Some Notes On My Evolution In Gaming Preferences

In the past, I've written a few articles discussing "My Own Heartbreaker", or MOHb, where I indicated some of my preferences at the time for game design elements. You can find most of them under the MOHb and gaming philosophy tags if you're interested. This article will discuss where I stand now, after time thinking about the matter, recent gaming, and so on.

First, let me say that I do still like GURPS, D&D, Traveller, and so on. They are some fine games, and there are quite a few games, even recent ones, that retain the old-school emphases that I like. I've even begun to soften toward PbtA ("Powered by the Apocalypse") and similar games, though they still aren't my main preferences. Still can't stand FATE, and even less the "talking stick" games like Dread and such where the mechanics exist just to determine who gets to write the next line of the story. That is terrible, and in my opinion places the emphasis in exactly the wrong place, minimizing the characters and emphasizing the players. Some of those games go so far as to allow the talking stick player to make decisions for other people's characters, and that's just annoying to me—I would still go so far as to say that such games aren't roleplaying games at all, since you aren't playing a role any more than someone playing Axis & Allies is, to choose a random example of something that is not a roleplaying game. But I'll save that discussion for when I ever get around to reviewing Dogs in the Vineyard, the game where you can't find out how well you did or didn't do until after the action is over.

So, for now I'd rather talk about what I do want to see in a game at this point in my gaming career, and maybe a bit about my history of preferences in that context.

My most formative experience in RPGs, as with most people, came in my first ever adventure. It's possible that I've discussed it on this blog before, but it's relevant now, so. I was 10, and my friends had talked me into playing this new game, Dungeons & Dragons, which I initially confused with Dungeon Dice and so was baffled by their descriptions of how their games went. When they got me over to play, I was told that since I was new I had to play a "first level" character, and what class would I like? After being given the options, I naturally picked Magic-User, because who wouldn't be enticed by the promises of infinite power dangled by magic, and anyway I had no idea what this "module" titled "Tomb of Horrors" might offer as a challenge.

Rolling up my character, I learned that I had a lot of "gold pieces" to spend on things, but I didn't really see a lot of things in the list to buy. So I innocently asked the DM, my friend's older brother as I recall, if I could hire anyone to help me out. He looked blankly at me for a moment, then remembered something in the Dungeon Master's Guide and started flipping pages. "Here you go," he said and showed me some tables of laborers and another of mercenary soldiers. I listed out some things, added up the costs, and soon I had a sizeable mercenary company at my command. To make a long story short, the DM allowed me near-complete control of my soldiers, and so as it happened, I was the only survivor of a party that included some high-level characters simply because I'd risk soldiers instead of my own character when checking traps and such. Oh, and at least three (!) party members, not even counting a couple of my troops, reached their hands into a sculpted green devil's mouth.

My lesson: have other people, or robots, to do things for you. As a result, I really like games that allow me to have a faction or otherwise put me in a position of authority. Charisma is not a dump stat is what I'm saying. For the purposes of this discussion, I have really come to appreciate systems that include faction rules that make it easier to make use of groups in play. While games that force you to track resources directly, as D&D does, are good, but not as good as ones that allow you to abstract all of that and let your virtual accountants take care of the bean-counting. Reign is probably the first I've seen to explicitly do that unless you count the megacorporate duelling rules in TORG's supplement Nippon Tech or the similar rules in Shadowrun's supplement Corporate Shadowfiles, but now it's pretty widespread, being found in everything from the Sine Nomine games like Stars Without Number and Silent Legions to even GURPS (which has a refinement of their version of factions coming out soon). So, yeah, faction rules are pretty important to my ideal game.

Next, when I first saw Hârnmaster, I was a bit in awe of the depth of the system and how it connected to the detailed setting that they'd been developing. But the thing that most captured my imagination was the descriptive wounding system. Instead of drawing from a pool of "hit points" or "hits to kill" or "stamina" or whatever, the Referee would make a few quick rolls on a chart and end up with a wound that could be described: "an infected shallow cut of 3 injury points to the left thigh", "a 25 injury point deep puncture to the chest that is bleeding 2 points per round". Injury points refer to the penalty to actions that use the affected body area, so that a 3 injury point wound would subtract 3% from any skill or other d% roll that involved the particular body part. I've since seen similar systems in a few games, such as the original BTRC house system that was used for TimeLords, SpaceTime, and WarpWorld. BTRC has since changed its preferred house system twice, first to CORPS (which used a simplified version of that descriptive wound system from their previous house system), and then to EABA, which I don't know well enough to describe how it works. I own a copy in PDF, though, so I should probably go through it one of these days. It's just that PDFs are such a pain for reference works like that, in my opinion. They're fine for adventures, but rules should be in hardcopy, in my preference.

Anyway, now I have a hard time justifying point pools to myself. Descriptive injuries are easy to implement, provide more narrative flavor while still being sufficiently quantified for simulation purposes, and provide for a lot of other related rules—Hârnmaster tracks different medical tools and procedures used to treat different types of injury, for example—that similarly add to the roleplaying experience. So, yeah, descriptive injuries are a must in my ideal game system.

When I was younger, I was very interested in "realism" in games. That is to say that I preferred games where the results were within parameters that I could envision occurring within a given set of scenario assumptions. I still am, as it happens, but in my youth that largely meant more complexity. The more elements of the situation that we could model, and the closer that model's statistical outcomes were to actual statistical outcomes, the better was my thinking at the time. Now, maybe not so much. I've come to understand that most of the elements either don't need to be modeled—the usual situation—or else it turns out that our hypothetical models of them don't actually resemble the real-world events anyway (when GDW's pioneering and excellent* work on modeling wound physics in games turned out to be only partly accurate, I learned a lot about how science really works, and more importantly just where we actually stood in comparison to the claims made about our current levels of knowledge). The point is, though, that there are ways of modeling "realism" that don't need to obsessively detail every aspect of the simulation. The bizarre "hydrostatic shock" modifiers, "stopping power", and similar minutiae in some of the optional Top Secret rules were detailed, for sure, but also entirely lacking in any sort of realism, to pick an example. So, another element that I am looking for now would be simple but accurate modeling at the table.

That aside, I am perfectly fine with front-loading complex calculations. Detailed vehicle and weapon design systems have not only never daunted me, they have satisfied my sense of verisimilitude. Such systems, of course, can never match a detailed CAD program optimized for the purpose, but they can provide statistics that are close enough for gaming purposes. They also allow the designer to weigh tradeoffs in the design phase that aren't really dealt with in fiat methods of giving equipment statistics. Sure, a designer can just make up some numbers that look good and then paper over matters by abstracting whatever they don't want to deal with, but I am interested in going at things the other way around: providing a reasonably accurate simulation, then working out designs within that simulation to optimize for various tasks. This is all a really wordy way to say that my ideal game would include detailed vehicle and equipment design.

This has gotten a little long, so I think that I'll set it aside for now. I should return to this topic later. I'll give it it's own tag, too: ideal game.

*Really, it's great. There are aspects of it that I think could still usefully inform other models to this day, like the whole cross-section thing. That would usefully cover the difference between the relatively low energy of a .45ACP and the observed injury compared to, say, a 9×19mm Parabellum or 10mm Automatic.

Linear Fighters, Quadratic Magic-Users

I have been working on the follow-up to the article on magic, but it has gotten out of hand a couple of times as I keep finding myself going off into tangents. It's a big topic, but I am trying to boil it down.

But today I am going to talk about AD&D and other D&Ds.

A big complaint some people have about the way that game is balanced is that Magic-Users increase in power at an increasing rate throughout their careers, while Fighters tend to increase steadily. This is formulated as the Fighter improving on a linear basis, while the Magic-User improves on a quadratic basis. It certainly does seem like a conundrum, since Gary Gygax was writing AD&D on the basis of many, many hours spent running the game at a real table, for hundreds of players. How could he have missed something so obvious?

As with many things, the answer is right there in the rule books.

