Old RPG Words That Make No Sense

Progress in RPG design and play is held back by the words we use that don't make any sense.

Hit Points.

So many RPGs have some version of "hit points" whether it's called hits, hit points, health, vitality, or whatever, it is expressed as a representation of how much damage a character can take. Video games have copied this idea for years, and you see your little digital bonhomme getting wailed on while a bar or a number  of hit points gets smaller. Why not? It's there in the name, right? Hit points, those are points you use up getting hit, right?

Someone is hoping the undead giant is almost out of hit points

Except it's not right. Not really. Hit points have almost always been an abstraction expressing something else entirely. I've talked about the problem of damage before, but in terms of Dungeons & Dragons and many games using hit points, there is no damage until the hit points are gone. Hit points represent the ability of a character to postpone the inevitable through skill, experience, luck, or script immunity. They represent an ability for a hero to keep fighting when everyone else would be done. They are more a measure of endurance than damage capacity.

This idea is further confused by the old-school rates of healing where characters only got one hit point back per day of resting. Something ridiculous when characters can easily get to a place where they have 20 or 30 hit points. If they are healing, then they must have been hurt, right? Except that is not how it works. A character is just as effective at one hit point as they are at full hit points. Because they are not hurt unless they are at zero! In the old days if your character went below zero they were dead! Not just wounded, but killed. Luck finally caught up with them and took her due. It wasn't long before rules developed for going into negatives where a risk was involved, but not immediate death.

Fast forward to the last few years. Two different innovations double down on the idea of hit points as an abstract that expresses endurance. The first is the death and dismemberment tables that came out of the Old School Renaissance (OSR) Blogs. The idea was if your character went below zero hit points they had been wounded and could be badly hurt or even dead. Rolling on the tables got you a result that your character had to live with. Maybe they lost a limb, or an eye, and it had ongoing mechanical effect on the character. After a while they could look pretty rough. Eventually a character could even be forced into retirement by accumulating too many, "old war wounds." I'm a big fan of the death and dismemberment tables. Partially because they reinforce the concept of how things work, but also because they add a real element of risk to fighting to your last. Players with characters who can be brought around in a moment to fighting condition with no consequence are not going to have any good reason to surrender, if there is no consequence to negative hit points. The idea that the table might give them a reason to play as if getting wounded is something to be afraid of encourages more realistic role playing.

Oops! You interrupted her short rest.
What's the worst that could happen?

The other innovation is the idea of short and long rests. I think the first game I saw this idea in was Barbarians of Lemuria, where a few hit points could be recovered by taking a breather and a quick drink and full recovery required night's rest. This same approach made it into a few different small press games, and the latest edition (the so-called 5th edition) of D&D. By explicitly recovering hit points through short and long rests the D&D, and any other RPG, rules are making hit points endurance. There is nothing wrong with this approach. I like it. It's cinematic and makes for high-speed pulp-fiction action! That's all great! It allows players to accomplish more by giving them more significant choices about how they use the two resources they have, time and hit points.

The problem is the thing is still called, "hit points," and we generate them by rolling, "hit dice," when these two things are expressions of endurance. It doesn't really matter where the name hit point came from. It may be a hold-over from the war games the designers of the early versions of D&D were playing and using to inform their first RPGs. Maybe someone thought it sounded cool. The fact is, it doesn't fit and is actually misleading. All the grognards and legacy players are already composing their comments about how wrong I am and how the word doesn't matter because obviously we all know what it means.

Except we don't. Many players think the fast recovery of hit points through rest is unrealistic because you can't walk of a sword thrust to the abdomen. If we expressed it as endurance and described combat with point loss as close calls, bangs, jams, bruises, and numbness in the limbs it would be easier to get more people all in on the concept. The other problem is new players. RPGs have exploded, in no small part to the efforts of Wizards of the Coast to make D&D accessible and easy to grasp. Words like hit points get in the way of that because they suggest the character is getting hit when they lose hit points. Why set them up to fail? Why not call it what it is? Because of tradition? Meh, there are more new players now than ever before. Because someone can tell them? People are learning to play from the books and watching actual play on you tube. Terms matter in both of these cases because that is how the new players will interpret what is happening in the game. I'm not the first to come to this conclusion. The Neo-Classical Geek Revival (NGR) fantasy RPG has used the term "Luck" for these points for years.

Someone is rolling on the death and dismemberment table!

The waters are muddied further by the idea of weapon damage. When D&D was first created, almost everything on two legs had single digit hit points. Humans were all assumed to be zero level with, at most, three hit points. That means that first hit was probably taking them down. A dagger could do it, but a two-handed sword had a better chance of ending a generic cultist or town guard in one shot. Fighting fantastic monsters the assumption was they were magical or huge beasts that could actually be hit more than once with little effect. Calling it hit points under those circumstances could have made sense to the people running and playing those first games. It might even still make sense to call the ability of a dragon to keep fighting hit points now. I'll concede that point. Still, for the sake of having a consistent expression it is better to have magical creatures with endurance than characters with hit points for the reasons I outlined above.

