Running 5e D&D for Newbs!

I ran a game last night for a group of people new to tabletop RPGs because one of their kids got 5e for Christmas and they asked me to show them how it's done. One of the dads was also dying to play Since his older brother enjoyed it so much when they were kids.

Character generation was SLOW with so many new people and only two Players Handbooks. My girls are experienced old-school gamers but had never played 5e so even they needed to be walked through it. I was glad my eldest had decided to roll hers up ahead of time so she could help the boys with their characters.

The game itself went well! I had a few plot hooks laid out on the rumour table for after the party got into town. They spread some gold around the tavern and talked to the locals until they got an idea of what was nearby and decided to tackle an old-school dungeon crawl a couple of days from the town.

Not all of the parents were playing. At one point one asks: "So you're grave robbers now?"

The table answers: "No, were saving this stuff from the goblins!"

My daughters adjusted well to the new system. They used their heads well and got everyone thinking outside of the box and how to work as a team.

Darkvision came into play in an interesting way. They knew the goblins had it and were afraid of alerting them with their light so they had the stealthy gnome rogue scout ahead so they could avoid stumbling into ambushes.

They played it smart pretty much the whole time. They were cautious and avoided traps. They played their fights out with sound tactics and busted out spells and spell like abilities at good times. They also found the secret door with player skill rather than rolling dice.

They talked about how much fun they had had after the game and the little guy who got D&D for Christmas talked his parents' ears off the whole way home and then some.

For me it was a tonne of fun helping some more people into the hobby and satisfying to have my tomb/dungeon cleared out in a single session. These intro games are a blast and always surprising!

Wonder vs Weird

The idea of Wonder verses Weird is one I've struggled with for a long time.

Kiel Chenier of Dungeons and Donuts fame started a thread on G+ back in March of 2015. He was talking about how the OSR seems to be caught up in the pursuit of the weird. According to his post old school gaming seems to be reaching toward more uncomfortable material and going for the ick factor while chasing the weird. What he's looking for from a gaming experience is wonder. The feeling of being taken aback by a scene and momentarily stopped by awe.

Wonder is a great thing to aim for in gaming but it's much harder to achieve than weird. I'd say the two of them are solutions to the same problem with most fantasy RPG material.

The majority of fantasy RPG material made in the last 40 years is based on the tolkienesque assumed setting of Dungeons and Dragons. There are certainly exceptions, but most fantasy games have the humans, elves, dwarves and halflings defending civilization against the evil creatures like orcs and dragons. These games influenced and inspired writers in the fantasy genre, entrenching these assumptions as "traditional fantasy" in RPGs and all kinds of other media like books, films and video games.

This common ground certainly makes entry into the hobby a bit easier since there is so much less explanation required. An introduction can be as short as saying the game is just like whatever movie, TV show or video game the person is familiar with that makes use of the common fantasy tropes and that's it. One sentence explanation. That easy summary has it's advantages, but it saps a lot of the wonder that comes from exploring something completely new.

That's not to say there was never wonder in D&D. I can remember opening up my Mentzer Red Box in total amazement at the scenes and creatures inside. I've seen that same look of wonder when I used the old Basic and Expert books to see if my daughters would want to play an RPG. They were blown away by what they saw and excited to explore the new world it showed them. The points of light in the "known world" setting worked well in terms of developing that sense of wonder as well. Civilization was in small pockets, slowly expanding into a wilderness full of monsters, ancient secrets and wild wonders. It's important to note that when I first encountered D&D I had not read any tolkien or his imitators. My exposure to fantasy by that point was small. Mostly books by Ursula K LeGuin and "historical" fiction with fantastic elements. I also read every Greek, Norse or Celtic myth and legend I could get my hands on. The only fantasy films I'd seen were Excalibur and Legend. When it came to D&D I took it all in like I was starving. Soaking up the elements of  Vance, Leiber, Moorcock and even Tolkien with all the wonder my ten-year-old brain could muster.

