the huge margins. It also allowed me to print out a few character sheets with the rules for each class on the back.

The rules themselves surprised me in their simplicity and flexibility. The core mechanic involves rolling under the relevant stat for any given action on a twenty-sided die (D20). Since stats are rolled on three, six-sided dice (3D6) player characters all start with a good level of competency. The balance of power from the difference between the levels of the player characters and the Hit Dice of their opponents (monsters) creates bonuses and penalties to combat rolls. The advantage/disadvantage mechanic that is a big part of the success of 5th edition D&D is also used to maintain the power balance and protect the specialisation of the different classes.

The rules are a solid blend of old school simplicity with modern improvements. The system simplifies resource tracking with the usage dice that also creates an unpredictable element to resource management. There is a six-item death-and-dismemberment style table for characters who are knocked "Out of Action." The sundered shield option to sacrifice a shield to escape damage is included as well. Encumbrance is streamlined with obvious penalties.

One interesting mechanic is how the players do almost all of the rolling, similar to Monte Cook's Cypher System. The player rolls under their relevant stat to attack and again to avoid attack. Because of this change, armour provides extra hit points instead of making it more difficult to be hit.

I didn't like it the first time I came across the idea of class-based weapon damage, but here it serves to eliminate the pages of weapon lists that you see in other clones while still having some variability in damage. I like how it assumes that fighters are more dangerous with weapons than other classes. It certainly makes sense when you look at fantasy fiction. Conan is just a deadly with whatever weapon he picks up and Fahfrd names all his swords "Greywand" because they do the same thing. The addition of the unarmed/improvised damage by class is smart. It means a balanced weapon of war like a spear or sword is going to be more effective than a chair leg or shield bash.

Spells are handled in a way I think will see more use of utility spells at lower levels. The player starts with the spell slots you see in most OSR clones, but the slot only expires during casting if the player fails an Intelligence roll. The total of spells memorised is restricted by level so players need to decide what they want to have prepared for fast casting and what they'll be pulling out their spellbooks for. It feels like the ritual casting option in 5e D&D without being so finicky. Also, this design choice creates uncertainty in the resource management of spells. If anything should be uncertain, it's magic!

The spell lists themselves are short, with single line descriptions filling one page each for divine and arcane spells. This is another good choice. Reading the spells I find the shorter descriptions far harder to misinterpret and stretch to irrelevant purposes than the longer ones of other clones and editions of D&D.

The monster entries are also almost always one-line per creature. Since they only roll damage, that, their hit dice and any special attack or defence is all you need. The list is two pages long and has creatures from one hit die up to twelve. With these examples, conversion of any other monsters should be no problem.

Player character progression by level is a nice innovation that works with the core mechanic. The player rolls a D20 for each stat and raises any stat they roll over by one. Each class has at least one stat which they roll twice for. Besides that each class also has a hit die that they roll for more hit points.

The game only has four classes including Warrior, Thief, Cleric and Conjurer. These four cover the basics and leave plenty of room for meaningful differences between party members. There are no rules for different fantasy races, but if you need them in your game it's not difficult to add them. With such a simple system, bolting on extras will be half of the fun!

That is why we see so many genre-based hacks of this system out there. The system is so straightforward and simple it would take some serious effort to break it. While reading the rules I came up with three genre hacks I'd like to do with it myself!

The example of play is one of the better ones I've seen. A player could read that one page and grasp almost the entire system.

I'm not surprised the game is picking up momentum. The Kickstarter had 604 backers. I don't know how many PDFs have sold since then, but The Black Hack community on Google Plus has 810 members as I write this review, implying it is only gathering more fans.

Still, the game is not quite perfect. I would change a few things that I don't like.

The cleric has a spellbook. This choice is not terrible mechanically, but for the sake of flavour I would call it a prayer book and refer to casting divine spells as performing miracles. It would create better separation between the cleric and conjurer.

The conjurer spells have "read languages/magic" as a third level spell. I'd put that back into the first level list and add "fly" to the third level list. Before I run this system I might come up with a streamlined version of the "summon" spell from Lamentations of the Flame Princess as well. If I can get it down to two A5 pages I think I'll slip it into my copy.

