[Old-School Game] Getting Started With Characters - Character Classes

 

Classes from the MCDM game.

Mine are somewhat different 

I didn't hit the ground running, I guess, when I made my plans, but maybe that's okay since I've added one more thing: I want to make my own OSR-style game. That is, I want to use straightforward mechanics—no elaborate skill system, embellished personality system, detailed combat system, and so on, though I could use rules that do those things in an obvious and direct manner (though they don't need to be as rudimentary as, say, the alignment system for personality rules or weapon proficiencies and secondary skills for skills). The art will be in finding what level of "obvious" as opposed to "detailed" I am willing to accept. To an extent, I'll be returning to something like the WRG game exercise from early days on this blog, though I don't know if I'll be specifically using the WRG Ancients/Medieval 6th edition rules I was focusing on back then.

As good a place to start as any might be characters. Other than the decisions made in play, how should characters be distinguished from one another? I like to think that there are a few characteristics that distinguish individuals in an adventure-fiction context. There are inborn traits, which can be thought of as a character's ancestry and innate talents. In games to date, those are mostly represented by the character's "race" (or, more recently, in an attempt to move away from the "blood will tell" eugenics assumptions found among some early fantasy authors, "ancestry" or "species") and "attributes" (sometimes called "characteristics", such as Strength, Intelligence, or the like). Then there is the character's profession, represented traditionally by a character's "class" or "skills", or a lot of times both of these. In some game designs, these things get muddled up, with innate talents and ancestry being represented by whatever the game calls its profession, such as games where "elf" is a character class or whatever. While that is a defensible position, I prefer to clearly distinguish matters that are inborn from ones that come from training, that is, nature from nurture, as the usual formulation has it.

I want to focus on character classes now, though. First of all, what is a "character class"? My understanding of classes in D&D is that they represent a statement of how the player intends to approach the game, with the most fundamental decision being whether the character will use magic or not. After the original division of characters into "Fighting-man" or "Magic-user", people came up with other approaches, so that very early on someone wanted to focus on fighting "undead" monsters like Professor Van Helsing in the Hammer Films Dracula movies, resulting in the "Cleric" class, whose association with religion implied some sort of Saint-like powers, to make them useful in scenarios where the undead aren't present. Most early character classes were simple extrapolations like that, so that a "Thief" was a character intended to be like the Grey Mouser or Cugel the Clever, which is why they include a means to dabble in magic without being a fully-fledged magic-user. The "Monk" was for players who liked Shaw Brothers films. The "Ranger" was Aragorn or maybe Robin Hood, perhaps with a touch of Jack the Giant-Killer?* And so on.

All of these approaches imply a particular set of skills, but it maybe doesn't need to be that way. Going back to the fundamental distinction of whether the character uses magic or not, I'll cut the number of classes back to "Adventurer" and "Adept". To handle characters who dabble in magic like the Grey Mouser and Cugel the Clever, I'll add a compromise class that I'll call the "Practitioner". because magic, historically, has included the ability to heal, I'll include healing magic, and a character's available spells will define what sort of magician they are, rather than defining it by class. Perhaps we will define a way to distinguish magicians who are better at one sort of magic or another later on, when we discuss talents and attributes.

However, I think that there are more approaches, other than magic or no magic, that are pretty fundamental. One is often covered in older games more as an afterthought, which we might call the "command" or "social" approach. Traditionally, this is usually relegated to a "Charisma" attribute, but I think that it deserves a more fundamental place. I'll call that class the "Envoy", and a dabbler who uses a bit of social but is also action-oriented to a degree, perhaps somewhat similar to the "Warlord" class of some later D&D editions, I'll call the "Commander". I think that an Adept who is also social would be just a different sort of Adept, focused on spells of enchantment and charm, so I won't need that sort of compromise class.

Finally, some players might want a character who approaches the game from a place of knowledge and skill. While I haven't yet discussed how I think training and skill could work, I'll just note for now that a character focused on that sort of play will be called an "Expert", and there won't be a need for a compromise class as the others, as I conceive them, already include elements of this category.

