WIR 13th Age #6

 The adventure is the last real item in the book, so I'll go over that and then address some final thoughts.

"Blood & Lightning" is such a simple adventure that I'm not going to worry about spoilers.

The adventure opens with the party traveling to a location called Boltstrike Pillar. There are three different descriptions of this pillar, based on which of 3 Icons controls it. Which is one of the things that can be decided when you roll your Icon Relationships at the start of the adventure.

Another plot-relevant element that can be determined at this time is which of the Icons is backing the goblins that try to prevent the party from reaching the Pillar. Stats are provided for the goblins, including variations depending on which of the 3 potential villainous Icons is backing them.

Which brings up my only real complaint about this scenario and 13th Age scenarios in general: How much work is the GM expected to do to accommodate the different Icon Relationships? It would be one thing if the GM could roll them while doing their adventure prep and work from there, incorporating them from the start. But it looks like Icon Relationships are rolled at the beginning of the session, once everyone has sat down to play. And this adventure sets an example that the relevant Icon has a mechanical effect, giving these goblins some cool little extra power.

Once the goblins are defeated, the party arrives at Boltstrike Pillar. And depending on which Icon controls the Pillar, the commander and their lieutenant are different. Different names, different career paths, different everything. Not that it matters too much, because they mostly exist for plot exposition.

The goblins weren't supposed to be able to get that close to the Pillar, so divination spells are cast and another group of interlopers is identified in an area called Greenstand. But the area is basically loaded with magical mines that just need someone to say "Shazam!" to set them off. So the party is sent on this mission and provided with a bit of magical kit to help them on their way.

But by the time they arrive at Greenstand, the interlopers have all been slain. The party can do some investigation, but there's also the risk of errant magical defenses going off. They discover that the area was attacked by a lightning breathing blue dragon and its lizardfolk allies. And that dragon is flying towards Boltstrike.

So it's back to Boltstrike for the final showdown. The defenders of the Pillar have been slain or routed, there's a dragon flying around and something magical seems to be going on at the top of the Pillar. The dragon seems pretty dangerous, but the fierce fighting before the PCs showed up has softened it up and made it beatable by a 1st level party.

Once that's done, they still have to deal with whatever's going on at the top of the tower. Which turns out to be the lieutenant performing a dark ritual of transformation. There are stats for him before and after transformation into some sort of dragon monster.

All in all, it's not a bad starting adventure. It's pretty linear, but it doesn't feel constrained.

One beef that I have specific to this adventure is its handling of rewards. After the goblin fight, you are instructed to give the characters an advance. Once you slay the dragon, you level up. There are suggestions that the characters be given magic items at the beginning of the adventure from their Icon Relationships and in the middle when they're hanging out at Boltstrike Pillar, they are handed some of the garrison's magic item stash.

I have 2 thoughts here:

1) It feels like each of these rewards is too big for what is done to earn them. Offering consumable items, like the potions or runes seems more appropriate. Something like a metacurrency would also work.

2) The Tyranny of Fun. It might still be a loaded term in some places, but I'm using it here to mean the idea that the game must continually be "fun." In between cool battles, you get cool stuff and your character gets cooler and more powerful.

Using a dragon as the climax of the adventure actually leans into this idea. Dragons are cool and fighting dragons is fun. Slaying a dragon is epic, and you get to do it at 1st level in your first adventure!

Overall Thoughts on 13th Age

Believe it or not, 13th Age has grown on me a little. It's gone from something that I wouldn't want to play to something that I might play.

Things I Liked

The Combat System: I actually give a lot of props to the combat system. It's designed for Theater of the Mind play and still offers fun options for players. Monster stats are simple and generate interesting results even if the GM is just making an attack roll for them every round.

Incremental Advancement: The fact that there were only 10 levels was a bit of a turn-off for me initially. Making the GM decide when to advance the characters and making the advances so chunky felt like it would be hard to the GM to manage well. Creating multiple smaller breakpoints gives the GM more flexibility in how their campaign is paced.

Things I Disliked

The Combat Focus: I have a lot of respect for a game that knows what it's about and does that thing well. But just about everything outside of combat was either handwaved or a really neat idea that didn't have a solid implementation.

Icon Relationships: This was a neat idea, but like nearly everything else that wasn't combat, it wasn't very well developed. And in the sample adventure, having each Icon give a different combat advantage to the monsters is a neat idea, but signals to the prospective GM the degree of design work they have to do.

No Metacurrency: I admit this is a personal taste thing. But I feel like there were shortcomings in how certain things were addressed that could have been better handled with a metacurrency. Rewards, especially, have the ability to feel very coarse-grained or chunky.

Now for the next question: If you are going to play or run some sort of D&D, is this the kind of D&D you should play/run?

13th Age is a great game if you:

Don't like bean-counting: There's fairly little to manage. There's very little to buy with money past a certain point. There's no XP to grind. Casters don't have to worry about filling their lower level spell slots because they disappear.

Love combat: This is the one area where the game really shines. It's not complicated, but players are sure to have cool things to do every turn.

Prefer Theater of the Mind combat: While other version of D&D can be run Theater of the Mind, 13th Age is really built for it.

Want characters to feel cool and awesome: Your character is going to be kicking butt and taking names right from Level 1.

RPGaDay 2024 #31 Game or Gamer You Miss

I took a bit of time in my last post to talk about people that I haven't gamed with in quite some time.

But there is much shorter list of people that I'll never be able to game with again. At the moment, I'm aware of only one person among my gaming circles that has passed. My good friend Meghan. 

When the university gaming club suspended operations over the summer, she helped keep the group together by letting us meet in her father's church (needless to say, he wasn't one of those anti-gaming preachers). During games, she was a wonderful assistant cat-herder.

The strongest memory of gaming with her was my GURPS Technomancer game. I don't remember all of the details of her character, but she found the rule for "bulletproof nudity" and decided that it applied to her character. Her character wore a simple wrap so it could be dropped in a moment when combat broke out. "Am I naked?" was a frequent refrain.