Gary knew that Fighters and Magic-Users had different focuses for their careers. Each was, after all, a statement by a player about how they wanted to interact with the game and setting. Everyone knows this. The other classes, Cleric, Thief, and so on, are all later attempts by various players to come up with a particular and new way to approach the game and setting, usually based on a particular fictional role model. Clerics were to be Fearless Vampire Slayers in the vein of Van Helsing in the Hammer Dracula films, Thieves were largely the Grey Mouser from Fritz Leiber's stories (and, yes, a little bit of Vance's Cugel the Clever too), Monks were an attempt to model Shaw Brothers wuxia films, Rangers were Strider/Aragorn. Later, the Barbarian was to be Conan.

The thing is, this was supposed to be a model for the character's whole career, not just a set of powers that were nifty. How did Gary see these characters spending their late careers?

The Cleric, of course, would be a fantasy Bishop, in charge of a holy temple with all of the attendants that implied, as well as believing peasants who would provide an income through their labor. This reminds me that AD&D is also explicit that the majority of the world does not have a class or level, and so most religious leaders are probably not able to cast spells, though perhaps more people who are able to are drawn to holy orders and so there would be more than among the general populace. But I digress.

Thieves become leaders of organized crime institutions, obviously.

Magic-Users, it seems would retire to a tower, presumably to pursue their studies, but they would also have a body of laborers who would fund them in exchange, it is to be supposed, for protection from threats.

Which means that Fighters should probably also have a body of laborers to protect in exchange for tax monies. Like, I would say, a noble. And what is the source of a noble's power? The number of swords they can command. And that is exactly what a high-level fighter gets access to: a loyal troop. But they only get this power if they pursue it by clearing a barony of sorts. This is where many players lose the plot. There is a perception that only hardscrabble adventuring is fun, that the logistics of running a small domain make the game bog down into boredom.

But D&D was a wargame first, and the people who played it were wargamers at heart. For many, the whole point of play was to get to where they could command fantasy troops. Exercising power means dealing with other power-brokers in the setting, which means more opportunities for adventure, not fewer, since a baron can surely equip an expedition into a ruined castle, but murderhoboes can't usually broker deals that affect the lives of thousands or more.

But this still doesn't explain the Linear/Quadratic disparity, I can hear you say. Magic-Users, the argument continues, are still more powerful at any given level.

It is true that an individual Magic-User up against an individual Fighter will have a great advantage, with some abilities that the Fighter will have difficulty countering. That said, AD&D introduced a system whereby a Fighter could prevent the Magic-User from casting by interrupting the ritual. In addition, there were requirements for material components, as well as motions and words, that made the Magic-User's job a little more difficult. Adding these together, along with the overwhelming power of masses—one thing that people learn quickly when designing wargames rules that attempt to duplicate the D&D combat system on a mass scale is that even the most powerful of heroes will have a hard time against tens or hundreds of opponents. Swords & Spells, Battlesystem, and others found that they had to emphasize the abilities of heroic individuals, or alternatively games like Delta's Book of War learned that most D&D "heroes" weren't even worth representing on the battlefield as separate figures. Even powers like a Magic-User's spells, which seem overwhelming at the individual scale, turn out to have only small effect at the battle scale—enough, to be sure, to be worth simulating, but they only steer a battle in relatively subtle ways.

Meanwhile, the loyal troop attending a Fighter steer the battle very directly.

Myself, I think that a character should get experience for the money that they take in by taxing their domain. This encourages them to expand their domain and keep it safe from threats, since the more people they protect directly affects their experience gains. That would also encourage players to play the endgame for its adventuresome qualities instead of avoiding it in favor of more dungeon-delving, murderhobo adventures. More likely, these days, I'll simply give players experience for money spent rather than collected, but I won't make any distinctions about where they got it.

And money spent on a castle is money spent.

[Obscure Games] Special: Games for Game Designers

I haven't done an Obscure Games for a while, but I thought that I'd do something a little bit different this time. Here's a list, with capsule reviews, of roleplaying games that game designers should be familiar with, in addition to D&D. These are games that introduce some sort of concept that I think should be considered by people designing roleplaying games. They are not necessarily my favorite games, though in many cases they are, nor are they necessarily games that as a whole are fun to play, only ones that have something of interest to add to the body of game design.

Albedo The Role-Playing Game: Often dismissed due to its "furry" content, Albedo is actually a solid hard-SF setting with innovative RPG mechanics that deserve more attention. Set in a region of space that is populated by genetically uplifted Terran animals (who basically awoke one day with full intelligence, raised by AI systems that taught them the sciences and so forth), the game follows the rising tensions between the Interstellar Confederacy (the ConFed) and the Independent Lapine Republic (ILR, or The Republic). Notable game systems include the unusual treatment of armor and injury and the author's first attempt at Ties/Antipathies and their effects on the character's Self-Image (see Lace & Steel below for the game designer's second foray at the concept). There's also a solid mechanic for simulating the character's ability to act in stressful situations, called "Coolness Under Fire". The emotional state of characters is an important area of design that has been largely ignored in the past.

Call of Cthulhu: At this point, most people know of this game and its primary innovation, the Sanity system. Still, I should at least mention it here.

Dungeon Crawl Classics: Mostly just a new way to approach the same game systems as D&D, while updating the game a bit, but still keeping the "old school" nature of the rules. The way that magic is handled, with Patrons and variable spell effects and so on, indicates a way to keep magic from becoming too predictable without screwing over players who choose to play magic-users.

Fantasy Wargaming: Generally only noted when people want to make fun of it, Fantasy Wargaming is a better design than its detractors would have it (if, unfortunately, underdeveloped and poorly laid-out in ways that lead to detraction by those who only read and never play). I've already done an extensive review of this one, which I link at the beginning of this paragraph. Systems to watch include the unified magic and religion system, what is among the earliest attempts to deal with characters' emotions in the "temptation" system (I'm not sure whether Call of Cthulhu's Sanity system predates it, as both games were released in 1981), and the integration of the medieval "physics" system (that is, astrology) into nearly every aspect of the game.

Flashing Blades: Still, in my opinion, the best swashbuckling RPG out there. It has quick, yet flavorful, mechanics to cover the sorts of scrapes that musketeers and pirates find themselves in, as well as the sorts of dirty tricks they pull to get out of those scrapes. Most importantly, though, it has an extensive "Career" system that allows a character to start at the bottom and work their way to the top in one field or another, whether that be the Royal Bureaucracy, the Church, or the Military, among other pursuits.

GURPS: Among other things good about it, GURPS includes a lot, and I mean a lot, of useful detail in its various supplements, from how quickly characters can dig to potential problems with pregnancies. I'd especially point designers toward some of its alternative magic systems, and most especially to the one they call "Path/Book Magic" (sometimes just "Path Magic") in the fourth edition. In the third edition, it was called "Spirit Magic".

Hârnmaster: Designed specifically for the world of Hârn, obviously, but people have adapted it to other settings as well. The system is not very different than that of RuneQuest, but the way that combat wounds are handled should be something that every designer knows about. Basically, each wound is described based on the type of damage (blunt, edged, puncture, etc), the severity of the blow, the location hit, and so forth. If the wound is bleeding, that is noted. Each wound is given a rating indicating how severe and therefore how much it affects the character through pain, tissue damage, and so on, and then when it is treated it also gets a rating for how fast it will heal. That also leads to examining if the wound becomes infected. Treatments are based on the type of damage, so that a bruise might only need an herbal compress, while a similar cut needs to be bandaged, and a compound fracture might need a surgeon (or chirurgeon). This sounds complicated, but in fact is very easy to do at the table, only slightly more complex than RuneQuest's tracking of hit points by location or GURPS's handling of "major wounds", critical hits, special damage types and hit locations, and so on.

Lace & Steel: Designer Paul Kidd's second RPG design, it refines some of the concepts that he worked on in Albedo, above. The setting is fun, with a number of mainly Greek mythological races (trolls and pixies being the main exceptions) living in a mostly Renaissance-era setting with magic. The biggest weakness of the game is the reliance on proprietary card decks for major game systems. That was fashionable at the time, but there's a reason that almost no games use those methods today. To me, one of the most useful design ideas is the concept of "travel fatigue". Basically, characters roll against their Travel skill and Endurance every day or two of travel to avoid minor discomforts, or even losing items of equipment or damaging clothing. Properly-cooked food or spending the night at the inn instead of in the open can help recover this fatigue during the journey, with more luxurious rooms providing a better chance of recovering from the fatigue. There are also mass combat and ship combat systems, so that the players can be involved in major events.