So if a weapon doesn't do damage to a character, what does it do? The way I run it at my table is attacks remove hit points. no one takes damage until they go down. Monsters snarl in pain at flesh wounds, enemy shields buckle under the assault, or they are beaten back as they lose their hit points. I've run it like that for a couple of years now. For example, "Your shield arm is still vibrating from the blow and you lose (rattle-rattle) four hit points." It seems cleaner to move this to something like, "Sparks fly as the bugbear's axe crashes against your sword and you stumble back a step. You lose (rattle-rattle) 7 endurance."

It's visceral, it keeps everyone in the fiction, and it shows the player what they still have in the tank to finish the fight. Then they choose how far to take it. Can they push through and find a place to hole up for long enough to get their wind back? Has the alarm gone up and they are facing a running fight until they can win or get out? Endurance is no less exciting, or dangerous with the addition of a death and dismemberment table. It's also still all close enough that converting old modules and third party adventures on the fly should be no problem for a referee/game master.

I run a hugely modified version of the original Black Hack rules. I call the threat to endurance, "attack dice," and it seems to work well. The attack die represents the combat ability of a given character or monster when they attack. It's logical, accurate, and it works well in play. I like to run for new people and experienced players alike. Everyone seems to like it so far.

Belkar Bitterleaf, of the Order of the Stick

These old words, hit points, have the baggage of old assumptions based on their wargaming routes and new assumptions based on what the words mean. For ease of adoption of current gamers, the words are used. They are a short hand that no one will question. Because no one questions the short hard, the baggage follows us to new games that arguably, would be better off without them. There are a host of D&D clones and D&D-ish games out there thanks to the Open Gaming License. These new and different games all put some kind of a spin on the tabletop RPG experience. The publishers of D&D might fear losing their current base by changing too much, but small press publishers have more freedom to break new ground. That's why most of the best innovations in game mechanics, campaign settings and game art come from the small press publishers.

If we take advantage of this freedom, and we dump hit points, hit dice, and damage, what is next? What other words make no sense? Levels, maybe? There are character class levels, spell levels, dungeon levels... How many different things do we need to describe with the same word?

Character level seems sacrosanct. The concept of leveling up is ingrained in western culture thanks to video games borrowing their framework from D&D.  If characters get levels, then everything else needs to find a better word.

Dungeons could be described in terms of floors: Floor one, two, etc. That makes sense and translates well enough to real experience. I don't go to an office on the fifth level of the building, I go to the fifth floor. This seems easy enough to change and will not make it more confusing, at least.

When we talk about spells, we are talking about power. Each level a magic wielding character ascends gives them access to more spell casting power. If spells were described in terms of power, it would make more sense for a level five wizard to finally gain access to power three spells like fireball! Power one, power two... or is it first power spells, second power spells, etc? Regardless, power is a suitable replacement.

As designers and runners of games, many of us do our best to trim the fat of game mechanics so our games run fast and smooth. We should be doing the same with the terminology. If we don't we are leaving a barrier in place for no reason other than that's the way it has always been done without asking if it's the best way to do it.

I'll be trying these out in in my home game and any D&D type games I run online this summer. I'll see how it works out. If you try it, let me know how it works for you. Does it change anything?

What?
I have the Warrior Princess Prestige Class so these arrows used up temporary hit points.
I'm still at full HP!

The Ecology of My Goblins or, How to Make Goblins Fun!

An article about how boring goblins are from Kotaku is making the rounds right now and it is clear that the author is missing the opportunity presented by goblins as a monster in an RPG.

They define goblins as stupid automations "produced in a factory" for the sole purpose of a fighting encounter as though they were a video game creature identical to the ones behind them and never leaving their spawn area.

Taunting Goblins by Thorston Erdt AKA Shockowaffel

Goblins have never been brave or even terribly capable fighters, but they have always been sneaky fighters. The author says they aren't "tricksy" or use traps, but even in the old modules goblins would use traps, raise alarms and run for help so they could overrun the party.

The biggest breakdown is in their suggestions on how to make goblins more interesting. One suggestion was an ambush failure because of a lover's quarrel in the goblin ranks. They suggest revealing cultural elements during encounters to make the goblins more sympathetic to the players. This direction is a missed opportunity to introduce the other and make goblins alien to the players.

I'm all for creating villains the party can relate to, but instead of humanizing monsters, why not use humans? Humans can be on the fringes of civilization even more easily than goblins. It makes sense for them to have stockpiles of currency as treasure and they start as relatable so you don't need to build a bridge to them with contrived situations. You can have lawless bandits that are causing trouble for the townsfolk. You can have a resistance group fighting the lawful, yet tyrannical local lord. You can have a chaotic cannibal cult terrorizing the area. You can have camp of refugees from a disaster in another kingdom that has taken to raiding local farms to survive. In all cases the party is dealing with humans who are evil from the point of view of the local population. They can employ whatever solution they want and easily justify it. If they go with combat they still have the problem of what to do with the children. Are the cannibal kids redeemable by society or is it more merciful to kill them? Does the party need to worry about survivors developing into recurring villains? If those are the things you want to deal with in your game, don't go half-way. Use humans.