I started this post while musing about introducing a couple of brand new players to the RPG hobby and dealing with the pretty serious problem when it comes to wonder. As uber-geeks who have consumed all the fantasy and sci-fi pop-culture can provide there is little in the D&D multiverse that they haven't been exposed to at least in some part before. They had their players' handbooks and they'd read them cover-to-cover. The game itself held a sense of wonder in that it was a new experience and they have nothing on which to base expectations. They knew it has rules so they can count on it being something, but they can't know what that something is until they've tried it out and become familiar with it. If role playing is the novelty then they are likely to jump from campaign to campaign, and game to game and ultimately system to system looking for that feeling again. We played for the better part of a year before life got in the way. There was wonder as they explored the world and tried different things. The fact there was no edge to the map, that adventure could be found almost anywhere as long as they interacted with the world it would present endless possibilities to explore.

When I started playing D&D, and when I start any new campaign, the wonder comes from the world itself. A world with its own set of rules can hold its own wonder. Learning those rules, exploring the world for more surprises can provide all kinds of fun. But the more the world conforms to expectations, the more the players need to delve into the edges and dark corners to find something new, something that has its own set of rules.

That's how games like Call of Cthulhu and Lamentations of the Flame Princess build the impact of the adventures. They don't even try to provide wonder in the setting. They've given up that fight as unwinnable and built their world into the shadows of the one we have here. That's the foundation of the weird. It disrupts expectations instead of creating new ones. It changes and tears at the rules and assumptions. It also tends to be terrible in some way. The weird revels in the tension it creates but it needs the mundane as a contrast. Tension needs the norm to pull against.

Wonder is something different. It doesn't need to be grounded because it does't rely on tension. Wonder inspires awe. Lovecraft did it with his Cyclopean columns in the ancient ruins of unknowable peoples. Carroll did it with the dream-time logic of Wonderland. Fantasy and sci-fi has always had graceful or delicate towers reaching into the sky and strange people with customs that need to be unravelled to be understood.

Goblins, orcs and elves present little mystery these days. Even the fresh takes on the old themes are grounded in the common expectations surrounding these common fantasy creatures. How do I inject wonder into these common themes without disrupting them so completely they become weird? Does the audience matter? How much do I add to the basic framework of goblins and kobolds for my new players? Am I merely creating uncommon expectations they will attach to familiar names only to have them disrupted by their next group? Is that even fair? It's probably not necessary to change things dramatically to get that burst of wonder. No matter how the world is set up the players will figure out its mysteries and make it "normal" for them.

I've also been running games for my kids and their friends with the Black Hack. They don't know the rules and have zero expectations. They are developing them as they interact with the world and explore. Wonder is easy as each new thing is amazing. I could leave everything bog standard D&D and they would eat it all up, but I've made changes. These things, like goblins hatching from a queen's eggs fully grown, they accept as part of D&D. No matter what they read in rulebooks later, goblins will have queens and their nests will be an HR Geiger nightmare with a bloated queen and egg pods everywhere. Those changes are for me, not them.

For someone new to tabletop gaming the smallest brush against a fantasy trope can create wonder. I rolled an encounter for them at night and had a dragon fly over their camp. They didn't fight it. Their characters couldn't even see it. It was a silhouette revealed by the stars it blotted out above, but it blew their minds to be so close to a dragon! They talked about it for months as that time they saw the dragon with the wonder written all over their faces!

For adults, wonder seems easier for something like science fiction. Planetary romance or space opera can move from planet to planet. Each new planetfall brings a fresh world with its own set of rules and consistencies that need not relate to any other the characters have visited before. Even hybrids like Vance's Dying Earth where the long past of the Earth lays shadows on the world so that any location could be out of sync with the campaign would the characters already know. I think that is the draw of games like Traveller or even the Planescape and Spelljammer settings of D&D. The perpetual need to explore, to figure out the rules of the current locale and the wonder they present.

Many of the small press fantasy creators focussed on the disruptive and weird in the past few years, but it's the stuff that captures a sense of wonder as well that seems to gain the most traction and be talked about in the most glowing terms. I think when people use words like "original" and "different," they are really talking about the sense of wonder they found reading or playing it.

The little products that snag ENnies and get talked about with such passion online are the ones that present worlds with new rules that create a whole new set of expectations through play. A few examples that spring to mind are A Red and Pleasant Land, Yoon Suin, and Veins of the Earth. All three of these present new worlds. The two LotFP releases straddle the weird by having entrances to the real/normal campaign world with a R&PL on the other side of the looking glass and Veins laying deep below the surface, beyond the deepest dungeon or mine. Yoon Suin is a place that can be entered by ship like the original Tékumel where your players need to figure out how things work and find a place in it. All three have their own systems for just about everything and incredible visuals that can deliver the wonder missing from the muddy roads linking the pseudo-european fantasy settings that have all started to look like New Zealand since 2001.

