A Quick Note On Terminology, or, Why I Prefer the Term "Adventure Game" to Others Such as "Role Playing Game"

So, I'm going to be working through some of my thoughts on what characterizes the hobby I like, and how that doesn't necessarily match up with later definitions that attempt to circumscribe the type of play in conformation with post-hoc assumptions derived from marketing terminology, rather than facts of play that led to that terminology. How's that for obscurant writing? Anyway, this is more impulsive than truly systematic.

In addition to not preferring "Role Playing Game", I definitely don't like terms like "Story Games" either, as they almost completely fail to capture what I like about Adventure Games. Adventure Games are not Story Games, though they may - and usually do - result in stories. An Adventure Game attempts to take situations derived from adventure fiction, such as sword & sorcery, epic fantasy, or the like, and use them as the framework of inspiration for situations that can be resolved by the mix of logistics, strategy, puzzle-solving, and other game procedures that constitute an Adventure Game. It was never really meaningful to call them "Role Playing" games, though of course that ended up as the marketing term preferred. After all, nearly every war game sets the player into a role, such as General, King, or other leader. The unique factor of Adventure Games was not that there was a "role", but that they provided an open-ended framework in which adventurous activities could be played out, rather than a closely defined set of fixed options. This is, in fact, very similar to other refereed sorts of war game - such as many forms of Kriegsspiel! - but tends more toward games like Braunstein which offer an asymmetrical set of unequal player positions.

 

So, some definitions, maybe a little bit after the manner of the Devil's Dictionary. Yeah, it's biased. That's the point:

Adventure Game - A game depicting an adventurous scenario, often inspired by adventure fiction. Because adventurous scenarios involve conflict by definition, these are generally War Games. Normally, they apply logistic, tactical/strategic, and logic puzzles to fantastic settings. Some people, not understanding logistics, ignore those elements because they believe them to be boring. This generally has a similar effect to removing the auction rule from Monopoly, which is to say it is not a good idea. As a result, it may be a better choice to streamline those rules rather than ignoring them.

Asymmetric - A term used, in this context, to indicate that elements of the game are different for different players. Unlike a game like Chess, in which both players have the same goal of checkmating the opposing King and have pieces that mirror the opponent's pieces, an Asymmetric game may have differing goals, differing resources in quantity or function, or other different elements.

Braunstein - A type of Kriegsspiel defined by the fact that the players have Asymmetric positions, and normally includes more than two players and a Referee

Fog of War - The factor of limited information that, among other effects, inclines player choices away from optimized decisions.

Interpretive Resolution - Resolution of an action or event by means of resort to the assumptions and knowledge of a Referee or, rarely, some other player. The chosen player provides a narrative result that affects the game state and player positions within the scenario.

Kriegsspiel - A refereed war game, generally to allow limited information procedures ("Fog of War"), but also in some versions allowing interpretive rather than procedural resolution of actions taking place within the bounds of the scenario.

Procedural Resolution - Resolution of an action or event by means of resort to a systematic procedure. Often involves dice rolls, tables, variables, or other mathematical means converted into narrative results.

Referee - A type of player who interprets rules for the other players. Frequently the designer of the specific game scenario. Typically not part of most commercially-produced games.

Role - The position a player takes within a scenario.

Role Playing Game - A marketing term, usually applied to Adventure Games and Story Games interchangeably. Some people try to use the marketing term to reinterpret how the games should work.

Scenario - The parameters of a game, especially those involving the framework within which players are expected to make their decisions or choices.

Story Game - A game intended to result in a story. Often used in writer groups and workshops. The usual mechanical format is to determine which player is allowed to write the next portion of the story, with variations centering on how that player is determined and how much of the story they get to write before moving on to the next player or turn. Stories typically involve conflict, so many Story Games are War Games even when they try to pretend they aren't, but stories without conflict do exist, and so a Story Game may be designed to avoid conflict. I'm sure those are very interesting for some people to play.