Pendragon: Using a simplification of Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying system as a base, Pendragon is simply the best Arthurian fantasy game out there. It includes several innovations that help reinforce the mood and setting, such as a system of Personality Traits and Passions that provide a method of depicting characters' emotions, built-in high-level play such as tending the characters' various manors that provide them with income and a base of operations, and the concept of "Dynastic Play", where the player will eventually end up, in a continuing campaign, playing their original character's children, grandchildren, and so on. Personally, I like the fourth edition, which includes a magic system and provision for wizard and female characters, but I understand that some people are less fond of that one. I don't know much about the fifth edition, to be fair.

Reign: Using the "One Roll Engine" (ORE) system, this fantasy game focuses on faction play. That is, the characters will be in charge of some organization or group that allows them to participate in the high-level events of the setting. One notable feature is the ability to either design or roll a character randomly, in a way that doesn't privilege one over the other. But it's the faction rules that should grab the attention of a prospective game designer.

The Riddle of Steel: Takes a lot of ideas from Pendragon and other games, which is fine, but the main innovation that this game brings is a solid grounding in actual medieval weapons use. Also includes another way to integrate character personality and emotions into the game mechanics. Unfortunately difficult to find, there is a "successor" game called Blade of the Iron Throne that apparently develops the system further in a more sword & sorcery setting, but I haven't seen that game and can't comment on it.

Space 1889: For whatever reasons, some people don't like the game system that GDW developed for this game, which was a simplified version of the "GDW House System" that powered the second edition of Twilight 2000, along with other games such as Traveller: The New Era and Dark Conspiracy. That said, the method that the designers chose to represent the abilities of inventors was a surprisingly interesting system, pointing toward an alternative way to approach "magical" abilities in a game, or could probably be adapted to any of a number of different game abilities.

Stars Without Number: Another game that is built on a D&D-like game system, the setting is purely designed to facilitate gaming, and should be examined carefully for its lessons in that vein. In addition, the game includes a number of Referee tools to facilitate running it, such as faction rules (see Reign, above), the concept of location tags (to provide a quick differentiation between one place and another), and so on. The game is a mastercourse in game design focused on the needs of a roleplaying campaign. All of the other games from Sine Nomine Publishing (the imprint of the designer, Kevin Crawford) are also worth examining for various reasons, generally having to do with systems that enable and facilitate "sandbox" style play while also providing a dynamic background.

Swordbearer: There are a lot of little rules choices here that serve to make a fairly unusual gaming experience. Notable ones include the abstracted approach to character wealth, where wealth is related to social status directly and finding treasure only acts to change the effective social status of the character (this has been approached in other games since, with varying degrees of success), the highly flavorful magic system, and (for me at least) the detailed travel rules, with parties taking time for breaks during the day's march, an extensive table of terrain and how long it takes to cross the various types, and so on. Combined with the "travel fatigue" rules of Lace & Steel, above, and the wilderness survival rules found in some Traveller supplements, I would be in some bliss.

Traveller: Most roleplaying games include the concept of increasing a character's personal abilities through "experience" or similar victory point systems, to the point that computer RPGs are partially defined by this feature. Traveller provides an interesting alternative to this method of character advancement. In this game, characters increase in power through acquiring wealth, building networks of contacts and favors, and so forth rather than through increasing their personal abilities. Advancement is also not tied to any predetermined abstract scheme (gaining victory points for finding treasure or completing story goals or whatever), but is concretely related to what the characters do in the setting. This doesn't mean that the characters can't increase in skill over time, but the timeframe is much longer than most other RPGs choose, and also is not tied to any action the characters perform other than pursuing that skill increase. MegaTraveller allows for more experience-based advancement, but the timeframe is still incredibly long compared to other RPGs. This helps add to the sense of the game that time passes while the characters work on long-term problems. The game has a long history and includes a number of excellent supplements, too, ranging from detailed survival rules in the "Environment" series from Gamelords to the excellent player-facing dynastic game found in the Pocket Empires supplement for the fourth edition of the game.

There are likely other games that I could include (CORPS comes to mind), but generally the principles that I think that they present are too difficult to explain. Obviously, a game designer should be conversant in a wide number of games in order to have a body of ideas on which to draw and then fit to the particular game being designed.

[EDIT 9 Mar 2019] I have taken the perhaps extreme action of removing one of the entries that was in this list. I find myself unable, in good conscience, to continue to promote the particular game. I will consider adding in a replacement shortly.

More Notes On My Ideal Roleplaying Game

Photo of Hardenstein LARP adventurers, 2014
Found on Wikipedia in the
"Live action role-playing game" article

After I wrote up the general outline of my ideal Fantasy Heartbreaker, I noticed that I forgot a few things. This post is intended to add on to that by describing some specific rules and systems from other games that I would like to adapt to the game I am currently calling "MOHb".

First, and I am not sure why I forgot this in the initial outline, I would definitely include a system of character personality based on the Personality Traits and Passions from Pendragon. To date, that is the best system I have seen for simulating and quantifying the particular attitudes and emotions of characters. It also allows for developing local attitudes by providing initial trait modifiers, while not constraining characters to being provincial stereotypes. That said, I think that I'd like to try to simplify down the central list of personality traits. Among other things, I'd probably just include a list of Virtues and let low levels of the Virtue be the same as having the associated Vice. I would allow for very high or very low (even negative) values for those Virtues.

Some variations of the mental health systems of Call of Cthulhu or Unknown Armies would seem to also be helpful. In fact, the latter version allows for a wide range of mental balance matters that would be an excellent complement to the Personality Traits and Passions system mentioned above.

The concept of Religious Inspiration from Fantasy Wargaming. One of the most difficult things to simulate in gaming is the effect of religious feeling. Inspiration seems to me like an excellent mechanism for that, covering what some Christians call "Feeling the Spirit", but which is present in pretty much any religious ceremony to one degree or another. This might also be the basis of allowing spirit possession in those religious rites that include that result among people who aren't otherwise spirit channelers/trance mediums (Vodoun, Pentecostal sects, and so on). This would be the goal of most religious ritual, though other sorts such as exorcisms, forms of therapy, and so on would also exist.

Related to Domain level rules, I have always liked the social climbing model in Flashing Blades. In that, exact positions and titles are integrated into a unified social status, with equivalent titles adding together to increase social status to the next level (two titles "worth" status 12 each would boost the character's overall status to 13, for example; note specifically that those two status 12 titles, worth 13 together, would also add together with a third title worth status 13 to boost up to 14).

Another element that I would like to include, when the game is expanded to cover modern and future settings, is something based on the corporate warfare system of the TORG supplement Nippon Tech. I always wanted to play a Megacorp CEO in that game (the template was in the supplement!), but none of my Referees were ever very receptive to the idea. The trade and commerce systems in GURPS Traveller: Far Trader include similar concepts that would also influence the specific design. This would probably integrate with the ideas on organizations which I discuss below.

Speaking of which, the Trade and Commerce systems from GURPS Traveller: Far Trader would definitely complement the more social systems related to trade found in GURPS Social Engineering, not to mention the price fluctuations found in the Rolemaster rulebook Campaign Law (at least in the 1st edition Character Law & Campaign Law that I have; I haven't seen the 2nd edition in years, so I don't remember if they kept that).

Also on the subject of economies, the supplement Grain Into Gold provides an excellent framework for developing an economy for a specific setting. I would want to make use of a similar framework in any campaign design notes. By the way, if you are like me and into the idea of developing rational economies for your setting, that supplement is easily worth the cost. It allows you to manipulate the various assumptions underlying your setting's economy and come up with useful baseline numbers for purchased items of all types. With only a little more work, it can be expanded to cover interacting economies, economies based on different fundamentals (the basic economy in the supplement is based on food production, but economies based on other things could probably be developed, with a little effort, from the basic outline).

In addition to several editions of RuneQuest, GURPS Spirits, and Dogs in the Vineyard, I am looking at the spirit rules from Horror HERO (for 4th edition, which are also found in the HERO System Almanac I).