So, to summarize, I see the game as allowing players to select one character class to define their character fundamentally, from the choices of Adventurer, Adept, Practitioner, Envoy, Commander, or Expert. To round out characters, I'll discuss a character's species, their talents (characteristics or attributes), and their profession (which I will disconnect from their class).

*And why that particular combination? I suppose that the idea was that characters had to have more to do than just follow tracks. Since the class was given even more wilderness and survival abilities as time went on, it does seem that Gygax and others understood the abilities as being a little underwhelming in relation to other classes. 

End of Year Assessments and Aspirations

 

Gaming projects I've been noodling around with and their working titles, an incomplete list:

 

Flanaess Sector: reskinning AD&D 1E as a space opera game, with new classes, spaceship combat, equipment from 1E/4E Gamma World, and intelligent aliens drawn from the intelligent species of Monster Manual/Fiend Folio/Monster Manual 2.

Towers of Saltgate: city-as-dungeon-crawl supplement in the tradition of City-State of the Invincible Overlord, the Chaosium Thieves' World boxed set, or even modules like "Dwellers of the Forbidden City".

 

Shining Swords: a space opera game in the tradition of Star Wars ("A New Hope" more than any of the other chapters), Traveller, or the Eric John Stark stories of Leigh Brackett, using the rules system found in Flashing Blades, especially including the careers and social climbing adapted to space fantasy; possibly with psionics, but very much not sure about that - even if it does, note that moving things with mind power did not show up at all in that first chapter of Star Wars.

 

Millennium: medieval fantasy, covering 486CE-1487CE, Europe to Persia, Scandinavia to North Africa. Really, a thorough revision and reworking of Fantasy Wargaming by Galloway et al.

 

Alpha Cephei: using the Cepheus Engine SRD to clone the MegaTraveller edition of Traveller, with my own setting centered on Terra.

 

Days of High Adventure: my own D&D, working from the already very stripped-down Swords & Wizardry: White Box, stripping it down to the barest essentials, then building it back up to a more complete rules set focused on long-term campaign play, possibly in combination with Towers of Saltgate, but certainly some sword & sorcery setting; would include faction rules and other GM tools designed to allow players to take full initiative and agency.

 

I really should just pick one at a time, focus on it, and not throw it away when I get frustrated with it… and try to ignore the most frustrating part, publishing and production, until I can actually look for solutions to questions like editing, art, and layout.

Tactics in Adventure Gaming

Virtual tabletops have caused something
of a renaissance in tactical
adventure game play, if only
because miniatures and terrain are
expensive and computer graphics
are less so.

 

 I'm not sure where I was going with this, but maybe someone will get some value out of it.

Adventure gaming has always had an uneven relationship with tactical play. The earlier D&D variations tended to make combat largely abstract, but this was done from the perspective that the Referee (aka Dungeon Master, Game Master, or whatever) would have a solid grasp on how combat should flow so that they could rule meaningfully on how players' actions should play out. Other games, notably including Melee and Wizard, ultimately adding non-combat-related activities as The Fantasy Trip, but also D&D-descended games like RuneQuest, laid out a tactical wargame for play and built the rest of the adventure game around it. Many would go on to imply that the wargame's actual board-play could be foregone in favor of imagining matters, and the details of matters like regulating movement were generally of varying strictness anyway, with games like RuneQuest just saying that characters would move "3 meters" or whatever and leaving the actual implementation of that to the Referee, while Melee or Champions relied on detailed hex grids to place characters in specific positions relative to each other and objects in the scenario space.