The peak of this was one session where she excused herself for a few minutes, I think just as a combat had broken out and it was time for her character to remove her wrap. She returned to the room wearing a flesh-colored body suit with a stole of red mesh fabric to represent the blood that we often joked got all over her for being naked during fights.

My friend Jordan (who had a bit of a crush on her) was so overwhelmed by this that he had to leave the room.

As for games I miss, that would be a lot of them. I mentioned earlier this month that the majority of my physical collection is still in boxes even though we moved to San Diego 5 years ago. One day ...

RPGaDay 2024 #30 Person You'd Like to Game With

Lots of people, really.

It's been far too long since I've gamed with Kris, but I do get him in my earholes thanks to the MegaDumbCast. To be honest, he's really the only person out of that particular era of my gaming life that I would say I miss.

Meanwhile, I think I would gladly get everyone from my OSRIC megadungeon campaign back together. The only downside would be that I don't have my notes anymore and I know Erik would really want to pick it up where we left off.

Looking to the future and contemplating the realms of possibility are things I really struggle with right now, so forgive me if I don't have a "dream team" of people from popular culture and history that I would want to invite to my table.

That said, I look forward to gaming with the group I have now and all of the wonderful people I have gamed with, and will game with in the future.

RPGaDay 2024 #29 Awsome App

 As I said yesterday, I do have a couple of recommendations to make.

My main recommendation for apps would be Obsidian.md for campaign information management. I'm using it as a repository for all of my prospective RPG campaigns. It's available on a variety of platforms, so I can access it from my main Windows machine, my Android phone and tablet, and even my Raspberry Pi based "lunchbox laptop." Because of that wide variety of platforms, I keep my Obsidian vaults stored on a flash drive which I plug into whatever device I decide to work with.

At its most basic level, it's like having a personal campaign wiki. It uses the same markup language for formatting and linking. But the thing that makes it really exciting is the plugin support. There are plugins for nearly every need. You could easily do a Google search for "Best Obsidian plugins for .." whatever your interest is and come up with some good options.

There was a fantasy calendar plugin as well as a conventional calendar plugin depending on whether you want to track fantasy dates or real dates. I also found a convenient plugin that allowed you to add "pins" an image that could link to articles. Great for overland maps to let you click on a pin for a city and open up your article on that city, maybe even with its own clickable map.

RPGaDay 2024 #28 Great Gamer Gadget

 I do have a dice tray that I really like. It lays flat during transport, but holds together with magnets while in use.

A dice tower would be fun, but coming up with something portable would be ideal.

Without much to talk about on this front, though I'm not technophobic about my gaming and do have some app recommendations for later, I think I'll take a bit of a mulligan and talk about my final Law of Gaming.

Doug's 4th Law of Gaming is: Characters can have secrets, but players shouldn't.

This is a new one, and not too thoroughly tested like the others. It's mostly a response to my wife watching lots of RPG Horror Stories on YouTube.

Players creating secrets for their characters can be a lot of fun, but if they are dedicated to keeping that secret for themselves and revealing it on their terms, there are a lot of ways for that to go wrong.

In conventional narratives, there's a thing called "dramatic irony," which means that there's information that the audience knows that the characters themselves don't, which can affect how they perceive the scene. For example, in a horror film, the audience may have a view of where the killer is headed next. So when the scene switches to that location, they get a heightened thrill knowing that the killer is coming into this scene at any moment.

At the gaming table, this is somewhat tricky to pull off, since the players are both the actors and the audience for the action. But if they're willing to buy in, it can be rewarding.

If the players know the characters' secrets, they can work towards playing entertaining scenes involving them without necessarily blowing the secret wide open. Like all those Silver Age Superman comics with Superman going through elaborate ruses to keep Lois Lane from discovering his secret identity.

RPGaDay 2024 #27 Marvellous Miniature

When I'm doing something with tactical combat or dungeon exploration, I'm no stranger to the maps and minis style. I'm also not a stranger to gaming on a budget.

When they were popular and more available, I would pick up packs of randomly assorted pre-painted plastic minis whenever my budget allowed. It seems like that wave has largely passed, though I'm sure if I looked I might find something useful.

I've also used just about anything I could find that fits on a battlemap. I've used gaming stones to represent a large number of similar creatures. I've hit vending machines for cute little toys.

If I had to pick one mini that I particularly enjoyed, it would have to be the gelatinous cube mini that was given to me by Erik. He had made it out of silicon that was probably clear when he made it, but had solidified into something fairly opaque. He had tried to put small objects in it to represent the things that the gelatinous cube had consumed, but only a few shown through.

 

Unfortunately, I don't know where it is at the moment. Believe it or not, I'm still not unpacked after moving 5 years ago and one of the main things that hasn't come out has been all my gaming toys. I've got some basics from the original collection, plus some new acquisitions and I've never lost access to my digital collection.

RPGaDay 2024 # 26 Superb Screen

 Better late than never.

A GM screen is not part of my routine kit. I won't say I never used one, because I did use a screen for my megadungeon campaign. It was a cheap cardboard screen that had come bundled in a Dragon magazine at one point, but since I was running OSRIC and not D&D 3.5, I wound up paperclipping charts that were useful to me inside.

For most of the other games I've run, I haven't used a screen. A lot of the time, I've been gaming in living rooms, so people will be sitting on couches with character sheets and books in laps with the battlemap on a coffee table if there is one. It takes a dining table with everyone sitting around it to make a conventional GMing setup with a screen and everything worthwhile, which is why I haven't typically done it.

RPGaDay 2024 #25 Desirable Dice

 One of the main things I think about when I think about dice is the dice set that I managed to keep together for about 15 years now. A set of green pearlescent polyhedral dice with gold numbers that I bought back in 2009, back when I was a regular at DunDraCon.

I thought it was an accomplishment that I still had those dice back in 2014 when I was gifted with a dice vault from my brother. But now that the dice vault makes it easier to keep a set together, I find I've been rolling the same dice for 15 years now. Though the gold lettering has faded somewhat, making them hard to read sometimes.