Horror HERO also has some interesting mechanisms involving short- and long-term mental stress that I might incorporate. I am remembering a PBM game called Power, The Star Throne Beckons from ECI (later released independently as Star Throne, sadly on a defunct website only viewable through archive.org). In that game, individual personality characters (as opposed to factions, starships, and groups) would generate stress as the result of performing or being the target of various actions and require stress-relieving actions to reduce it, such as going on vacation or the like. That would make a good mental complement to a short- and long-term fatigue system, which I had already decided on using. It could also provide a concrete game benefit to actions like carousing, drug use, or carnal relations, all of which could also have potential negative side effects. Tradeoffs are good.

In Lands of Adventure, weapons are divided up by their relative weight categories (relative to the character's strength). These affect how often that the weapons can be used in a turn, but players can choose to swing them more frequently by paying EP ("Energy Points"). I think that this is a good idea to incorporate. I might also allow spending short-term fatigue for "extra effort", such as a stronger hit, more focused attack, or the like - basically, most of the things that GURPS includes under "All-Out" actions and "Extra Effort" modifiers.

I'm currently going back and forth on the idea of explicitly including stats for a character's inherent "soul" or "spirit". This would be things like POW from RuneQuest, the LP ("Life Points") and to some extent the EP of Lands of Adventure, the "Soul Departure" rules from Rolemaster, and so on. I dunno, though. I may just want to keep those things implicit rather than explicit. The more that I can allow people to interpret rules as representing whichever metaphysical assumptions they prefer, the better. Which is, by the way, another reason to look especially at Dogs in the Vineyard for ideas on how to define spirits in game terms (though, of course, I will want to avoid the moral judgements on spirits implicit in that game). I want to leave it open for people who prefer materialistic explanations to interpret "spirits" as the subtle factors in a situation that are difficult to reduce to simple ad hoc modifiers, such as the imposition of meaning by the parties involved or the spread of memes or psychological archetypes or whatever, while also leaving it open for people (such as myself) who find the experience of independent nonphysical entities to be a convincing explanation or model for some aspects of human existence.

It occurs to me now that HeroQuest (or the first edition, Hero Wars), the more narrative rules designed for Glorantha, also includes some good ways of looking at spirits. I'll have to see if there's anything I can adopt from that, too.

One of the best things about the sixth book of the Thieves' Guild series was the set of rules covering "saltbox" adventuring. That is, it had a set of encounter tables for both normal encounters (ships and monsters) and land encounters (uncharted islands, island chains, all the way up to new continents!) while sailing as pirates or merchants. I'd definitely want saltbox and more traditional sandbox assistants like those. There are a lot of sandbox assistants in AD&D and also in the various Judges Guild products from which I can draw inspiration. The various games from Sine Nomine also include some excellent sandbox rules.

There are several games that include rules for "factions" and "organizations" and the like. GURPS has several types, such as GURPS City Stats, GURPS Boardroom & Curia, and so on. Various Sine Nomine games like Stars Without Number, Silent Legions, and so on have similar systems. I think that the first game I saw do that meaningfully was Reign, actually (though the first edition of CORPS also outlined a similar system, but dropped the ball on making very much use of it; there's more discussion of using the abstract stats in the second edition, so perhaps it was first after all). These are simplified and abstracted ways of describing organizations and groups, rather than the method more common previously (in games like Chivalry & Sorcery or Realms of the Unknown, not to mention D&D itself) of simply describing the actual assets. The older method is somewhat unwieldy, but still has its virtues. I'd probably want to develop ways to make rough conversions between the abstract characteristics and the concrete assets so that a Referee could choose which is more easily used in their game.

Because it would be important for a "dynastic" type game, which I specifically want the rules to be able to support, I would want some fairly detailed rules for pregnancy and childbirth. There are a couple of models out there, a couple in GURPS but also in Pendragon and some other games and supplements, but I'd also want to do my own research into specific numbers.

So, going over all of these things in this and the previous post, what I am seeing that I want is a game with some detail allowing for meaningful player-character decisions, especially in terms of interfacing the players' choices into the detailed game setting without necessarily defaulting to modern Western cultures, a range of action from hoboes (murder- and otherwise) to nobility with the implicit "zero-to-hero" game being a solid - but not the only - option, no inherently particular focus on any aspect of play (combat/adventure, social, domain, crafting/invention, etc), sandbox-friendly, with some unusual detail on the particulars of individual characters (personality, exact injuries in combat, mental and physical fitness, etc). Of existing games, GURPS comes closest to what I would want, but falls down heavily in the "sandbox-friendly" aspect (lacking a viable random character creation system is a big culprit here, but there's more; admittedly, some of the issues are being resolved - slowly - as more supplements such as GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 8: Treasure Tables are released, but my experience is that there is a deep resistance to and even resentment toward random character creation in the GURPS community so I don't expect that issue to ever be resolved to my satisfaction). Aesthetically, I also prefer consistently "roll high" systems to the GURPS "roll high for some things, low for others". Still, if someone were to come up with viable random character creation system and other sandbox support, plus probably a descriptive injury system to replace the hit point system, I'd probably just go with that game as it would be close enough. Lacking those, though, I see strong reasons to design a more ideal game for my purposes, which is probably a good thing in the end.

Expanding On My Fantasy Heartbreaker Ideas

Image originally from Big Fish Games

A little while ago, I posted on the various gaming projects I have going. I haven't really gotten anywhere on any of them for various reasons, mostly having to do with work and other obligations. I did make a comment elsewhere which caused me to think about expanding my thoughts on one of them, though.

Whoops. Wrong "Heartbreaker".

One of the projects I mentioned was "MOHb", my very own roleplaying Fantasy Heartbreaker (loosely interpreted). That is a game that would incorporate the things that I like from various other games into one, hopefully cohesive, whole. It's that qualifier to be "cohesive" that is the important element. It wouldn't be hard to just slap together the various systems in which I'm interested and jury-rig the game at the table, but to make them work together smoothly would be a work of design. It's that design work, in fact, that keeps me from just slapping together something, putting a cover on it, and selling it at Lulu.com. I have (perhaps too much, considering how difficult it's been for me to publish any gaming materials other than this blog) some pride of craftsmanship that keeps me from doing it half-assed like that.

So, I figure that, for now, I can just discuss where I see that project going. I'll describe the systems that interest me and why, give an overview of some of my initial thoughts, and throw it all out so that you readers can see something of how I think about gaming. It's not really a work of staggering genius - I am, after all, just thinking of ways to tie together the disparate designs of others in pursuit of an experience that I think I'd like.

The comment that got me thinking about that today, was in a YouTube comment thread (now incorporated into Google+) on a video that rehashes the old "D&D combat isn't realistic because armor shouldn't make you harder to hit" chestnut. I started out by giving the normal rebuttal "D&D combat is abstracted in these particular ways", and a couple comments later noted what I'd like to see in a roleplaying game's combat system: "I'd like a combat system that incorporates the detail and tactical choices of GURPS (including some of the high-detail options like 'The Last Gasp', which regulate the pacing of combat in an emergent way), the naturalistic scales of Swordbearer, and the descriptive wound system of Hârnmaster."

This is your last warning.

What I'll do is go through a notional outline of my ideal game and describe what I'd like to do. WARNING: LOTS OF VERY GEEKY, NECKBEARD, GROGNARD, WHATEVER-YOU-WANT-TO-CALL-IT DISCUSSION FOLLOWS. Also, since it runs long, you get a cut-tag.

Spectacular Science Stories and Psychic Powers (and Tales of the Space Princess)

I finally got hold of John Stater's Tales of the Space Princess (not to be confused with James "Grim" Desborough's Machinations of the Space Princess, which is a very different game), and I love it! I especially love it because it's very similar to what I've been trying to do with Spectacular Science Stories. Oops. Still, there are differences in our respective approaches, so I'll keep going. I want to write a more complete review of Stater's game, but I need to do some research first, so it will wait. In fact, I want to talk about many of the other games that cover similar territory, from TSR's High Adventure Cliffhangers: Buck Rogers to Warriors of the Red Planet. Maybe even the FGU Flash Gordon game if I can manage to afford a copy.

Instead, right now I want to talk about Psychic Powers and the Psychic Warriors of Spectacular Science Stories. My initial brief for them was "like a cross between Jedi and Lensmen, by way of Blue Öyster Cult", and I didn't have much more than that to go on at first. I've been playing with different ways to represent their psychic powers in the game, initially looking at a variation of the D&D Vancian system (discarded as not really good at representing either Jedi or Lensmen), then thinking about ways to adapt the WEG Star Wars RPG approach to the Force (also discarded as it would push the class far too close to Jedi for my liking). Finally, I decided to examine what makes Lensmen different than Jedi, and to consider what it was about "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" that I could import to make a real difference in the class.