Armour points are used up during combat, but return after a short rest. Shields are included in this rule. I think shields should be persistent in their effect. I would give a character a bonus to their level for the purpose of defending against attacks from monsters of plus one for a small shield and plus two for a large shield. That way a first level character attacked by three hit dice monster could roll without any penalty to avoid getting hit instead of the plus two penalty for fighting a more powerful monster. The persistence would make shields particularly useful and would make the choice to "sunder a shield" to avoid damage a harder one to make.

Fighters get one attack per level every round. That is way too much rolling in combat for my taste. I like the speed provided by this system and after third level the fighter player would grind every round to a halt during his or her turn while rolling hits and damage. I'd replace this ability with the ability to use shields offensively against more powerful monsters so they get the bonus levels when attacking as well. I'd also allow fighters to roll to hit with two-handed weapons without the plus-two penalty. Those two changes should protect them as the most effective characters in any combat without putting the rest of the party to sleep every round.

Overall, these are small things and likely have as much to do with my gaming taste as anything else.

For two bucks this game is a steal! I printed my PDF out as a booklet on five sheets of paper. This thing will go into my bag for every face-to-face game I play. I'll probably put a small notebook in with it with some quick adventure generation tables and class-based equipment lists so I can use this game as a quick replacement if some players cancel at the last minute.

I think the best use of The Black Hack is probably introducing new people to fantasy RPGs. Its blend of old-school flavour with modern mechanics is a great doorway into the possibilities of tabletop role-playing. Its simplicity means no one is left behind and there's way less of the, "What am I rolling now?" and more, "I do X!"

Well done David Black!

RPG Adventures in Space and Time or, Dogs in the TARDIS

It never ceases to amaze me the depth of creation in the world of RPGs. There are rules and  systems created for virtually every kind of play and to cover every eventuality and possibility at the table somewhere. The result doesn't always match the intention and sometimes you get the perfect system to play one game already completed in another.

Licensed properties are a special case because every time a new company acquires them they need to update the rules system to be consistent with their own brand, differentiate it from an older version of game or capture an aspect of the intellectual property the new designers think is more important than others who have worked with the same fiction.

Few intellectual properties exemplify all of these circumstances better than Doctor Who. There are a host of games out there for it with Cubical 7's version as the currently available, award winning choice. I haven't played Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space but I've heard some great things about it. The fact is I live in Canada and it's produced in the UK. Between the high price of everything in the UK and the cost of shipping from there to here the total cost of the thing is just too much for me. Lucky for me I already have a set of rules on my hard drive that will work with Doctor Who quite well.

"Doctor Who Space Travel" by David Hoffricther

D. Vincent Baker released Dogs in the Vineyard back in 2004. Since then countless people have used it to play religious cowboys going from town to town to root out evil and get into gunfights with sinners. Baker says he created the conflict resolution mechanics to create tension in social situations because, as a GM, he felt he was allowing his NPCs (non-player-characters) to agree with player character requests far too often. His solution to that problem gave us a game that fits the feel of the conflict you would find in a typical episode of Doctor Who.

Conflict in Doctor Who usually involves talking, running and getting captured. The running in particular has drawn attention over the years but in the newer series it is something writers have embraced and really, well, run with.

Cubical 7 uses initiative to encourage talking and roleplay over going straight to violence. The order of action places weapons use last and talking first so weapons are downplayed as a tool for players and allow the better play to keep the players one step ahead of the violent, oafish NPCs. It fits the feel of the series well as characters always have a chance to say something or run away before they are killed by the bad guys. It also explains why Captain Jack never actually uses his wonderful sonic pistol and Leela never gets to stab anyone.

Despite the fact that Cubical 7 clearly has a good handle on Doctor Who as an RPG, there's a few reasons why I think Baker's game is well suited to play a Doctor Who style RPG campaign. Dogs in the Vineyard's conflict resolution system works on a process of escalation that typically also begins with talking and moves upward as characters resort to other means to add to their dicepool in order to win the conflict. The emphasis on talking to open any interaction compliments the material the same way as Cubical 7's initiative system, but it's the way the conflict can end that really works. The dice pools are added to the conflict two at a time until someone has to use more than two to match the opponent's score (and suffers consequence because of it) or someone decides to Give.