RPGaDay 2024 #24 Acclaimed Advice

This one's another toughie. Not just because I'm not running anything right now and so I can't point to what advice I'm taking or offer anything that I've discovered as I'm running my current campaign.

It's also because as I've been gaming and GMing, I've changed pretty significantly. Referencing the Six Cultures of Play, I started out pretty Trad, but then my megadungeon campaign shifted me to the OSR, and my reading of a variety of games opened me up to Story Games, to the point that I spend a lot of effort trying to reconcile those two cultures.

It might be part of what's keeping me from GMing as much. Without a solid grounding, I don't really know how to prep or plan for a session. I've managed from time to time, devising a workable structure for my All Outta Candy Canes holiday adventure, and now for my optimistic apocalypse scenario. But both of those structures are not the same, so I can't say I've got it figured out yet.

What I do have are my Four Laws of Gaming.

1. Define the core activity

2. Put the players in the driver's seat

3. Never roll dice unless you're willing to abide by the results

4. Characters can have secrets, but players shouldn't

I've discussed the first 2 when I mulliganed on previous prompts this month, so maybe I'll take some time to talk about #3.

Most of it is just some advice from Spirit of the Century. Imagine success. Imagine failure. Only call for a roll if both possibilities are interesting.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, it works as a counter to a lot of bad advice out there.

One of the most annoying bits of advice I've heard is that if your players aren't paying attention, just start rolling dice behind the screen. They'll assume something is up and pay more attention. The problem is that every time you do that and nothing happens, you cheapen the move. Do it enough and the surprise becomes when something actually comes of your dice shenanigans.

It's fine if you're actually making checks or implementing a procedure behind the screen. That's what the screen is for. I used to make random encounter checks behind the screen all the time. Though I did sometimes have the players roll for me.

Which leads me to another issue. Engagement and Agency are not always the same thing. When I had my players roll the dice for a random encounter, or to determine the value of a piece of jewelry or gem that they had just recovered, they were engaged, rolling dice and announcing results, they had no agency. They were making no decisions or taking action as their character. I mostly did it to keep the accounting wrap-up at the end of the session less boring.

This was one of my big complaints in the Battle for Oz Plot Point campaign. There were Dramatic Tasks scattered throughout the scenarios that required the players to make multiple rolls to accomplish a larger objective. But looking at the adventure text, those rolls don't matter, because the task must succeed for the adventure to proceed. There's no risk of failure and any cost for failure must be minimized to avoid derailing the adventure. So you wind up with dice-rolling busywork.

And then there's the infamous roll to find clues. If you fail the roll, you miss the clue. The roll may have been intended as a formality and may have been set as super easy, but by making it a roll, you have now created the opportunity for failure that you probably didn't consider.

My preference in this situation is to hand them the information. If there's a roll involved, it's to determine something else. Were you seen meeting your contact? Were you able to preserve the clue for evidence?

There's clearly a lot to unpack regarding my opinion on dice, but I've got other prompts to tackle.

RPGaDay 2024 #23 Peerless Player

 I bet you thought I was going to say Kris here, weren't you?

Well, I could. But I want to keep Kris in the hopper to help me answer a couple of the other prompts.

So for today, the prize is going to go to Erik, my unreformed Old School DM. While I will talk up all the things about megadungeons and the OSR that I think helped my campaign last for as long as it did, I would be remiss if I didn't mention his contributions as well. Because a lot of it was his enthusiasm and his player-wrangling efforts that kept the group together and showing up for as long as it did.

I was doing okay with Boots and Mike and a couple of other players getting the megadungeon started. But then I was introduced to Erik, who was running a campaign that one of my other players was in, too. While I assumed that most people who run D&D are running the latest version (I think this was right around the transition from 4th to 5th, though 3.5 and Pathfinder were still relatively popular), I was surprised to find that his campaign was Old School as well, straight out of the AD&D books. So when he stuck his nose in to check out my campaign, he was quite pleased to discover that I was running something that he understood.

He asked to join my campaign and he was very quickly my most motivated and enthusiastic player, bringing his wife and some of the other players from his home campaign into my game, wrangling them to show up just like he dragged them to his own campaign. Not that anyone was dragged or in any way unwilling, but whoever said that being a GM is like herding cats was right two ways.

The typical assumption is that "herding cats" means keeping the players on task during the session. But it can also mean the task of wrangling players to show up to the session in the first place. And Erik was very good at both of those things, for his group and for mine.

RPGaDay 2024 #22 Notable Non-Player Character

 As I explained back on the 14th, I don't get to spend a lot of time with my NPCs because they only really exist at need. And I wound up discussing one of my recent favorite NPCs that day.

So I'm going to go ahead and talk about someone else's NPCs.

I'm sure I've told the story of Sir Meriwether, but it's so notable that it's worth retelling.

To try to replicate some of the feel of an Old School game in his D&D 3.5 megadungeon, Kris set up a rival party, led by Sir Meriwether. He presented himself as a paladin of St. Cuthbert. Kind of snooty, but in that paladin sort of way. The rival party also put some pressure on us to explore the megadungeon, since whatever treasure we didn't find would go to them.

Outside of the dungeon, we got on well enough with the rival party. I remember a not-very-social dwarven druid named Bear that my character had a few interactions with. Sometimes, our wizard would take time off to make magic items, which was annoying because there weren't really other downtime activities that the rest of the party was into, and also meant that we would have to meet with Sir Meriwether to request that he keep his party out of the megadungeon to keep things fair.

This worked out okay for a while. Right up until we decided to build a clubhouse for our adventuring club. Some groups might have called it a "guild," but we were all shouted down by one very vocal party member. That same moment, Sir Meriwether decided that he needed the same resources that we did in order to build a church to St. Cuthbert.

We needed the sponsorship of a town matriarch to make our club official, and the matriarch had a granddaughter that she was looking to marry off. So Sir Meriwether came courting as well. The Diplomacy checks were flying fast and furious, with our sorcerer just barely getting the edge on Sir Meriwether.