Not wanting to abandon the Jedi connection entirely, I looked at the WotC Star Wars method of handling the Force, too. Most of it was either too complex, too tied in with "Feats", or too close to the WEG version to be useful to me. I did like the idea of using hit points to power the abilities, though, as that helps to emphasize the fact that hit points aren't physical damage, plus it gives a potentially interesting tactical puzzle to the Psychic Warriors - spend hit points for powers or save them to soak damage?

The main thing about the Lensmen is that their powers don't really have much of an effect on the physical universe directly. Their real strength is in their ability to affect the minds of others and to sense things at a distance. On the other hand, I didn't want to completely discard the Jedi ability to manipulate things at a distance, though I also didn't want Psychic Warriors floating space fighters around by wiggling their fingers.

What I think I am going to do is divide abilities into Power Groups, like Telepathy, Psychic Combat, Self-Control, and so on. Each Power Group will have five levels of ability, each with one power. At each character level, the Psychic Warrior's player gains two levels to distribute among the Power Groups as he wishes. I currently have six Power Groups (Healing, Probability Manipulation, Psychic Combat, Remote Sensing, Self-Control, and Telepathy), so it would take a character being at 15th level to have all of the abilities at their full capability. Since that would require 20,480,000 experience points, that is a long way off for most characters! Plus, I do plan to come up with other Power Groups (and let my playtesters come up with some if they want), as well as providing loose guidelines for Referees to develop their own. Psychic Warriors do not become a master of every psychic ability there is.

Here are my current notes for Psychic Powers. Note that most of them are not defined enough to even have a cost yet. Also, the Healing abilities will only be usable on others, never on the Psychic Warrior using them (except for "Transcend Death", which can only be used on the Psychic Warrior using it).

Healing

1. Soothing Touch (heal 1d6+1)
2. Cure Disease
3. Healing Hands (heal 3d6+3)
4. Neutralize Poison
5. Transcend Death (become an astral being)

Probability Manipulation

1. Lucky Break (reroll one die roll)
2. Gremlins (machine malfunctions)
3. Serendipity (useful coincidence)
4. Probability Control (specify one die roll)
5. Telekinesis (move object up to 10', cost: 1 per pound or fraction)

Psychic Combat

1. Mind Block (counter most mind-affecting psychic powers with a save)
2. Distraction (minor hallucination distracts target)
3. Psychic Whip (1d6 damage, can't wound/kill)
4. Invisibility (become unobtrusive)
5. Neural Overload (save or fall unconscious 1d6 turns)

Remote Sensing

1. Danger Sense ("I have a bad feeling about this.")
2. Sense (get a general description of a remote location "A room containing four dogs", "An open plain with a tree, and no animals or men present", and so on)
3. Clairvoyance (perception as if at a remote location)
4. Psychometry (detect history of an object)
5. Precognition (general sense of future events)

Self-Control

1. Ignore Pain
2. Rapid Recovery (recover from wounds faster)
3. Resist Heat/Cold (save for half damage)
4. Strength/Endurance (feats of strength, increased damage, and so on)
5. Regeneration (regrow limbs, super-fast recovery from wounds, etc)

Telepathy

1. Empathy (detect emotional state of a target)
2. Read Thoughts (detect surface thoughts of a target)
3. Send Thoughts (transmit thoughts to a target)
4. Suggestion (Jedi mind tricks)
5. Mind Control (direct control of actions, edit memories, etc)

Keep in mind that I am also going to be disconnecting hit points from injury. Basically, while you have hit points you aren't injured, but when you run out and get hit you roll on an injury table. Note that the Healing Power Group doesn't actually allow you to heal physical injuries! This is deliberate. I am thinking about the idea of Advanced Powers, which require two Power Groups at high ability to be able to choose them, and which give one powerful ability instead of improving any of the Power Groups.

I'm still thinking of ways to play up the "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" angle. Maybe introduce a streamlined Sanity system from Call of Cthulhu? I dunno. Maybe the Mind Control ability is enough, since it will allow editing of a target's memories.

Adventure Games, Goals, And Spectacular Science Stories

Adventure games are often presented, these days, in a manner that doesn't emphasize what you are supposed to do as a player. The first games were pretty straightforward and objective: collect whatever marker counted for points for your character (usually this was money, either as a means to get experience points or for the benefits that the money could produce directly in the game setting). Later, the objectivity dropped away and the goal became, basically, to guess what would please the Referee and have your character do that, because the Referee was effectively told to give out a number of these points on a purely subjective basis. Still later, there was no clear objective presented for games (by now universally called "roleplaying games" instead of "adventure games"), with the players expected to develop objectives for their characters in advance and pursue them without any real support from the game system.

Since I am basing Spectacular Science Stories on a set of rules (Swords & Wizardry: Whitebox) that is close to the earliest games, I want to try and stick to the objective method of giving out success points to the characters. Unfortunately, this presents a small problem, because there are three different sorts of raygun fantasy story that I am trying to emulate. I could probably make this simpler on me by getting rid of one or two of the three character classes, but I don't think that the game would be as enjoyable if I did.

First, there is the Adventurer. This can be dealt with just as in traditional adventure games, as the prototypes include such figures as Northwest Smith, who was just as much of a money-grubbing adventurer as any in D&D. Nothing needs to be done there. Next, there is the Scientist, for which I have found a great way to offer carrots that point them toward the sorts of behavior that you'd expect from that type of character (basically, they can get special benefits from exploring the mysteries of the universe).

What I'm left with, though, is the Psychic Warrior. This one is difficult, in no small part because they are portrayed in the source material (Star Wars and the Lensman stories, mainly) as above such venal matters as money. How do you give objective rewards to someone like that? Obviously, they could get experience points for "defeating foes", but that's entirely secondary in the rules to getting paid. I also want to make them, in some ways, like paladins, with few (and minor) technological items, relying on their psychic powers rather than worldly concerns in their pursuit of moral perfection. I've got some rules for "fallen" Psychic Warriors who fail in their moral pursuit, of course, but I'm still trying to work out how to make them advance properly. I don't want to just give them a set of experience point goals that are special to them and no one else. Maybe I should just add a set of "karma" experience point awards for performing specific objectively-determined actions. Not sure how I'd go about that, though, and there's the matter of what to do about villainous "fallen" Psychic Warriors.

My first thought was to let them donate their money and found items to the Psychic Warrior Temple and get extra experience points for that, but that doesn't seem quite right (though I probably will keep that, and also give Adventurers and Scientists a way to boost experience points by giving up money too). If you've got any ideas, I'd appreciate it.

Maybe I'm Back, Plus Updates

Sorry for being away for a while. Burnout, self-criticism, and numerous projects sort of ate my interest in posting for a while. Still, I thought that it would be nice to update you lovely people.

The main project I've been working on, gaming related, is a game that I'm calling Spectacular Science Stories. It is a raygun fantasy game, inspired by the likes of Northwest Smith, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers, but also Commando Cody, Star Wars, Captain Video, Barbarella, Firefly/Serenity, Krull, Dune, Foundation, Cowboy Bebop, Lensman, and the Blue Öyster Cult song "Veteran of the Psychic Wars", among other things. I've discussed it a bit before, but I thought it would be worthwhile to give a brief description again.

The basic rules will be derived from Swords & Wizardry: Whitebox. Players will have several choices for their characters, selecting a class and a background. The classes will include (for human characters) Adventurer, Psychic Warrior, and Scientist, and non-human options will include Robots and Aliens or Genelines (with their own class options, usually one or two per alien race or human geneline).

Adventurers are typical action heroes in the Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers mold. Psychic Warriors are, obviously, inspired by Lensmen and Jedi (and Blue Öyster Cult!). Scientists are researchers and inventors, along the lines of Dr. Zarkov or Dr. Huer. These define the basic approach of the character toward the game: the Scientist will have rules relating to discovering the secrets of the universe and building superscience devices, Psychic Warriors will be pointed toward engaging with the moral dimensions of the setting, while Adventurers will be given the normal hustling and murderhobo activities traditional to adventure games.

