#RPGaDay 2015: Day 6 - Core competences

Prompt: Most recent RPG played

Like Feng Shui before it, Fate Core rocks the
appeal of combining gunplay, swordplay, magic and
cyborg apes.

The most recent game I've played is my by-Skype Fate Core game, Operatives of CROSSBOW. If this were the prompt for Monday it would be No Rest for the Wicked. So it goes. I talked about Fate Core a fair bit last year, I think, but what I love most about it is its flexibility. It's designed as a moderately universal system, and it is in terms of content. You can run pretty much any sort of story under Fate Core, which is not to say that it is the only game you'll ever need. It only has one style of play; as crunchy as you might make the skill set, it is fundamentally a collaborative narrativist game and will never be hardcore simulationist or competitive.

The content customisation is vast, however. Permanent and transitory qualities of people, objects and places are described by Aspects, the abilities of animate beings by Skills and special abilities by Stunts. Anything else can be tacked on. I created three magic systems for CROSSBOW in about an hour, although I'd spend longer if they were a major part of the game or if how they worked mattered.

The next game I have planned will likely also run in Fate Core, because I like being able to stat an NPC in seconds and because an 80s action TV inspired game isn't right for Gumshoe.

-

So, my broader discussion is on adaptability.

Generally, the simpler a system, the easier it is to adapt. Fate Core is designed for it, and keeps things nice and simple. Skills are trained abilities and give a flat bonus for rolls based on that skill. Aspects define intrinsic properties and can be invoked by spending Fate points or by Creating an Advantage, an action which either creates or exploits an existing Aspect and usually gives free invokes. Stunts either provide a narrow +2 bonus or some means of bending the rules in a specific situation. Stunts can easily be expanded to provide systems of magic and superpowers, and Aspects to include a heroic origin or mystical nature. Skills are tailored to setting.

Power systems are always the most complicated, often requiring substantial front loading (see for example the Dresden Files RPG,) and the one restriction I would tend to go with in any similar game having played The Dresden Files is 'all wizards or no wizards'. They're just too much more complicated, and while an all-wizard group would all know the rules pretty well (we hope) the players of a vampire, a sea monster and a faerie have no cause to learn those rules and you can end up with the wizard's player and GM spending a lot of time referring to the book (seriously, they're complex as hell, and I played Ascension.) I guess you could be more flexible once you were comfortable with the system, but not at first.

Unisystem Lite was my old go-to for conversion, but again it requires a lot of front-loading. My Stargate and Star Wars ports each had a few bits of description and a crap tonne of Qualities and Drawbacks. Still, it worked pretty well. Gumshoe would almost certainly port easily to pretty much any investigative setting, again with a bit of front loading on career profiles.

D20 on the other hand, basically needs a core book to use. You could work from just the basics, but creating and balancing classes is hard to do and pretty much impossible on the fly, and just look how many professionally produced licensed games screwed it up. This is because D20 is complicated. Its simplest iteration is D20 Call of Cthulhu, best described as an interesting experiment, which pares the system to the bones (its classes are 'offence' and 'defence' and are only very slightly different.) D20 works pretty well for a game with a zero to hero ethos, where PCs start off weak and become mighty, facing appropriate enemies all the way up.

Similarly, anything gritty and simulationist is likely to be rules heavy and thus hard to adapt, even though it should be pretty straightforward since its job is to be a simulation engine and thus relatively free of fiddling narrative conventions. The problem is that each setting then requires fixed rules for anything specific to that setting, which are often difficult to develop on the fly.

Ironically, the worst system to approach for adaptation is something like GURPS, which was to all appearances designed to be a universal, largely simulationist game engine and then incorporated a massive corpus of specific exceptions, including rules for simulating narrative conventions such as Anime Hammerspace.

#RPGaDAY: Day 27 - Game you would like to see a new/improved edition of

This is quite the hot topic at the moment, what with Onyx Path rolling out the All-New World of Darkness Second Edition Show (formerly [apt and/or pretentious title] the [iconic antagonist] Chronicle), and D&D (ostensibly) 5th Edition now fresh off the printers and allegedly smelling of fish (literally, and I've certainly had gaming products which had that particular ink-smell problem before).

Angel sarcophagus ON THE MOON!
Sign me up!*

The God-Machine Chronicle release for nWoD is a truly massive overhaul, involving pretty major alterations to every aspect of the game's design. The basic resolution mechanic is the same, but there is a lot more focus on intrinsic abilities, and the 'Condition' mechanic, which basically borrows a page from Fate's playbook and allows a great many powers and effects to pin a description on their target which either gives them penalties or gives other characters advantages against them until they can resolve the Condition in some way.

It also links experience and character progression directly to in-play action rather than raw game time clocked, and decouples morality and sanity. There are a huge number of changes that I really like, and in particular the preview material for Mage and Forsaken suggests that the writers have a much, much stronger handle on what they are actually trying to do with the game than they did with the first editions.

Of course, it's a tabletop game and I mostly (only) play WoD in a LARP setting where about 50-75% of the changes would be a massive headache to implement, but I can hardly criticise the games for that; it would like complaining that hammer is no good for whisking eggs, or at least that my frying pan is too shallow to make sauces in. National-scale LARP societies is not what the game is written for (and given White Wolf's history with the Cam, you can see that they might really not want to go there again.)

This one is newer than mine; I don't know if
there is a yet-newer one.

On top of the announced games, I'd like to see them take a revised run at Geist, which is the game I run and - as we work in a much smaller arena than the big four (Requiem, Lost, Forsaken and Awakening) - it would be something I actually could implement. It's needed as well, as there's still a lot that doesn't entirely tie together in the game as is. I'd like to see Synergy function as a balance mechanic rather than being shoehorned into the linear, unidirectional morality system (they are apparently doing something of the sort with Werewolf's Harmony, so I might just nick that when it's unveiled).

This (or Unisystem cinematic) is
basically my new edition of anything I
don't like the system of.

I hear that there is a new Feng Shui out/due, which would be interesting to take a look at, although my ideal wuxia RPG would be one more removed from the Shadowfist setting. There is also Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2nd Edition, which intrigues me strangely. Onyx Path, again, is revising the Aeon series (Adventure!, Aberrant and Trinity) and that intrigues me, especially the first two (I was never really taken with Trinity, although a closing down sale at the game shop means I have, like, all the material knocking around at home).