We figured out that something was up when he started carrying an amulet of undetectable alignment in the shape of a holy symbol of St. Cuthbert. As a sign of how devious either Kris or Sir Meriwether really was, the amulet had been made on commission by our party wizard. Sir Meriwether has used a broker to manage the transaction and kept his name out of it.

Our first assumption was that he was a fallen paladin, but further investigation revealed that he had never been a paladin.

We were eventually able to figure out his scheme to embezzle money from the townsfolk in the guise of giving them a temple of St. Cuthbert.

Once he was defeated (my wife and I still argue which of us got the killing blow), Kris let us behind the screen a little bit and revealed that Sir Meriwether had always been a Neutral Evil Bard that had been built to fake being a paladin in as many ways as possible.

So this incident goes down in history as "The time the party nearly got pwned by a bard!"

RPGaDay 2024 #21 Classic Campaign

It seems like the campaign that dominates my thinking is my Castle of the Mad Archmage megadungeon campaign. I've run other campaigns before then, though not a heck of a lot after. I did fulfill my New Year's resolution last year by running a campaign of InSpectres consisting of two sessions with continuity between them. I have yet to meet that target this year, though I'm actually playing in a Blades in the Dark campaign that's gone on for about 4 sessions so far.

Before then, I think my favorite campaign would have to be my Cartoon Action Hour Martians vs. Atlantis campaign. It was just a couple of ideas and the need to keep my players entertained every session. And that gave us treasures like Xian Calcus the master of interpretive dance, the double-decker wolves, and an epic finale complete with a heroic sacrifice.

I tried revisiting that setting a couple of times, but I stumbled every time. Part of it might have been that I was trying to take things too seriously. More notably, I didn't have a core activity. No reason for the party to really do anything together. The first campaign had a good inciting incident, which helped a lot, and an interesting Big Bad. Not a perfect substitute for a core activity, but a decent one.

It might be fun to revisit at some point with all that I've learned about GMing in the years since, but it would require a lot more work than I put into it back then.

RPGaDay 2024 #20 Amazing Adventure

 I don't typically write adventures. I'll prep for a session or a campaign, but writing an adventure doesn't really happen for me. Mostly because my definition of "adventure" is: A scenario intended to be largely resolved within a session or two that may or may not connect to a larger campaign.

The only time I would do something like that would be if I was explicitly planning a one-shot, such as for a convention.

While I've done that a few times, I still think my favorite adventure that I've written for a convention would have to be my Transformers adventure, Attack of the RetCons. It started from my dislike of the first Michael Bay Transformers movie, especially when compared to the animated film from 1986, but really blossomed when I stumbled upon the pun that found its way into the title.

I put a lot of effort into converting Transformers characters for Cartoon Action Hour (the first edition. There have apparently been a couple of editions since.) and working out the retcon mechanics. The plot was largely a revisitation of locations and characters from the animated movie with fights with the RetCons at regular intervals.

I'm suddenly wondering if I could bring it back and do it all again, but armed with everything I've learned about RPG plots in the interim. That could be a fun challenge

RPGaDay 2024 #19 Sensational Session

 So instead of coming up with a singular moment of interesting or amusing play, today we're looking for times when the whole session was great.

This would have to be the session of The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen that we did during Kris' megadungeon campaign.

The campaign had developed a plot by that point and we were anticipating a major confrontation. But rather than jump right into that (for all I know, he still had some prep to do), he decided to run a side session where we were all citizens of the town near the megadungeon waiting for the heroes to step in and save them from the threat. So we passed the time telling stories of the heroes' previous adventures from the perspective of the townsfolk.

Since The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen is a game of competitive storytelling, it got pretty wild and hilarious. The person who ended the game with the most points was my friend Alex, who is also good at winning in Fiasco, though in the Baron's game, ending the game with the most points doesn't make you the winner.

RPGaDay2024 #18 Memorable Moment of Play

 One of the downsides of having this blog for as long as I have is that all of my notable gaming stories have wound up here sooner or later. Though I did bring back the story of Konrad the Barbarian and his stupid broken hammer earlier his month, so maybe I'll give myself a pass for another recycled story.

Or I could tell you about a recent session of the Blades in the Dark game that I'm in. We're a gang of Assassins, so our mission this time is to take down a corrupt cop (at least for now, we're trying to focus on "heroic" missions). My character is a Tinker named Fester (inspired by Uncle Fester from the Addams Family, of course). By exposing himself constantly to various reagentts, he has the ability to secrete poisons and such through his skin, breath and (with special GM permission) his butt.

We had setup wagon crashes on either end of a bridge in the city to isolate him from any backup. In order to disable him so that one of the other members could administer the final blow, my job was to swing down from the bridge's cables with help from another member (who was a sentient orangutan) and blast him in the face with a toxic fart.

The GM had typically run Blades in the Dark for one shots and was very open to being silly. But this has turned into a campaign and as things progress, it's getting a little more serious. But Fester and his toxic farts have come in handy in jobs since.

RPGaDay 2024 #17 An Engaging RPG Community

 This one's easy. As much as I play the tortured lonely soul here on my blog, I do have a lovely gaming community here in San Diego. I found the San Diego Roleplaying Association on Meetup.com shortly after I moved here. I was starting out in a new place where I didn't really know anyone.

Along with individual GMs posting about their games, there are also regular gatherings. In fact, later today, I will be attending a picnic hosted by the group.

RPGaDay 2024 # 16 Quick to Learn

A day late, but I'm not giving up.

I don't typically rate games on how easy they are to learn. I've read enough RPGs in my time that I can pick up the basics fairly quickly, Getting past the basics typically takes some effort, either preparing to play or run the game and working through some practical trial.

And as someone who expects to be the GM, my typical standard is more about how easy or difficult the game is to teach.

Fate Accelerated and Fiasco are fairly easy to teach and I've enjoyed teaching people those games. I've taught players GURPS as well, which is not as hard as you expect. Character building can be challenging, but using character templates or providing pregens can help. But how to roll dice and take action in GURPS is pretty straightforward.

