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!

Dangerous Magic in Fantasy Gaming

I started reading the Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock just before Christmas. The magic in the stories and some other things that have come up while gaming has me re-evaluating magic in fantasy RPGs.

Back in the days of 1e and 2e D&D, when I played a magic user I would bend spells until they broke. I found ways to use spells that had little to do with their original intent but worked within their description. I drove GMs nuts with my descriptions of how my characters were using the spells because they'd would constantly need to make a ruling on whether it would work out the way I wanted or not. Things like casting an Enlarge spell on a wooden door in a stone frame so it would shatter as it grew too big for the space it was in, or casting a Knock spell to unlatch all the buckles on the enemy's platemail.

The newer games have either nerfed the spells or created far more explicit descriptions that don't allow for these interpretations of effects. That's progress I suppose.

I recently found myself exercising those old creative muscles again in a Fifth Edition game I'm playing. We're well into our second year of play and my Warlock hit 9th level. That means she can summon Elementals now. When I saw that ability as one of many on the menu to choose from at 9th level I thought about the Elric stories and all the things I could get an Elemental to do during the one-hour duration.

Now I look at the abilities of the different elementals and figure out what kind of things I can do with them. The reaction of horror from the other players when my character commanded an Earth Elemental to drag an opponent into the ground and leave him there was something of a surprise. I figure a Warlock has the moral flexibility necessary to bury imaginary bad guys alive.

Between the four kinds of elementals my character can solve a lot of problems. Combat and movement are two common ones. For instance, Air Elementals can carry your character through the air and blast your enemies. So much more fun than a regular Fly spell!

I've mentioned before that I'm working on my own fantasy game system and one of the priorities I have is to make the magic system more open. To design it to reward creativity and unconventional thinking. As wonderful as that is, it's taking a long time for me to test everything and make certain the game does all the things I want it to do (like be fun to play). Not to mention that a lot of people don't want to change their game even though they might like to bring what I'm talking about to their table.

The pulps that influenced the creation of the first RPGs leave their marks on the magic systems we take for granted now but the structure keeps magic safe and largely predictable. Magic was always a bit scary in those old stories. A good example of something that they brought into the structure is the creature from Robert Howard's first Conan story, "The Phoenix on the Sword," inspiring the Invisible Stalker spell. When you read Michael Moorcock's Elric stories though, they summon water elementals to create a fog to hide their navy or fire elementals to set fire to a town when attacking. They summon terrible creatures of chaos to get secret knowledge or help navigating the different dimensions. These creatures have their own agendas and goals. Sometimes negotiation is necessary and sometimes they simply oblige.

I know that Stormbringer has a magic system that works like this, but I don't play Stormbringer nor do I know anyone that does. What I think I need is an OSR/5e D&D compatible character class that uses magic from other creatures and does no magic other than summoning and binding them to the caster's will.

Using the Magic User/Wizard class as a base, we could get there pretty quickly. For whatever system you are playing in simply adopt all the hit dice, skills, weapon and armour restrictions, etc of the Magic User/Wizard class and swap out the spellcasting for summoning and binding magic that can be used any time.

"Summoner"
This piece is actually my own attempt at drawing. I'm hugely jealous of people who can illustrate their own blogs so I'm going to try to learn to do this. If you are interested in my journey in that department or you want to see the links to the reference model you can see it at DeviantArt

This makes it easy to drop the class into whatever game you are playing without disrupting the game balance as it exists. If you are playing LotFP you get a character that can use any weapons and armour, like the rest of them but the lower hit points and lack of martial manoeuvres balances out the magic abilities. In 5e, the proficiencies and characteristics fit the flavour created by that system and its assumptions about setting.

Although for 5e, it might make more sense to use the warlock as a base for a summoner class. Once I've tested it out it would be nice to see if it would work for an Eldritch Knight. Elric was a warrior first. He only summoned elementals for large scale effects or to save him from drowning. He fought for himself.