War Game - A game intended to capture the decisions and events typically found in a conflict. Most are specific to military conflicts, but the category includes financial or business scenarios, among others. Public health was a rising favorite until the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Train company expansion is a remarkably common topic.

More Potentially Unpopular Gaming Opinions

 I missed a few last time, so here are some more.

 

1. Backstory is not very helpful, for the most part, and largely comes from a player wanting to write their own story, not play in an adventure game. If you must, don't handcuff the Referee, don't significantly worldbuild unless invited to do so, and don't expect anyone to read more than a paragraph or two. Remember that the only real value in backstory is to let the Referee know what general sort of game you want to experience, but a lot of that is better explained by character design choices like character class or selection of skills. Most especially for the pathological backstory writer, always remember that your character in most games is a beginning adventurer, so don't write backstory that over-glorifies your character.
2. Skills in games should be more about giving characters options than enforcing "niche protection". Also, most skills don't need to have a roll for success. A character with a skill should be able to do the thing.
3. Most game worlds don't really need non-human intelligent species like orcs, gnolls, and such, and they usually are uncomfortably incorporated into the settings they inhabit at best. Consider replacing wandering groups of humanoids with human groups, unless you have a pressing need for non-humans. Is "making violence against them more acceptable" a pressing need? Maybe? At least you'll be more honest about your motivations rather than just accidentally coding your prejudices into the setting. To look to a couple of examples from Japanese fantasy that illustrate the point, the predatory demons of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End/Sōsō no Frieren, whose use of language only serves the purpose of attracting their prey and subduing its fears rather than creating social connection as with other speaking beings, are a perfect example of doing it right. The goblins of GOBLIN SLAYER are perhaps less perfect, but at least they make the author's fetishes plain.
4. While there is certainly value in sticking to the tried and true like Tolkien or D&D Kitchen Sink fantasy, it's also worthwhile to look wider for inspiration. I am particularly interested in Japanese fantasy lately, such as the aforementioned Frieren, Attack on Titan/Shingeki no Kyojin, Made in Abyss (which is particularly interesting from a D&D/Dungeon Fantasy perspective), Ishura (worth comparing to the Sine Nomine game Godbound, actually; free version is here), Clevatess/Clevatess: Majū no Ō to Akago to Shikabane no Yūsha, and the like can stand strong beside other non-Tolkien and non-Poul Anderson fantasy like Gormenghast, the works of Lord Dunsany, Barsoom, or Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty.

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.

Random Musings of Gaming-related Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

More later, I think.

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.

[Obscure Games] Magical Fury

Star Princess Astraia getting angry

As I've mentioned before in this blog, I have a soft spot for magical girl (mahō shōjo) anime, manga, stories, and RPGs. There is something about the earnestness and kindness built into the genre—a kindness that is sometimes subverted, making the subgenre of Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction—that is a balm to my otherwise noir-inflected heart. There have been a number of versions of the genre set forth in roleplaying form, from the earliest ones like the character Bright Sun Angel described in GURPS Wizards (1998, and among the earliest published depictions of a magical girl in RPG format outside of Japan, though of course there were precursors in games like Teenagers from Outer Space and the like) or The Sailor Moon Roleplaying Game and Resource Book (1999, and of course Big Eyes, Small Mouth had already previously included ways to build such characters), through to today when there are many already published or in-progress magical girl RPGs available.

Back in 2015 or so, author Ewen Cluney was apparently struggling with putting together an RPG to describe a setting he had in his mind about a magical girl named Star Princess Astraia. He had been inspired by Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, and especially Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Unfortunately, he wasn't getting anywhere and so he decided to take a different tack toward the subject matter, just as a way to get his creative juices flowing. He started with Apocalypse World and simplified the rules considerably, coming up with a system he'd later simply call "Powered by Fury" (inspired by the "Powered by the Apocalypse" games that followed Apocalypse World) and published a short game titled Magical Fury.

