Notes On The Notes

Let's have some "behind the scenes director's commentary" about the notes I presented on my upcoming AD&D campaign.

The Tetradic Church is mainly inspired by an article in Dragon magazine issue 77 by Nonie Quinlan, titled "Elemental Gods". It argued for a less monster-style approach to gods and religions, presenting a model based on the classical Four Element system. The names of the gods are in Indonesian, Banteng meaning "bull, ox" and representing strong, solid earth, Kucing meaning "cat" and manifesting a sort of playful/cruel, almost-Dionysian air/wind, Naga Emas meaning "gold[en] dragon", the Church's understanding of fire, and Bidadari meaning "angel, nymph, beautiful woman", who is ever-changing water and the Moon.

The Church of the King of Life is inspired by the story game, Dogs in the Vineyard, and so is a fantasy version of the LDS/Mormon church. Like that game, my current plan is to leave specific scriptural justifications up to the players who choose to play adherents, or to the exigencies of play as I need them, but the patriarchal culture and Branch system of organization are the general basis of that religion. Padishah, of course, is Persian for "monarch".

The Weaving Goddess of Fate is my version of Gary Gygax's "Istus, Lady of Fate" from his World of Greyhawk setting, by way of the three Norns/three Fates, Islamic and Norse fatalist ideas, Irish weaving prophetesses, and so on. Her name is from Inanna, because I wanted that Middle Eastern connection.

The traditional D&D/AD&D cleric class fits best with those three religions, whose gods don't have hit points, per se. 

The Alien God is based mainly on G.R.S. Mead's analysis of what we know about Simon Magus. Aśundǒr and Śukar are words in Romani meaning, respectively, "listener", which is more or less the meaning of "Simon", and "brilliant, shining", a rendering of Helen, who was Simon Magus's partner, probably taking the role of Gnostic Sophia in his theology. I like the mix of Stoic, Neoplatonic, and Gnostic/Manichean ideas that Mead derives from the Simonian fragments we have. Plus, Mead's work is also a major influence on Tierney's and Rahman's "Simon of Gitta" stories, which are excellent sword and sorcery/sword and sandal/weird story yarns. There may come a time in the future of the setting when clerics of the Alien God travel the world of Dunia, but for now things are more personal, less involved with intermediaries.

I explained most of my take on Druidism already. Erodia is a rendering of Aradia, hero of an allegedly ancient Italian witchcraft poem collected by Charles Godfrey Leland. The name is related to the Biblical Herodias, but may also be related to Diana (I believe "Herodiana" is attested). Dunia, who gives her name to the world of the setting, is a Gaea-type (or Terra, Demeter, etc.) Briga's name comes from Celtic languages and means "High One" or "Powerful", the same as Brig in Irish legend, St. Brighid, Briginda, Brigantona, and so on. The particle also finds its way into Irish briocht/Gaulish briχtia, both meaning "magic spell", which I adapt as similar to "heka" in "Hekate/Hecate". Artor and Medraut come from Arthurian legend, being versions of Arthur and Mordred, and take roles in my game setting's Druidism from Robert Graves's poetic inventions that he tried to impose over historical ideas (and which have been adopted by some modern neopagans/Wiccans). The idea is, basically, that the Summer/Oak King and the Winter/Holly King meet in combat twice a year, representing the turning of the seasons, with the victor taking up the White Goddess as wife until the next combat. In reality, pretty weak sauce as theology in my opinion, but it has its supporters. Karnon is derived from "Cernunnos", a lightly-attested Gaulish deity of largely unknown (but perhaps not unknowable) character who was adopted by early neopagans/Wiccans as the Horned God of their craft, inspired by Margaret Murray's unfortunately flawed reconstructions. Whatever the historical flaws, I hasten to note, it does carry great meaning and depth for many. Mixing that with material from the Barddas of Iolo Morgannwg and other sources I mention, I get a fun naturalistic/esoteric philosophy that easily carries and supports the flavor of AD&D druids.

My vision of polytheistic cults worshiping/forging relationships with localized spirits is in part from long consideration of the place of gods depicted as a sort of monster in D&D-style games going back to Supplement 4: Gods, Demi-gods, & Heroes for original D&D (which used to be the only book from that edition I owned; it has since vanished from my collection, but at least I still have my original copies of Cults of Prax and Cults of Terror). As noted in my writeup, I'm looking to an article from Dragon magazine as the mechanical basis of this cleric-free religion cluster, though also including a version of the "warlock" class adapted to 1st edition AD&D terms and other approaches. I'm pretty sure there won't actually be any Zeus or Athena gods, those were merely examples demonstrating the idea of local epithets.