As for goblins, I use them as scavengers and upcyclers that are close to civilization so they can raid and steal what they need to make things better for their nests. They repurpose all kinds of stuff into ramshackle contraptions that are dangerous and sometimes comical. This use they have for the player characters' society explains why goblins are often the first creature encountered by adventurers as they begin to push into the frontiers.

Goblins by Llaaii

I organize goblins into nests rather than tribes. The hive-like organization explains why so few of them have any ambition for individual achievement (in that they don't take class levels despite being close enough to society to get the resources they need to do so). The rulebooks (in whatever edition) usually have the goblins ruled by a chief with higher hit dice. I give them a queen, whose hit dice come from her immense size. She rules the nest populated almost entirely by her children. The rest include her honour guard consisting of her sisters and her mates. Her bloated form towers above them all as she is at least as tall as a hobgoblin and massive enough to lay the huge eggs.

Goblins in my world are hatched fully grown. They have a certain amount of genetic knowledge passed to them that allows new goblins to start contributing to the nest without wasting resources on developing them. I describe goblin rookeries as something out of one of H. R. Giger's nightmares.

Alien Landscape by H. R. Giger

This lack of childhood and hive organization make goblins different from humans. They are alien in outlook and motivation. They caper with delight as they take pleasure in the sadistic sport of an ambush. They are selfish and cowardly while still putting little value on individual lives. 

They make great opportunists, working with other pack and swarming creatures like wolves, rats and stirges. I love the look on my players' faces when they realize the goblins ambushing them with nets and bows also released stirges to attack.

Goblins need to be sneaky gits to cause the party major grief, but players can also underestimate them because of that. My favourite goblin trap was a shabby wooden construction in the outer entrance to the nest. The party could hear the rats squeaking and scratching in the wooden walls and ceiling but thought nothing of it. Their low opinion of the goblins also caused them to ignore the unstable construction. That made it a surprise when stepping in the wrong place caused the ceiling to fall in and drop a swarm of rats on top of them. The noise brought the guards who raise the alarm and took pot shots at the party while they scrambled and fought their way out of the wreckage. They decided to retreat and come back with a plan.

If you are wondering about hobgoblins, I run them as larger, more martial versions of their smaller cousins and their queens are the size of an ogre! They are organized as warrior cooperatives that value the damage they can do as a group to expand the holdings of the nest. Combat is not a forgone conclusion though. I had a party played by kids find a back door into a hobgoblin nest, kill the queen and then bluff some other hobgoblins into believing they had bought some of the prisoners so they could get directions to where they were held. (B2 Keep on the Borderlands is the gift that keeps on giving!) 

Goblins, like everything else in D&D, are an opportunity to spin your game into something your group will love to play in. Monsters are a place to build your world into something fantastic and different. The darkness surrounding the light of civilization can define the world as much as points of light found in the towns and cities. A great example of that brand of storytelling in the 5e D&D Monster Manual is the aboleth. Although the best example of world building through monsters I know of is the system neutral monster book Fire on the Velvet Horizon. All monsters allow you to double down on the strange and wondrous elements of your fantasy world. Don't skip the goblins because of their low hit die!

What it comes down to is there are as many ways to use goblins as their are DMs. There is no wrong way. If you are happy with goblins as a twisted mockery of humanity that needs to be cut down like the vermin they are in the search for gold and XP, great! If you want them to have a complex society with speech patterns that confuse and confound your players during negotiations and interrogations, great! If you want to give my spin on the goblin a whirl, great! Goblin encounters are what you make of them as a group. Enjoy it!

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!

Why Let D&D Be the Gateway?

Teach Your Kids to Game Week last week started me thinking about introductory games. In my last two posts I talked about wonder in RPGs and gave some advice to non-gamers on what to buy to get their kids into tabletop RPGs. These two things are tangled up in another idea I have struggled with for some time as well.

The Problem

It feels like the RPG hobby is set up to make D&D and all its assumptions the default. This situation is perpetuated by WotC being the only company actively marketing to people who are not gaming yet. By ceding this introductory space to D&D we allow the idea to persist that D&D is the default RPG and for many, the correct way to play.

There is certainly good aspects to the situation. It makes it easy to jump from game to game as all fantasy RPGs have familiar elements such as elves, dwarves and hobbits. It is easy to understand who the good guys and bad guys are and understand the basics of the world without instruction. In this way, the bar is lowered for entry as the D&D platform for play has been repackaged for other media over the years, from video and board games to books and films. These advantages only serve the argument that D&D is the best product for introducing the hobby to new people who do not have someone to guide them into the hobby.

In my last post I explained why Fifth Edition D&D would be my first choice as a tool for someone to introduce themselves to RPGs. The thing is, I would not use it to introduce new people to RPGs when I run. I have done so, and it works well enough, but I prefer using something else for many reasons.

Philippe Caza

Genre is not one of them. I love playing in fantasy worlds. I love the possibilities allowed by the magic or blend of sorcery and super-science that is available in such settings. Genre may be a factor for others though and it is certainly a valid reason to try to grab people before D&D gives them ideas about the right way to play.