The basic game is very short, only 42 pages at 6" × 9", and very light on both rules and setting. Characters are created by a simple process of answering a few questions ("What is your name?", "What does being a girl mean to you?", "What are you afraid of?", "What is your wish?", and so on), picking a few traits that describe your magical girl hero (how she changes in her henshin, or transformation, what her magical theme is, her dominant color, and of course her magical name). There are d66 tables for all of these if you can't, or don't want to, come up with your own, so beginning players are given ample assistance. Have you noticed that I haven't mentioned anything about stats? There are no stats. There's also no discussion of gender variance, magical boys, or anything like that. It doesn't really get much in the way of any particular interpretation that a Referee and their players might want to include, though.

Once the character is created, the game runs similar to a typical RPG, with description and response from Referee and players. To adjudicate actions, the Referee classifies them as (or the player chooses from among) any of a number of "moves". Each of these is a simple description of what the action boils down to ("Go on the offense", "Protect someone else", "Run away", "Sorcery", "Investigate", "Comfort", and the like; there are also special moves, only called for by the Referee, for "Desperation" and "Stay Calm"), combined with a short table on which the player will roll 2d6. The result from the table describes what happens, and may sometimes result in the character gaining Hope, Magic, or Trauma points. When one of these categories reaches three points, the magical girl experiences a "shift", or consequence to the character. There are four types of shift of each category, and when all four have occurred to the character and another shift is called for, then they must instead choose an Extreme Shift (for Trauma or Magic) or a Great Hope (for Hope).

Fights are very quick, consisting of picking moves, rolling, and taking points of Trauma or Magic as necessary. There is a table for figuring out the outcome of a fight based on the total number of hits scored by the players' characters compared to the number of characters there are.

The rest of the game is filled with suggestions for the Referee in worldbuilding their specific magical girl setting and tables to assist in various ways including with all of the choices in character creation (as mentioned). That's it. Super simple, particularly focused on narrative play.

I don't much like that sort of roleplaying game, generally. These sorts of rules always strike me as being slightly more complex versions of the games that amateur writers' groups play, and I don't much like them in those settings either—which is one reason I no longer go to writers' groups, probably to my own detriment. However, in this specific case, I am willing to go with the idea simply because the genre is that compelling to me. Also, things don't end there, as there are two supplements for the game, Magical Fury Companion and Magical Fury Appendix, as well as the "Powered by Fury" game Angel Project, which apparently (I haven't picked up a copy) describes another magical girl-style setting based around "Seraphim Suits" that can only be worn by pure-hearted girls.

Magical Fury Companion provides some new moves ("Hide the truth", "Keep up with life", "Lash out", "Patrol the city", and "Sense magic"), a new ability (Overdrive, drawn from Yuki Yuna is a Hero/Yūki Yūna wa Yūsha de Aru, which allows a magical girl to greatly increase the strength of her powers at the expense of a permanent disability), along with new tables to describe the magical girls, their various tsukaima, or animal companions, and the youma monsters that oppose them. There's also a table of potential secrets underlying the setting and the nature of magical girls for the Referee to use in worldbuilding.

Magical Fury Appendix provides a table of complications to help the Referee build a story when they're stuck, a list of types of places and some examples drawn from the author's "Star Princess Astraia" setting, a table of random youma, six example magical girls from the "Star Princess Astraia" setting (including a couple of dark magical girl antagonists), and a table of 36 more from that setting described briefly.

To my way of thinking—that an RPG should be an open-ended exercise in which the players are allowed to attempt literally anything through their characters, with success determined by the abilities ascribed to those characters—the limited nature of the moves allowed seems like a problem. [EDIT: The game does explicitly note, when discussing moves, that "you may find you need to invent new ones to do everything you want to do with the game."] That said, it is true that most things that players will try fall into a fairly limited set of categories. It's also true that the Companion shows that it is really a fairly simple matter to come up with new moves to cover whatever unusual action a player attempts. The Referee should probably familiarize themself with the ways that moves are put together and be prepared to generate new ones on the fly, but that isn't really discussed in the game anywhere. [EDIT: As I note above, it is.]