As an aside, I'm still working out the exact places of demons, devils, daemons, and so forth in the setting. Was it the demons or the devils who built the world-prison in opposition to the Alien God? Not fully sure. I'm actually leaning toward the devils at the moment. It will give them more purpose in the setting, and make Hell a somewhat meaningful place.

I didn't mention it, but that wasn't a comprehensive list of religions in the setting. Notably, I skipped over the Church of the Serpent, found among the Drakkonern people, my adaptation of the Dragonlord people found in Mayfair's Dragons supplement in their Role Aids line. I really liked the dragon civil war situation laid out in that supplement, and often work to fit it into my settings. The Dragon religion looks to four great elemental dragons, so it fits with my Tetradic Church, but I can also mine the Palladium Role-Playing Game, which also includes four elemental dragon-gods, for ideas. Another religion I have in mind is the Loathesome Toad Gods, inspired by Jeff Rients's Miscellaneum of Cinder, but also John Tynes's vision of the Lovecraftian gods laid out in Delta Green (as well as its supplements and follow-on games) and, especially, the D20 adaptation of Call of Cthulhu.

AD&D Game Notes

Bryn Celli Ddu, a barrow mound

Time for a post, to remind you I am alive.

I started off working on the Gygax75 Challenge, though I didn't stick strictly to its schedule. Mainly, I decided that the opening location would be a version of Portown, of Ruined Tower of Zenopus fame, with an additional megadungeon of my own devising located a short journey away. Further, though I don't mention it in the following notes, I've also placed Quasqueton, from B1 In Search of the Unknown, nearby. I figure that the Tower, smugglers' caves, and ghoul tunnels, a megadungeon/mythic underworld, Quasqueton, and the usual port city-based activities should give the players any number of hooks on which to hang their adventures.

My megadungeon, as noted, is found beneath goblin-haunted barrow mounds, which hold entrances to a mostly classic mythic underworld, a place where adventurers, through bravery, skill, and luck, might make their big score. 

In  addition to a house rules document (that remains somewhat in flux as I keep running into rules interpretations to consider; at least it's short, only four pages plus a couple of pages on changes to experience point awards), I've written up the opening situation as the initial player-characters arrive by ship in Portown, and a précis of the religions of the setting, noting how most of the additional character classes I plan to make available fit into the world's religious landscape. Here are those:

Introduction

The players have sailed from a town on the Gold Coast, where they grew up. Choosing a life of adventure rather than waste their bodies in the rapidly diminishing mines or live the quiet lives of peasant farmers, they’ve come to a town they’ve heard might reward a brave, and lucky, adventurer.

Portown is a small but busy trading port on the coast, with a population of perhaps a couple thousand or so, including people from all over the known world and perhaps beyond. Rumored to be built up from foundations standing on the ruins of an ancient city that may predate the coming of humanity, it lies a short distance, perhaps three or four leagues, North of a field of goblin-haunted barrow-mounds.

Stories tell of an underworld kingdom beneath the mounds full of riches and magical terrors. Many have gone into the mounds, never to return, but some few have come back to the surface with loads of jewels, gold, and magical swords, enough that there are always some brave, foolish, or desperate enough to try their luck.

The players step off the ship they’ve arrived with onto the wooden dock. Seagulls call in the overcast, leaden skies, and a strong smell of decaying fish and seaweed in brackish seawater permeates the air. North of the docks, the harbor is protected by a narrow spit of land reaching from East of the town, making the harbor into a cold lagoon. The dock leads up to shore, where large warehouse buildings line the boardwalk promenade, beyond which hints of other buildings can be seen through the alleys between the warehouses, and a few taller buildings peek over the roofs of the storage buildings. To the West, across a part of the harbor that projects south of the main lagoon, the fisher’s quarter hosts dozens of fishing vessels along a shore that leads back to hundreds of decaying houses. North of that quarter a peninsula stretches into the sea, with a lighthouse tower overlooking a cliff side at the North end. Access to the sea lies between the end of the protective jetty and the lighthouse. Beyond the fisher’s quarter, further to the West, a ruined tower overlooks the town from the top of a hill. Between the tower hill and the fishing quarter, a cemetery can just be seen. Not far from the tower ruins, a few hundred feet at most, on a smaller hill to the southwest of the tower hill, is a smaller tower in much better repair.

There is much bustling of working sailors along the docks and boardwalk, much shouting and strong language in a dozen different tongues, ropes being tied or untied, boxes of cargo being moved and carried, and some passengers lugging their own baggage to or from the shore themselves.