The Give mechanic allows the character to avoid the consequences by accepting a loss of whatever was at stake. Accepting this loss allows the character to hold onto the highest die in the pool to use in the next conflict. In a Doctor Who game, Giving probably results in capture but that extra die is helpful in getting the big bad to explain the master plan and/or escaping.

"Yes, that sounds like a great plan. It's a good thing you didn't tell anyone about it."

A typical scenario would feature the Doctor uncovering an area in the basement that has a technology far beyond the period and locale the episode is set in. He starts prowling through the high-tech lair and is confronted by a Sontaran. That's bad news for the Doctor as he just figured out it was Sontaran technology and he has no way of warning his companions upstairs. The player knows talking is his strong suit but the Sontarans have a habit of escalating to violence so he just runs for it so he can warn the others and come up with a plan.

The conflict becomes a chase through the corridors of the secret base with the Sontaran shooting its big, honking space gun to get some extra dice. The Doctor is quickly outclassed in this conflict so he pulls out his Sonic Screwdriver to try to close and lock a door behind him and add 2d10 to his pool for this wonderful little item. The player locks the door well but holds his best roll (a 7) back in case the Sontaran has any tricks of his own. Turns out the Sontaran has a big, excellent explosive device in its equipment and makes short work of the door. The Doctor immediately Gives so he can keep his best roll (the 7) and have the advantage in the coming interrogation with the Sontaran commander of the secret base so he can find out what is going on and hopefully get away back to his companions upstairs.

Giving certainly fits in well with Doctor Who, but what about the consequences mentioned earlier when the stakes are too high to stop? That tends to happen quite a bit in the new series. The Fallout could be the loss of an important item. NPCs can fall into that category and we can see a high body count in the odd episode where the stakes are particularly high. If things get too rough the Doctor might be injured and forced to regenerate. That means new character generation and maybe a conflict of its own. For a Companion maybe it means being left behind or traumatized to the point they can't travel with the Doctor any more.

The raise and see conflict resolution with escalation is a great system for a Doctor Who RPG, but what about the rest of the game? The premise of Dogs in the Vineyard is a group of people wandering from town to town uncovering demonic influence and sorting out trouble. There's a system for town creation in the rules that helps keep things interesting and allows the GM to easily present a variety of challenges.

A game about a group of people wandering through time and space uncovering alien incursions and sorting out trouble is a pretty good description of Doctor Who. The actual locales that any given episode is set in is usually no bigger than a town so that's not a problem. The town-creation system would need some tweaks to make it fit Doctor Who but with all of time and space to choose from it should be easy to come up with an exciting variety of challenges to keep a campaign rolling for years.

For character generation all the cultural stuff from the game can be tossed out but relationships certainly continue to be useful. Family seems to get dragged into conflict in the new series often enough and certainly the relationship between the Doctor and the Companions should be worth some big dice. The Doctor is at his most dangerous when one of his companions is in mortal danger and certainly they have been full of surprises when he needs help.

Character creation in Dogs in the Vineyard also includes playing out a conflict as part of the character's background. I'd modify this conflict to always be about how the companion met the Doctor. For the Doctor it should be the theft of the TARDIS.

For my campaign I'd likely have another renegade Timelord, like the Doctor, as the PC that drives the TARDIS and gathers the rest of the party, rather than have the players playing the actual Doctor and his companions. A "Doctor's" name is as menaingless as the Doctor's so it makes sense for them all to take a title such as Head, Traveller, Professor, Elder, Inspector or even Doctor (just not that Doctor).

Honestly, it fits so well I'm surprised I haven't seen a Dogs in the TARDIS hack before now. It's not like there aren't a good number of Dogs in the Vineyard Hacks to use as guides. I'll have to put this on my list. Message me if you do it or find another one first!