Cthulhu sure is popular

It never cease to amaze me, but everytime I mention Cthulhu in one of these posts I can see an effect in the visitor statistics. Funny that.

Playing Trail of Cthulhu

So, after a bit of a hiatus, I have again played a rpg session. A friend had a vacancy in his ToC group and I jumped at the opportunity.

It's always interesting to play with pre-gens. You never know what you're getting, and you'll have to make the best of it. This time I got to be a journalist who wanted adventure. I must confess I don't understand why he went to a god forsaken piece of Scotland to find it! Anyhow, it was fun and interesting to try to fit into the strongly class based society, where how you're approached has everything to do with name and who you know. Damn is it annoying to be treated like dirt just because you're not an upper class snob! Historical role playing can be an eye opener sometimes.

I wonder if most of us don't let our players off the hook to easy in our fantasy games. In Judges Guild's Wilderlands, you had a value for social class. Maybe it could be used to good effect in more settings?

Some thoughts about how to organise rpg rules

I was just reading the Swords & Wizardry forums and found a thread about how neat it is to be able to take the .doc format file of White Box edition and edit it to the rule hack you want. The reason it is so handy, according to one poster, is that you can make a booklet with just the rules for the players. Even though it's not always explicitly said, that do imply that there are rules just meant for the game master.

When I was younger, and was first introduced to this wonderful hobby of ours, everyone read all the rules. One boxed set with one or two booklets was the norm. But, in contrast with, say, D&D it wasn't clearly labelled for the Player and for the GM. I haven't asked anybody else about it, but I think most people did like we did, and bought the box if you played the game. That usually meant that in each group you had maybe half as many copies of the rules as there were players. It also meant that almost everyone had read everything in there, including the rules for casting and learning spells, the chance to catch gangrene or what modifier you'd get for trying to use your Listen skill in thick fog. I never saw a problem with that.

When I first actually opened a rule book for D&D, it was the 2nd ed era. Not only were there two books, they also had the weirdest layout with the same section in the two books saying slightly different and (in theory) complementary things. I was thoroughly confused. For some reason there were things which you got the impression you should hide from the players! With my background that seemed preposterous. What was there to hide?!

Now today I realized that this way of splitting up information have shaped me more than I've imagined. The idea of having a standard list of magic items which sooner or later everyone knew about, or a list of standard monsters, is just an alien concept where I'm coming from. Now, many years later I have kind of adapted and know that the way things are, can be different in different places. But, to put this in perspective I think a game were everyone knows how to play the game, but where magic and monsters are all unique creations by your GM/DM is really a more interesting way to play the game. The mystery and wonder of fantasy sure is easier to maintain that way, and for those interesting in the history of the hobby it is the way to experience how it was when Ken and the Phoenix circle, Dave and the Twin Cities players, and Gary with his Lake Geneva group played. Nothing was yet codified, and every piece of magic was new, and wonderful. Imagine that.

Reading T&T 7.5 - Character Generation II p.p20-28

Now we have come to the part of the rulebook which talks about attributes. I find it odd that these are described after the Types, since they are more basic. Also, you early on is told to roll up your attributes, but the descriptions of them come much later, even though that might be useful information for deciding what type to play! Ken has said that this is not bad editing, since it's just that he thought about things in that way. Personally I think a game editor should be doing that kind of reshuffling of the text to make it flow more easily and make more sense. You can find a long debate about the state of editing in the business elsewhere.

After this comes something interesting. T&T have since the early days been a game where you can play a "monster". Any kind of race, or kindred, is defined by attribute multipliers. You basically have a table with a multiplier for STR, DEX etc. for all races. This is fun, and an easier way than calculating effective level, level limits or any such scheme. A dwarf with x2 STR just is stronger than a human. Learn to live with it. In my games we had a crazy assortment of kindreds and it was fun. Basically I see no reason to hestiate to bring in a new funky race, since many players will bring in new interesting problems or adventure seeds that way.

There is one thing I find annoying with this table though. Some creatures obviously have special abilities, and some are even hinted at in other parts of the book. But, none of them are described anyway. Of course, some of this data comes from the older Ken St Andre game, Monsters! Monsters!, but since it's not in print it is hard to refer to it. It do make some beings kind of oddly "amputated" though. What is just terrible unprofessionalism, though, is the fact that FDP managed to print 7th ed with a note saying that all Leprechauns have the spell Wink-Wing as an inherent ability, but they forgot to put it in the book! Even if the oversight was Ken's fault, it's just terrible to let such a thing slip by. Did they even read the book they published? In 7.5 ed. they did include it, but in a additional spell book, and not in the list of standard spells in the main rule book. Palm, meet forehead.

In this part of the book we have some real goodies, but the most interesting part of characters like AP, Level and Talents, I'll cover in my next post.