RPGaDay 2024 #15 Great Character Gear

 My favorite piece of gear that's come up in a game that I've played or run would have to be the Sunsword, or should I say, Konrad the Barbarian's stupid broken hammer.

I'm sure I've told this story before, but it's a fun one.

I was in a Third Edition D&D game shortly after those books first came out and the DM was running us through the original Ravenloft module. It's the first scenario to feature Count Strahd von Zarovich, who would become one of D&D's iconic villains.

When all of the players first rolled up their characters, the DM also granted each of us a minor magic item. For my character, a barbarian named Konrad, it was a +1 undead bane warhammer. It served him well for his first few adventures, as he could smash skeletons and zombies very handily.

Then we got sucked into the mists and found ourselves outside Castle Ravenloft. There's a fortune teller there and one of the bits of the fortune telling scene is determining the location of the Sunsword, a weapon capable of killing Count Strahd. And the DM determined that the Sunsword was with the party and in fact in Konrad's possession. But he didn't have any swords, just his hammer. So the fortune teller showed him how to pull this and twist that and make the Sunsword appear.

But that hammer had been in Konrad's family for generations and here it was a magical sword instead. So Konrad the Barbarian reacted in the only way he could: "You broke it! Now it doesn't hammer anymore! Stupid broken hammer!"

RPGaDay 2024 #14 Compelling Characters

I feel really bad because I'm thinking about calling a mulligan on this one, but we'll see.

I don't play regularly enough to really think about what kind of character I want to play. I don't experiment with builds or spend a lot of time on backstories. Neither of which would really do me a lot of good in an OSR game, since there aren't a lot of build options and your character is not guaranteed to survive long enough to make a backstory relevant.

But I should be trying more games and building characters to see how things work. I know I didn't really understand Burning Wheel until I went through the character "burning" process. And that was a really good game for creating compelling characters. Even though I've never played or run that game, every character I built became a character I wanted to play fairly readily.

I do spend some time with NPCs, since I do think of myself as a GM. But often not enough.

I spend so much time either rolling things up randomly or running something very heavily improvised that I don't think about spending a lot of time with my NPCs.

The occasional exception can be fun, though.

During lockdown, I tried to do my blank map exploration/world-building game and had a lot of pre-rolled encounters. One of them wound up sticking with me. It started out as a werebear and since this was an intelligent creature in their lair, I started adding more details to help me answer questions as they came up. I rolled up a gender and a name, so this was a female werebear named Ealdred. And I made a reaction roll and it turns out that she was very friendly (by which I mean willing to ally with the party when encountered).

The party did meet her, amusingly enough on the night of the first full moon in the history of the world and she kept watch over them in her werebear form as they spent the night in her lair.

That was all of the action she got to see, but she's been in my mind ever since. If I ever go back to that campaign, I think it would be to see what actually happens to Ealdred. Not that I have a plotline or anything in mind for her. Just to see how the players would react to her and how she would affect their course of action.

Okay, I guess I fulfilled the mission today without a mulligan.

RPGaDay 2024 #13 Evocative Environments

Fantasy environments are fun. I do love my dungeons. But for me, the dream is about a place where all of those environments come to life. It's been a long time since I've had a space to game in my home. There are some nice places around town to game at, but like Dorothy says, there's no place like home.

One thing I know I want is a gaming table. I don't know if I would ever be rich enough to afford one of the fancy ones, but maybe an add-on to an existing table (if someone wants to make a joke about my table having a sub-table, I would laugh at that). An elevated platform to hold the battle map while the players have room to manage their sheets and dice on the regular table's surface.

I don't know that I'd go for something with a display set into the table to add a digital element. Not just because of the potential expense of such a large screen, but I do think that there comes a point where you're not necessarily adding to the game and just mainly showing off.

I also wouldn't want a situation where I'm running so many things digitally that the human element gets forgotten. I've seen videos of people playing an RPG around a table with their laptops and devices out because that's where their character sheet is and that's where the virtual tabletop is and it looks just like anywhere else where people are just hanging out with their devices. If I'm going to put the effort to get people into the same physical space for a game, I'm going to want people connecting in that space.

But that's just me.

RPGaDay 2024 # 12 RPG With Well Supported Campaigns

 You probably saw this coming a mile off, but I'm going to go with the OSR.

I'm not really interested in published campaigns with lots of scripted twists and turns. As evidenced by my Second Law of Gaming, I'm far more interested in something that can be player driven. If I had more experience with something PBTA, which also leans into a player-driven structure, I might go with that.

But it's not just a game putting the players in the driver's seat. It's also about how much support you give to the GM to respond to those players. And with the wealth of dungeons and random tables and populated hexcrawls out there for the OSR, I think that's a clear winner.

I kept a party going with a single megadungeon for 5 years. If I had had the confidence and wealth of tools when I was running that campaign, it could have gone in several directions and who knows? Maybe that megadungeon that was the centerpiece of the campaign would have become a side show.

RPGaDay 2024 #11 RPG With Well Supported One-Shots

 If I'm looking for a one-shot, my go-to is Fiasco.

Not only is it really easy to set up, but there are loads of playsets for it. And each playset has enough variety to it that each playthrough is going to be different. I've played a Fallout themed playset three times with three different groups and each time has been very different.

The first time was a personal drama about squandering hope in the wasteland. The second time was a raucous romp that could only happen with that raucous group of players. The third was a more straightforward crime drama.

RPGaDay 2024 #10 RPG You'd Like To See On TV

 Let me start by saying that I am only slightly interested in Actual Play. I'm interested in learning different games, so something that doesn't engage with or explore the rules of the game they're playing is not interesting to me. I have enjoyed the Critical Role animated series, but have negligible interest in watching the Actual Play.

So what I would want to see on TV would be a scripted program telling a story set in the world of a tabletop RPG.