Maybe the audience doesn't matter. Maybe the need for wonder is my own no matter if I'm playing or running. I think for my next campaign setting I need draw inspiration from the crazy fantasy illustrations and paintings that have no limits like the work of someone like Moebius. Start with visuals full of wonder and build a fantasy world that makes sense with that.

Party Up Like It's 1976!

I played the original version of D&D, the one published in the little brown booklets back in the 1970s, for the first time last night. Even though I've played clones like White Box Swords & Wizardry the old game presents a unique experience.

We were using the reissue PDFs Wizards of the Coast released a few years ago. Those versions were cleaned up with a better typeface but they still use the same layout and art that the original booklets had. I thought we were going to stick to the first three books with the core classes of the cleric, fighter and magic user. One player wanted to play a thief, another wanted to play a druid and I don't see the point of standing in the way of a player's fun while DMing so we added the class info from books 4, 5 and 6. For quicker reference I was using one of the fan made single volume versions with a better layout and art. It included some rules from Strategic Review like grappling to fill in the odd blanks as well.

We needed to dip into Greyhawk for the thief class and the rules for the druid class is spread out across Greyhawk, Blackmoor and Eldritch Wizardy!

Character generation went well. Everyone rolled a good spread of abilities with some 15s and 16s balancing out the odd 4 and 7. When it came time to roll hit points everyone rolled a 1. All of them! The fighter starts with +1 to their hit die, so she ended up with 2 and the druid had a 15 Constitution so he also added +1 for a total of 2. The thief was out of luck with only one and refused to name his character until second level. When asked he called himself Thief. This led to some odd roleplaying, but he insisted that he was named that way because everyone from his culture was named after a calamity of some kind to keep them safe from it.

In play the old rules held up. As well as the rules work in play though, the organization is a total mess. It was clearly a "make it up as we go along" project over the two years the books were published. I'll be adding tabs to the pages I need the most before the next game!

Combat was easy to run, and with everyone doing 1D6 damage it made for some creative maneuvers rather than strategic weapon choices. One of my favourite moments came when our the player with the fighter said: "Damage is always 1d6 right? So it doesn't matter if I hit the goblin with my sword or smash him into the tree with my shield?" New DMs, the answer to 'can I smash the goblin into the tree with my shield' should always be yes!

Strategy featured high as the players used hit and run tactics to keep the advantage over their foes. Surprise is a great advantage and easy to achieve if you plan for it. Without the hit points to take a hit and keep fighting they planned for it!

For all their clever tactics, the group didn't manage to do much in the way of adventuring. Being afraid to take anything on in a straight up fight left them unable to commit to entering the only dungeon they found.

Most of the first session was spent getting the lay of the land and roleplaying in the town serving as the centre of the campaign. They started by entering the frontier town called Swan's Landing by river barge. They spent some time gathering and verifying the rumours they dug up and made a quick foray into the woods on the eastern shore of the large lake called the Deepwater to raid the goblins they heard were there. After surviving that they felt they needed to find some magic. That led them to track another adventuring party across the Serpent River to the west that disappeared about a week ago. Player skill made the difference here as they asked around and found someone who saw where the other party entered the woods so they could pick up the trail easily. Their other option was to accept a Geas from the local wizard and they weren't too keen on that.

The setting itself is a small sandbox with a few secrets of its own. Everything should shake out over time. We have plenty of things for them to mess with and otherwise destroy to get us well into the New Year. I'm looking forward to seeing how things change when we add the people who were missing and get into the wilderness adventuring the party is headed for now.

So much better than the original cover!

As a system I liked it. I have pretty much everything I need to run in those first three books and the rest I can easily make up or borrow from somewhere else. It's a bit quirky, with the miniature wargaming roots really showing, but it's not like that gets in the way. There's so little there, it's not like we'll break it by ignoring a rule or two.

The single best thing in the old rules is the 2D6 based table for initial reactions and the hiring. It made for some interesting role playing moments and gave Charisma a relevance it rarely receives in later editions. People say that system doesn't matter but the existence of that table caused one player to say: "Hey, in this edition we can talk to anyone and anything and it might work out, right? I think we need to do that all the time!"