But this is all tangential to the point, which is what would I like to see revised, rather than what is being revised. I have to admit, this question is complicated by the fact that I realised recently that I can pretty much run anything I like the setting of, but not the system, in Fate Core with a little prep work; possibly less than learning a new system would take.

I suspect that there are games I would get excited about a new edition for. Hell, I was mad keen when I heard there was a new AFF, wasn't I? But I don't think that there is anything that I think 'man, if only they would revise that', in part because I'm now an experienced enough rules hacker to be confident changing anything that doesn't make sense, and I haven't felt bounded by 'canon' setting since Kung Fu Vampire Hunters at the latest.

Look for the #RPGaDAY hashtag for more on new editions, and check back tomorrow when I'll talk at you about the scariest game I've ever played; or something like it anyway.

* If there are no angels in sarcophagi on the moon in GMC, please tell me; break my heart clean.**

** I would totally accept Mars as an alternative.

#RPGaDAY: Day 26 - Coolest character sheet

What is the measure of a man? Or woman? Or dwarf, or for that matter cyborg killer afflicted with a deep and unremitting melancholy fugue as a side effect of his intra-cranial armour plating? In an RPG, that measure is the character sheet.

I have no particular dog in today's fight, so I've just gone trawling through a Google image search for some prime examples. Most of the examples below are stock sheets; where I can see that they are otherwise, I've credited the creators as best I can.

 

D&D: Lowering the common denominator since 1974

We begin with the daddy of them all: Dungeons & Dragons. Just look at that thing; it's huge and cluttered and... I think the best thing I can say for it is that it's comprehensive. I guess that the tabular layout is clear, but it's not visually appealing (although in all honesty the teenage me would have been excited by the multiplicity of apparent options, however irrelevant). I guess it does at least not have a space in which the artistically inept can self-consciously not draw a portrait of their PC and feel kind of like a failure each time they look at the blank space where they know they could have drawn a portrait if they were any good. I disapprove of RPGs making their players feel even more wanting than most of them already do. It's not like the cool, confident kids tend to find their way into roleplaying, especially not as teenagers.

Overall, I include it here as an example of what is not (to me) a cool character sheet.

If anyone knows what this is actually for, drop a note in the
comments.

By comparison, here's another sheet purporting to be for D&D; I guess for 5th edition, although the necessarily chaotic and complex nature of my high-dimensional data mining exercise (search terms: character + sheet) means that it may be mislabeled and not a D&D sheet at all. The presence of a 'Tec' attribute and the 'Augments' section argues for the latter somewhat.

I much prefer the layout on this one. The curves are visually appealing, and the information is clustered according to use, and the whole thing is on a single side, including a reference list of favoured combos. The combination of form and function makes this a strong contender.

Some folks will always go the extra mile.

One of the hallmarks of a good character sheet is how easy it is for the financially and tech impoverished to replicate using a piece of paper and a pencil, and in fairness the D&D sheet above would be easy to copy, given its tabular layout.

The hand drawn sheet on the left (created for Dungeon Crawl Classics by The Earthlight Academy) is proof, if it were needed, that not everyone considers such simplicity to be a virtue. Despite the visual elegance, however, the layout of this sheet remains clear and concise. D&D could learn a bit about structuring a D20 character sheet here. On the down side, being of an obviously artistic bent, the maker has left that great big character portrait space in the centre to tease those of a more literary or mathematical persuasion.

This one also represents the PC as
the Vitruvian man, so Da Vinci props.

Speaking of simplicity, here's a couple of fair examples. On the left, Tunnels and Trolls, and on the right, no less than two character sheets for In Nomine; one for an angel and one for a demon.

Each has a straightforward design; tabular, but broken up by images so that they don't look like an unalloyed accounting spreadsheet. They contain all the information needed for a character, and don't take up pages and pages of paper.

On to the Fate system now, and the Fate Core character sheet.

Again, it's a beautifully simple and elegant layout, and no taunting portrait space. It's got pretty much everything it needs, although if I'm honest I find it a bit stark. Aesthetically, it works for me as a sheet for a modern or futuristic game, but I'd find it odd looking at that style and layout for a fantasy or historical game.

It is dead easy to copy into your own variation if you so desired, but in and of itself is all function and no form.

This sheet for Spirit of the Century is almost the opposite; very visual, but not necessarily convenient in play. I do like the fact that you could absolutely draw a portrait in the centre circle, but because it's the hub of the sheet rather than an obvious picture frame, there's no pressure to do so.

Moving on quite quickly, I like the cog design of the Tephra sheet on the right, and it looks pretty usable.

On the left, a D20 Star Wars sheet. Much prettier than the D&D sheet, but I have a feeling that this one is incomplete, to the level of there probably being at least one more sheet.

And the final instance, and winner of the coolest character sheet award is this little beauty:

Why? Well, it's about Vampire Pirates; what's cooler than that?

Check back tomorrow for the game I would like to see an improved or expanded version of, and in the meantime check out the hashtag, #RPGaDAY, for more cool character sheets.

#RPGaDAY: Day 24 - Most complicated RPG owned

The game which had a skill called 'Do', which
seemed a little broad.

I don't own many mechanically complex games. Easily the worst offender is Dark Heresy, which as I've noted before took five or six rolls to resolve a single combat hit from the psyker's Force staff. If I had 'Lost, in Space' to do over, I'd just have said "Okay; add Psi-Rating to Strength Bonus and Armour Pirecing; have fun with that."

However, I've already talked a lot about Warhammer in various forms, so instead I'm going to look at a game whose complications were metaphysical rather than mechanical (although it's a White Wolf old World of Darkness game, so it has its share of rules complications, from endless lists of secondary skills to a four stage resolution for each and every basic combat roll): Mage: The Ascension.

The central premise and conceit of Mage: the Ascension is that magic is a point of view. All reality is fluid, determined by the consensus beliefs of the mass of humanity. Most humans are unconscious participants in the system, Sleepers; the Awakened are the Mages whose enlightened condition allows them to impose their will on reality and say: "No, you work like this."