The magic of summoning should be accessible but dangerous. Since the entities often want to get to our world for whatever reason summoning them should be easy while the real challenge comes when trying to control the creature. I also like the idea that it gets more difficult to control new entities throughout a single day. That way there's a good reason to conserve the magic and use it only when it's needed. That escalating danger is a good reason for characters using this kind of magic to be universally feared by ally and foe alike.

I already have summoning magic baked into my own game and tests are going well so far. I'll be putting together an OSR Class for summoning soon, but since I'm playing mostly 5e and playtesting my original game I'll probably do one for 5e D&D first. If you beat me to it, send me a link!

Island Crashers!

Last month Brent Newhall threw up an impromptu Fantasy RPG design contest. There was only about two weeks to come up with an RPG that fit a list of parameters. He was tired of the same-old same-old in Fantasy RPGs. He wanted something without the standard tropes of Sword and Sorcery so the contest was to make a game without things that you'd expect to see: No swords, no dungeons, no guns, no boring monsters, no women in revealing outfits, no barbarians, no Vancian magic, and no elves/dwarfs/hobbits.

"Island" by Elbardo

Back when I first started the blog I mused about a mash-up between Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom and Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea settings. I never did anything with it before, but the more I thought about it the more it fit Brent's requirements. I had to lean it more toward Earthsea than I originally planned, since swords and the scantily clad are a big part of the Barsoom identity, but it would fit naturally.

With my setting decided and ten days left in the contest I cleared a few days to sit down and write. I have a scattered collection of hand-written notes for an RPG system that emphasizes fast, pulpy play that I've mentioned here before. I took that scattered mess, read through it, and then I wrote.

The 3D System is designed to facilitate the fast-paced pulpy play that I love. There is room to be creative as a player. Combat is usually decisive and brutal while having the robust quality needed to for the fight scene in The Phoenix on the Sword. Magic is freeform, making wizards almost as dangerous to partner with as they are to face if they overreach their ability.

"Ruins - Environment Sketch" by Jorge Jacinto

The character generation system is integrated with the system. If there is a weakness, this is it. Anyone who wants to run in their own home brew setting will need to adapt the character generation tables to fit their dream setting or rewrite them entirely. I plan to make at least one fairly generic version of the game that can be used for different settings but the implied setting is going to be baked in regardless. What could be a bug for some I see as a feature. In the process of rolling up a character a player should get a feel for the world that created that character. The character is a natural product of the setting and fits into it.

"Overgrown Temple" by Jorge Jacinto

The Island generator is also not as complete as I would like. I'll finish fleshing it out after the contest, but for now it has a lot of repetition and does not go to the 216 unique encounter entries that I originally conceived when I started it. There was not enough time to fill it out the way I wanted within the contest time but it will allow a GM to create a viable point-crawl on an island in 15-20 minutes.

"Turtle Island" by Khirono

The setting for Island Crashers is an Archipelago that is slowly sinking into the sea. The need for new land to settle sends explorers out into the blue for new island wildernesses to tame. Too bad they aren't the only ones interested.

I basically jumped on the contest to force myself to get the game into a playable form that I could share. I don't know how Brent will be choosing the winner or even when. The draft for Island Crashers is rough, but usable and the island generator should get you a couple of decent islands for your group. There are some subtle hooks to draw your party into intrigues in the Archipelago proper, but there's no reason why you can't start with something like that.

If you do take the time to read through the rules I'd like to hear what you think about it. If you actually give it a try, I'd love to hear how it went and what your thoughts are.

Thanks!

"Fantasy Island" by Peter Lee

#3DSystem

The Problem With Damage In RPGs

Role playing games feature many kinds of conflict but physical conflict is nearly always a big part of the game. With that comes the problem of tracking damage to Player Characters and its effects. I haven't written much about the system I'm developing here on the blog, but now that I'm ready to playtest the "3D System" that's going to change. Here's a look behind the curtain at my reasoning for how I dealt with the problem of damage in RPGs.

