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.