I will be underscoring the non-physical nature of hit points by four means: the use of a "Death & Dismemberment" table for injury, greatly increasing recovery of hit points, causing Psychic Warriors to spend hit points to power their psychic abilities, and making use of the Swords & Wizardry: Whitebox method of determining damage (that is, everything does 1d6, with a +1 or -1 for particularly large or small attacks; artillery is another story, of course).

I'm planning to give Robot characters an entirely different approach, where they improve only by spending money to buy better body components or software, and giving them a starting budget. This will allow those players who demand the ability to design their characters a route to go, and also play along with the idea that Robots aren't the same as living beings.

I don't know for sure which Aliens I want to include with the basic game, but I am considering Draug (sort-of wolf-bear-men that I found in the Swords & Wizardry Monster Book), Giff (from Spelljammer), Haashek (Lizard Men, though I am not wedded to that name; I might change it to Gorrans, from Starships & Spacemen 2nd edition), Koni (basically humanoid bunnies; Bunnies & Burrows!), Moonspiders (intelligent giant spiders), and Tabaxi. I don't know if six aliens is too many, though, and I'm not sure which ones to cut if I do end up having fewer. I'm pretty sure I want to keep the Haashek and the Moonspiders for sure, and probably the Koni. That would give a tough warrior race (like Dwarves), possibly a subtle and wise race (like Elves, if that's the direction I take Moonspiders), and a small sneaky race (Halflings). Moonspiders and Koni (as Bunrabs) originally were inspired by intelligent races in Swordbearer, but I like them a lot. In the long run, I want to take the Flanaess Sector idea for the Aliens of the setting.

The setting itself will be centered on a Galactic Republic that has stood for a thousand years. Despite living with its old ideals, it has become a corrupted system, with overweening bureaucrats and self-interested politicians running matters for their own benefit. The Temples of the Psychic Warriors have become increasingly out of touch with the needs and situations of the common people, though some Psychic Warriors still try to live up to the spiritual and moral imperatives of their calling. Rocket Rangers with their special battle suits rub shoulders with the Space Patrol and small-time (or big-time) hustlers. Aliens who have transcended the need for physical bodies help and hinder curious humans in distant worlds. Meanwhile, unknown horrors from beyond spacetime threaten to break through and dissolve the minds of humans in backward colonies off the main spacelanes. In this tottering interstellar community, the players scramble to make an honest, or more likely dishonest, Credit.

I have some ideas for spaceship combat which will hopefully give the feel of science fantasy space combat. Well, I plan to adapt one of the abstract space combat systems I've seen. The main slowing point is coming up with inventions for Scientists to develop, but I hope to have at least a couple dozen examples.

Traveller And Dying Before You Play

The other day, I was talking on someone else's blog about old-school gaming and how it differs from the new schools. One of the things I mentioned was a tendency toward wide-open games, in which players are not limited in their choices beyond in-game justifications (for instance, the game "physics", represented by the rules, or concern for social penalties within the game setting; metagaming concepts like "story" or "plot" or even "spotlight" don't influence the choice-making abilities of the players within the rules), which have become latterly known as "sandbox" games. This particular play style tends to be well-supported by older game designs, which (for example) minimize the penalties for playing "wrong" and losing a character in play by making the creation of a new character a matter of a few minutes at most.

There is at least one notable exception among the pre-1980 game designs in regard to this idea of simple and quick character creation, which is the system developed in Traveller. Now, Traveller is among my favorite all-time games. I've noted it before as my #1 game, in its incarnation as MegaTraveller (which is a name I still dislike intensely, even as I love the game itself; as an aside, I still need to get around to a comprehensive review of Mongoose's edition of Traveller). In Traveller, character creation is not only slow, with the player required to roll dice repeatedly to generate a lifepath of sorts at four-year intervals, covering a number of different aspects (each with its own dice roll), but also, in the original game and to some extent in MegaTraveller, faced the distinct possibility that the character being created might die before ever seeing regular play. As a result, it was not uncommon to have to generate several characters in a row before one came up that managed to make it to the point of being actively played. Or to cheat, which was a common response to the issue. In any case, this results in a rather extended character creation process. It is usual, I've found, for Referees of a Traveller game (with the sometime exceptions of Traveller: The New Era, which uses a radically different method, or GURPS Traveller, which uses the GURPS conventions of character design) to schedule character creation entirely separate from actual play.

Later editions of Traveller, beginning, in fact, with MegaTraveller, altered the situation or lightened the blow. MegaTraveller, while retaining the "Survival" roll, offered the option that it might represent a mere shortening of the current term and loss of the benefits associated with it (with the penalty of a couple years being added to the character's age), followed by an automatic mustering out into play. Other versions of the game either eliminated the "Survival" roll or altered it similarly.

But why was it there in the first place? Obviously, the designers thought of it as a simulation exercise. While it is preferable to have characters with some level of previous experience, they perhaps wanted to express the facts of life: if you join the military, you might not live to tell your story (though, entertainingly, in the original career charts, one was slightly more likely to survive to play as a member of the Army, due to the significantly lower characteristic requirement to qualify for a dice bonus to the "Survival" roll, than as a Merchant, for example).

More importantly, though, the "Survival" check offered a sort of evolutionary pressure on characters. Some characters would be more likely to survive to play, and there was system-based selective pressure for characters with higher characteristics to be among those. Furthermore, some careers were less likely to include survivors, and those careers tended to give greater benefits to the player, such as a cheap starship, access to better skills (such as the dramatic availability of the extremely useful Jack-of-all-Trades skill to characters in the Scout career), and so forth. The "Survival" roll allowed characters to pursue those careers, but offered a tendency to keep those benefits in check to some degree. The player would be less likely to keep going for too many terms of service (four years each, remember), and so less likely to gain excessive levels of the more useful skills and benefits.

Let's examine the Scout specifically. In the original game, the player had to roll a 7+ on 2d6 for survival each term. The dice roll would get a benefit of +2 if the character was rated with an Endurance score of 9+ (the normal range of rolled stats is on 2d6, so this is significantly above average). That means that, of characters with an Endurance of 8 or less (that is, 72.2% of characters at the start of generation, before gaining any improvements during creation), 41.7% will die during their first four years of being in the service, and so cannot possibly see play. The lucky ones with the higher Endurance score will do better, but still fully 1 in 6 will die in that first four year term. As compensation for this, Scouts get two skills in each term (other services get only one, though they may gain bonus skills by being promoted), and have maximum access to the coveted Jack-of-all-Trades skill, with the skill appearing on 3 out of the four skill charts available to Scouts. Three other careers have access to the skill (Navy, Merchant, and Other), but all three only have the skill appearing on one of their available skill charts, and Others have it on the chart that is only accessible to characters with a high Education rating. If skill charts are chosen randomly (assuming high Education), a Scout will gain an average of 0.25 levels of Jack-of-all-Trades skill each term, where a Navy, Merchant, or qualifying Other will gain only a sixth of that or so! (Without the Education requirement, the Scout gains 0.22 levels per term, while the Navy or Merchant gain 0.056. Note that these numbers can be boosted by sticking to the specific skill charts in question, but other than Scouts this tends to push the character away from other cool and useful skills.) These numbers are brought slightly closer together because the non-Scout services actually gain a base of two skills in their first term, which is then balanced yet again by the Scout gaining a useful skill (Pilot) in their first term for free (only Army and Marines characters also gain a free skill in their first term: Rifle for the Army, Cutlass for the Marines).

It's not just one skill, either, no matter how valuable it might be in play. There is also the matter of starship availability. Scouts are one of two careers in the basic game that might get access to a starship before play starts. Of the two careers with that access, Scouts are the only one that might get a starship without having to make payments on it. Furthermore, a Scout is much more likely to get access to a ship, since the other career with starship benefits (Merchant) requires that the character have reached a rank of Captain (Rank 5), meaning that the character will have been in the career for at least 4 terms - gaining Commission and Promotion in the first term, followed by Promotions in each subsequent term. The Scout, on the other hand, has no ranks, and even a 1-term Scout might gain access to a Scout/Courier starship. Assuming he survives.