Most adventure games built these tactical wargames around the character as a basic unit. This resulted in tactical games where the unit of space was generally on that scale, so that a hex might represent one or two yards or meters, sufficient to contain about one character, or sometimes a few of them. A two-meter or two-yard hex might also contain a horse, and so that was a frequent choice. Some game designers might concentrate more completely on the human scale, resulting in some games such as GURPS or CORPS setting the scale at 1 yard or meter per hex space, or even in the case of Swordbearer at 1 "pace" of 30 inches/2 ½ feet for its tactical movement regulation. For some games, though, a tactical unit might as frequently be something other than a human being-scaled object, or even larger than a horse. Car Wars for example, while not initially intended as an adventure game, was centered on vehicular movement and combat, while also allowing for "pedestrian" combatants on the field. Since a typical automobile is in the range of 5 yards long, the game centered its maps on a scale of 1 inch on the map representing 15 feet, making a quarter-inch into 3.75 scale feet, which is close enough to human scale. A couple of years later, GDW came out with an adventure game modeling military operations in the then-near-future, after a "limited" nuclear exchange in the future war of Twilight 2000, requiring it to be similarly built from the ground up to handle vehicles. Shortly after, the company would revise its flagship adventure game, Traveller, to incorporate ideas that had developed in the intervening decade, from a different modeling of weapon characteristics that had initially seen use in the tactical boardgame Azhanti High Lightning (a development of the earlier Snapshot, intended to cover the claustrophobic tactical situations of close combat aboard spacecraft, something not well handled with the "range band" system of combat in the classic Traveller game) and then been expanded in the miniatures wargame Striker. Perhaps intending to encourage more military SF in the Rebellion scenario, MegaTraveller was also built from the ground up to handle vehicle operations, mainly by changing the earlier game's 25m "range bands" into 15m squares, which also allowed the game's combat system to be easily scaled down to 1.5m squares to match the grids of deck plans for spacecraft that had been drawn up for the earlier Snapshot and Azhanti High Lightning games, or scaled up by orders of magnitude to handle other situations like mass combat units. Some of the alternate scales, notably naval warfare and space combat, were inconsistently handled for various good or bad reasons.

Other GDW games would go on to use this variable scale in order to handle resolution as well. Space 1889 alternately used large hexes of 200 yards to handle aerial vehicles like sky galleons, taken directly from the vehicle combat games Sky Galleons of Mars and Ironclads and Ether Flyers and more abstractly handled character movement in feet per turn, regulated by the Referee much as RuneQuest had done in its first few editions, or on close quarters maps with square grids. 2300AD, originally and somewhat confusingly (as it had no relation to Traveller) called Traveller 2300, also incorporated vehicles. Then, the so-called "House System" was developed for a new edition of Twilight 2000, among other reasons to revise the timeline and scenario to incorporate the rapid changes that had occurred in the late '80s and early '90s in regard to the Cold War between the US and the then-collapsing USSR that were so important to the game's setting. That system used a variable scale of 2m individual squares and (initially) 8m larger scale squares, followed by a change to 10m larger squares in a later refinement of the rules. Before the rules were refined, they were adapted to a few other settings: the Cadillacs & Dinosaurs comic book series (and soon also an animated series) and a cyberpunk/horror crossover called Dark Conspiracy. The former did quite well, but as a licensed property was somewhat limited in scope and potential. DC, unfortunately, was badly marketed (for instance, it took quite some time before I even really knew what it was, and the advertising made it seem like a Shadowrun knockoff more than its own game in part by using the same artists as SR). The refined rules, using a d20 to resolve success instead of the earlier d10 system, were then unveiled in an adaptation of the system to the Third Imperium setting of Traveller, though that interstellar polity was entirely (and, in retrospect, inexplicably given the previously existing fan base) swept away in the New Era. This was followed by a new revision of Twilight 2000 that included the newly revised rules, known as v.2.2.

As far as I know, that was the end of the heyday of games that deliberately incorporated human-scale and vehicular scale, if they used a tactical boardgame at all. GURPS and its imitator CORPS (and CORPS was a simplification and development of the earlier system that BTRC used in its games TimeLord, SpaceTime, and WarpWorld, which was similarly inspired by GURPS; another BTRC game, Macho Women With Guns, was another GURPS-inspired system, though more in that case as a parody - the company has since gotten its GURPS-worship out of its system, as their current house system, EABA, bears hardly any resemblance to the SJG game) were built for man-to-man combat and never easily handled even mounted combat due to the awkward scale. Later editions of D&D were similarly focused on human-scale in the tactical combat system at the heart of those games, though some effort was put in to handle such things as giants. Interestingly, they tend toward the same 5 foot (almost exactly 1.5m) spaces of games like Snapshot and MegaTraveller. But many games just dumped any tactical matters into the hands of the Referee, usually without even providing guidelines on how combat should flow, much less how to handle tactical considerations. Some games just turned matters into "story" issues, usually with "talking stick" mechanics like the "raise" system of Dogs in the Vineyard, foregoing tactics as a consideration at all.