Tunnels & Trolls walkthrough delayed

Today's post will be a bit delayed. Hopefully those of my about readers in the US will see it later tonight. The rest will see it tomorrow. Sorry about that.

A new way of looking at combat adds

Over at the Trollbridge, the very creative mind known as "Toad-Killer-Dog" put forth his suggestion on how to use different attributes to calculate combat adds for your T&T characters. I've seen many suggestions how to do this, many of them interesting, but none that so sharply went for the kill and just formulated the way to make the Types special.

This was his suggestion:

What if Warriors get to choose three attributes for combat adds.
Rogues get one attribute plus Luck for combat adds.
Wizards Luck alone for combat adds.

I really like this suggestion! In many fantasy rpgs the fighting man fades into obscurity as the mighty spell slingers aproach godhood. In 3rd ed D&D it's a common complaint that the Fighter is the less interesting combat character to play. That problem is usually solved with more feats and just more stuff. With T&T my canine friend have solved that problem far more elegant. I can see even now how much role playing potential there are in those attributes choosen by the players. Imagine the difference between a Rogue with LK & DX and LK & CHA.

Yes, I'm an old schooler that belives in role playing, like Ed Greenwood, not just moving pieces around on a board. Live with it. 

Miniature wargaming, roleplaying and me

Sometimes the blogosphere is filled with people talking about this or that game is dependant on minis, and if the gaming tables of old featured minis or if everyone just had much more imagination back in the day. Yeah, I'm making fun of the discussions. One thing nobody could possibly have missed, though, is the phenomena called Warhammer. Even if you only play rpgs, you have probably seem how your local game store have been invaded by miniatures and splatbooks. When you talk about miniatures these days, you can't ignore Warhammer.

Back when I started with these funny games where you pretend to be an elf, you could find ads for the fun hobby of using cast and mold to make your own miniature soldiers. Since the one of my friends had a father who worked in printing, we happened to get hold of a bunch of "lead" of some kind, and did try to make some minis. They looked terrible.

A few years later Warhammer 40 000 arrived, and that same friend actually bought it, and played the first scenario in the book, using paper chits. It was a very strange game, which talked about the armies of the future, but had rules for minute details of your own characters. It felt like a weird rpg. Soon newer editions were published and we bought figures and played it a bit. Somewhow I still felt that the weird first edition hinted at something much cooler to be done with this setting.

What goes around, comes around. Right? Anyhow, I finally encountered historical miniature wargaming. My present "home" game club had an enormous stack of figures, since some members used painting of tin soldiers as a way to wind down from work, and gladly let us others play with them. That way I found out how fun it was to play ancient battles with 15 mm figures, with DBA. DBA is a very slim set of rules, but with very subtle effects. It's a little bit like the OD&D, in that serious exegesis can be needed to figure out all the implications of a rule. Almost a game in itself. I have an army of visigoths, which also can be used as franks. Quite fun.

Now, since the people at my game club are fond of their minis, almost any excuse in a rpg session to break out some minis is cause for celebration. Or at least a lengthy search in the boxes for "that figure" which will be just right to represent a PC. I used to hate that part.

So, now I'm back at the beginning. By my side as I type this is Warhammer 40 000 Rogue Trader, and I'm planning to use it as a setting for a roleplaying session. Not only that, I'm also going to be very much prepared for when my players break out the minis. Am I then returning to the roots of the hobby, with table top wargame miniatures turned into a rpg?

It's no wonder it took so long for any official rpg for the setting to arrive, and that they decided to write three games. It's very hard to capture the setting in just one game.I've decided to isolate my players on a hive world, just recently the target of a major invasion of the Empire of Man. Nothing should scream WH40k as much as a warzone, right? Now I'm just going to print out a bunch of character sheets and let the war begin.  

Bless your weapons and go! For the Emperor!

The gaming classic Daggerfall available for free

Those of you who have been me a while know that I once played the computer game Daggerfall. As an example of world building I found it amazing. Not only where the game so big it truly felt like you explored a whole world, the fact that your actions generated a reputation for you in the local area made it feel real. Your actions did have an impact on the world, without you being in the centre of the world all the time. Now I just learned that this game is available for free! If you visit the web home for the game series, you can try it out. While it might look a bit rough by the standards of today, I still think it could teach us something about world building for any roleplaying game.

What makes a game fun?

I have been thinking about what makes a game fun. One game in particular, which I played when I was younger, have stuck in my memory as fun. This I will concentrate on, in comparison to a game that I've played lately without enjoying as much. So, what made Wastelands so much fun? I'm going to start with the fact that it's a game about lack of resources, and a game where everything was randomly generated.

For those of you who don't recognize it, Wastelands is a Swedish post-apocalyptic rpg. Yes, it was actually called that in Swedish! The alien byrr invaded and humans who haven't become their workers and allies are living in a wilderness where food, ammunition and artifacts of the elder days are sought after treasures.