D&D and many of the games that came after it use the idea of: "Hit Points." A character or creature can take a certain amount of damage before it's mortally wounded and goes down/dies. Hit Points as an abstraction of a character's survivability causes some confusion since it's tied to weapon damage. The concept is more of an expression of script immunity and games like Neoclassical Geek Revival are more explicit about it by calling them luck points instead.

Hit Points as a concept are illustrated by the typical action hero movie. Action heroes take a tonne of punishment over the course of a typical film. They are banged up, bruised, cut and bleeding all over, but never seem to loose their effectiveness as bad-guy-killing machines. Sometimes a particular wound will have some kind of dramatic effect for a while, such as John McLean's feet cut up by the glass in Die Hard, or Jack Bauer's heart being stopped during torture in one of the 24s. Even these consequences for critical hits are not permanent, resulting only in a quick bit of first aid or an ill-timed, dramatic nap. As characters "level up" in an RPG of this type they gain more ability to stay in the story despite the negative impact of opposing forces. Basically, they are allowed to be heroic longer and have bigger adventures. It's only that last swordstroke that really gets through the character's defences that actually connects in a way that matters. The one that brings the characters down is the mortal blow that can put a character into coma or a fight for it's life.

The Fifth Edition of D&D embraces this model by allowing characters to recover some Hit Points merely by taking a break to rest and recover and get them all back with a good night's sleep. Barbarians of Lemuria is similar, allowing the recovery of half of what is lost in a combat merely by taking a break to have a drink and rest. If Hit Points are just a matter of staying power and not actual serious wounds, they should be easy to recover.

My favourite part of 5e D&D is the fight for survival after losing all Hit Points. Rolling saves to either stabilize in unconsciousness or die without help show how deadly that last hit was. Old D&D countered the massive hit points with some things like poison and magical effects like a Medusa's stare coming down to a single roll to avoid death. Fail that saving throw and the character is dead, no matter how many Hit Points they had. Even the greatest hero could be killed by a serious threat. A poison dart was all it took to kill Achilles after all.

Playing big damn heroes is fun, so this abstraction works pretty well for a lot of games but some of the genre fiction that these games are based on takes a grittier approach. The idea that you could take a beating and still be as effective as you if were fresh also requires more suspension of disbelief than some people want in their fiction or games.

Some games stick with the hit point approach and limit them to keep things tense. Games like Talislanta and Barbarians of Lemuria have hit point values for characters that allow the character to handle a few hits, but there is no expectation they will ever be tougher than that. Traveller, which I talked about in a recent post, uses a random physical stat as a stand in for hit points. These values are pretty low compared to the damage that can be done so combat is over quickly, usually going to whoever surprises their opponents. It also makes combat in Traveller a deadly prospect that players will want to plan with care. In these cases every combat has the potential to be the last one but there's no expiration of the characters like you get with the hit point model.

At least as characters run low on hit points the players become more wary and don't want to commit to a fight they might lose. Even the highest level characters are slowly run down by a succession of combats. This change is a way of mechanically expressing the exhaustion caused by life-or-death struggle and the change in play to a slower, more careful pace is representative of the effects of exhaustion without having a direct mechanic for endurance. It's also why the Constitution stat in D&D is used to modify hit points. The healthier you are the more staying power you have for fights, adventures and shenanigans.

(One of Frank Frazetta's many paintings of Conan)

Hit locations are sometimes used to create effects from damage beyond coma/death so characters could lose the use of an arm or leg and have penalties to actions instead. I find that annoying to track for NPCs and it gets even more silly than hit points when the luck of the dice spreads the damage of lighter hits across all the locations for no effect. This one has always felt fiddly to me and never worth the effort to track.