It has become somewhat fashionable among "old school" gamers to disdain tactical combat boardgames in favor of more purely "theater of the mind", Referee-heavy combat resolution. While I do see a place for that sort of thing, I think that combat boardgames are also of value. It depends on the context, as Matt Easton might say. Tactical play, while not the only method or matter of interest in adventure games, keeps things from degenerating into resembling "JRPG" computer games, with alternating lines of combatants exchanging attacks and spells.

Some Obscure But Fun Small Rules

 One thing about learning many games (here, I am talking about adventure games/RPGs, or "tabletop" RPGs, since now we have to accept that there's a type of computer game that adopted the name but has gained currency over the original usage of the term) is that you'll almost always find some small rule in a game that makes sense and seems fun, but isn't included in most other games. A lot of these are famous, such as the Personality Trait rules in Pendragon or the Sanity rules in Call of Cthulhu, but others are less well-known. I'll do a quick overview of a few of these.

In the Traveller supplementary game, Snapshot, there is a list of actions that a character can take each game turn by spending Action Points. Turns are about 15 seconds long and an average character has a range of from 2 to 30 APs for human characters with no enhancements, and an average of 14 APs. That is roughly 1-2 AP per second or a bit less, in the game turn (but that's not relevant here). During a turn, a character can try to pick up an object that has been dropped. To do so, it takes a random number of AP, generated by rolling a d6. If the player wants, the character can abort this by spending 1 AP, but may not attempt to pick up the object again until a different action is taken. One of the actions permitted is the 1 AP action called "Expletive", which is pretty descriptive. So, a character might reach for a dropped knife, but not get a good grip, draw back and swear, then attempt to pick it up again. Alternate uses for "Expletive" include filling time while a machine, such as an automatic door for example, cycles through its action. So, a door might take 3 APs to open, requiring the character to spend 3 AP before going through the door. Sure, some other action might be taken, but if nothing else presents itself, the character can spend three consecutive "Expletive" actions, costing a total of 3 AP.

Sticking with Traveller-related games, let's discuss the Jack-of-All-Trades skill. In most versions of the game, JoT (the usual abbreviation) alleviates the penalty for not having a skill. That is, if a skill is not possessed by the character, usually they will take a penalty to attempts to perform actions using that skill, varying slightly by particular edition. With JoT, that penalty is reduced or alleviated in some fashion (for example, in Marc Miller's Traveller, or T4 for short, if the difficulty of the action is greater than the character's skill level plus their JoT level, then the difficulty is increased by one; in others, the numeric die roll penalty of -3 or -4 for lack of skill is reduced by the JoT level toward 0, but never providing a bonus). To my way of thinking, that does a poor job of representing what JoT skill actually represents in the setting. MegaTraveller (MT is the official abbreviation) took a very different tack with the JoT skill. Rather than providing a situational bonus to characters who lack a skill, it tried to simulate flexible thinking. In MT, there is an economy of re-attempting a failed skill roll, assuming that it isn't an urgent skill like an attack or attempt at social influence. If a character normally fails an attempt, which is a failure by 1, they can go ahead and retry, but of course this takes as much time as the original attempt. However, if they have an "Exceptional" failure (missing the roll on 2d6 by 2 or more), they normally must roll to "Stay Determined", that is to say they need to be able to come up with a new approach to the problem. This roll is based on the character's Intelligence and Education attributes. The advantage given by JoT skill is that they get a number of free attempts to retry a task equal to the JoT skill level, representing greater resourcefulness at approaching the task. Note that this means that JoT is not typically useful for the types of urgent skill uses described earlier, but that's kind of the point. The skill objectively improves the ability of any character, skilled or not, to perform technical, research, crafting, and similar actions by giving them more attempts to succeed, assuming they have the time to spend. This represents coming up with different approaches to the problem. It doesn't do this by simply increasing the character's effective skill level (even if fractionally) as the other editions do.