Magical ability was determined by Spheres - nine branches of magic, which determined what you could do - and Arete - degree of enlightenment, which determined how well you could do it. Within the dominion of your Spheres, you could basically do anything. There were some sample effects, but basically there was no spell list, no power set; if you could conceive it in terms of your Spheres, and make the Arete roll (the tricky part, as casting pools tended to be the lowest dice pools in the game), you could make it happen. The fundamental simplicity of this system was the source of its complication, because in the absence of a spell list, every casting was up for debate: Can you do this, or are you just blagging it? Nuclear blasts are the preserve of the Forces Sphere, but what if I use the Matter Sphere to create a critical mass of fissile plutonium? (Official ruling was that without Forces, the material would not be fissile, as the inherent instability of plutonium was a function of the consensus reality that you were bypassing to make the plutonium out of thin air in the first place, IIRC.)

The debate was further complicated by Paradox. When a mage tried to bend reality too far, reality could push back through a little-understood force called Paradox. Spells that worked cleverly around consensus reality were coincidental, while those that punched the consensus in the nose and called it chicken were vulgar; vulgar spells generated more Paradox, which built up inside a mage until it was either bled off, exploded, or sent a manifestation around to take you out back and give you the business, so every casting involved a measure of debate over whether something 'could have' happened.

Of course, that was all hunky-dory compared to the Technocracy issue. The Technocracy were the morally ambiguous bad guys... Sort of. They were mages who, rather than harking back to a mythical golden age of wonder, sought to create a perfect world of ordered reality... through SCIENCE! They were so succesful a sympathetic antagonist that later material on them did everything short of slapping swastikas on all their iconography to make them more obviously baddies, before giving up and making them a playable option.

The thing of it was that the Technocracy truly believed in 'enlightened Science'. They didn't see themselves as wizards monkeying with technology; they were scientists and inventors and surgeons and explorers who used Sufficiently Advanced Science (TM) to shape the future scientific paradigm of the consensus reality. And the metaphysic being what it was, they were right. Wrap your head around that, if you please; at least until the 3rd edition showed up and was all: "Nah; they're wizards monkeying with science, but now none of that consensus shit applies and the world is as it is." 3rd ed was weird in its efforts not to be weird.

Next up, in a few minutes really, my favourite RPG that no-one else wants to play. I have literally no clue what to talk about for that.

Check out the hashtag for more overly complicated RPGs.

#RPGaDAY: Day 21 - Favourite licensed RPG

Technically, this is a licensed RPG,
although the licensed property is -
or was, at least - also an RPG, making
this the game of the game, or the
game of the game of the game, since
the original WFRP was built on the
wargame.

I tend to be a bit sniffy about licensed RPGs (see yesterday's blog, for example), but the truth is that this is because my mind tends to focus on a few specific examples, and in particular the rash of D20 licenses for SF properties such as Stargate, Farscape and the big daddy, Star Wars that ensued from the first flush of the Open Gaming License.

The problem of these licensed products is threefold. Firstly, D20 is a shockingly poor choice for a game attempting to recreate a dramatic setting. The games attempt to hack this - with greater or lesser degrees of success - but ultimately if you're playing Star Wars, you really don't want to start off with a level 1 Fringer who's getting pwned by Stormtroopers, and while it's an easy fix, if you have to ignore the first 5-10 levels of character progression to make the game work, you're playing with the wrong system.

Umm... adventure? Wow; this is a cover
that screams 'we don't give a shit about
this product.'

Secondly, D20 is intrinsically class based, which means that you need to define classes in a setting which is not class based (even Call of Cthulhu D20 had 'Offensive' and 'Defensive'). Stargate flailed particularly horribly in this, creating a not-entirely-convincing divide between 'Soldier' and 'Guardian' (alien soldier/barbarian), while at the same time failing to make the fairly obvious - I thought - distinction between 'Scientist' and 'Scholar', or even 'Engineer'. Creating the highly-competent lead characters actually required prestige classes, which feel like they ought to be an extra, rather than standard.

This brings me to thirdly, which effects all licensed products: When push comes to shove we all have our own ideas about how a fictional setting works, and by locking down fictional history and trying to reconcile the available information without actually being a canon source, the licensed RPG often becomes a source of contention, even resentment (Ra was a Goa'uld possessing an Asgard possessing a human, puh-leese!). Even one of my most level-headed friends* was drawn in to note that the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG (which will be covered more in the second part of this article) gives Angel a higher Strength than Buffy (who is also strong, but ultimately is statted as a Dex monster), despite the opposite being explicitly stated in Angel (the show, not the RPG). Blasphemy.

Of course, there are also games licensed from other media, including books (MERP and The Lord of the Rings RPG draw on the books as well as the films, regardless of the heavy use of movie photos in the latter, Call of Cthulhu is not exactly licensed, but is subject to a whole mess of legal and quasi-legal brouhaha, and if The Dying Earth RPG isn't mentioned in today's Gonzo History Gaming, it will only be because it turned up on Day 17), computer games (World of Warcraft is the RPG of the CRPG of the RTS), and wargames (the assorted iterations of the WH40K and WFRP, it least once away from Games Workshop's direct control and into the licensed sphere). If nobody has ever hacked out an RPG based on Hamlet, I would be amazed (and indeed, here is Forsooth!). All are subject to similar limitations (although wargames and especially CRPGs are probably better modelled by D20).

ETA: I completely forgot comics, from Judge Dredd to Mouseguard.

I am struck by how much better this
cover is than Stargate's, despite still being
just a bunch of faces.

Which brings us to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Easily my favourite licensed product (discounting anything Cthulhu as being far more complex than that), BtVS addresses all three of my main concerns (that minor point three thing aside for now). Of course, Eden Studios lost the license for Buffy in 2006, but the books that were published are still available.

BtVS runs on the Unisystem Lite/Unisystem Cinematic engine, which divides characters into 'Heroes' built largely on attributes and skills, and supporting characters (for BtVS 'White Hats'), who have less raw ability, but a larger stock of Drama Points, making them more wild cards than the dependable Heroes. One of the key features of this system is the great swathe of Qualities and Drawbacks available for character customisation, including packages (such as 'Watcher', 'Werewolf' or 'Slayer') which can be absolute game changers. What this does mean is that, while the system is absolutely perfect for dramatic settings, it does require a substantial amount of prep on the front end for anything that doesn't have published material (and I know that Buffy does, but when I ran a Watcher-focused game I still had to create a run of tailored packages so the PCs weren't all functionally the same).