I think the setting that I would most like to see in this format would be Traveller. While there was a Kickstarter that promised a show or at least a movie, it was run by the infamous Ken Whitman and therefore unlikely to see the light of day. Throwing some Netflix or Apple+ money at the property might help make it up to everyone who got burned in that fiasco.

One idea that I've had that could be fun would be a show that featured a group of gamers navigating life both at and away from the gaming table, with each episode exploring some bit of each. Would could represent the game by putting the actors in makeup and costumes instead of their street clothes, or do the game elements in either 3d or 2d animation.

For example, one episode could revolve around the theme of sacrifice. The party is on a quest to recover a great treasure and there is a monster that they cannot defeat guarding it. So Steve the Paladin throws the party's most valuable treasure so that the monster will chase it, allowing them to proceed on their quest for an even greater reward. Then Steve the Bartender realizes that playing roadie for his girlfriend's band is holding him back from the career he really wants and makes the painful decision to break up with her.

There is a series of movies about The Gamers that does some of this, but it could be played for drama (as I illustrated in my example) as well as comedy. And the possibility of switching campaigns or rotating the GM for each season could be fun, too.

RPGaDay 2024 #9 An Accessory You'd Like To See

 In terms of physical props for play, my primary focus seems to be on convenience and portability. Give me something that is compact and that can be easily carried into any gaming scenario and I'll be very happy.

While the Noteboard is a great solution for anything from sketch maps to note-taking to battlemaps, conveniently portable minis has been a challenge. I'm not overly choosy about exactly what my minis looks like on a battlemap, but the ability to tell Steve's character from Sheila's character is always good. I was a fan of prepainted miniatures back when those were being made (Are they still?) and will pick up figurines out of vending machines when possible. But all of these items take up bulk and weight.

I have thought about paper minis, which should make transporting a lot of minis easy, but I'm less a fan of printing them myself. I remember, as a newbie gamer, seeing a booklet of Cardboard Heroes for any occassion on the shelf at my local game store. I thought about it a lot, but never got around to buying it. Looking online recently, I can buy that as a PDF and print any one of the pages that I want. If only I could get past the terrible need for printer ink and making sure I have good quality paper. If I could see that again in a shop, I would buy it in a heartbeat (when finances allowed).

Considering my love of random generation, I would love to see random scenario generators for a variety of other settings/genres/core activities. They might be out there already.

RPGaDay 2024 #8: An Accessory You Appreciate

 I think I already mentioned these items in my "Good Form" post, but the Noteboard and reusable index cards. The fact that there are games where those can be among the short list of things I need to play is immensely helpful

There's another accessory that isn't really an accessory, but I've found it to be very useful. The game Pandemonium: Adventures in Tabloid World! has a wonderful Instant Scenario Generator within its pages that is great fun. It also meshes well with the way I prefer to run D20 Modern.

I didn't care for the fact that D20 Modern ported in its fantasy content via D&D. D&D is fine as its own thing, but if you expect me to accept its tropes in my modern-day game, we're going to have a problem. But ignoring the potential wealth of content by avoiding crossover is not great either. So treating it as a "tabloid world" is a good compromise. Beholders and displacer beasts are cryptids right alongside Mothman and Bigfoot. That sort of thing.

The really fun thing with the scenario generator is that it offers two levels of plot: What appears to be going on and then what's really going on. And trying to connect those two can be a really great spur to creativity.

This all just reminds me that I need to run D20 Modern again, even though it's 20 years out of date. (Don't @ we about Everyday Heroes.)

RPGaDay 2024 #7 RPG With "Good Form"

 Not quite sure what "good form" means in this context.

I'm going to make my own definition then. I'll say "good form" means the game and everything needed to play it is easily transportable. I've played and run games with lots of books and the whole maps & minis business and have the back troubles to prove it. Games that don't require lots of books or lots of props are to be treasured.

Fate Accelerated fits this criteria. The rulebook is light, I've got a dice bag for Fate dice and the Fate point tokens I got from a Kickstarter. A Noteboard is a pocket sized eraseable playmat that can be very handy for drawing out battle maps on a table whether or not I want to use a grid. I also have a supply of reusable plastic coated index cards for noting Aspects, as well as wet erase pens to mark them. That's enough to play, but I also got the "It's Not My Fault!" scenario starter card decks which add some bulk but also help me create a scenario on the fly.

Fiasco is another good candidate, though it can get bulky. The new card-based version comes in a box that contains everything you need to play, including all of the playset decks from the initial Kickstarter. The original version is still lots of fun though. Props are simple. A box of black dice and a box of white dice. Those reusable index cards and the wet erase pens. Playsets add bulk here. I not only have the playset compilation books, but also a number of playsets that I've downloaded from the internet printed out.

RPGaDay 2024 #6 RPG That is Easy to Use

 With a lot of games, ease of use is a matter of simple practice. Play it or run it enough and it becomes second nature.But in terms of "pick up and play" capability, I would lean towards Fate. 

Once we had used Microscope to build up an optimistic apocalypse, I started having ideas for scenarios at various points along the timeline. One idea, early in the apocalypse, was clearly a one-shot. It would be highly compressed and ideally played through in a single session.

So as I began casting my mind out to decide what system to use, I knew I wanted something that didn't take a lot of effort to run. I didn't want the players to spend 2 hours building characters for a scenario that would play out over about the same span of time.

I also wanted something that would be fairly easy to run. Easy to stat NPCs or opposition. Lots of room for player solutions and improv.

I kept gravitating towards Fate.

Though it did present me with a problem and an opportunity. Since death is off the table in Fate by default, that meant that survival was not a viable stake for the scenario. They may be concerned with death in character, but it's not something that I could realistically threaten them with via the mechanics of the game.

So then I had to come up with something else that I could make the stake of the scenario: The success or failure at the climax that determines the outcome. And that's where Fate came to my rescue. With concepts like "plot stress tracks" and "social maps" from various Fate implementations, it's very easy to establish alternative stakes and give them mechanical support.

That allowed me to come up with a scenario that had real tension and risk, but also touches on the eventual optimism that comes out of the other side of the apocalypse.