 

Religions of Dunia

Tetradic Church – The Four Elemental Gods: Earth “Bantəng/Banteng” (Solidity/Strength/Emotion, masculine), Air “Kuching/Kucing” (Wind/Weather/Intellect, androgynous), Fire “Naga Emas” (Sun/Craftsmanship/Manifestation/the World, genderless), Water “Bidadari” (Moon/Magic/Illusion/dreams, feminine) – clerics, cloistered clerics, exorcists, warrior monks, witch hunters.

Church of the King of Life – Padishah, God of Life – clerics, cloistered clerics, exorcists, paladins, warrior monks.

Church of the Alien God – exorcists, magic-users, warrior monks. Aśundǒr  says he has come to rescue the souls of humanity, demihumans, and humanoids from the world, which is a prison built by the Demons to trap human/demihuman/humanoid souls, which are the fragmented light of the Alien God. Also, the Aion of Wisdom was lured into the trap and degraded by the Demons, finally incarnating as Śukar, a slave-prostitute he found and bought away from the brothel which owned her. Aśundǒr and Śukar are living humans who are teaching the philosophy of the Alien God with a retinue of twelve Disciples. 

polytheist sects – see note on gods in "Demonology Made Easy" – exorcists, magic-users, steppe shamans, warlocks, summoners, witches. Local gods may be manifestations of "deity-types", sometimes with related or even the same names as others of the type, usually given a location epithet (like "Zeus of Stonedale", "Parisian Athena", or whatever). 

Druidism – Erodia, Dunia, Briga, Artor, Medraut, Karnon – bards, druids, monks, rangers, witches. A sort of mix of Wicca and Taoism with other random influences, with three goddesses, Erodia the Huntress, Dunia the Earth Mother, and Briga the Wise, and three gods, Artor the Oak King, Medraut the Holly King, and Karnon the Antlered God. There's a philosophy of manifest Summer and potential Winter as the fundamental energies of the universe that combine and recombine as the Four Elements, the Eight Trigrams, the 64 Hexagrams, and other symbolic indications. I'm taking ideas from the Barddas of Iolo Morgannwg, European alchemy, Chinese Yì jīng and wǔxíng, Japanese kusei kigaku and onmyōdō, and mixing them all up with whatever takes my fancy. Dunia embodies the Summery Feminine, Artor the Summery Masculine, Briga is Wintry Feminine, Medraut the Wintry Masculine, while Erodia and Karnon are varieties of androgyny and “non-binariness”.

Denialism – "world is illusion", spoken by Kuhare Nadi the Enlightened One – exorcists, illusionists, monks, psionicists. Kuhare Nadi saw through the illusion that is the world and learned how to impart that knowledge to others. Some Denialists learn how to manipulate the illusion and create Phantasms or even create substance as Shadow. 

Fatalism – Inan, the Weaving Goddess of Fate – clerics, cloistered clerics, dervishes, exorcists, paladins, warrior monks.

[Obscure Games] Rolemaster

 Originally published as an alternative combat system for Dungeons & Dragons, followed up by an alternative magic system and finally an alternative character creation system, Rolemaster began as the individual books Arms Law and its follow-up Claw Law, Spell Law, and finally finished up in its basic form with Character Law and the GM-focused book Campaign Law. Shortly after, though, methods that helped distinguish the game on its own were published as optional rules set out in a series of Rolemaster Companions, with seven of those in the main series and several more focused on specific topics (like Elemental Companion or Oriental Companion; the latter, like AD&D's Oriental Adventures, came out before "Asian" was generally understood to be the preferred adjective for describing Asian nations and cultures, even though it seems obvious now). To my way of thinking, the first two Companions are essential for the game, with the first including the "Smoothed Stat Bonus" table and the second offering a complete listing of skills and their effects in the game. There are a number of other optional rules in the various Companions that some may like, such as alternate initiative and turn sequence systems, additional ways to use magic, more developed systems for mounted combat, and so on. All of the Companions also include new character classes, which are usually at least of interest (I'm personally a fan of Rolemaster Companion 2's Dervish class).