Hit points are a nice simple solution to express a complex situation. Even when people don't understand how much is going on it still works as a game mechanic. As much as I like it in D&D and other games, I don't want to use it for the one I'm designing. Because my game embraces the pulp feel where heroes are worn down but still succeed, I decided to make damage an increasing penalty rather than a ticking clock.

Part of the inspiration came from reading Robert E. Howard's Phoenix on the Sword [Spoilers! this paragraph only] in which an older Conan is set upon by a group of assassins.  Because he's Conan, they can't get around his defences to land a definitive killing blow, but they do wound him making it impossible for him to do much more than defend himself. As the minor hits and cuts pile up he slows down and becomes more vulnerable. It is an awesome fight with great tension! It would be so much fun to play that way! As damage makes the fight more desperate players get creative to end it quickly. When that happens it's more fun for me whether I'm playing or running.

The old D6 System from West End Games had a wound track with increasing penalties. This method worked great for the cinematic action they were going for with games like the original Star Wars RPG.  There are other games that use wound tracks and some of them integrate them into the game exceptionally well. Mouseguard is a great example. I have a lot of love for D6 Star Wars though, and the more I think of it, the more I realise it may be game that gave me the subconscious push in that direction when I was deciding on the damage system for the 3D System. The pace of the game and the pulp-cinema swing of the action are things I love in a game. I've said it before, D6 Star Wars only needs little tweaking to be a sweet sword and sorcery game itself. Based on the pedigree of the wound track, I'm confident it will fit the feel of the play I want at my table.

My take on the wound track is pretty simple. Humans and their equivalents have two boxes in their tracks that correspond to Wounded and Down similar to the Wounded and Incapacitated statuses in D6 Star Wars. In the 3D System each box ticked means another -3 penalty so that Down character is rolling -6 to do anything and is more likely to push too hard and wind up dead than succeed. Other creatures will have different tracks but this model is the character kind of resilience.

The wound track is not enough though. It still doesn't catch the flavour of the fight in The Phoenix on the Sword or the other pulp fiction I'd like my games to feel like. That's why I added minor hits. These light wounds are the flesh wounds and bruising that can be shaken off or ignored with a little rest and quick medical treatment. These cumulative -1 penalties can build up in a fight and make it hard to continue a fight without ever threatening the actual life of the character. First blood is a serious advantage.'

"It is but a scratch"

The difference between wounds and minor hits is the size of the penalty (-3 vs -1) and speed in which they are recovered. A proper wound will take time to heal whereas a minor hit can be recovered from with a roll after some rest and possible medical treatment. Rolling to recover means some of these light wounds will persist in hampering the character's ability. The timeline is tight, and it means the characters can continue on, but fate will catch up with them eventually if they push things too far. This system blends the grittiness of low hit points and would tracks with the limited endurance of the hit point system.

From what testing I've done in scenarios for my #3DSytem, it looks like will work. We'll see how it plays soon enough. There's no perfect solution to RPG damage, but I'm hoping this one works out for my gaming style.

UPDATE/NOTE: In playtest the wound track created a situation one of my players dubbed the "death spiral" where the advantage gained by one side or another allowed them to push the loser into ineffectiveness quickly. That turned combat into a situation where the two sides fought for the upper hand and once it was secured surrenders started. In one case a character that was wounded stepped away from the combat and tried to help in some other way because they were too wounded to continue.

I enjoyed the moment to moment consequence and the way it changed the flow of the game from the abstract hit point style combat. I've rarely seen surrenders happen in D&D because the bad guys might be only one HP from defeat. No one wants to give up. Because the flow of the fight is obvious to everyone involved, the fight to the death is becoming less likely in the 3D System.

Wargaming in 3D

Dissatisfaction with the current state of tabletop wargames is something of a recurring theme on the internet. People complain about how they don't like the new rules, the obsolescence of their minis, the necessity of buying the latest spat books, how constrictive the splat books are, and other ways the hobby is set up to milk gamers for cash. A recent Google+ thread rehashed all these issues and more.