Moving on to GURPS 4th edition, there is an optional rule called "The Last Gasp", found in Pyramid magazine issue 3/44: Alternate GURPS II. This actually comprises two separate sections that revise the Fatigue rules in GURPS, but I'm only going to deal with the second section, "Short-Term Fatigue" (there's also a lot to love about the first section, "Long-Term Fatigue", though). In this optional rule, characters get a number of Action Points at the start of combat, based mainly on their attributes. In addition, they get a small pool of points for Skills they have at a high level that can only be used for actions using that Skill, but this pool can only be recovered when the normal AP pool is fully recovered. In this system, unlike the Snapshot APs above (or the APs in FASA's Star Trek and Doctor Who RPGs, which are very similar to the Snapshot ones), APs have to be actively recovered by taking what amount to resting actions during combat, mainly the Do Nothing, Evaluate, and Wait actions (though with a Wait, APs can only be recovered if the Wait is not triggered during the turn). An important exception is that the player may choose to expend regular Fatigue Points (FPs) in exchange for a number of APs recovered (and I think that this should replace the regular system of spending 1 FP for any fight that lasts 10 or more seconds/turns). The system isn't fully developed as printed, with a notable issue being how movement and AP interact, but serves as an excellent basic system for modeling certain types of emergent behaviors that occur during real fights.

In Lace & Steel, one of the skills a character may have is Travel. This skill is used to avoid minor mishaps on the road, ranging from fatigue, embarrassment, lost temper, and the like to rips in clothing (that must be repaired with the Tailor skill or buying new clothing), lost items ("What in the world did I do with that bottle of ink?"), minor injuries like sprains or small animal bites, and so on. Each of these mishaps is given a specific penalty (becoming "disheveled" might be critical if one, say, meets the Duke at a wayside inn on the way to the royal court due to the deleterious effects on Charisma) and a specific way to alleviate it. This also provided reasons to stop at a comfortable waystation like an inn when possible, and to pay more for more comfort, rather than sleeping outside all of the time.

Fantasy Wargaming has an extensive and interrelated magic and religion system that has many interesting features, but I'm only going to deal with one small one here. In the Norse religion section, deities are described in part by their relationships with other deities (this one is the son of so-and-so, this one is married to that one, another is close friends or bitter enemies of yet another, and so on). This affects the ability of a deity to intercede with another on behalf of a character. Normally, of course, one would simply approach the deity in question, but perhaps they have a "Resistance to Appeals" characteristic that is too high, or there is a specific penalty related to that character and that deity for some reason. In such cases, a character might want instead to appeal to another, more sympathetic deity (or perhaps even one's own personal fylgja, which is something not entirely unlike a Guardian Angel, though perhaps not quite the same either) to ask the original deity for a favor. This allows for much more personal nuance to affect the religious actions of characters in the game and helps bring out the personalities of the deities in ways that less flexible, more mechanical systems do not. To an extent, RuneQuest dealt with similar issues by listing "Allied Deities" and the spells that they provide to followers of the main deity, but in a way that was much more rigid than the FW approach allowed.

Do you have any favorite small rules? What games are they found in?

Random Musings of Gaming-related Nature

 I had it spelled out to me recently (not in so many words, but the implication was pretty clear) that I am exactly the sort of gamer that isn't really welcome in the SJG Forums. After the stinging of the semi-public rebuke wore off, I came to the conclusion that they were probably right to do so, and since I have had poor luck with getting my own questions answered there I have, somewhat reluctantly but with resignation, decided to not participate there anymore (note, they have not asked me to leave, but I'm not likely to change my ways and those particular ways are ones they have made plain they don't want around). Better for us all. And thus passes from me the last forum-style internet site I had any interest in participating in; which I guess is a milestone worth marking in some way, thus this comment here. Blogs and social media work better for me. I should probably get back to paying attention to TikTok, though, as I am not really interested in social media with marked learning curves like Mastodon.