Most of the other services have a base "Survival" roll of 5+ on 2d6, or a 5 in 6 chance of surviving each term, and can gain a +2 bonus, giving only a 1 in 36 chance of not surviving each term, with (usually) a much lower characteristic, usually a 7+ in one characteristic or another. The Marines have a "Survival" roll of 6+ (and need an 8+ Endurance for the bonus), Others need a 9+ Intelligence for the bonus to their base 5+, and Army characters get the best "Survival" roll of all, needing a base 5+ to survive, and getting a bonus with only a 6 or greater Education score.

So, what does this mean for the game? Army characters will tend to have long careers, since it is very likely to survive any given term, and thus have a large number of skills. They get the smallest amount of material benefits on leaving the service, however, and with the lowest valued cash table. However, this is compensated by the worst chance to successfully reenlist of all 6 basic careers, so their careers are frequently cut short by forces beyond their control. They do manage to rise in rank very quickly, for as long as they can stay in, so that benefits them, as each rank increase sees a bonus skill roll. Merchants have a pretty good chance of survival, almost as good as the Army, and have an excellent chance at reenlistment, so their careers tend to be the longest of any of the six branches of service. They find it easy to become an officer, but very difficult to rise in rank after that. Navy careerists have a very hard time getting a commission, but they get promotions pretty regularly after that. Scouts don't have ranks (again, though, they don't need the bonus skill given by promotion since they get double skills each term), and their reenlistment is nearly automatic, but their main stumbling block is that very high risk nature of the career, meaning that the player making the choices has to balance the risk of one more term against the probability that they will need to start again from the beginning.

Those numbers did not change substantially in MegaTraveller, though as I noted there was an option to take the sting out of failing a "Survival" roll. And, of course, I am not analyzing the "Expanded" character creation systems found in Books 4-7 of the original game, also included as options in MegaTraveller. Those systems change the level of detail, determining the history of the character on a year-by-year basis instead of in terms of four years each, but they also dramatically alter the way that survival is determined, since "Survival" is then based on the particular assignment during each year, rather than a simple number. I really like the "Expanded" systems, but they were only ever finished for the five basic careers of Navy, Marines, Army, Scout, and Merchant (though "COACC", also known as Flyers or aerospace service, were added to this list during MegaTraveller's run). There were a few other occupations, such as Law Enforcement, which saw "Expanded"-style systems in third party products (I think that the LE one was in Dragon, actually), but those are of course "unofficial". The biggest problem with the "Expanded" generation systems is that they don't fit well with the normal generation systems, meaning that if anyone uses them, all of the players are more or less limited to the services that have "Expanded" versions.

But what does it mean? Some people are of the opinion that when you do work to generate a character, that means that particular character is then the one that you are playing. That's a fine way to look at things, too. On the other hand, there's the "funnel" approach of Dungeon Crawl Classics, in which several raw characters are generated and filtered out during the initial play session, presumably resulting in the characters with more talent and so on ending up as the actual characters for the rest of the campaign. That's only slightly different than the Traveller method of filtering out unsuitable (or overreaching) characters prior to actual play, especially so since the character creation process is a fairly enjoyable mini-game in itself (even more so with the "Expanded" generation methods). Of course, the extra time required to both roll each term (or year) individually followed by the possibility of having to create another character entirely due to a failed survival roll can annoy some people. Also, the possibility of getting one's hopes up for a promising character followed by losing it to the dice can be frustrating.

There are different ways to approach games. Some people prefer to get to the "story" part as fast as they can, others prefer to wait and let the story come to them. Some people want high efficiency, some want robust resilience. And we come again to the idea that different people want different things out of their games. I hope that I was able to illuminate, to some degree at least, why the original Traveller design was put together the way it was in this regard.

Science Fantasy Space Opera Game

One of the things I am working on lately (because apparently I don't want to have any spare time to rest) is a science fantasy space opera game based on S&W:Whitebox. I like the streamlined mechanics and simplified character system. I've been thinking that there should be three character classes available to players for human characters: Adventurer, Psychic Warrior, and Scientist. Adventurers will be the general sort of adventuring character. Psychic Warriors take a cue from Star Wars, Lensman, and Blue Öyster Cult. Scientists will be of the sort who want to learn about the universe and build new inventions (and there is absolutely no truth to the idea that any of them are "mad", that's just absurd; "mad" they call me - but it is not I who am mad, it is they, with their blind adherence to "convention" and "morality"!). I plan to adapt the invention rules from the original Space 1889 for them, changing the specifics to fit the setting.

After that, I want to allow robot characters, but they won't get experience points. Instead, they will spend money to buy better equipment for their bodies and software upgrades, or even backup copies and extra bodies. The idea is that robots don't actually "think" or "learn" as such, but act in a way that is very sophisticated otherwise.

Alien races will probably have 1 to 3 character classes available for each, and I'll probably include a couple in the base rules that are just variations of Adventurer. I also might include one alien race that is more complex, as a sort of example of how it can work. I don't know if I'm going to adapt some of the ideas I had for the Flanaess Sector to this, but it would be pretty cool to have at least one or two of the aliens be from D&D. Gulguthra are pretty alien and fit the tone, and I've always liked the Neogi/Umber Hulk pair (though, of course, I'd have to use one of the Umber Hulk simulacra out there, since that is one of the monsters that WotC has reserved to themselves; I like the Underground Goliath of Adventures Dark & Deep). Not sure if those are suitable for beginning players, though.

I'm going back and forth on adopting an idea from the WotC Star Wars game and having the Psychic Warriors power their abilities with Hit Points (and then have a second pool of Body Points based strictly on Con). Right now, I am leaning away from the idea and just using a regular pool of Psychic Power Points for Psychic abilities.

I'm also going back and forth on genetically modified beings. I think that, if I do include them, they'll just be another sort of alien species, game mechanically speaking. I kinda want to have a space nation that is all about bio-tech, full of gene-lines that act as a social stratification, and such. Not sure, though, how I would make it so that players wouldn't just choose a genetically "improved" gene-line as a matter of course. Maybe I should take a hint from Dragonquest on that.

I'll include a form of alignment, based on the idea of Light Side/Dark Side Force (actually, I plan to draw on the ideas of community power as opposed to individual power), but it will only be important at all to Psychic Warriors. I like that idea of a sort of "paladins", "fallen paladins", "anti-paladins", "redeemed paladins", and so on.

I want the setting to be centered around a Terran Federation of some sort, but one that is teetering on the brink of collapse, like Rome in the early 5th century or so. I have some ideas for surrounding stellar states that can act as the barbarians getting ready to overrun the Federation. I also think that it might be worthwhile to provide hints that could lead to the Star Wars storyline of an evil manipulator setting up conditions for the Federation to become an autocratic state, but that a Referee could ignore if she wanted.

I do want the Federation to be an increasingly militarized one, with police forces that set up checkpoints where they check people's papers at random, engage in warrantless searches in force, and so on, because that stuff can lead to fun adventure, I think.

Polytheism And Religion In Games

The heat wave is continuing here, though things are getting better. I haven’t done any work on the blog at all, so there’s a good chance I won’t have the Middle Sea Witch class done by Monday. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll work on the Bullrider instead.

But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about polytheism in game worlds.

Most people think that polytheism is just like monotheistic religion. However, there are many characteristics of polytheistic religion that make it completely distinct from the latter. For one, there is no exclusivity. That should seem obvious, but people designing games tend to forget that and make their “polytheistic” cultures look like a whole lot of competing monotheisms, or at least henotheisms (henotheism is the practice of acknowledging that there may be other gods, but worshiping/venerating only one). This becomes particularly noticeable in those settings where gods generate power through the number of their followers, and so the competition for worshipers ends up being fierce.

Now, it has been rightly pointed out that in polytheistic cultures, there are priests or other religious specialists who focus strongly on just one god. This does not, however, change the fact that the general body of the people give honor to any number of gods, and even the religious specialists are known to look to other gods when the need or desire arises. Also, there is a marked tendency in most games for a priest specialist to pick the “strongest” god, as the powers that the priest will be able to wield will be determined by their god. This flies in the face of the historical fact that there have always been priests who focus on even the smallest gods – or even non-god beings like nymphs.

To illustrate the point, let’s look at how various games handle religion, whether well or poorly.