This past year, I used The Black Hack to introduce my kids and some others to playing fantasy RPGs. With my kids and their friends we call it D&D even though we're using a completely different 20 page rulebook designed for experienced GMs to run fantasy games with simplicity and flexibility in mind. I've reviewed it before if you are interested. Although, between their play and the blank spots in the rules we've added and changed so much it's not the Black Hack anymore either.

What bothers me about D&D as an intro-RPG is also one of the reasons it works so well. It is generic. It is the fantasy that everyone is familiar with and that means it in many ways is not fantastic at all. My struggle with this issue is mixed up with my post on wonder in RPGs. When I started playing D&D it was an amalgam of the different ideas in the fantasy genre. It drew on all kinds of fantasy traditions to create a tool to allow groups to play in worlds of their own creation, inspired their favourite stories and themes used by the game's creators or jump into their favourite worlds from the list of influences, such as E.R. Burroughs' Barsoom, R.E. Howard's Hyborian Age, Jack Vance's Dying Earth, Tolkien's Middle Earth, H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands, and the world of Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions.

Forty years later, controversy and corporate design has scrubbed it clean. Now its place in fantasy has eclipsed the media that inspired it and the elements in the game are part of regular fantasy.

"Regular fantasy."

"Normal fantasy."

"Mainstream fantasy."

As accurate as these descriptive terms are, they are words that simply do not belong together! Fantasy is expansive and wondrous! I think the first game should open doors to new spaces, like it did in the 70s and 80s, rather than present people with a well-worn path. While the well worn path leads to fun, it does not often lead to wonder. (I know it can, and since that earlier post generated so much discussion I'll certainly talk about that in another post. There's a lot to process!) I don't want new people who pick up an RPG, flip through it and try it with their friends to only have fun. I want them to have their minds blown the way ours were blown when I first started playing.

I'm not saying it is bad that so many people are exposed to fantasy as a genre, but the regulation of it makes the achievement of wonder more difficult. Reinforcing the walls around the fantasy gospel with the intro to fantasy gaming only makes it harder for people to hit one of the the high points of the gaming experience; the 'holy shit that's amazing' moments.

Sundered Skies is a campaign setting for the Savage Worlds RPG that suffers from where it stays inside the walls. The world is a shattered collection of rocks floating in an glowing mist full of madness and fantastic creatures. These islands of rock float in a chaotic arrangement that only increases the dangers of travel between them. Many could be lost or cut off to develop outside of the core society. Adventures feature characters sailing through the mists to explore these floating islands. The concept seems ripe for moments of wonder, at least in the short term, but it is populated with elves, dwarves, orcs, etc. Everything largely follows its type with a few changes to the elves. There are some playable fantasy creatures created exclusively for the setting that are interesting because they interact with it in unique ways, but even their origin is tied to the elves!

That's not the real problem though. Even if the publisher had committed to the setting and created everything to enhance their vision of the world no new players would have discovered it as their first RPG experience. It was made for Savage Worlds, a generic RPG system that is marketed to experienced gamers. In fact, the target audience for Savage Worlds is people tired of playing crunchy games like Pathfinder and 3e D&D.

If you agree with me, and I'm sure many of you don't, we're still stuck with a number of serious problems. How does a person design a game with wonder in mind? As an introduction, how much is too much when it comes to RPG conventions like levels and hit points? How do make sure the game works as an intro but is still fun for experienced players so they don't need to abandon it in favour of other games? How do we get an introductory game in front of the potential player without millions of dollars and 40 years of cultural capital?

Can a game be created to introduce the concept of RPGs, be fun to play and be a good platform for moments of wonder? What does that look like? To design something like that every element of a game's design could be examined with the criteria in mind to make sure it supports these three goals.

Hacking It Together

My home game, based on the Black Hack, could be a good place to start such an experiment (it certainly is for me), but almost any system or setting could work. I think simplicity is important for entry so a medium to light rule system is probably the best way to go. The lighter the better to keep rules from becoming a distraction that pulls people out of the events in the game.

Because the Black Hack is a D&D clone with bits cribbed from other, more modern games an intro version might be a gateway into regular D&D. The mechanics are different enough, and take enough from other sources that it should lead different places for different people. Hopefully, this means they explore RPGs with less of a bias than they would had they started with D&D. Besides, I think the main problem is the assumptions built into D&D that keeps it and many of its fans trapped in its lane.

One big thing from D&D that I did away with that is so ingrained in the system is initiative. The words 'roll initiative' signal a change from open roleplay and exploration to regimented, turn-based combat. 'Roll initiative" is such a part of the D&D culture it is an easily grasped punchline or image caption. I threw it out in my game with the kids because it was boring. Their short attention spans makes the moments where they are waiting their turn excruciating. Also, as the Black Hack has all player facing rolls so it seemed silly to keep it. Because they don't know when the monster will turn on their character or have a set time to act, they pay attention throughout the round, tense with anticipation or looking for opportunities. It's good for adults with smartphones too!