In the end, I wouldn't call this the best game, but it is certainly one that I would play if someone were to run it, or even run if I found a group or individual that wanted to. From some of the moves and the way that fights work, I think that it is probably better suited to a small group of players. Also, the tools provided to the Referee for worldbuilding are probably equally useful to a Referee of any other magical girl, or even just magical, game. The secrets suggested for settings (drawn from works like Puella Magi Madoka Magica—there are secrets that concisely describe the central secrets of both that series and Yuki Yuna) could be used as the deep secrets of a magical girl-friendly setting in a more structured game, for example. Basically, if you like magical girl RPGs at all, you probably should spend the few bucks to pick up this one and its two supplements. If that's not an interest to you, then only pick it up if you're interested in rules-light, narrative-style games.

[EDIT 13 Jan 2023] Shortly after I wrote this, the two supplements were put together in a print volume as Magical Fury Apocrypha. It contains exactly the same content as the two PDF supplements, but in print format.

Why I Like: GURPS!

This is hopefully going to be a new series for me to post once in a while. I want to discuss why it is that I like the particular game systems that I do like. I'll probably also touch on what I don't much like about them, because that's the kind of jerk I am. Anyway, let's get started with the game I am currently running, GURPS.

I've written before a bit on a thing that annoys me about GURPS, which is the lack of any really quick way to generate characters without having to think about them. A random generation system for the game would go a long way. Unfortunately, in experimenting with them, it occurred to me that any such system would have to be closely tied to the particular setting of the game in question. And that's a key to one of the things I really love about the game.

See, most people think that GURPS is a game. It isn't, really. It's a toolkit to make a game. It's a set of rules that hang together in particular ways which can be picked among like creating a salad at a salad bar. A little bit of this, some of that, and do we want to have a detailed grappling system? Are rules for social interactions going to be something we should pay attention to? It's possible, of course, to pick among these on the fly, using the GURPS Social Engineering rules in a situation where social interaction has become important, but skipping back to the normal, simpler methods laid out in the basic rules for skill use in most cases. There are some cases where that won't work, like using or not using an optional rule like "The Last Gasp", which deals in great detail with the way that short-term fatigue in a combat situation works at the expense of greatly increased recordkeeping. Using the rule also changes elements of character creation, so it has to pretty much be chosen at the outset of the game or not used—though obviously a creative Referee could find a way to handle switching it in and out, but it seems to me like that would still be clumsy. In any case, the specific rules in use have to be picked by the Referee based on what the game will emphasize or not emphasize. Will players have a lot of options to customize their equipment, or will it all just be used at a more basic, even semi-abstracted level? Is wealth an important concept and money a subject of recordkeeping, or should it be treated abstractly?

As a result of this, a game of GURPS will only mostly resemble other games of GURPS. A lot of the choices made, however, will have to do with worldbuilding elements. And that is what really attracts me to the game. I really like worldbuilding. I keep a file with campaign ideas, which currently reaches number 114. Almost every one of those represents an entire worldbuilding exercise. Some of them are explicitly designed for a particular game, like the Flanaess Sector idea—though that one could certainly be done in GURPS as well, especially now that much of the work of converting various AD&D monsters has already been done by an excellent rules mechanic—or some of the ones that are explicitly intended to show off a particular set of rules and, usually, setting. Examples of the latter are some Glorantha-based RuneQuest games, Space 1889 (using the original rules, not the Savage Worlds conversion currently in print), obscure games like Aftermath! or Shattered Dreams, or whatever. But still, most of the campaigns I dream up are worldbuilding exercises, like the "Dawn of the Elves" game that envisions a world divided up between various "wug" races such as insect-men, fish-men, dragons, and the like, and a primitive, yet highly adaptable and curious, race of elves, before they develop their elven civilizations and nurture humanity to reach its potential. Some of those I could easily do in another game—AD&D could probably handle the "Dawn of the Elves" setting—but GURPS gives me the option to more closely tailor everything to exactly the vision that comes flowing from my dreams.