Heroes and White Hats is a good split for the setting, and no further class-based division is needed, which is just as well. I can't imagine that the game would be helped by having to split Buffy's levels between Slayer, Student and Cheerleader (let alone those prestige levels in Fast Food Wage Slave).

Finally, the game avoids the problem of canon and fanon conflict by being totally and irreverently upfront about the non-specific nature of Buffyverse history and cosmology, which is largely whatever works for the drama of the episode. Getting way too involved with the cosmology is part of what didn't work with Season 8 (also the artwork and the fact that by the time they did the time-shift episode I pretty much disliked Buffy to the point of wanting Fray to punch her lights out), and the RPG is perfectly willing to put its hands up and say 'it looks pretty much like it works this way'.

I've only actually run one game, but it worked well enough except for the bits that weren't entirely the system's fault (I underestimated the degree to which the mook rules would render a heavy-hitting adversary truly monstrous and almost managed a TPK with a giant scarab beetle, and the sorceress would only use the single sample spell from the book and so tried to solve every problem in the game with a magic missile).

Tune in - some day soon that idiom is going to be replaced with 'log on' or something similar - tomorrow, when I may be talking about my best secondhand RPG purchase, if I can find something else to say about it, because I don't buy many games, let alone secondhand, so I've already covered most of the options quite a bit.

* Actually a friend, not code for 'me'. I already told you I had a PC who was Drizzt Do'Urden's cousin; do you really think I'd be ashamed of a little nitpicking?

#RPGaDAY: Day 20 - Will still play in 20 years time...

I'm not keen on that ellipsis in today's prompt. There's no call for it, and the only thing it could realistically stand for is a pause before some sort of sass.

"Will still play in 20 years time... bitch."

I mean, I know that none of these prompts are grammatically complete sentences, but this one niggles at me like the themes from Live and Let Die (which does go 'in this ever changing world in which we live in' and not 'in this ever changing world in which we're living') and Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ('just repeat to yourself it's just a show, I should really just relax', apart from the first series, which had 'then repeat to yourself...'.)

Which is a pretty long winded way of saying that I have no idea what I'll still be playing in 20 years time. I suspect that I will still be gaming, but what I'll be playing escapes me. Maybe something using Fate Core, but probably not the current edition and certainly I don't think any of the other systems I currently use will last unchanged. Setting wise, I have even less of a clue. Maybe I'll finally write and sell my own game, based on my bestselling novel, retire and give up this life of crime.

Okay, actually... I don't know about 20 years, but here's my plan for 15 years in the future, which may or may not come off in the end.

Sometime between 2025 and 2029 I'm going to teach my daughter about tabletop. She's been LARPing since she was a twinkle in her parents' eyes, but I'm going to teach her about small-group, tabletop roleplaying, and I'm going to do it with Call of Cthulhu (since I'm pitching her the setting good and early). My plan is to run a session for her and any interested friends set in the unimaginably distant and romantic past of the early 1990s, with all those half-discredited tropes like MiB conspiracy theories and other Delta Green goodness. My own past will be retro, and I plan to use that.

Tomorrow's topic is Favourite Licensed RPG, and I'll talk about that if I can stop laughing at the concept. There must be something; is CoC a license?

Meantime, check out the hashtag and talk about your future gaming prospects. Catch you on the flipside, as all the retro investigators will be saying in 2029.

#RPGaDAY: Day 18 - Favourite Game System

I got the original core book and ran my
game within a few months of first
publication, I still had about six sides
of errata stuffed in the back. This revised
edition was badly needed.

I haven't yet found my perfect system, so instead I'm going to talk about some bits and pieces that I like.

I'm a big fan of dramatic system design. While I feel that there ought to be a random element, or at least a risk element in RPG design, I don't feel that the purpose of RPGs should be competitive, but rather collaborative, and that this is easier to achieve when the players and the GM/ST/Ref share a degree of control over the world, usually through some form of drama or fate point system.

I first came across this concept in two very different implementations: Eden Studios' Buffy the Vampire Slayer licensed RPG, and White Wolf's Adventure!.

BtVS used Eden's Unisystem lite - Attribute + Skill + roll + mods vs difficulty, IIRC - to model the world of the TV show. Perhaps its finest achievement was in its implementation of the stake through the heart: Roll a penalised attack and calculate damage, then triple it. If that's a kill, the vampire is dust; if not, untriple it and use the penalised damage. Why is this so awesome? Because it provides a mechanic that supports combat as it is seen in the show. Against a fully healthy vamp, a stake is a very long shot indeed, but it's an excellent finish after a few rounds of kickboxing.

That action is one-fisted; one-
and-a-half tops. I want my money
back!

Buffy's Drama Points were used for bonuses and rerolls, or to absorb damage, and in character creation a player could chose to play a Hero - lots of skills, not so many Drama Points - or a White Hat - not as skilled, but the story loves them. Drama Points did not refresh or recover automatically, but were gained by doing cool and awesome things without spending Drama Points, or by taking a throw for the story (a player could allow their character to be knocked out, captured or otherwise hurt or imperiled without resistance in exchange for Drama Points).

This being Buffy, emotional pain also netted one Drama Points.

BtVS was all right. Unisystem lite I loved and used to run a Star Wars game. The only problem is that there is a system of advantage and drawback packages, which requires a fairly substantial piece of front-loading on the part of the Director.

Adventure!'s aim was to model the pulp heroics of the early twentieth century. It featured almost-superhuman Stawarts, psychic Mesmerists and exceptionally skilled or lucky Daredevils, all of whom used their Inspiration pool to activate different abilities. Inspiration could also be used to improve rolls, to further the plot by gaining hints, or to make small alterations to the scene (such as adding a chandelier to swing from).

Fate is setting non-specific, rather than
trying to work in secret agent wizards,
swordswomen and cyborg gorillas. If
you want that, however, see Feng Shui.

Ultimately, the White Wolf system remained too clunky and mechanics heavy to really do the concepts of Adventure! justice, although it was better than the D20 system version, but the idea of altering the scene was one of the first I'd seen which brought the collaborative nature of gaming to the fore.

Collaborative is pretty much the watchword of Fate, a system which has been through many iterations, including Spirit of the Century, a pulp adventure game which by all accounts knocks Adventure!'s spirited effort into a cocked hat. The Fate system is one I touched on in Day 9's discussion of dice. Fate Core is the most recent variation.