Speaking of SJG, they have hinted that they might be thinking about a 5th edition for GURPS, using similar language to the last time they were preparing for a new edition (20 years ago!) I've answered them as to what I'd like to see, but it's pretty clear from other responses that my interests for that game are not those of the majority of their customers so I don't expect to see them enacted. Meanwhile, I was reminded that Basic Roleplaying has an Open License (and is working with other companies like Paizo on a new one that WotC can't pretend to touch). I'd have to do some work to hammer that into the sort of game I'd be interested in getting deep into in the same way I've been getting into GURPS, but that remains a thought.

The ridiculousness of WotC, in trying to create a power in regard to the OGL 1.0a that is not granted to anyone, has certainly upended D&D significantly. Nobody knows what the future is going to hold, and so it feels like most of the industry is holding its breath, even the people who are loudly declaiming their disinterest.

I continue to think about the idea of a city-as-dungeon project and its practicality. Coincidentally, there's been an interesting series running on Mailanka's blog (I, II, III, IV) that is directly relevant to such a project. So, perhaps it draws closer to actual realization. I'm definitely thinking about a post on the concept.

I spent a lot of today thinking about The Beastmaster, a film from 1982 that was widely considered to be a low-budget coattail-hanger on Conan the Barbarian. Certainly, there are some similarities, but the differences are also pretty pronounced. One thing that both films have in common that I notice is a reliance on a sort of implicit Bronze Age setting, even though the tools and weapons are obviously made of iron. The village in The Beastmaster, especially, reminds me (vaguely, not in detail) of reconstructions of Bronze Age settlements on the Central Asian steppe. The same can be said for a number of "barbarian" films of the era. Deathstalker doesn't have a medieval flavor, The Warrior and the Sorceress employs Cyclopean masonry, which is a Bronze Age hallmark, nearly. So, I looked at Bronze Age architecture and design. Lots of fun sword & sorcery ideas to be found there. It also fits in with a recent interest I've had in sword & sandal adventures… with sorcery. A lot of adventure ideas to be found in Genesis, and there's a lot more sorcery in there than people want to say, apparently. The bit where Abraham forges his compact with God reads like a goetic blood rite with all the animal sacrifices going on.

Speaking of those films, The Arcanum includes a character class, aptly called the Beastmaster, directly modeled on Dar from The Beastmaster, and Tales from the Fallen Empire, a setting supplement for Dungeon Crawl Classics, includes a character class, called the Sentinel, modeled on Kain from The Warrior and the Sorceress. Those would seem to go along well with the Thief, modeled on the Grey Mouser, the Ranger, modeled on Strider/Aragorn, or even Unearthed Arcana's Barbarian, modeled on Conan the Cimmerian (though in my opinion that last was not very well done). For that matter, the Cleric owes much of its form to Peter Cushing as Van Helsing in the Hammer Studios Dracula films and perhaps Christopher Lee's character of Nicholas, Duc De Richleau in The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil's Bride in the US release, because the studio worried that American audiences would mistake it for a Western). I wonder what other characters from fantasy fiction might deserve to have a character class modeled after them?

More later, I think.

A Minor Point In The OGL Dustup

 I watched an interview with Ryan Dancey, architect of the Open Gaming License, in which he discussed what is copyrightable and what is not. His example, though, was the combat tables in AD&D (1st edition, naturally), which he claimed were not made according to a formula, but were instead adjusted by Gary Gygax manually according to "what looked good", and were therefore art and copyrightable. That, though, is not the case at all. All of the combat tables in AD&D (and the "alternative combat system" in the original D&D booklets) were simply a highly "at the table" usable expression of a fairly complicated, but still systematic, formula. This can be attested to by the existence of THAC0 ("To Hit Armor Class 0") in the listing of monsters in the 1st edition Dungeon Masters Guide. There was also an "AL", standing for "Attack Level", listed in the Monster & Treasure Assortment, Sets One-Three: Levels One-Nine, which is effectively a "To Hit Armor Class 9" (where Armor Class 9 represented an unarmored target) entry. Dancey is simply confused by what he thinks his team was able to add to the D&D legacy in terms of rules systems.