(I haven't run this scenario yet, so no spoilers.  But I am really looking forward to this.)

RPGaDay 2023 #5 RPG With Great Writing

Just like great art, great writing hasn't come at me in a while. It certainly may be just me. As I said yesterday, I've been in a bit of a funk. So again, I'm charting my own course today and taking about my Second Law of Gaming.

I've been looking for some pithy and clever way to phrase it, but it's always been too clever for its own good. The simple way to phrase it is: Put the players in the driver's seat.

I think this goes a bit further than most standard anti-railroading diatribes. Because it's not just about giving the player choices, but giving them control. This doesn't mean letting them run roughshod over your campaign. It means that once you've laid out the core activity of the game, let them do that thing and see where it takes them. Which should be right into the arms of the adventure.

While I learned this lesson from my Castle of the Mad Archmage campaign, it's also something that I've tried to keep in mind as I run other games. I found that campaign very freeing, as I never needed to push or prompt the players into action and the players had a huge amount of room to explore and find things that appealed to them.

Though I don't know if players are really accustomed to having that level of agency.

During COVID, I tried to run an online Old School sandbox hexcrawl. Trying to keep with the roots of the hobby, I tried to run with a pretty open table. Two players that I found (not entirely sure where anymore) had mostly played 5e, but were willing to give the Old School a try. This was my "blank map" campaign, so it was very much on the players to decide what to do. It was still early days, so there was only so much that had been discovered. So they could have gone on to explore on their own, but when they heard that a previous exploration had discovered a dungeon, there was almost a relief and certainly a clear purpose when they decided "Let's explore/clear the dungeon." Maybe in a few more sessions, that would have led to some new confidence, but things fell apart not long after that.

RPGaDay 2024 #4 RPG With Great Art

Maybe I've just been in a funk for a long time, but I don't think I've seen many recent RPGs that blew me away in terms of art. I could always wax rhapsodic about Castle Falkenstein, but I think I've done that enough over the years. So I'm calling a mulligan. Rather than go with one of the alternative prompts, I'm going to write about something that I've been meaning to put together for a while.

I'll be going over one of my Laws of Gaming. This is a list of things that I've learned as a GM to help guide my process. I'm currently at 4.

The first one I'll cover is very simple: Define the core activity of the game.

As defined by Robin D. Laws, who inspired this one, the core activity of a game is what the game is about. It should fit in the sentence "You are all X who do Y."

Some games will have this core activity baked into the setting and/or mechanics. For example, D&D's core activity is "You are all fantasy adventurers who kill monsters and take their stuff." The character classes and races determine what the character are, while the default XP rewards are for fighting monsters and stuff is often its own reward. (Don't @ me about milestones).

Even without having mechanical rewards for leaning into the core activity, you can still have one. Licensed RPGs will typically have the same core activity as the original media. For example, a Star Trek RPG will typically assume that the characters are Starfleet officers who explore strange new worlds.

But if you don't go into a campaign with a core activity, whether that's determined by the rulebook you bought or something you came up with on your own, your campaign is going to struggle. I can definitely point to campaigns I've run where I did have a core activity and those I didn't, which also generally lines up with the campaigns I remember fondly and those I remember with chagrin.

RPGaDay 2024 #3 Most Often Played RPG

 In terms of campaign length or number of sessions, nothing has yet topped my Castle of the Mad Archmage megadungeon campaign. 5 years of pretty much weekly sessions.

More recently, I think Fiasco has been a strong contender. It's a great pick up game and without a steady group, that's been useful.

I managed 2 sessions of InSpectres last year with continuity between them, but only 1 session in that continuity this year, so I haven't managed my minimum standard of campaign yet. I remain optimistic.

RPGaDay 2024 #2 Most Recently Played

 The RPG that I have most recently played would be Blades in the Dark.

A friend of mine offered to run something over the summer while he has more free time. This is also a good opportunity to try out some of the longer term mechanics in the game that we haven't gotten to explore with one-shots. We spent most of session 2 discussing experience points and other outcomes of the adventure we had in session 1. I'm really looking forward to session 3 right now.

RPGaDay 2024 #1 First RPG Bought This Year

 Yup, like a groundhog oi February 2nd, I have come out of a long hiatus to be here for RPGaDay 2024.

The first RPG I bought this year would probably be Microscope. Though I do put a couple of qualifiers on that.

The first qualifier is that it was my second copy of Microscope. I had bought a copy at least a year before, but had misplaced it. So I got the second copy because I needed to replace the first.

The second qualifier is that I wouldn't necessarily call Microscope an RPG. It is definitely RPG adjacent and it's a good game, so don't think I'm trying to damn it with faint praise. Just that it doesn't call for making decisions as a character.

The reason that it was very important that I had a copy was that I really wanted to try it out. Thankfully, I was able to get a session together and we created a history that start with an apocalypse, went through a Gamma World phase and ended up Star Trek. It was a wild ride.

I wrote a scenario for an early point in the apocalypse and hopefully, I'll get to run it with the group that helped me build the setting. Then think about other ideas based on the other points on the timeline that we created.

Making Dungeons

 I am proceeding with my #dungeon24 plans. I completed my January level and you can download it here.

It's entirely randomly generated, and a good portion of the month went to working out my process.

My original plan was to use the random dungeon generation from OSRIC, swap in the dungeon encounter tables from the Adventures Dark & Deep Random Terrain and Encounter Generator with its lovely d1000 tables and the simply massive Adventures Dark & Deep Bestiary and be off to the races.

Then I hit a snag. Because AD&D clones like what I'm using (both OSRIC and Adventures Dark & Deep) have very large numbers in the Number Appearing entry. So for one encounter, I rolled up an army of 200 dwarves intended to populate a 20x20 foot room.

So I had to add a couple of steps to my process.

Clones of older version of D&D, such as B/X clones Labyrinth Lord and Old School Essentials, tend to have different, smaller Number Appearing values. That's likely because those values were intended specifically for populating a dungeon, while the AD&D values were intended for wilderness encounters (at least according to my research).