Every time the conversation starts up I'm taken back to my beginning in the hobby in the 1980s. Back then, the only thing we needed to play was the rulebook. One rulebook full of options for building armies and manoeuvring them on the battlefield for epic battles.

I started playing with the third edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle from Games Workshop that my friends and I picked up at the local comic store. It wasn't long before the owner of the store was playing with us and then adding tables with terrain. Tabletop wargaming has only grown in Sudbury through the years since then.

When we started there were no restrictions on minis for "official play" or any of that nonsense. Any mini was a potential combatant. We used the GW minis because they were often the best available at the time but most armies included minis from Grenadier, Ral Partha and others. About the only thing holding the rag-tag forces together were fantasy race themes and uniform colours.

For our first games we didn't even use miniatures. We started out with coloured cardstock cut into bases. Even after we embraced the painting and modifying miniatures part of the hobby, it was still normal to see to cardstock minis with pictures or descriptions written on them fielded along side painted and unpainted miniatures.

Those early games were pretty wild. There were high elf armies fielding huge trebuchets, mixed forces that made no sense, and a list of other things that violated our assumptions about the fantasy setting the battles took place in. That all changed with the release of the Armies book in 1988. 

The Armies book had lists of troops that fit the theme of each race and rules for allied forces and hiring mercenaries. The flavour of the setting informed 

the rosters without throwing everything out of balance. For example, elves didn't have access to heavy artillery but they did have dragons. The restrictions gave each army its own specialities and strong points. It made the choice of forces more interesting than before. It did not stop us from using non-GW minis. If anything, our needs for cheap masses of things like wood-elf spearmen only increased with Armies book. As a joke I even fielded a tree from a train set with googly eyes stuck on it as a treeman miniature.

It feels like there were less rules back then and it made for more fun. The only real problem was the magic system. It was so random. There were spells in the lists that were battle-winners. The "Vorpal Hurricane of Chaos" could devastate an army and make it impossible to fight with anything other than long range missile weapons. 

The rules have changed over the editions. There have been so many editions of WFB and 40K, the biggest challenge when I play is remembering which of the rules in my head apply to the current game. The rules have improved a little but mainly it has tweaked things such as shifting focus back and forth from missile combat to melee combat. 

Certainly magic has gotten better since those crazy games in the 80s. I think the best version of magic was the one that used the card decks for the different kinds of magic and a power deck to represent the ebb and flow of magic on the battlefield. It made magic an important part to any strategy without allowing the game to turn on it. Almost all of the handful of spells available to a wizard would be useful. It was random without being stupid. 

Still, with the army splat books pushing the envelope farther with each release the special rules appear to escalate in a vicious circle. The last few editions have been less about improving the rules and more about wiping the slate clean to re-establish balance between the available forces.

The love affair with splat books probably came out of the success of the two Realms of Chaos books. These books are notorious for the amazing art and over-the-top craziness for content. Not buying these is my one regret from those days. I picked up Warhammer Siege which we ended up using well into the later editions, but the Realms of Chaos were something that Games Workshop never did again. They never pushed as far or as high as it did with those books. My friend had them and I read through their copies but didn't buy my own because I didn't play Chaos. Sadly, I had no idea what a rare thing it was to have dark fantasy explored so deeply and so well in game form. I could write pages about the art but it's all been said before elsewhere on the gaming blogosphere.

Despite all of the complaining, tabletop wargaming appears to be in something of a resurgence. There are more games to choose from now, with War Machine in particular taking some serious ground in the hobby. I even seen some reports of people playing H.G. Wells' Little Wars. I hear doom and gloom about Games Workshop, but the local store still sells a tonne of it and hosts multiple game nights filling all the tables so even the complainers are still playing it.