In Fate Core, everything is collaborative, from world-building upwards. Character creation is part of play, and adding features to the world isn't even a function of Fate points; it's a standard action.

Horns on ma hat, and I don't care

The system is basic and generic, and any non-standard mechanics need to be devised as part of a front-load, but even this can be collaborative ('you want to play a wizard? How do you see that working?') I like the system a lot and it's currently one of my favourites. I use it for my campaign Operatives of CROSSBOW, which is about to get a darker, edgier, sexier reboot.

We're very serious people

Rune takes the collaborative play thing a step further. I've not played it (I have played the PC game, but this is a different beast), but the concept is interesting: All players have a character and take it in turns to be the Runner, who GMs for a session. I'd be interested if anyone has played it to know how - and if - it words.

Finally, a favourite mechanic that I came up with myself. I've mentioned before my habit of assigning a campaign a theme tune and getting people to narrate their characters' credits montage (c.f. more or less any credits sequence ever, but especially Buffy and Angel, cop shows and The Tudors).

In my Dark Heresy game, Lost, in Space, I added a mechanical hook: As part of the credits sequence, there would be a 'this week on...' section. I narrated a few likely scenes, and based on this - or on character traits - the players would narrate a brief scene including a line from their PC. If they managed to use this in the game, they got bonus XP. This was of course inspired by the catchphrase mechanic which James references in his description of the Dying Earth RPG, with my own twist.

Come back tomorrow for 'favourite published adventure', although having kind of covered that in 'funniest game', I may do something a little different.

In the meantime, check out the hashtag for more RPGaDAY stuff.

#RPGaDAY - Day 11: Weirdest Game Owned

Winner of the world's worst flautist award.

De Profundis is probably the weirdest game I've ever read, by design at least; I also saw bits of deaDEarth, which were insane, but not in a good way, as you might expect given the bizarre lengths to which the writer/publisher went to try to make it look like the game was being well reviewed, which showed a slick professional canny that simply wasn't evident in the game design itself.

But I don't own a copy of deaDEarth, nor - as it turns out - of De Profundis, or not anywhere I can locate. In fact, I'm short on hardcore weird games in general. That being the case, let's make like we're middle class conservatives, interpret 'weird' as 'innovative' and instead look at a couple of the indier games that I own:

Wield: A little game of ancient powers is a fun-looking little concept game in which the players take on the roles of ancient, sentient artefacts seeking to accomplish some aeons-old goal through the manipulation of mortal instruments that they call pawns, but most people call maize*... I mean, heroes.

The game is, at first reading - I really just got hold of it from a Kickstarter campaign - flawed, but interesting, and most of the flaws are essentially proofing errors in the early-release PDF, such as not including an easily referenced not as to how many wounds heroes have, or how to design named NPCs. There are also at least two or three vatcha powers that shortcut the torturous process of destroying a vatcha (and powers explicitly overrule other rules).

In brief, each player designs a vatcha, a relicts of a long-dead empire created and endowed with vast power and intellect to achieve a specific goal, but having to work through human intermediaries to do so. The ST then creates a hero for each player, with each hero starting off as the wielder of another player's vatcha. All wielders are fundamentally disposable and a hero can be lost and replaced many times, or even passed from vatcha to vatcha, but a player never controls a matched pair of hero and vatcha, because the central theme of the game is the conflict between the two. The vatcha can grant incredible powers to its hero, but at a price. The more power the vatcha gives, the better the hero can serve its goals, but also the more control the hero has when their destiny clashes with the vatcha's goals.

That subtitle knocks White Wolf's 'a role-
paying game of [pretentious nonsense]
taglines into a cocked hat

In some ways, it's like a less-serious, fantasy-themed version of Wraith: the Oblivion, in which each player controlled their own character and another character's dark impulses, which was great in theory and practical only with a vanishing minority of gaming groups.

The other game is Fiasco, which doesn't have anything as bizarre as the setting of Wield, but has a mechanic and play style so innovative that it is only just an RPG.

Inspired by the spiral of chaos ensemble pictures of the Cohen Brothers, Fiasco is a one-shot parlour RPG for about four players, which uses a bucket of D6s and a series of random tables to generate character ties and plot hooks. Players then take turns to play out one-on-one scenes, each of which is deemed to have gone well or badly, from which each player collects a set of 'good' and 'bad' dice.

At the end of the game, the players narrate the end of their chatracters' stories based on their collected dice set, with the most tragic and pathetic outcomes falling to the characters with a mixed set. There is no skill set to speak of and the game, while it has winners and losers among the characters, has ideally no PvP element. The collection of random tables used to create hooks, ties and plot twists for a playset, and there are dozens of these available pretty much for printing money.

Come back tomorrow for an oldie but goldie, and look for the RPGaDAY hashtag for more weird games today. In particular I draw your eye to the following quality sites by people I love:

Gonzo History Gaming Edition

Dice Tales

The Anxious Gamer

* I swear, I didn't pick the game for the pun, it just came to me as I was typing.

#RPGaDAY - Day 9: Favourite Die/Dice Set

'The Boys'

Dice are at the core of what we, as roleplayers, do. With a handful of exceptions, which are either entirely non-random systems - a concept pioneered by Amber Diceless Roleplaying - or utilise a different means of random number generation, such as a card draw, every roleplaying game eventually uses dice to simulate the vicissitudes of fate in some fashion.

Some roleplayers seem to genuinely fetishise their dice, keeping favourites with 'the 1s rolled out', or shaming those that misbehave (although I suspect/hope that most diceshaming is mostly done in fun, rather than earnest). I don't, so instead of talking about my favourite D20 ('I call her Vera'), I'm going to muse on a few of the different ways that various games ask you to use these most ubiquitous of gaming paraphernalia (well, the most ubiquitous apart from purely mundane kit such as pens and pencils and bits of paper).

Polyhedra

Probabilities

The simplest method of using dice is to roll a single die and read off the result, perhaps adding a fixed number to it. The appeal of this is of course that the probabilities are extremely simple. You have the same number of possible outcomes as the number of sides on the die and, provided a rough approximation to an unbiased die, an equal chance of any given outcome. On a D6 you're as likely to get a 1 as you are a 6.

3 or 13?

If you want something a little more predictable, rolling two or more dice and adding them together gives you a bell curve. If you roll 2D10 there are one hundred possible outcomes, of which ten result in a total of 11 and only one results in a 2 (or 20); there's a possibility that you'll get an outlier result, but the chances are good that you'll end up somewhere in the middle.