Anyway, that's just a thing that I felt I had to get out there.

Let's Talk About Game Design

 

A long-time project of mine has been to update the old RPG Fantasy Wargaming, a game which was never properly developed or even well-edited. Different authors had different chapters, and those portions of the game weren't very well integrated into a cohesive whole. In addition, the people involved had very little collective experience at game design, though of course some had more than others. Further, the game was based on very early designs like D&D and Tunnels & Trolls and so had few models to examine to provide the best ways of approaching different parts of the game.

Even with all of those flaws, though, some of the ideas incorporated into the game verged on brilliant. I still haven't seen religion, especially polytheistic religion, handled quite as well (I'm  not sure that there's any other game which included the idea of appealing to a Power to intervene on the appellant's behalf with another Power and make it meaningful), and magic drew on then-cutting-edge ideas current in the so-called "Chaos Magick" movement that was happening at the time in England. It wouldn't be until Mage: The Ascension was published a dozen years later that similar ideas would be seen again in game design.

As I sit down to turn my notes into a playable game, I find myself thinking about things that I haven't seen discussed in game design before. For example, I am thinking about the relationship of the player, the character, and the setting. Some games treat the character as a mere extension of the player's desires, allowing an absolute control and decoupling the character from any setting-based relationships. This is a reflection of the purely individualist conception of a person that prevails in a lot of Western cultural contexts, but most especially as a very American attitude toward the person. I want to encourage a more social understanding of the character within the setting, so I am looking to models like Pendragon and Lace & Steel to examine elements of a character that constrain the omnipotent control by a player over the character usually assumed in RPGs. Factors like emotions, attitudes, and so on should be included in the game I am conceiving. These ideas were included in a rough form in Fantasy Wargaming, of course, in the systems related to Temptations and the resisting thereof, in the Leadership and Social Class rules, and so on.

As I'm conceiving the metaphysics of the game, as it were, I see the player as representing the soul, giving purpose and direction to the character. The character, though, has a history within the game setting, and this affects the attitudes and assumptions of the character that might run counter to or align with the will of the player. Fears, desires, hatreds, and devotions mix with personality traits like Honesty or Generosity to influence the decisions the player might make, for good or ill. Getting those personality elements to align with the player's preferences is part of the psychological work that the character and player might embark upon. In addition, social traits like Social Class and Leadership value have their effects on how the player approaches the game as well.

In Fantasy Wargaming, the personality traits were mostly expressed as the negative pole of the trait, so that they were described as Greed, Selfishness, and Lust (there's also Bravery, but that served as both fearlessness and anger). I am reversing that, so that those three traits are Temperance, Generosity, and Chastity, respectively, and I'm adding two others, Honesty and Stability, while the final personality trait, Bravery, I am leaving largely as-is. Stability is sort of the odd man out here, since it isn't involved with many Temptations, but it does allow the player to choose to temper the excesses of the character's passionate emotional reactions. I might choose to make it a regular attribute of the character instead.

In regard to more prosaic game design issues, I am still struggling with whether I should retain the odds tables of FW or re-figure things so that the game produces simple target numbers to roll on a d20. I am almost certainly going to replace "hit point" style damage pools with descriptive injuries, simply because that is a major aesthetic preference of mine. I am certainly going to keep the character levels approach, divided into the three types of Combat & Adventuring, Magical, and Religious, but instead of 1000 experience points of the appropriate type per level, it'll be 1000 for first level, doubling for every level after. That does mean that most characters won't be rising much above 6th or 7th level over their whole adventuring career, and rising above 14th level will be nearly impossible, but that's well within the parameters I want to see anyway. It also means that players who have to start a new character won't be really left that far behind their fellows and can catch almost all the way up fairly quickly.

Anyway, just some initial thinking about how to approach the game. In some ways, this is also related to JB's thoughts on fudging dice rolls, in the sense that we are both exploring what it means to be playing a game as opposed to just playing around. I'm not, of course, saying that JB would necessarily agree with my thinking here, only that we seem to be exploring the same questions of purpose.