For me, what I really want is the excitement of those early games where the rules helped us have crazy fights on four by eight foot areas of carpet blocked off in chalk and covered in a mishmash of train set and fantasy terrain. I miss those loose games where fielding a model like a dragon could be a critical hard point in the battle line or an awful waste of points depending on how things came out with the tactics and dice.  I don't want to play the old game though. I still have the books but I don't want to use them because years of play has taught me a thing or two about how rules shake out at the table. My involvement with the OSR for RPGs has also convinced me that sometimes stepping back to earlier editions and then stepping forward in a new direction with the benefit of years of development can yield some awesome results.

The first time I encountered the complaining about GW was three or four years ago. I decided I could do better so I spent a few months designing a new wargame. I built in the flexibility to use a wide variety of miniatures and settings, from gonzo steampunk fantasy to historical re-enactment. That recent thread on G+ brought it back to me as something others might enjoy too. The first time I shared the playtest document I didn't have the blog as a reference point for development of it and it basically petered out as I became busy with other things.

For the dice mechanic it uses a variant of my 3D System. I always found the rolling of one die per mini (to hit and another to wound and then another for an armour save...) to be tedious. I understand that the large number of dice made chance less of an issue since the odds would wash out with more dice, but it makes for a slow game with unit fights taking too long. It means battles had to be fought between limited numbers of units if the players had any hope of finishing. To fix that I used rolls of three six-sided-dice totalled with all modifiers for each unit. One throw per side, per turn for each unit in combat speeds everything up and still mitigates the luck factor with the results curved on the three dice.

I've tested it a bit and the point spreads seem balanced so far. The rules have worked well enough for me but I haven't had much feedback from others on how their games went with it. I'm still not sure about the rules for flying creatures so I'd like to hear about how that's worked out in play for others. The magic system is pretty basic, but fits the rules-light system well. The magic makes the wizard models a flexible tactical piece that can affect the battle without turning the game in to a wizard's duel. Success seems a little difficult for larger effects though so I'm toying with lowering/removing some of the modifiers or dropping down the base target numbers for success. Again, any feedback about how it goes in play would be appreciated.

I'm attaching the link to the original playtest document. The game hasn't changed much from this original version. There's about 12 pages of actual rules here. The first page you can ignore. It's old text explaining what I was trying to accomplish with the game and contact info for feedback. The rest of it is a rough draft of the Open War Fantasy Battle game. Give it a try. Let me know about any holes or things that don't work in your games. I'm aware of the typos but I'd like know if the language is difficult to understand in any way. I had originally envisioned a pocket mod version of the game, but I don't see that happening ever. Too much detail would be lost.

So give the alpha version of Open War Fantasy Battle a whirl and let me know how it works out!

Thanks!

National Game Design Month?

I posted an image last November of the notebook I was using to write down the details of my RPG. By putting it out there on G+ I was making a promise to myself to finish it. November is as good a month as any and better than some for getting back on it.

November is a popular month for writing or at least starting a novel. A few years ago the creative action spilled over into game design and we got the National Game Design Month or NaGaDeMon. Last year I jumped in knowing I wouldn't be able to finish because I'm busy this time of year but hoping the momentum of a month-long press would get me far enough along to that I'd be able to finish eventually. That worked for a while and it looked like I was going to have a first draft ready by January. Then my life exploded in December and I dropped the game along with pretty much everything else.

By the spring I was almost back to normal and I started working on the game again. I started carrying the composition notebook that still said "NaGaDeMon 2013" on the cover with me everywhere and working on it when I could. I had a system where I would write large ideas that were fairly well organised in my head on the right hand pages and use the "backs" or left hand pages for shorter ideas that just came to me as I was going. Trouble started when I found myself writing on the left-hand pages as much as the right-hand ones as the game came too quickly put down neatly into one notebook. I solved that problem with the chromebook I got for my birthday which wasn't much larger than the composition notebook but allowed my to work on multiple sections at once. It was slow going though since summer is my busy season. Which brings me back to now. It's a year later and the game that has percolated in my head, changed and grown basically the entire time I have played RPGs is now so very close to being a playable thing that I could share with the world instead of merely a collection of ideas and experiences that inform my play and GM style.