Of course, those same two dice read as the tens and units of a D100 bring you back to the flat probability distribution on a much larger scale, and make it easy to work out the chance of rolling less than or equal to a given number as a percentage. Percentile systems are popular because people have a pretty solid understanding of percentage, or they think they do at least, even if that understanding stops at 50/50 means even odds.

Say hello to my little
friends

Clusters

Do you want a) more exciting probabilities or b) more rattling? How about dice clusters? Roll a whole bunch of dice, but don't worry about totals; just count the dice that turn up above (or below) a given target number. The ur-example is probably the White Wolf/Onyx path system, which reached its ultimate expression in Exhalted, where 'bucket of dice' ceased to be hyperbole for high-powered PCs.

Dice clusters, and especially that little fistful of D6s over there, brings me to the first of two dice mechanics that I want to give a little more thought to. Don't Rest Your Head is a game in which the characters are insomniacs, whose level of sleep deprivation has become sufficient to catapult them into a parallel reality where exhaustion brings power. To do anything of note in the system, you roll a number of D6s, so does the GM.

Resting your head is, it turns out,
a really bad idea

As standard, you roll 3D6. These are your discipline dice, you always roll them, and a roll of 1, 2 or 3 is a success. Get more successes than the ST and your action succeeds. There is a good chance, however, that the ST will be rolling more pain dice than you have discipline dice, in which case you can make up the difference in one of two ways.

Exhaustion is a measure of how tired you are. It starts at 1, and you can increase it by 1 every time you take an action. If it hits 6, you collapse into unconsciousness. Why increase a stat which eventually knocks you out? Because every level of exhaustion is another die you can roll. Again; 1-3 succeeds.

Madness is pure risk taking. You can add up to 6 madness dice to any roll, just like that. 1-3 succeeds.

Cthulhu D6s - could be
good for pain or
madness

So, low rolls are good, right? Well... sort of, because once the basic business of succeeding or failing is out of the way, you check which set of dice has the highest number showing (hence the multi-coloured cluster there; white for discipline, black for exhaustion and red for madness. I wasn't running the game, so I have no pain dice.) That set dominates, and you really want that to be discipline when possible. When discipline dominates, you are in control, even if you failed; you keep it together.

If exhaustion dominates, you pick up another point of exhaustion; this is what most often causes people to pass out, at which point the gribblies come for you and you are completely defenseless until you wake, and mostly defenceless for a good hour afterwards, since being rested in the world of the Mad City is to be borderline functional.

What fresh lunacy is this!

If madness dominates, you completely lose your shit, and you can only do that a few times before you lose it for good.

Finally, if pain dominates, your situation deteriorates, even if you succeeded.

I am filled with admiration for this system, which combines pretty much every major facet of the system and setting into a single exchange of rolls, even while I don't especially like it as something to play. It's slick and clever, but it means that characters have almost no significant strengths or weakness and there is virtually no strategy, beyond the game theory involved in deciding when to risk going mad and how exhausted you're prepared to be. It's emblematic of the fact that the game is more about the setting than the characters, and as a result it's fun for a bit, but there's no great mileage, for me at least. On the other hand, it's well worth a try if you get a chance to play.

Minimising randomness

Modern FATE cares
little for the colours of the
dice, but two pairs is
traditional

A final approach, and one that is increasingly popular in recent years, is that of FUDGE dice.

A FUDGE - or increasingly FATE - die is a D6, but in place of numbers it has two sides with + symbols, two with - symbols, and two left blank. They are rolled in sets of four, with each + adding 1 and each - subtracting 1 to modify a base stat. This minimises the randomness inherent in dice rolling because the outcomes will average at the level of the stat in question, but leaves present the possibility of a wildly atypical outcome.

In modern FATE systems, the outcome of a roll is also modified by spending Fate points for a fixed bonus. This system maintains a level of uncertainty, but ultimately means that PCs will usually succeed at tasks within their field of expertise; a bad roll tends to mean putting more effort in, rather than failing outright.

FUDGE/FATE tries - and to a large extent succeeds - to have its cake and eat it, maintaining the tiny random gods of gaming tradition, but at the same time placing agency squarely in the players' hands. Again, well worth a look, and something I'll be coming back to.

#RPGaDAY - Day 7: Most Intellectual RPG Owned

I'm not much of a collector of RPGs and I've never been a big part of the Indie RPG scene. Most of the games that I own are pretty straightforward, or where they want to be intellectual are aspirational old World of Darkness supplements which drop the ball so astoundingly that they don't really count. I was, therefore, at a loss what to write about for this day, until James reminded me that De Profundis exists.

Now, I only own De Profundis in a slightly nebulous sense, in that I bought a copy and may have the PDF somewhere, but I can't download it again if I don't because it's attached to a DriveThruRPG profile connected to an email I don't use anymore, with a password I've forgotten, which is a level of abstraction that kind of suits De Profundis, although I think it also applies to the PDF of Mummy: The Curse, all my Fiasco materials, Diana: Warrior Princess and a game about warrior squirrels.

(ETA: Having gained access to that account - one of three that I seem to have wound up with - I can confirm that I never bought a copy of De Profundis from DriveThruRPG, so where did I get the one I read, I wonder?)

De Profundis was originally presented as one of Hogshead Publishing's New Style games, a line which included Puppetland - a narrativist, but almost normal game in which you played puppets rebelling against the vicious rule of Mr Punch - The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen - a pub storytelling game in which players take on the roles of Prussian aristocratic adventures and make up outrageous exploits and use a system of challenges to force other players to get even more outrageous - Violence - a self-loathing dungeon crawl where you kill the occupants of a complex and take their stuff, but set in a modern apartment block - and Power Kill - a metagame attached to a normal RPG in which players take on the role of delusional schizophrenics who think that they are the characters in the regular game.

As you can see, New Style is a rich ground for today's topic.

De Profundis is an epistolary game, in which the players write letters to each other about their lives. Not the lives of imaginary characters, but the actual lives of their actual selves, embroidering the details to cast a Lovecraftian interpretation on everyday events.

It's pretty much named after Oscar Wilde's cathartic breakdown letter, written from prison to Lord Alfred Douglas, in which he describes their relationship and then compares himself to fellow romantic artist Jesus Christ, so I don't think anyone could argue that it isn't intellectual, in aspiration if not in attainment.