The game is really very simple in concept, with almost all actions resolved by rolling percentile dice, adding a bonus based mostly on skill, and either hoping for a result of 101+ or comparing the result to a table to derive a degree of effect. The dice roll, in most cases, is "open-ended", which means that a dice roll of 96 to 100 allows the player to roll again and add the result, potentially rolling more times if more results of 96 to 100 are scored (and a similar downward result subtracting additional dice rolls can begin on a roll of 01 to 05, continuing to subtract more rolls if 96 to 100 results are obtained on the negative dice, though occasionally rolls are defined as "open-ended high" which precludes such negative results). In Arms Law/Claw Law, the table for each different weapon is divided into columns representing different armor types and the result of the dice roll is cross-indexed to get a number of "concussion hits" to be applied to the target's hit points and, often, a letter result for a "critical", which is rolled by a percentile roll (usually unmodified) on a table to derive a more detailed injury result. Such "crit tables" are defined by the injury type and the letter degree, so that a critical result might be described a "B Slash", an "A Crushing", or a "C Burning" to indicate which specific critical result table and which column to reference. Most characters involved in combat will be affected by crits rather than accumulated concussion hits, especially as they move beyond the lowest levels.

Other than simple attack rolls, actions are usually defined as "Movement/Maneuvers" or "Static Actions", and rolled similarly by comparing an open-ended roll, modified by skill in most cases, to a column representing the difficulty of the action on a table found in Character Law.

The character creation rules give ten attributes to each character, rolled on normal percentile dice, rather than open-ended ones. These attributes provide a modifier, and in some cases a number of "development points" or other benefits. The player takes the total development points and spends them on skills which are given point costs that vary by character class. Further, the number of skill ranks that can be purchased at a time varies by character class, so that a Fighter can buy two ranks in most weapon types at each level, while magic-using classes can't buy more than one rank, and the situation is basically reversed when attempting to learn spell lists, so that magic-using classes can buy as many ranks in a spell list as they can afford, but Fighters are limited to only one rank in a spell list "Pick" per level, and that one for a high cost in development points. Skill ranks and attribute bonuses, plus some other benefits, are added together to give a total skill bonus to use when attempting to use a skill. For spell list "Picks", this allows a roll during the "level-up" process to see if the character acquires the spells of that "Pick" type from that list. This is usually 5 or 10 "levels" from the spell list. Casting a known spell costs spell points equal to the spell's "level". Some spell lists do not have spells of certain levels. The "Picks" that a character is allowed to attempt to learn vary depending on the specific spell list and its relation to the character's class, such as if it is a "Base" list for the class, "Open" or "Closed" in the category of spell use for the class (Essence, Channeling, or Mentalism), and so on, as well as if the character has any previous "Picks" from the spell list, such that a "C Pick" requires a previous "A Pick", a "D Pick" has a "B Pick" as prerequisite, and so on.

So, you can see that most of the game's complexity is actually front-loaded into the character creation and advancement process, contrary to its reputation. Some people find referencing the action charts to be onerous, but that seems a frivolous complaint to me.

After the core rule books, the game has some other supplementary books of value. Creatures & Treasures provides a good list of both foes and magic items. Personally, I only think the first one is worthwhile. War Law provides a mass combat system for the game, while Sea Law gives nautical rules and equipment, like ships and such. In addition, Space Master adapts the rules for SF games, with Armored Assault giving vehicle design and combat rules, while  Star Strike does the same for spacecraft. A setting book titled Dark Space offered a setting that mixed the SF and fantasy elements with some horror concepts.

In general, I don't think that the game deserves its reputation of being particularly complicated, though there is a certain amount of system mastery that is necessary to play characters of some types, with spell-using classes being more difficult to play than combat- or stealth-oriented ones. It certainly has a very particular flavor that is different than most other games.

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 Possibly Unpopular Opinions Regarding Gaming-related Issues