Over the course of the month I'll be sharing bits of the game I have already and more as I write them. Feel free to comment on anything you like, don't like, or think could be better with a change. I'll be continuing with posts on other topics as well so if my game isn't your bag I'll still have content you might be interested in.

So what is this game I'm talking about? Why bother when there are so many games out there? I have a half-finished blog post on the go that mentions there are so many systems out there you probably don't need to reinvent the wheel to get what you want so what makes me think what I have here is worthwhile or remotely necessary?

I've always liked fast play. In recent years, the rules-light games with little in the way of rules to slow down the fun are my favourites. I've been playing since the early 80s and I started with those early rules-light games, then moved to newer, more complicated games but the wild speed of the retro clones and some of the new games are the ones that have me now. It could be that I'm old and my life is complicated enough that I don't want to spend time with the rules any more. I just want to play. Maybe I'm just lazy.

There are other games that come close to what I want but don't quite hit it. I like a possibility curve because it allows skill and talent to shine in an opposed encounter. I like a single die mechanic because the question "What dice do I use for that?" slows down the game for no good reason. I like six-sided dice because there's no barrier to entry since people can usually get (or even make) a set of normal dice without any trouble anywhere in the world. I like having a simple framework of rules to allow a GM to give a fair and consistent difficulty for the roll so players can try any action without consulting the rule book. I like to do things in the game and rolling dice is a fun part of that, but I like games with a single roll to determine both success and the amount of success. If I roll well to hit something it should do a lot of damage or something awesome. Two rolls are a hassle and can give silly results. There's nothing out there that has all of that and emphasizes the kind of play I love.

Enter the 3D System. It uses 3, ordinary six-sided dice rolling on a simple resolution table. One roll gives not only success but also the degree of success. It depends on the GM being fair and applying the rules consistently but gives a lot of leeway for players who come up with wild schemes on the fly.

Mediocrity is the most likely result unless some exceptional circumstances come into play. It's not hard to succeed, but it is difficult to excel. In combat that means minor hits are more likely than a decisive, fight-ending hit. When rolling to do other things it means you can get by but won't be able to get a grand effect without some talent or a mismatched contest coming into play. I'll expand on that in another post. This time around it's just the basics.

My game design process is all about boiling it down. I originally started with 15 different attributes. As I ran it through different scenarios in alpha testing I would often find that two attributes are equally relevant to the roll. Every time that happened I combined the two. Eventually I ended up with only four attributes to differentiate one character or creature from another: Acumen, Physical, Social and Will. When I moved from hard copy to e-documents these became: Acumen, Body, Charm and Determination. I think the ABCD will look cool on a character sheet and make it easy to remember.

For the skill section I had a similar epiphany of simplification. I started off with with skill groups kind of like what you would see in ZeFRS where expertise in one skill gives a basic ability in related skills. This seemed a little unwieldy for playtesing so I came up with a simplification that I may end up using long term because it speeds up character generation in huge way!

What I'm working on right now is character generation. I'm creating a flow that will allow PCs to grow out of handful of rolls or choices so players can be ready to go in ten or twenty minutes. I'm going with the simplified skills for now. Even if I return to the more detailed skill groups I may keep the simple method as a basic version of the game. I'll test them both out and see.

Once I have some character generation documents and the rough draft of the magic system I can playtest with me as the GM to see how it all feels in play. Once the initial bugs are out I'll be able to put together a more complete rules document and maybe a couple of sample adventures or conversion notes for existing adventures so I can see how it works for another GM.

So here it is, the beginning/continuation of my #NaGaDeMon adventure! Here's to another big push for my own personal fantasy heart-breaker! Hopefully this year I keep the promise to myself to finish it.