In his video for today, James asks: What can you put in 100 pages of a De Profundis core book (I won't say rule book, since as James points out, there are no rules). As I recall the entire book is written in the character of the games designer unlocking his own realm of horrors through writing the book and warning prospective players of the potentially disastrous mental effects of actually playing the damned thing. Which is different, although I confess I am undecided whether it is brilliant or just hopelessly up itself. I tend towards the latter, but as I am something of a pretentious git at times, it's hard to say.

(ETA: Apparently there are also sections on playing as other characters and even a diceless tabletop version of the game, but I clearly never read those bits.)

If nothing else, De Profundis is the game I 'own' which has the most aggressively intellectual aspirations. It's not just the influence, it's the determination to explore perception in a way that challenges the ontological foundations of the everyday, or at least aims to make semi-traumatic IC bleed a feature rather than a bug. If Rona Jaffe had ever got hold of a copy of De Profundis it would have literally blown her mind. Pat Pulling would have spontaneously combusted.

Either of those two outcomes, by the way, would be a reasonable interpretation in a game of De Profundis, if... (checks Wikipedia) Ah, hell; that was... I had no idea, really.

Come back tomorrow when we'll be talking about favourite characters, and hopefully avoiding accidental tangents of extreme bad taste.

#RPGaDAY: Day 5 - Most old school RPG owned

We'd like to welcome Governmental Tinlid on his
return engagement here at Out of My Mind.

The question for Day 5 brings in a lot more uncertainty than the previous prompts, for what is 'old school'?

The oldest game I own is Maelstrom, for sure. The book pictured is the one I have; it's a 1984 printing that retailed not as I claimed at £4.99, but at the princely sum of £1.95.

Looking back over it, what really shines through is the almost stream of consciousness layout of the text. The rules are presented pretty much as they come up (most glaringly, the Endurance cost of casting spells is seamlessly attached to a paragraph which begins as the example of casting spells) and there are sections which are clearly the writer, Alexander Scott, just waffling and trying to show his working out. It also contains the classic statement that players should 'remember that women are weaker than men, and will be at greater risk in combat', a statement with no mechanical support which is therefore just an assumption of fact (Scott was a teenage boy when he wrote this, and it was the 80s; we can let him off, I think, but it's interesting to note).

But I'm not sure if Maelstrom is actually old school. The wealth of class (living) specific skills fits the bill, but other than that its design is actually pretty far from the classic 'old school' mould. Character creation is largely non-random, and the only significant random element is one not touched on in most old school games, age. You pick a living and roll to see how long it took you to train, adding that to your base age (14, or slightly higher for nobles), and if you get too old, you start having limits on your attributes. The attributes are also percentile-based and directly rolled, in contrast to the derived values common in old school games, and bought up with a points system.

I'm willing to bet that a more determined man
than I could count the stars on that cover.

So, if we define old school as conforming to the traits of the dominant 'tribe' of RPGs from days of yore, then we're looking at something considerably newer as my most old school title.

Stars Without Number is one of a number of games produced in the 21st century using a very 1970s sensibility. Character generation is heavily randomised, each attibute ranges from 3-18, but is only really important in as far as its value derives a bonus or penalty from -2 to +2, and different types of roll use different sizes of dice (Maelstrom sticks to 6 and 10, but SWON rocks pretty much everything from 4 to 20).

I was going to ponder when random generation started to be replaced by point builds, but Maelstrom kind of answers that. The two have always, or at least for a long time, coexisted, and the distinction is more of choice than of era. I guess that the point build comes from a growing desire for play balance, where all PCs have the same basic potentials, and I suspect that this in turn has been promoted by the rise in prevalence of a PvP approach. Partly due to the development of games with a more morally grey setting than classic fantasy, and partly to the increasing influence on tabletop and live-action roleplaying of computer-based MMORPGS, the dynamic of roleplaying has shifted, in the average, from 'players vs the world' towards 'character against character'.

And perhaps in the end, that's the real distinction between old school and new school, that in an old school game like SWON, there is a basic assumption that the PCs are working together; they aren't just the PCs, they're the Party.

Your mileage, as with any definition in... well, more or less anything, may vary.

Come back tomorrow for Day 6 of #RPGaDAY, in which I talk about the games I want to play, but never do... or something related at any rate.

#RPGaDAY: Day 4 - Most recent RPG purchase

I hate this artwork; just for the record

My most recent purchase is, like most of my recent purchases, something I picked up on PDF because of a game I was running or playing in. In this case, my friend Jon's upcoming game - so, I've not played this one yet, nor even read it through comprehensively - using the Dresden Files rules, for which I picked up the payers' book, Your Story. I'll write more on the pro and cons of licensed RPGs in a later post, since there's a specific topic for licenses coming up, and today focus on the specifics.

I think because it is so recent, this will be a less personal account than some of those which came before, as I don't have an emotional connection to it.

The Dresden Files is based around a) The Harry Dresden novels of Jim Butcher, and b) the Fate/Fate Core game system, of which also more later. For those even less familiar with the books than I am, Harry Dresden is a moderately disgraced wizard who works as a private investigator in a Chicago that is positively wormy with supernatural gribblies; not that the police will admit to it. As urban supernatural fiction goes, it's pretty high-level, although the game contains options for playing anything from hapless beat cops wrestling with barely known demons, to magicians with enough oomph to split the world open.

As I say, more on Fate Core will follow, but the basic set up breaks a character down into Aspects, Skills and Stunts. Aspects are descriptors which define the character and allow the player to modify their rolls or make declarations which change the scene. Skills are basic, mundane abilities; Stunts are special abilities which come from training or natural abilities and which modify the way the rules apply to your character in some way. The Dresden Files adds Powers, which are like Stunts, but are much more wide-ranging and result from a supernatural origin or training. Aspects are activated using a limited pool of Fate points, while Stunts and Powers are always on, but are bought by expending your initial stock of Fate points, trading definite and specific bonuses for a limited, but wide-ranging advantage.

In addition to Powers, the game adds Catches. Powers are more potent and generally applicable than Stunts, but Catches reduce their costs by setting limits on when they can be used. I like this aspect of the system as it effectively models the supernatural checks and balances which lie at the heart of the Dresdenverse. Operating largely at the GM's discretion, an important feature is that certain powers must have Catches, and that Catches can reduce the cost by 0-points, so that they are important for more than just a way to rake back Fate points.