First up, the basic D&D approach (also used by most D&D-like games) is to have a Cleric class which represents the main way to approach the gods. In some versions, other characters are allowed a slight chance of appealing to the gods by invoking their name and hoping for a good die roll to get Divine Intervention. The second mechanic there goes a long way toward alleviating the problem, but limiting the majority of divine appeals to a specialist class is something that is particularly a characteristic of monotheistic religions. A good rule that would help even more than the Divine Intervention chance is to incorporate the ability to get one-time bonuses for a character of any class who makes an offering to the god at their shrines, temples, or whatever. For instance, by buying and sacrificing a sheep at the temple of Fortuna (with the aid of the priests of the temple, of course), the character might be given one reroll (must take the second roll) to use at any time in the future. Or whatever, maybe even one-use spells of an appropriate level to the character (and certainly the bonuses carried at one time should be limited by character level, perhaps one bonus per level). This should probably require tracking the piety of the character with regard to that god – those who blaspheme Fortuna shouldn’t get her bonuses without making some sort of appropriate penances. There was a good method of tracking such piety in the old FGU game Lands of Adventure. Of course, now that we’re tracking piety in relation to each god, we should work that into the system somehow, but I’m not here to write up an entire method.

Speaking of Lands of Adventure, religion in that game is handled much like it is in D&D, where characters choose one god from whom they get most of their divine powers, leading to a henotheistic system rather than a polytheistic one.

Next, we find RuneQuest (and, to an extent, HeroQuest). In that game, characters can become Initiates of various Cults, each dedicated to a deity. Even non-Initiates (called Lay Members, though Lay Members still have to undergo a minor initiation – they just don’t have to sacrifice POW to get their initiation) can often gain some bonus from the Cult. This is a very good approach, but leaves out the possibilities, common in historical polytheisms, of approaching gods one has not yet had a chance to become acquainted with, not to mention the fact that, normally, becoming a Lay Member should give one access to all of the gods of the culture. Still, RQ is a great way to approach polytheist religion, and I recommend it. Not surprising, really, as the designer of the original RQ setting, Glorantha, is an active and practicing polytheist himself.

In Chivalry & Sorcery, religion is dealt with cursorily, by specifying religious practitioners and giving them powers, pretty much ignoring the gods themselves. Eh, it works, but has all of the problems present in the D&D system. At least by avoiding naming particular gods and sticking to the social roles (“Priest”, “Druid”, “Shaman”, or whatever), the C&S system avoids the problems of seeming to be a henotheistic semi-polytheism.

GURPS Voodoo takes a slightly different tack, by ignoring the religion parts, but treating the gods for what they can do. Anyone can approach any god (or “Loa”, more properly spelled “Lwa”) and ask for assistance (which is generally granted by the dispatch of messengers – what Christianity and some other religions might call Angels – to provide assistance). In some cases, that process is treated generically, as a regular use of magic. In other cases, it involves the specific summoning of Manifestations (the aforementioned messengers). Some characters have an entourage of spirit helpers. Finally, certain characters, called “Spirit Warriors”, are given the ability to call on the powers of the god (or Lwa) and manifest them in their own body. This is a really good system.

An obscure game (which I plan to review eventually) is Legendary Lives. This game handles religion well enough, but no better, by giving characters a choice (or roll) of religion based on their culture. This system is only added in the supplement, Societies Sourcebook, though. Every character is given a Devotion score, which acts as a skill in relation to religious powers. The details of what Devotion does vary by religion. Unfortunately, the game falls into the D&D trap of treating individual gods as religions in themselves.

Pendragon is one of the better treatments of religion in gaming, though it avoids immersing players in the role of religion. Characters have five Personality Traits, known as Religious Traits, that are related to their religion, and if those Traits are kept at a high enough level the character gains special bonuses, varying by religion. Beyond that, religion is mainly assumed to be a strong background factor. Unlike Fantasy Wargaming, to choose one example (see below), the characters are given no reason to pursue religious ceremonies (except for the relatively minor effect of being a requisite for the Pious Personality Trait – which is actually a hindrance to Saxon Heathens, for whom the opposing Trait, Worldly, is one of their Religious Traits).

Hârnmaster allows characters to gain piety points that they can spend in exchange for miraculous interventions. The religion system of Hârn resembles the normal henotheism of most games, though. It could perhaps be fixed if characters were allowed to accumulate piety in regard to all of the gods involved, but that might end up being too complex to handle easily in the game.

Unknown Armies only tangentially deals with religion, and mostly from the point of view espoused by Chaos Magick. Characters may pursue becoming an Avatar of a particular Archetype. Archetypes are the game’s equivalent to gods, and the more that a character manifests that Archetype by emulating it, the more of that Archetype’s powers can be expressed by the character. A good system for the setting and ones that use similar assumptions, but not one that fits most historical religions.

Speaking of modern-day/near-future games, Shadowrun has gods of a sort, but they are relegated to a secondary role. The totems in that system factor in as “gods” after a fashion. I wonder if it would be possible to make actual gods using that template? I suspect that it would end up looking very much like D&D-style henotheism, though.

Whatever other merits or flaws it might have, Dogs in the Vineyard treats its religion very well. However, it is focused on one specific sort of religion, in which there is a religion of the Community, and forces outside of that religion that attempt to destroy the Community. Like real-world Mormonism, the religion of DitV tries to account for the polytheistic peoples living around them, and does so only moderately well. Certainly, the religion system in DitV could be adapted to other monotheistic religions, or even the henotheistic ones of most D&D games.

There are other games with religious systems, such as The Riddle of Steel, The Burning Wheel, Wyrd is Bond, and so on, but they are minor and don’t really fit into historical religious beliefs, in my opinion, no matter how good they may be as games. They generally end up appearing much like D&D-style henotheism.

My favorite approach, though, is that in Fantasy Wargaming. In that game, both monotheistic and polytheistic religions are covered (the former primarily by Christianity and Satanism, the latter by Norse religion), and the system manages both well. Characters in that game are given a “religious rank”, which is not directly tied to the Religion level (FW uses a system where every character has three levels: Combat/Adventuring, Magic, and Religion, corresponding to the original three classes in published D&D, with characters generally starting at level zero in each). For Christians, this is either as Lay Clergy at the lower ends of the scale, Ordained Clergy, Monks, or Friars (or Religious Knights), with most characters having no religious rank at all. Satanists are all given a minimum rank, and there is no particular process of Ordination, so that characters may rise in the Devil’s hierarchy on their merits. Norse pagans have two main tracks – either as Priests or as Laity. Priests have a higher minimum/starting religious rank, but Lay members are actually capable of gaining a higher religious rank than Priests (although only if they can manage to become King or Queen)! For the most part, religious powers mainly consist of Ceremonies, which dedicate Mana (magical power) to the god or gods being worshiped and provide a bonus to morale for a while and a chance of Inspiration to the participants, which gives various bonuses, along with other benefits depending on the Ceremony. Anyone may appeal to higher (or lower) powers for a Miracle, which is resolved by the invoked power using the methods of the magic system to cause changes in the world (or, in a few cases such as Resurrection of the dead, the magic system is used in a modified form). Characters can have “patrons”, which gives the character a bonus in appealing to that power (the Norse ones usually are given at birth, and their patron’s name is typically incorporated into their personal name). There is no method given in FW for changing patrons during the game, which is something I will add in my rewrite of the system. Another aspect that helps the system work well is the concept of “Intervention”, whereby an appeal is made to one power who is asked to Intervene with another power. This has benefits in the matter of patronage mentioned, but also because some powers are more difficult to appeal to than others. In the Norse religion, the personal feelings and relationships of various powers affects this chance of Intervention, as well, so that, for instance, the wife of a god will have a better chance of Intervention with that god, while two gods who hate each other (Loki and Heimdall, for instance) reduce the chance of successful Intervention. Finally, each power has areas of Favor and Disfavor, which affects the likelihood of the power responding to the appeal. Altogether, this system became the first to incorporate the personalities of the powers into the game system in a meaningful way. So, this system included both the religious (characters can attend or perform Mass, for example) and the miraculous (through the process of appeals) into one system. Sometimes both are incorporated, such as the rites of Benediction and Malediction. The primary weakness of the FW system in regard to religion is the handling of “negative” piety, which is always assumed to place one in communication with the Devil, even if a Norse pagan. I hope to address this problem in my revision of the game.