In practice, instead of switching from doing stuff to the combat game the players continue doing stuff in combat. This lack of transition is supported by the resolution for combat staying exactly the same as every other action. I've found this set up stops players from staying inside the box in combat. There's very little 'I roll to hit' and more of the 'I throw my maul at his legs' and 'I jump on the lion's back' I enjoy so much as a GM. It probably helps that I threw out half of the rolls from combat to cut down on needless die rolling as well. Anyone who plays Dungeon World will recognize these things as pretty normal, but from a D&D perspective, it's pretty revolutionary to separate RPGs from their wargame roots.

I'm keeping humans as the main playable choice because I think it is good to have us as a reference point to start from. I also added other options for creatures that characters can play as well as a host of human origins. The human origins help place the characters in the setting and add an extra dimension to them without needing too many character classes. They range from traditional staples like Barbarians and Street Rats to extraordinary ones like Child of the Prophecy, Driven by a Terrible Secret and Haunted. One good point made in the discussion about wonder was that it was most effective if it was interactive and personally relevant. These origins help flesh out the character's background with a single role or choice and that is something that can be used. The head of a giant statue might invoke wonder, but one that opens its eyes and delivers some important bit of information about a character's situation takes it up a notch.

I made playable creatures other than humans each its own origin. It makes the shared identity of each alien group important. Their otherness presents opportunities for conflict, roleplay and maybe even wonder. That's where I want to keep the focus. Otherwise the players are merely playing humans with pointy ears, etc. Lizard Folk have a different set of cultural values from humans largely based on their biology. Siebh (sheeve) are utterly alien hedonists cloaked in dreams. I was mocked on the internet for including felinoids and the like in my campaigns before because of the popular derision of furries, but they are fun to play, some people love them, and if I can think of a reason they support the presentation of wonder I'll keep them!

Goblins remained much as they were from our campaign as these malformed creatures, hatched fully grown, with a basic set of genetic knowledge and instincts. How does entering the world without a childhood change a creature's outlook? How much of that influences goblin behaviour, culture and history? Does playing that out give opportunities for wonder? I'll have to playtest it to find out.

I think there can be wonder found in playing something that thinks or feels different from humanity. Committing to that otherness might lead to some interesting ideas or interpretations of events that could change the whole group's perspective on events.

One game that built up each fantasy race as a different element well was Talislanta. It had a great variety of creatures to play with unique cultural identities. An example is how the desert people always wore elaborate masks. At one point in the fiction the masks were likely for protection from the elements but by the time the game was set in the masks had cultural and even religious significance. How does such a thing create opportunity for wonder? I'm not sure in that particular case, but room needs to be made for players and GMs to create those moments.

I don't feel like there is much room for wonder presented by another dour dwarf with a wretched Scottish accent. Fun? Certainly, but probably not wondrous. Do dwarves sap a game's or setting's potential for wonder simply by being present?Should they stay part of the mix because so many people love playing them? Is there a line that needs to be drawn? Am I being too hard on dwarves?

Maybe we accept dwarves the same way we accept humans and make sure there are no hobbits/halflings. The last time someone tried to make hobbits more interesting we ended up with kender. No one wants to take a chance on anything like that happening again!

The next thing is classes. Do character classes contribute to wonder?

Having each character inhabit an archetype of some sort ensures them spotlight moments. Dungeon World commits to that idea by not allowing two characters of the same class and going as far as saying the cleric, ranger or thief in the party is the only one of their class in the game world. Their archetype is unique in that setting. With the mix of stat variety, origins, classes and player choices every player character should be different enough to present the spotlight moments for everyone.

Is a spotlight moment wonderful though? On occasion, maybe, but they certainly are fun. With a good GM classes aren't necessary for spotlight moments but they might be for the sake of wonder. If anyone can cast spells is magic still magical? Besides, classes or any other form of specialization helps to ensure spotlight moments which might be important in an intro game where there is a learning curve for the GM.

For an intro game I think it's important to have clear differences between the classes. My nine options even start with different letters to make it that much easier to differentiate them (or put class in an NPC stat block with a single letter). In my campaign we have two spellcasting classes with the cleric and the magician. Their magic differs in significant ways. There are three classes that have magical abilities but no spells with the bard, druid and sorcerer. I set them up as reflections of each other, being structurally the same but thematically different. There are three classes that are exceptional at doing certain things with the expert, thief and warrior. The last one, the ranger, is so skilled at certain things they are kind of magical. I find this covers plenty of bases for fictional archetypes without being overwhelming. I didn't want to have more than nine because I read somewhere that the ideal number of significant choices is seven, plus or minus two.

Bards get a lot of hate for being lame, but in our campaign they are keepers of the law and truth. They are semi religious figures more like paladins, celtic bards, viking skalds, or biblical judges than the singing fools the class is often identified with. It works well with the Moorcockian Law verses Chaos vibe that I like to have in my games.

Levelled character improvement does serve the idea of presenting wonder. It allows the GM to scale events up so the experiences in the game can become bigger, more amazing and more epic. That process allows for more or easier opportunities for wonder. There's also an upward curve so the campaign feels like it is building. It's also good for new players as they get to grow with the character, learning how to play their archetype in slowly increasing stakes as they become more effective.