1.  I will never attend a convention in Indiana. The people of that state have chosen to enact policies that make everyday existence dangerous for some people. There are some other states that this applies to, but Indiana is notably relevant in this at this time. I'm sure the populace of Indiana has their collective reasons for doing so, but whatever those might be don't change the hazard the state poses to some people.
2.  I don't play games to "tell stories". That's what writing is for. I might tell stories based on things that happen during a game, but that's a different matter. It was a severe mistake to reduce adventure games to writing workshop exercises, resulting in some "games" that are little more than glorified, sometimes overly complicated procedures for passing around a metaphorical Talking Stick.
3.  Playing wargames no more means that a gamer likes or glorifies war than playing Monopoly means that a gamer wants to be a slumlord or similar parasite.
4.  Adventure games work best when they don't assume an inherent "heroism" and invest characters with superpowers as if powers are the same thing as heroism. Heroism is, or should be, a quality of the player, not their playing piece. This opinion is, of course, complicated by the existence of adventure games centered around superpowered genre conventions like superheroes or shōnen battle anime, but I should hope that the basic point is clear to anyone who isn't being lazily contrarian. Such games should put players on a more or less equal footing with their opposition and allow the players to shine or fall on their own merits. Which is not to fetishize an unnatural "balance", as overcoming adversity should be part of the process, not merely testing tactical acumen. It's a fine line to walk for the person designing the scenario.
5. Speaking of that last, and a conclusion I keep coming to, "adventure game" is a better term for the sort of game I most like to play than alternatives like "roleplaying game" or "storytelling game", both of which latter terms have led to misguided design, at least from the perspective of adventure gaming. Are they now three separate but related hobbies? Maybe. Certainly the more extreme games, like Capes, Once Upon A Time, or Tales of the Arabian Nights no longer much resemble the classic adventure games that caused the first gaming explosion (the second was trading card games, the third computer games).
6. Not really an opinion, but a thought occasioned by that last: maybe I should write a taxonomy of sorts of games, to cover sports, parlor games, board games, dice and card games, wargames, adventure games, and so on. Basically, I would want to list out the various sorts of games that I see and try to capture the characteristics that seem subtly different but create entirely different experiences, especially between the categories of adventure games, roleplaying (or perhaps "role-immersion") games, and storytelling games that often get conflated as if they were all the same. It would be complicated by the fact that some games take elements of different types of games and combine them (like chess boxing and other kinds of combative chess variants or Dread) for various effects. And of course the perception that some are the same type even when they aren't creates issues as well. Ugh, it would be an involved project, for sure.
7. Complex games shouldn't have the stigma they are given. Most aren't really all that complex in the first place (Aftermath! really doesn't deserve the reputation it has, to pick a notable example), but even the ones that are create a distinct, unique, and sometimes enjoyable atmosphere of play. Mostly, people seem to object not so much to complexity but to elements and mechanics they find uninteresting for one reason or another. Those mechanics, though, are generally included to present an aspect of play that the designer wanted to emphasize. An example of a specific, common mechanic might be encumbrance, which was included to present a logistics challenge in many early adventure games, but is discarded as "too complicated" by some who don't understand the value of that kind of challenge. Similarly, people who aren't interested in weapons might chafe at measuring fine differences between various weapons that weapon enthusiasts might enjoy. "Who cares about a 3cm difference in length?" the dilettante might complain, "That's too much to keep track of." Meanwhile, the enthusiast enjoys weighing one tradeoff against another, even at the expense of "complexity". So, it isn't complexity that is the issue, it's what elements are you interested or not interested in weighing the relative merits of, and things like speed of play and ease of memorization are parts of that equation.
8. Somewhat related, can people please stop dismissing calls for "realism" by resorting to claims of "fantasy"? Yes, there are no dragons or fireball spells, but some people are looking to engage with those things as if they were real rather than treat them as merely story elements that fill plot and story purposes (or game elements chosen to fill out a mechanical matrix of game procedure options). While "verisimilitude" is perhaps more precise a term, it's pretty obvious that people looking for "realism" mean that, so why force the more cumbersome word on the discussions?

 Maybe more later.

Checking In

I apologize for being quiet for several months, and for not continuing my look at expanded Domain Play in AD&D. I do want to say that I'm still around, though I almost wasn't as I had a stroke in mid-January from which I'm still recovering. Mainly, it's meant that I've lost, hopefully only temporarily, the use of my left hand, which makes typing somewhat slower. Otherwise, there seem to be few or no major ill effects. We did learn that I've had some heart damage consistent with a heart attack sometime in the last five years, but I have no idea when exactly that might have happened.

 

For now, here are some things that could be of interest:

Over on Dice and Discourse, we have a post on using isekai tropes with GURPS Banestorm. That's a nifty idea that could use characters based on the players, original characters, or ones based on the players but with anime-style superpowers or even just bonus powers like Magery 3. Of course, not all anime uses high-powered characters (see, for instance, the excellent Ascendance of a Bookworm for an isekai example, though to be fair that one does eventually grant the main character some extra magic power).

Speaking of GURPS, Dungeon Fantastic had a quick discussion of why characters can't just target Vitals without knowing where they are. Personally, I think that's probably something that should be applied more generally: make a Physiology roll, at default if necessary, to target Vitals. It's not like a character can see where the kidneys or whatever are.

Enraged Eggplant has been adapting ideas from ACKS, especially the recent Imperial Imprint second edition (see, the initials make a Roman numeral "2", because Macris thinks he's more clever than he is; being fair, though, he's a good game designer, whatever his other shortcomings might or might not be) to GURPS. For my money, the most useful so far is adapting the Market Class rules, but there are other good ones if you look around over his posts since January. Market Class is an idea that should have been in GURPS City Stats, if they'd have thought of it.

I hope that you are doing well. Take care of yourself.