As an example, I'm currently getting ready to run a swords & sorcery game set in ancient Sundaland at the end of the last Ice Age. I'm doing this because I'm having some difficulties in pacing the metahumans game I've been running in a way that makes it less enjoyable than it could be. Anyway, Sundaland, as I envision it, is a large subcontinent, about half the size of North America, which has developed civilization and metalworking in a few river valleys long before the rest of the world. Partly, that's because I think that a bronze-age civilization would be more interesting to the players. I'm doing some other slight anachronisms as well, like including some of the megafauna and hominins that had probably died out by 10,000-15,000 years ago. Megalania, for example, pretty closely resembles the dragon that bedevils Conan and Valeria in "Red Nails", so it seems like something I could use! Who cares that the species probably went extinct around 50,000 years ago? A 20+ foot long venomous lizard is something that fits a sword & sorcery setting! Another (probable) anachronism that fits the setting is Homo floresiensis, a diminutive species of hominin that happens to exist right in the region of Sundaland. While current research seems to indicate that it went extinct around the same time as Megalania, it was initially thought to have existed as recently as 12,000 years ago, which is also within the right time frame. Anyway, the point is that I can take all of these elements and easily come up with GURPS statistics, along with statistics for bronze weaponry, appropriate armor, and so on, all without having to completely rebalance the game as I might have to do to run it using a D&D-type.

This brings me, roundabout, to another thing I really like about GURPS. It's a great simulation. I know that "simulationism" gets a bad rap these days, but that's just because people have different tastes. My tastes run to games that can give me a feel similar to what I might feel if I were in a particular situation. That is, I like "immersion" in my games, and I get immersion from feeling like the things happening at the games table could happen, theoretically, if the situation in question were occurring. We shouldn't call this "realism", because the situation can include elements that are "unrealistic" like superpowers. However, GURPS also allows a Referee to fine-tune the "realism" too. Magic, as I have said recently, exists in the real world, and is therefore "realistic" in that sense, but that doesn't mean that magic acts like the magic systems of your favorite novel or RPG. No one can wave their hand and shoot a fireball at people who annoy them, not without extensive preparations and technological assistance anyway. GURPS allows a Referee to select magic systems that are more or less like those in a particular novel, like a default system that Steve Jackson dreamed up some 30-odd years ago, or like a great number of other systems. Or, as I note in the previously-mentioned article on this blog, a Referee could select elements that more closely resemble the sorts of things that magicians have done for millennia—and still do today—here in the real world, even to the point of cutting off any animistic hypothesis in favor of a materialistic one if that's the way that world should work. (As an aside, there is probably still room for fine-tuning the game in that arena, but the point is that such a thing can be done, and done fairly easily.)

On the other hand, GURPS can also be run as a very cut-down, fast and loose, largely abstracted game, too. Really, the game system only insists on the basic mechanics of a 3d6 roll under a target for success (with critical success and failure as possibilities), a number of d6 and adds for effect (mostly damage, but the mechanic has been adapted for a couple of other results as well), 3d6 with high results being good for reactions, and occasionally 3d6 plus degree of failure for effects that are impacted by the degree of failure (this is mostly only the effect of failed fear rolls). It wouldn't be impossible to run a game which removed the Health stat, for example, bringing the game a bit closer to its predecessor, The Fantasy Trip. Such a game would probably, in fact, bring the costs of all stats into line with each other, where currently Strength and Health each cost half as much as Dexterity or IQ. There are proposals in various short articles for the game to add stats, so why shouldn't a Referee consider simplifying instead?