Even then, I could wind up with maybe too many monsters. Which leads to my next step: The Lair %. While it could be read as the percentage chance that a monster is in its designated lair, I decided to read it as the portion of monsters that actually stick to their lair. So I had reduced my 200 dwarves to about 20 thanks to Labyrinth Lord numbers, but with a Lair % of 50%, that meant that only about 10 dwarves are hanging out in their lair at any given time. The rest of them could be used to generate my random encounter tables.

But the AD&D Bestiary doesn't include Lair %'s in its monster stats. That's listed in the OSRIC bestiary section.

It might be that I'm shooting myself in the foot by using Adventures Dark & Deep so centrally, since I wind up needing monsters that line up in 3 different sources for my process to work. But OSRIC and AD&D are what I've run and played the most, so I'd like to stay in my comfort zone when working on something so ambitious.

One of the other things I was doing that was part of my process from the start was making an initial reaction roll for each encounter. The idea here is to 1) create more variety of encounter by ensuring that not every encounter is a simple fight and 2) to assist with creating backstory and interest in the dungeon. A Hostile dwarf has a reason for being that way, just as a Friendly dwarf does. Unfortunately, I haven't delved deeply into that aspect, with the other issues I had to address.

The Golden Age?

 Well, it has happened again. All the wits and pundits of the blogosphere have spoken and I feel like I must weight in as well.

Ben Riggs, who purports to be a historian, has made a bold claim that 2023 marked the end of the Golden Age of TTRPGs. https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/18xtxdq/the_golden_age_of_ttrpgs_is_dead/ And the reason I say "purports" is because he's missing an obvious historical parallel to the scenario that he lays out in his post: D&D 4e.

The Open Gaming License was first introduced to enable the average hobbyist gamer to support Third Edition D&D back in the yesteryear of Y2K and maybe make a buck or two while doing do. And some people began making more than a buck or two and were able to do very well for themselves. Over the course of the 3,x publishing era, a number of companies sprang up that were able to sustain themselves entirely on publishing 3.x content under the OGL.

I mention those companies because that seems to be the thread that Ben isn't following, but it's really key.

When D&D 4e was announced, it was made clear that it would not be an OGL game. While players would have to buy all of their books from Wizards of the Coast from then on (which WotC didn't mind at all), this is also cut off the meal ticket for this whole ecosystem of publishers who supported 3.x over the years.

So the hunt was on for a d20 successor system, so those publishers could continue to do something very close to what they had been doing previously. Paizo and its Pathfinder system ultimately won, but let's not forget that once D&D left the OGL market, there were a number of people trying to fill that gap. True20, FantasyCraft and a host of others that I've forgotten in the interim.

And now, thanks to the OGL 1.1 fiasco of a year ago, we're in a similar situation. Even though WotC has recanted and relented and begged for forgiveness, they burned a lot of trust. Enough that the OGL publishers supporting 5e decided that they needed to design for a system that either was truly, assuredly open as WotC had previously promised D&D would be, or was under their direct ownership and control.

That's what these products that are "fracturing the market" are. Publishers seeking assurance that the rug won't be pulled out from under them again. And there's every possibility that those game lines won't last long. For every Pathfinder, there are a large number of True20's. And this disruption is arguably smaller than the one that created Pathfinder, so it could happen than none of these manage to sustain much more than a niche interest.

New Year, Same Old Me

It's been a while since I posted here, but I've been doing pretty good.

I don't know if I mentioned, but my main New Year's resolution for 2023 was to run a campaign. And since it had been so long since I've been a stable GM, I made myself a generous definition: Run 2 (or more) sessions that share continuity. This could be a traditional campaign, or it could be an OSR open table, where I run multiple sessions in the same dungeon and keeping the progress and changes to the dungeon from one run into the next session even if the players and characters are different. It could even be a Fiasco "campaign," which would be fairly close to a film franchise with sequels and side stories, kinda like the MCU or whatever the American Pie franchise is.

But even with that generous definition, it took me a long time to manage it. I'd been meeting with my Wednesday group off and on for a while, but it was all one shots. Some Fiasco from me, Blades in the Dark if one of them wanted to run. Finally, I got to run my traditional Halloween one-shot for them, which was InSpectres.

The end of the year was drawing near and my resolution still going unfulfilled. So I suggested that we try InSpectres again. They enjoyed the first session, and so a week or so before Christmas, we were able to make it happen. They still had their character sheets and I still had my records from the session, so we had the continuity. It was a good session and I got to say that I actually kept my New Year's resolution.

I also got to run my All Outta Candy Canes Christmas one-shot. I've wanted to use the All Outta Bubblegum system for about 5 or 6 years, but the notion of "The Expendables save Christmas" was only 2 or 3 years old. So this was a long time in coming, but I finally got some interest at the monthly RPG Meetup in December.

For this year, I'm going slightly more ambitious for my New Year's resolutions. I'm planning on keeping my resolution regarding running a campaign. I'm not even going to revise my definition of "campaign." While I did pull it off last year, it was a near enough thing that I am not going to get cocky this year.

But what I am doing is #dungeon24. I found out about #dungeon23 on social media last year, but wasn't sure if I had my act together enough to do it. The idea is to create a megadungeon by creating 1 room per day. At the end of each month, you will have completed 1 level. At the end of the year, you will have a 12-level megadungeon.

My plan is to leverage the power of random generation. I've already got my first level mapped using the random dungeon generator from OSRIC, as well as some of the second. While I will be using that procedure to determine whether monsters and treasure are present, I'll be using random encounter tables from Adventures Dark & Deep. The Bestiary is enormous, so I'm expecting some good variety of encounter to keep things exciting. I'll also be using their rules for reaction rolls, since OSRIC doesn't really include those.

Just because everything will have a procedure for it doesn't mean that I'm not going to be creative about this. It turns out that my creativity is the kind that's really good at filling in the gaps between existing things, not really so much about making things from whole cloth. Those reaction rolls are going to help me fill in the story of the dungeon, along with every other detail that gets rolled up.