The game's licensed material is introduced through a Castle Falkenstein-type presentation, where the game text is given as an in-universe means of modelling the lives of the characters, who comment in the margins on its accuracy or otherwise. I've not read enough of the source material - or read the game text thoroughly enough - to know how well it models the original, but as licensed products go it seems to be pretty good. The game makes a decent fist at the setting's dark humour, and also uses the commentary to discuss applications of the rules, rather than as pure fluff, which already puts it streets ahead of Falkenstein's clunky presentation.

Next up, for Day 5 I'll talk about the most old school RPG I own, but sooner rather than later I'm going to need to start freeforming, because on a lot of these topics I don't have anything much to talk about.

Remember to look at the hashtag for more on this topic. Also, check out some of my friends' blogs for more #RPGaDAY:

Gonzo History Gaming Edition

The Anxious Gamer

Dice Tales

#RPGaDAY: Day 3 - First RPG you bought

I actually can't remember what the first RPG I bought was, but it was one of two. It was either Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, or it was Dungeoneer aka Advanced Fighting Fantasy.

We may be seeing this picture a lot.

WFRP has a clunky system which essentially attempts to transfer the Warhammer Fantasy Battle system directly into an RPG by adding an intrinsically flawed skill system (principally flawed due to its inconsistency; some skills grant a bonus to certain standard rolls, some allow rolls that most people can't make, others modify rules in specific situations) and converting the strictly 1-10 stat scale of WFB to a percentile system - except for Strength and Toughness, which remain 1-10, and Movement which is 1-X, where X is a number higher than 10, but not 100. The result is a deliriously uneven system in which an experienced adventurer is rocking a slightly better than even chance of hitting, but could conceivably arm wrestle a dragon.

The classic career transition following an
arrow-related patellar injury.

I do like the career system, clunky as it is in places, in which PCs are assumed to begin their adventuring life as a bartender or stable hand with itchy feet. The second edition cleaned this part of the game up a lot, as well as making the skills system much cleaner and introducing the 'Talents' category to cover the less standard effects.

But with those limits why did and why do I still love WFRP (because I do)?

It's the setting, and in particular the original, first edition setting; so much so that when I ran a game using the updated 2nd ed rules, I busted out my old 1st ed rulebook for the setting info. I adore the grubby fantasy Renaissance feel of the original setting, back when Brettonia was a land of political corruption rather than pseudo-Arthurian grail knightage.

Over time, the demand for distinctive army lists has led to the exaggeration of the various countries (and the virtual elimination of Tilea, Estalia and - Sigmar help them - the Border Princes), and the generally bigging up and tidying of everything. Nothing is cheap and grubby anymore, and for me, WFRP is at its best when it's cheap and grubby, even if you're rubbing shoulders with Electors.

Is that not the saddest dragon
ever?

Dungeoneer was also cheap, although that was the book itself. Sold in the same large paperback format as Maelstrom or the Fighting Fantasy Sorcery! series, at £4.99 it was the cheapest core rulebook around (although the wilderness adventure book set me back about £30, being bought long after the fact). As the subtitle - Advanced Fighting Fantasy - might suggest, Dungeoneer is (the first of three books) aimed at expanding the Fighting Fantasy game book series into a roleplaying game for more than one player. It focused on dungeon grinding, and was followed by two other books, a city guide called Blacksand - focused on the infamous Cityport of Thieves - and Allansia, named for the main continent of the setting and looking at wilderness adventuring.

The basic system is simple; you have three core stats and can also spend your core Skill points to increase skill in specialised areas, like 'sword', 'pick pockets' and 'magic'. Magic was flawed in AFF, as buying up magic allowed you to cast a larger number of different spells, but also reduced your core Skill and your specialised skills with it, including Magic. This meant that you could never get better at magic, just know more spells and be worse at everything else.

I always wanted to run more Dungeoneer, not least because I also have the paperback editions of the setting books for Fighting Fantasy, Titan and Out of the Pit, which show case the mad bag of ideas that is the FF world.

As little as this character sheet has, most character won't
use half of it.

Both of these systems are notable for belonging to the great flourish of random character generation which these days is sometimes derided for lack of play balance. In strict WFRP character generation, you pick your race, but not even your career after that. It was entirely possible to end up with a Dungeoneer PC who was complete rubbish at everything. I may well touch on this subject again in a later post.

More posts to follow throughout the month. See you on Day 4 to talk about my most recent purchase. I am slightly tempted to go and buy something this evening just to queer the pitch.

Out of Our Minds: The Importance of Madness in Gaming

So, following on from my last post, why is it important to have a madness mechanic at all? Well, largely because it reinforces a horror mechanic like nothing else. Monsters that far outstrip you in power? That's doable if you're careful. Sorcerers impervious to mortal weapons? You can outsmart that. The crippling of your own mental equilibrium as a consequence of your own actions... Well, shit.

To use a media shorthand, games without morality and sanity mechanics are like an eighties TV series. Short of flat-out character death, consequences are limited to the current episode and winning tends to obviate any kind of come back. Failure is penalised, success is rewarded and your methods are only in question if they don't work. Such games can be a lot of fun; they can be exciting, and they can even be tense and a little scary. They are not, however, horrific, any more than - for example - the A-Team is horrific.

Games with these systems are more like more recent TV, where arc plots and character continuity mean that everything that has a consequence has a lasting consequence. Character growth - or degeneration - is ongoing, and watching your beloved character go slowly insane despite - even because of - their success, is part of the fun and about 90% of the actual horror. The erosion of character autonomy and agency allows the players to integrate better with the scene, such that the eerie description of the approach of the Great Old One is not just a cool description and an indicator that a shift of tactics might be in order, but something genuinely scary. Likewise, if filling the cultist leader full of lead is only an expeditious means of ending the threat, rather than an arguably necessary, but heinously immoral action which will have a lasting impact on your worldview, then harming others becomes a serious and daunting prospect.

With mechanics such as these, choices become more difficult, shadows become more scary; the world becomes more realised and alive. It's not something you always want (no WH40K-based RPG should really be concerning itself with morality outside of player-driven contemplation, and there is a strong case to be made for a mechanic which limits the opportunities for a fantasy hero to brood), but for horror games there's nothing like it.