The other thing I enjoyed was the titles of the supplements. Greyhawk, Blackmoor and Eldritch Wizardry all evoke a feeling of the fantastic in a way that something newer, such as The Black Hack or Dungeon World, does not.

This foundation RPG project is going well so far. Everyone enjoyed it and delving into the OD&D game should give our whole group a new perspective. If you are interested in how one of my players found it, you can check out their post here.

And Now for Something Completely Different, but First, More of the Same Black Friday Commercialism

A few years back my group decided to give the Fate and Fudge systems a go for a couple of campaigns. I'm not going to review these games (unless someone asks me to do so) but I did have quite the adventure looking for the funny dice that you need to play those games.

Fate and its predecessor, Fudge, both use six sided dice with two plus signs, two minus signs and two blank faces. With the popularity of the Fate system I thought getting a set would be easy. I was wrong.

Sadly, good art costs money. I'll add that to the list!

I live outside of a city of 160 thousand people. There is one comic shop and two gaming stores that all sell table top RPGs and the dice you need to play them. No one at any of them even knew what Fate or Fudge was. At one store when I asked for Fudge dice they handed me loaded dice!

I know what you are thinking, "The internet will provide," right?

I thought the same, but I was wrong again. I live in Canada. Up north and far from the border so I can't keep a US Post Office Box to beat the crazy shipping costs. As much as the internet had reasonably priced Fate Dice, getting a set for less than $30 was impossible after shipping was added.

For most of the games I used a set of wooden cubes with plusses and minuses drawn on with a marker. I eventually purchased a set at the Complete Strategist while on a family vacation. Thankfully it was only a couple of blocks from the Empire State Building and my family was willing to indulge me.

The idea that I had to go to New York City to buy a set of dice for ten dollars is completely insane! Thinking about it reminded me how hard it was to get different RPGs up here back in the day. So many games only existed in the pages of Dragon Magazine. There was no Traveller, only Star Frontiers. No Talislanta, only AD&D. We had access to only the most mass produced and widely distributed games.

Now, getting the actual games in PDF is easy no matter where a gamer is. In many ways this might be the best time ever for RPGs. The problem of getting dice is still a real one for many gaming groups. The more remote you are, the less access you have to other media, the more attractive an RPG can be as form of entertainment, but the harder it is to get the dice!

And the dice are important. A die rolling app on a computer or phone is not the same. There is a greater feeling of tension built by the time it takes to roll the dice and for them to stop! There is satisfaction in the physical act of rolling! It's fun!

Besides, funny dice are awesome!

For all these reasons I decided to create an online store to sell dice this fall. I spent a great deal of time finding manufacturers and distributors that could ship to just about anywhere at a price that would make dice accessible to anyone.

And that is how the Save or Die store was born!

I created Save or Die so anyone could get the polyhedral dice they need to enjoy gaming. I set it up so shipping is always free. The price shown is the price people pay. Depending on where people live they may have to wait a little longer to get their dice, anywhere from three to eight weeks, but they won't get boned on shipping.

It's Black Friday/Cyber Monday this weekend so I'm opening the store early. There is still plenty of work to do. The promo isn't done. The product line will continue to expand, especially with the other things people need for gaming like graph paper notebooks (something else that is hard to get around here). I haven't completed all the SEO. There's no Facebook page. I haven't set up PayPal yet. The list goes on. But the dice are available!

So head over to Save-or-Die.com and take a look around. If you have any questions shoot me an email.

NOTE: We now have a Facebook page for Save-or-Die! Take a moment to like it!

#RPGaDAY 2017 - Day Nine

A good RPG for about 10 sessions is the Black Hack by David Black. It's a 20 page fantasy RPG with streamlined rules and a surprisingly robust system. I reviewed it in detail way back when, but here I'm going to focus on why it's good for 10 sessions.

While the system can handle any situation with a quick judgement the rules as written appear to break down in long term play. This isn't hard to change, and the Black Hack begs to bent to the whim of the table, but I figure for this question I should stick to the rules as written.

Part of the reason it's so good for a short campaign is character generation. Characters can easily be created in five to fifteen minutes so there is no reason you can't get right into the action in the first session. With time limited in the campaign you don't want to waste too much rolling characters.

Another point in its favour is the speed of the system. At 20 pages it's about as rules-light as you can go with D20 game. There is no time lost looking up rules, and there are no fiddly bits to slow down the players. They declare and action and test against a stat for success. That's it. This allows the group to cover a lot of ground in whatever adventure they are playing.