I could go on about specific things, like the way that the game currently handles different martial arts styles—or styles of any particular thing, such as magical styles, styles of civic arts, or whatever—but I think that I've gotten my main points across. The game is flexible enough to really support my worldbuilding ambitions, offers a range of verisimilitude and detail from highly abstracted to deeply simulated, and a depth of detail that other games can't really match (it's the only game I know of that can usefully simulate Wolverine's adamantium skeleton out of the box, for example, with specific advantages to make unbreakable bones) without a much greater outlay of rules tinkering. I do wish that some things were able to be handled with randomization that aren't, and some things are presented in absolute terms that might be usefully treated with a range of values (see, for one example, the previously-mentioned unbreakable bones), but those are relatively minor complaints in the end.

Next time, I'll probably talk about AD&D 1E. Or maybe something else. Who knows?

Games That Influenced My Current Understanding Of RPGs

I'm still working on the follow-up to the "What is Magic?" post, describing what spirits are, exactly. I also need to write up the events of the Deindustrial Future game, where the players' characters fought off a major assault by the forces of the antagonist—or antagonists, as the case may be—and realized that they may have been making some bad assumptions about what is going on. However, because I want to post something before the end of the year, this will be a simple social media game about my history in gaming. All it really is is a list of "games that influenced me", but I want to include some commentary to make it worth your time to read. Without further ado, and after the first two in no particular order:

1. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st edition - This was, of course, the first RPG I played, before I had even heard the term "RPG". I learned a lot about gaming from this, in part because I had no idea what I was doing. It was where I learned that having followers is a good thing. It was where I learned that maybe you shouldn't trust your fellow players, but also that you could generally rely on them if they weren't dicks. I learned what it means to be able to attempt anything, even if you might or might not succeed. Some of those I would count as life lessons, too. I learned that resource management is a fun game in itself, even if it took me years to be able to articulate that lesson.
2. Traveller - Since it was the first game I'd ever run instead of just being a player, this is where I learned the value of Referee tools. Random encounters, rumor tables, world generation procedures, and so on mean that the Referee can concentrate on the arc of the story and leave the details up to the dice. This has served me as well in learning what the value of divination is outside of gaming, too.
3. Call of Cthulhu - This is where I learned that even a single rule, if properly designed, can thoroughly change the experience of the game by altering the approaches that the players will tend toward.
4. Champions - I didn't know it at the time I was playing it, but this game taught me that point-based character creation is terrible. Even if the intent is otherwise, it encourages players to find as many loopholes in the system as they can. This is also called "system mastery", and it continues to infect some games to this day. Some games revel in that, such as Pathfinder, while others, such as GURPS, try to minimize it.
5. RuneQuest, 3rd edition - Proved that it is possible to use points to generate characters and not have it be awful. On the other hand, it does this by limiting the point use to only one segment of character creation, the skills of the character. Technically, I probably learned this with 2nd edition and with Call of Cthulhu, but I really like 3rd edition RQ and wanted to include it in this list.
6. Marvel Super Heroes - I learned that the description of a power—what Champions calls "special effects"—is very nearly as important as the mechanics of the power. I also learned that the direction of complexity that I was heading deeper into was not necessarily the best direction.
7. Pendragon - There are other ways to play a game is what Pendragon taught me about gaming. Adventures can be had without making "adventuring" the centerpiece of the game. Instead, adventures can serve a larger purpose of supporting the play of families and the exercise of power politics.
8. Hârnmaster - This game taught me that not every situation affecting a character is best simulated as a pool of resource points, but that conditions applied to the character are often the better tool to use. Also, that characters don't have to be high-competence to be fun to play. Other people learned that latter lesson with Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing, but this game was my lesson in that.
9. Flashing Blades - Here I learned that the proper focus of a game is on the players' characters, even if the events being portrayed are larger than those characters. I also finally came to understand the lesson that I should have learned in Traveller or even earlier, that character development is not necessarily something that affects stats and skills.
10. GURPS - Taught me that the math in the game is important, but that it should absolutely not be something that the players have to deal with much. It should be baked into the system as much as possible.
11. Lace & Steel - Here, I learned one part of the lesson that even small things can make an adventure more fun, by helping to immerse the players into the setting. In particular, the concentration on the small indignities of travel, and how this encourages characters to choose to pay for better accommodations when available, taught me about the little things that matter to characters.
12. Swordbearer - Like the previous entry, I learned that even seemingly minor elements, presented correctly, can add immeasurably to play, with travel being another area treated especially well, in this case by detailing how things like setting and striking camp, the condition of the travelers, weather, and so on affect matters. I also learned that sometimes finances are better handled abstractly, since the characters shouldn't be worrying about every last copper piece and so neither should the players, at least in some settings.