Hit points are a sore point for many and I can see both sides of it. I won't go into all of that in detail again since I've posted about it before. The real question is do hit points help with the presentation of wonder?

Hit points as an abstract certainly promote the cinematic style of play. That can help a group get to a place of wonder. The loss of hit points is often presented as a wound or other damage sustained which quickly becomes silly and makes it difficult to suspend disbelief as the characters level and gain more hit points. Making the recovery of hit points a healing process only exacerbates that problem. To keep new players from scratching their heads and to make hit points cinematic they need to be presented as the ability to continue fighting rather than soak up damage. Then hit point recovery needs to match the concept. With all of that, the abstract matches up with the levels and it all serves to get to those moments of wonder without breaking the fiction.

Based on the ideas above and my experience running it for the better part of a year I think our version of the Black Hack could deliver fun and wonder. I know it works for new players, but it needs to be repackaged for them.

Organization and Presentation

The problem with an intro game is how much of the necessary parts of it become useless the more it is played. The hate for the "what is a role playing game" section of every rulebook has featured in game reviews and internet arguments running back for years. It is a waste of space the moment it is read and understood, but it is necessary info to deliver in an intro product. This problem could be solved by putting the what is a roleplaying game on the back of the book along with the description of what is this roleplaying game.

As a reference an RPG works best with character generation in the front, followed by the rules and other resources for play. The how to play, and how to run are not necessary for most of the people using the book. In fact, the only person that likely needs to read such information is the first person to run it in a social group. They know their group better than any game designer and can explain it far more efficiently than we can. That means all the how to play, sample play transcripts and other nonsense can go in the back with the how to run a game advice.

The only problem with that is, as an intro book it's pretty crazy to expect someone to slog through all the other bits before getting to the context in the back of the book! Does that mean there should be a companion pamphlet that can be discarded? Would a 'how to use this book' section of the introduction/first page pointing new players to the relevant appendices in the back do the trick? I like the idea of the the context of what an RPG is and how to play it staying in the book because I'd like to be able to hand someone new the book and know they have everything they need. That's part of the problem with the game I'm playing now. I have nothing to hand to one of my players and say: "Here's the game. Have fun!"

What About the Marketing?

Let's say it's possible to have everything on how to play in the book without ruining it for experienced players. That still leaves the biggest problem: How do we reach the people not playing RPGs yet that would enjoy it without the advertising budget and place in our culture that D&D has?

Numenera owes much of its success to how its early marketing communicated a sense of wonder. The art was a huge component of that, but the setting itself seemed full of possibility. The idea of the Ninth World, an impossibly ancient version of Earth, filled with relics of an advanced past captured my imagination. The game itself is simple, the mechanics are easy to grasp and system takes no experience to run. It is organized so all the important rules are in the first 60 pages. The layout and design is nothing short of brilliant and it is a great reference book for game play. It could do all the things as far as presenting wonder and introducing new people to gaming.

Too bad it's marketed to experienced gamers based on Monte Cook's reputation in the gaming industry. It makes sense to do that. It's difficult and expensive to create new players for a game. Why not market to a receptive audience? It's good business!

Fate is dramatically different from D&D despite being part of its Open Gaming Licence. The gang that published Fate spent more than a decade building the audience for their game that they leveraged to create a hugely successful Kickstarter for the current version. With the exception of the Dresden Files fans who came to to Fate through their licensed RPG for it, Fate's core audience is gamers looking for something different. It's more of a game design kit, than a game itself.

Certainly there are games other than D&D used to introduce people to gaming. Plenty are brought into the hobby with all kinds of small press and indy games, but only when introduced by an experienced gamer. That limits new people to what they can find. For instance, there's no way anyone in my area plays Fate. I haven't even found anyone who has heard of it and there's no place to buy the special dice it uses within several hundred kilometres!

Even Hero Kids, a game designed as the first RPG for children, is marketed to gaming parents who are looking for a system they can use to introduce their children to the hobby. It's great for that, but it's not likely to be purchased by someone not already invested in the hobby.

D&D's fifth edition is the only RPG marketed effectively to new people. Pathfinder has its own starter set but you'll only find it at a gaming store. Even then, I'm not sure how many store owners would suggest Pathfinder to brand new gamers. When it comes to access, D&D is in the local bookstores and toy shops on top of the gaming stores. It is everywhere and that means many people will start with it not even knowing there are other possibilities. That's how it managed to cement its place in the market in the first place. I bought my first copy of D&D in a department store in 1982.

When successful gaming companies are shying away from the intro market what can a person with no money, reputation or cultural impact hope to accomplish? How can I get an alternative to D&D into the hands of the new people that don't even know they want it yet?

The 3 iconic player characters from the Lamentations of the Flame Princess RPG - LotFP.com

I can think of two ways to approach it.

The first is a grass roots marketing effort. I'd reach out to people I know in the library system and try to get open games running there (because it fits with their mandate of promoting literacy). I'd need to convince them to support it with copies of the game book in the city and town library branches. It's possible local success could be built on to roll it out to other city libraries.