The advancement system is loose and can be as fast as one level per session. That means the characters end the campaign at level 10, the old name level from the original fantasy RPG. This means in only 10 sessions the PCs can develop all the way from zero to hero. That short development is something you aren't going to get with another traditional RPG rules as written.

The system is adaptable. You can use it with the list of monsters in the back to put together your own adventure or adapt on the fly anything made for the D&D family of systems. What it comes down to is the Black Hack is an easy choice for a short campaign, whatever your goal.

Their First Campaign

I've gamed with my daughters in the past. So far we've played a few one-shots to try out or playtest games aimed at kids.

I tried to get them into D&D with the Mentzer Red Box a few years ago. Both of them loved the images and the ideas in the book. The youngest didn't really have the attention span for it at the time and the game died out after the first session. D&D is not much of a solo game.

My oldest (12) has been pushing me to play again so I asked my youngest (9) this weekend how she felt about trying D&D again. She was super-excited to play!

We made their characters Sunday evening. The level of engagement this time was on a completely different level. When they were younger I was using the art to draw them in and help find out what they'd like to play. This time around we talked it out. Part of that came from their maturity level and part of it came from my decision to use The Black Hack as the rules for our campaign. It has no pictures and the rules are so simple all we needed to talk about was class-based concepts and what they wanted their characters to be able to do.

They responded well to starting with rolling the stats to find out about their characters and learn what they were good at. From there we looked at the four classes, what they could do and which ones would be complemented by the strengths and weaknesses of their characters. We also talked about what each class excelled at.

The short one liked the idea of a sneaky character who does things quietly and carefully, so she was keen to play a Thief despite her character's low Dexterity. Fortunately The Black Hack allows for two stats to be switched around during character generation and she didn't care if anyone liked her character, so she traded her DEX and CHA around to get herself a grumpy thief to play.

I barely started to ask the tall one what she wanted to play when she exploded: "Conjurer!"

This girl wants to play a wizard. I think it comes from reading her the Earthsea trilogy when she was little. She rolled a 17 Intelligence for her character so no stats were swapped.

Names came next and after some talk about naming fantasy characters we ended up with Snekava the Thief and Olys the Conjurer.

Snekava the Thief "...because she's so sneaky!"

While the girls shopped for their equipment I rolled up a henchman to help support their characters and avoid the TPKs that come with a party of two. Wojeb the Cleric (AKA Ol' Wojeb) came out of a low STR and CON but relatively high WIS. He can't carry much more than a torch and a shield but his hit points are high enough he should make an effective meatshield.

For the campaign I think I'll start with B2 The Keep on the Borderlands. It's a good spot for it and the Caves of Chaos allow for all kinds of different approaches to dealing with its monstrous inhabitants. Besides, it's an iconic adventure with sandbox elements that I ran recently in 5th edition so there's little for me to do in terms of prep.

The iconic Keep on the Borderlands

As for the larger world, I'm not sure what I'll do for that. I'm considering setting it in the old D&D Known World setting on Mystara. I've already done all the work of sprinkling my favourite OSR and classic D&D adventures throughout the setting. I've also subbed out chunks of the setting with cooler stuff from the Hydra Collective. For all that, the world has a history that makes suspension of disbelief easy to achieve. No matter what I do, it's all new to them, so exploring it will blow their little minds!

As far as system goes, I chose The Black Hack for a few reasons. I've already seen that it's simplicity makes it attractive as a way to bring beginners into D&D style gaming. I also like how it uses some of the modern gaming mechanics like usage dice and advantage/disadvantage. I want my girls to benefit from the old school, but I don't want them trapped there! I also like how damage by class makes weapon restrictions irrelevant so I could let them use whatever weapons they wanted without messing up the game balance. The biggest thing that made me want to use it for my daughters is the level advancement. Every level they'll roll for each statistic to see if it increases. This kind of obvious character improvement is going to make levelling that much more exciting and keep them engaged in the campaign. It also means low stats are not a big deal since they are more likely to increase than high ones.

We've decided on Wednesday evenings for our games since my wife is out that night and both of the girls are home. I'm looking forward to campaign play with the girls. I can't wait to see what they discover about their characters as they change and grow through play!