Playing the game we spent much time keeping tabs on tins of dog food, used shells for guns (of different calibres) and some of those treasures. The fact that they were scarce made them valuable, and fun to have and track. It reminds me how the previews for D&D4 considered that kind of play "not fun". I clearly remember how something that I was annoyed that I couldn't get was very sweet once traded for, or gotten as a result of smart play. The question I wonder about is when this is "fun" and "not fun"? Clearly the designers of D&D4 felt the fiddly bits were not fun, and instead the managing of resources is the domain of the "powers" you have. For me the latter was dead boring, so clearly something is different, though.

Something else which was very special for us when playing Wastelands, was that we randomized everything except the character name! Yes, everything. In our party we had a nearly two meter tall woman who stuttered and had as life goal to get friends. Yes, you rolled physical and mental quirks as well as sex. Not only did you have to survive in a deadly future, you had to portray believably something totally different from yourself. This makes me think that maybe one thing that makes this "fun" different from D&D4 is that the whole game was focused on making the best of what you'd got. There was never any talk about "build paths" or how you wanted to design or develop your character to maximize this or that side of it. You rolled with the punches.

So, what makes a game fun then? Well, after comparing the two games above my hypothesis will be that scarcity of some kind is a good thing. There must be something to aim for, to strive for but never all together be able to reach. Probably it also helps if you have less than total control of where you are heading. This also seem to be a point of contention. Why this is so much fun for some people is still a mystery to me. I not only suck at making "optimal builds". It bores me to tears! As you can see, this is not a theory of fun, or even thoughts thought through to the end. I have encountered something which struck me as odd when I remembered Wastelands, and it got me thinking. So, do you think make a game fun?

Reading T&T 7.5 - Character Generation p.6-20

Who said it was slow on Fridays in the blogosphere!? Here I am again, reading T&T from cover to cover. This week I'll look at Character Generation.

After the introduction we get a nice little summary of how to play a rpg, including the very nice suggestion for game masters to not prosaically deliver the adventure, but actually get in character and why not goof off? Ken starts off the section on generating a character by telling us how to roll dice and generate stats. For some reason the stats are listed, but no detailed description is available on these pages, even though one is promised to show up later. After that, and the import rule of "TARO" (Tripples Add and Roll Over), the listing of classes and their ability fill the rest of the pages until p.20. I'll stop at TARO for a second

While our rule designer tells us we can roll in order or distribute the stats according to taste (he rolls in order), he also tells us something of the thinking behind the TARO rule. "Trollworld is full of heroes, freaks, and monsters -- not a bunch of averages." I find this interesting, as it gives us a glimpse of the mind of the designer not missing a fact, but actually designing around that fact. More than once I have read rules and wondered if the designer didn't see that it was broken. One effect this rule has, which the "balance police" will complain about, is that it will probably cause one PC in every second party to be seriously powerful. So, what if one PC has a STR of 65? He will strengthen the party and help you survive longer and get up to that STR yourself! Also, it will take ages for such a PC to get higher STR. No big risk of him building upon that and leave you in the dust. The experience ruled will handle that. Calm down!

Then we have the list of classes. In T&T the classes are called Types, and we have Citizens, Rogues, Warriors, Wizards, Specialists and Paragons. Warriors fight, Wizards cast spells, Rogues do a little of both badly and the Paragon do a little of both well. As you can see they all have their niche in a fantasy adventure. Specialists are basically doing one kind of fighting or spell casting and then some. Even though Ken St. Andre tells us we need the Citizen for NPCs like farmers and fishermen, I can't see the point of this Type. Sure, in a class based system like T&T, you will ask the question "what class is the owner of the inn". But, I think it is a question wrongly asked, and answered wrong as well. The owner of the inn is either a source for for resources, or an opportunity for the GM to act out funny voices and chat with his players in character. Who cares what Type he is! He needs to use a spell or an ability? GM fiat is the right answer, not a new Type.

The rest of the Types are all interesting, with the Warrior being able to get double value of armor, the Wizard being able to know all first level spells. The Specialist deserve a special mention. They all use the same concept, of having one specific talent triggered by a Saving Roll and the prerequisite being rolling triples of one specific stat when those where generated. From the ones mentioned (Leader, Ranger, etc), it's very easy to see how to expand this system to build other Specialists based on this mechanic. The rules show very clearly how they can be used in a toolbox manner. Very neat and modular.

Now, after this and a descriptions of the concept of race or Kindred, the stats are finally explained! Why not before the mentioning of Kindred, and the long descriptions of Types? This is where the editing of this rulebook show neglect. I don't mind the designer writing it that way, but why was it left that way when edited? You think I harp upon something trivial? After the stats we revisit the subjects of kindred again, and the first mention is not enough to choose a kindred for your PC or tell you what it means. It needs reshuffling.

Next up: Generating characters II