The local library also runs the local comic con. That's another cost effective way to get the word out to people receptive to the genre and possibly interested in the hobby. Getting some tabletop RPG intro games into the Con as events might even be possible.

There's a video game con that is put on locally that has potential as a place to reach the like-minded gamers. A lot of the common themes used in tabletop RPGs made their way into video games so it shouldn't be too hard to get some people at the con to try it out.

Both of those would do better with an online component. Luckily I'm married to a film maker who could shoot and edit a series of actual play videos. With those in place the people on the fence could see a demo that looks like actual fun. It also allows for a reach beyond the local area, which is key. A solid website is another necessary component but also not that hard to manage these days. That online component could then be delivered to bloggers and podcasters in any space that overlaps with RPGs. Building out from the face-to-face built core.

The other facet of the grass roots campaign would be marketing it to the current RPG market. Plenty of current players would love a solid tool they could use to introduce new players to the hobby that they could also hand off to them. Building some excitement in the gaming community for the game on its own merits would be important too. The more people playing it, the easier it will be to find a group to play with! A Kickstarter for an edition with colour art or a large print run might help build excitement and a reputation too.

As for the second method, I'm working on another approach that might completely change the RPG market. I'd be throwing out most of what I have above to operate on a level no one has conceived of before for gaming. I'll get to that in a later post. There's a lot of work I need to do first to see if it's even possible.

In the meantime, I'll at least get my rules into a printable version so I can hand it over to my players. The sooner they don't need me to play the better!

"My Kid Wants D&D, What Do I Do?"

Either Wizards of the Coast have done a good job promoting the latest edition of Dungeons & Dragons or Stranger Things got it into everyone's head, because a bunch of people have asked me about getting D&D for their kids this Christmas. 

"You know about this stuff, Dave. Where do I even start?"

Good question! If you've never played a tabletop Role Playing Game before, guiding your child into the hobby could feel like anything from confusing to terrifying. Luckily, I have your back!

There are actually a lot of games that give you a great RPG experience. Some of them are even specially designed for young people. Despite that, I'm going to suggest starting with the fifth and current edition of Dungeons & Dragons for a few reasons. Everyone who has contacted me has had their kids ask for "D&D" by name. They want something that says "D&D" on it. As the former kid who received a Tandy COCO II from Radio Shack instead of a Commodore 64 for Christmas like everyone else, I'm telling you it's best not to disappoint them with an almost what they asked for. (Don't worry, my parents don't read my blog. Their feelings are safe!) The other thing is D&D has always been something of a lingua franca of roleplaying. Because it is so ubiquitous in the hobby almost everyone has some experience with it and can relate what they are playing to it. It's also the most popular game so it's easy to find other people to game with. The last reason is they've went to a lot of trouble to make it easy for new players to pick up the game without someone helping them through it.

 The best place for a new player to start is The D&D Starter Set box. It has a stripped down version of the rules with a set of sample characters to play and one of the best starting adventure campaigns ever! They can open the box on Christmas, read through it, choose someone to run the game and be playing as early as that evening (although Boxing Day is probably a more reasonable expectation). Everything necessary to jump in and actually play is in the box, including the funny dice. It's carried by some book and gaming stores, but it's also available to order on Amazon and Chapter's Indigo.

Each player controls a character who is an avatar in the shared, imaginary world of the game. One person is going to need to take the role of the referee who adjudicates the rules, runs all the people in the game not played by the players, and presents the problems and situations for the players to solve with the resources of their characters and their wacky ideas. This referee is know as the Dungeon Master or DM. The series of adventures in the box helps a new DM get the hang of running all these things with a great advice and explanations.

The adventure, called The Lost Mines of Phandelver, has a series of locations that the players can interact with in any order they like as they figure out what is going on in the campaign area. This is important because it introduces the idea of player choice to everyone playing. The fact that the players can do pretty much anything they want is what makes a tabletop RPG so much better than a video game. 

Everything in the D&D Starter Set box

To continue playing after they are done with what they get in the box they will need more rules. The Basic Rules are available online for free with a guide for both the Players and the Dungeon Master. These will allow them to create new characters and adventures of their own that can keep them going for years. As much as I love how the ease this creates for entering the hobby, I think it is worth spending some more money on a hard copy of at least the Player's Handbook. Dead tree books are easier to reference at the table than tablets and you can roll dice on them without scratching a screen. 

The Player's Handbook for D&D has all the rules and offers all the possibilities needed to create characters to suite the imaginations of the players in straightforward steps. It's fairly easy to get. Most book stores carry it and you can get it on Amazon or Chapters in a couple of days.

At this point you are up to nearly $60 in stuff, but if you are sure your kid is going to love it and you want to spend money on things that fit neatly on a shelf, there are a couple more things you can look at right away.

The first is not made by the D&D people, but one of their competitors. It's compatible with D&D and has a great deal of value beyond the adventure itself. Broodmother Skyfortress is an adventure in the first half of the book with all kinds of options to tailor the adventure to their taste. It is amazing! The second half is full of advice on how to create campaigns, settings and run adventures. The advice is super useful to a DM new or experienced. The other wonderful thing is the Jack Kirby, 1960s comic book style art is a nice contrast to what you get in the D&D products and might help them think outside of the box. It's from a publisher in Finland called Lamentations of the Flame Princess but is also available in a few days on Amazon.