A Dungeon Master's Favourite Spell or, Why Bother with Lichdom Anyway?

Since the very first edition of Dungeons & Dragons the spell list for magic users included Magic Jar. It is in every edition and almost every OSR retro-clone and second generation clone. Its inclusion is a huge benefit because this spell could be the core element of a horrific villain in any campaign.

Magic Jar is a fifth level spell in most D&D-type rules (except in 5e, where it's 6th to stop players from combining it with Contingency*). With slight variances between editions and games The Magic Jar spell works by placing the caster's essence, intellect, personality, experience and soul into some kind of gem or crystal receptacle (the magic jar).  From the magic jar the caster can possess the bodies of others. Originally the caster could possess any living creature but in later editions eventually became any living humanoid.

The potential for a magic user to terrorise a party with this spell is delicious!

Suddenly anyone, even trusted allies, could become an enemy wizard without warning! This device would be most useful in a long-running campaign where the player characters have connections to the world and the players have built up expectations about how the NPCs will act in certain situations. The disruption of those expectations would definitely freak out a party before they put together what is happening.

"Iannisport Spy" by Patrick Keith

Another feature of the spell is the effects of body death. If the host body dies the caster is pushed back into the gem, the soul of the host body is then pushed out and dies. From there the caster can try to take another host within range. The spell doesn't end until the caster returns to their own body so there is no limit to the number of times the caster can experience this kind of death. If the caster's body dies the spell effectively never ends. The caster continues to move back and forth between the magir jar and new hosts until the magic jar is destroyed. The destruction of the magic jar only strands the caster in the host they are in and destroys the soul of the host body. Even then, it's no big deal if the caster has another suitable container and time to cast Magic Jar again. The real danger comes from being in the jar when it is destroyed or stranded in a host when it is killed.

Why would a caster trade their humanity for lichdom when they could become functionally immortal with a fifth level spell?

The idea of a caster trapped in a gem creates some interesting possibilities. An adventuring wizard could cast Magic Jar in an attempt to survive certain death and become part of a treasure hoard. The party could defeat some terrible monster only to find out part of the treasure is cursed with the ghost of a dead wizard that keeps possessing people around them. The gem could be in the belly of a sea creature that attacks the ship the party is travelling on, leading to one of the crew suddenly casting spells and insisting they not let sea creature sink out of sight.

A magic user could be waiting in a gem for a suitable host any length of time. This circumstance will have a pretty profound effect on them once they are able to act in the world again. They would have lost all their resources in the intervening years! If they had a tower it would have new inhabitants at best and be a crumbling ruin at worst. They have no spellbook so all the spells they have are the ones memorised when they entered the magic jar. Any magic items or wealth they had at the time of their body's death would be long gone as well. All friends and allies are dead. It might be that no one even remembers they ever existed at all! A terrible blow to a heroic wizard! Such losses will likely motivate them to regain their lost wealth and position. They might be able to rationalise all kinds of terrible behaviour.  Even a hero who died defending their world may not feel any kinship to the people of the current era and plunder it ruthlessly.

A long sojourn in a gem could have some severe psychological effects as well. The caster might become unhinged. If you want to have a crazy, body-stealing wizard stalking your party, this setup is a plausible one.

"hello mother" by Paintausea

A magic user who started using the spell with the best of intentions to extend their life so they could continue to protect people will begin to feel less empathy for people with each life they steal. The party could meet this heroic figure of legend only to find them descended into a narcissistic psychopath and even more powerful than in the past in which they made their name.

What I like best about this idea is how I could use it in play. Even though such an enemy could start with less spells and resources at their disposal they can use hosts to spy on the party and influence others against them to undermine their position in the land. They could use hosts the party doesn't want to kill, or at least not want to let the locals see them kill. If the wizard possesses an eight-year-old girl to go after the party in the middle of a crowded market it's not going to go well for them when they fill her full of arrows.

Depending on how angry the villain makes the players with these sorts of antics the party might spend a whole campaign trying to track down this magic user and stop them with a minimum of collateral damage. They may need the help of others, need to quest for an artefact or special spell. Who knows what adventures it could lead to?

Memorising Lightning Bolt to blast the party!

* I think the designers of 5e D&D did an excellent job adjusting and tightening up the descriptions of almost every spell so it could be used only the way they thought it should be used. I would not call this situation progress.

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!

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!