After that you might want to look at the Monster Manual or Volo's Guide to Monsters for them but it's not necessary. Save them for a birthday!

Some other things you'll need right away are pads of graph paper, pencils and a stack of character sheets printed out!

To make playing easier you could look at player tokens or miniatures. Painting miniatures is a whole other part of the hobby that comes with its own costs and entry hurdles. If people ask me about that I'll do another post, but for now I'll give you some resources for paper miniatures. These can be printed out on a home printer and used as needed to help the players keep track of where everything is when they are playing. They aren't necessary, but I found with my girls that when they were younger (6-8) having miniatures helped them engage with the game.

Paper minis slid into plastic slotabases. They could have as easily been glued to some cardboard. 

One of my favourite sites for these is Eddnic's Fantasy Paper Minis. They can be printed and folded to create all kinds of monsters to help run encounters! It is possible to find these with some time spent on Google or Pinterest with a simple search for "fantasy paper miniatures" if you have the time. If you don't you can buy PDFs of different printable miniatures for a few dollars (a good use of someone's allowance maybe?) and download them from DriveThru RPG. I'm a fan of the Disposable Heroes and Trash Mob Minis. 

Click image to see more detail. 
These are the characters from the web series JourneyQuest and film The Gamers: Dorkness Rising. :)

After that they'll want more dice. To keep them for stealing all the normal dice out of your boardgames you should probably buy them a set or two at some point. This is another thing that there is no rush for. You can buy them in comic shops and order them online. I know a guy with an online dice store that can get you a great deal with free shipping (not in time for Christmas)!

If you are wondering about the benefits of RPGs as a hobby for children, it is a social game that helps develop problem-solving skills, creative thinking, imagination, vocabulary, math skills and teamwork. There are all kinds of benefits so if they want to do it there's no downside. After 35 years of gaming I have no regrets for the time spent. My involvement in RPGs has allowed me to meet some incredible people and is a part of some of my longest lasting friendships. 

Rules for Pets in the Black Hack

The longer I run David Black's stripped down old/new school D&Dish retro clone called The Black Hack, the more I find myself writing rules to suit the situations my players create and modify the game to our taste. The more I add and change the more I find myself with what looks like the beginnings of a great RPG that straddles the old school and new school well enough to function as a great little introductory fantasy RPG. That might fuel some posts for later, but for now here are the rules I created for running pets and animal companions in the Black Hack.

My players for my Keep on the Borderlands campaign went into the woods to see if they could find the dragon they heard about and only found the crazy hermit and his lion. They killed the hermit and then they tracked down the lion so they could use a Charm Monster potion on it. The warrior character treated it well and fed it more than the hermit did while they had it under control. I gave the player in control of the warrior a Charisma roll when the potion expired to befriend the lion. I figured with a 6 Charisma I was safe and the lion would just run away.

That's when they rolled a critical and the lion became their pet. Now I have rules for how pets work in the Black Hack. These are the expanded and polished version of what I sketched out during that session so they could use their lion right away. They've worked well so far. If your players force you to make up rules for pets you can use these ones!

There is a Moebius image for every blogpost!

Creature companions/pets have three attributes besides their regular DMG, HD and HP: Action, Sense and Loyalty. The ACT and SEN attributes are based on the creature’s HD. ACT is 10 + HD  to a maximum of 16 and SEN is 10 + HD + (roll 2d6 and choose the lowest one) to a maximum of 18. LOY is a usage die and depends on how well trained and well treated the pet is before bad things start happening. A faithful dog that has been with the character for a few years will have LOY of d8 or even d10. A pack animal that was recently purchased will have a LOY of d4.

ACT is used for physical tests like dodging falling rocks or combat. SEN is used to notice something, track or any test that depends on the animal’s senses. LOY is tested any time something bad happens, such as the beast is wounded, mistreated or neglected when hungry. If the LOY result is a 1 or 2 on a d4 the animal will attempt to run away.

Pets and creature companions can play different roles during combat. One option is to attack independently using their ACT attribute. If used this way they risk damage from opponents if ACT rolls are failed. Another option is for them to fight with the character that owns them and add a +1 to their effective HD for the purposes of fighting powerful or multiple opponents. Pets could also harass and distract a single opponent to create an opening and allow the character that owns the pet to get Advantage on an attack. It depends on circumstances, but creativity should be rewarded.

Pets get one action or attack, the same as the characters. Their damage based on HD already reflects the results of using all their natural weapons.

Here’s an example notation of a lion that was charmed using potions and then became a pet:

ACT 15 SEN 15 LOY d8

DMG 1d10 HD 4+1 HP 18

This way all the rolls stay player facing while they roll against the stats their pets have when they take some kind of action. The loyalty die allows whoever is running the game to keep things from getting too out of hand. If the pet is being overused they can call for more loyalty rolls.

Let me know what you think in the comments. Especially if your try them out too!