That gives an even dozen games, though I could have included more. I learned things from Chivalry & Sorcery, Fantasy Wargaming, Vampire: The Masquerade, TORG, Rolemaster, and many others as well, but I have to stop somewhere. That's not even counting the negative lessons—other than Champions, which I think was one of the most important lessons—such as the WotC editions of Dungeons & Dragons.

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.

Adventure Design Consideration

Still haven't written up the Deindustrial Future episode 4 report, and we played a game of MegaTraveller set in a small-ship LBB77-style universe of my own dicing. I should write that one up, too.

I've been reading a few reviews of adventures lately that pick on one thing: adventure space "wasted" on things that the Referee can make up themself. On the one hand, I can see this. It wastes space that could be used for something of more value, or else could be edited out to save on the size of the product. That's fine and all. The thing is, though, that I want those things. I can for sure make up the contents of a kitchen or pantry, but sometimes in the heat of running a game I don't want to make them up. I want something I can look at and just lazily pick. That's why I'm paying for an adventure instead of writing it myself. If I have a better idea than what is written, then I can supersede* their material with my own.

For example, I'm reading a review of Spires of Altdorf for Warhammer FRP 2nd edition. It talks about how some info on what might happen if you fight, sneak, or interact with the locals in a location, but complains that some of this info is given for mundane places like streets or generic tenements. Honestly, I have other things to think about when I'm running a game, and really appreciate having some suggestions in the location material. One of the things that I loved about City-State of the Invincible Overlord was the suggested encounter for every street. Those things really help provide a sense of what the city is like to live in and move through.

And yes, a generic "dungeon dressing" table like the ones in the DMG is really helpful, but I think that such tables are even better if they're tuned to the specific setting. So, I guess that I'm just disagreeing with one of the frequent points of Joseph "Against the Wicked City" Manola and Bryce "tenfootpole" Lynch. Adventure writers, please keep providing mundane set dressing for us lazy Referees.


*Fine, I give up. It's a dumb spelling, but I'll submit to it. For now.

An Observation And A List

I don't have much to say right now. The holiday meant skipping a week for the game I'm running. Still, I have thinky thoughts.

First, I haven't seen anyone say this as bluntly as I think it needs to be said. Games that don't have skills, and even some that do, should be run with one major principle in place: characters succeed. If it's in question, roll a d6 (or maybe a Saving Throw in Swords & Wizardry and related games). If it involves people's reactions, make a reaction check.

When a character in D&D in any of its varieties before 1.5E tries to do something, it should generally just work unless it's ridiculous. This is even more true in versions that don't have a variation of the Thief class. No Thieves and you want to pick a lock? Did you buy lockpicks? Then you do it. Maybe a roll of 5-6 on 1d6 will cause the lockpicks to break after opening the door. Want to bust down a door? You do it (with a wandering monster check). If the DM says that the door is particularly tough, roll 1d6 with a modifier for your Strength, and a 5 or higher busts it down. If it's particularly complicated (hunting through a library for a particular manuscript, for example), maybe refer to the character's background and make a ruling based on that. In fact, setting a general background (Conan the Librarian!) might be the one thing you could add to character creation, where AD&D 1E has Secondary Skills for much the same purpose. Something technical like forging a sword would require an appropriate background, for example.

The same principle applies to other games. You're playing Traveller and you want to rappel down a wall? Do you have some rope? Then you do it. You want to convince someone to help you? Roll a reaction check (if you have some appropriate skill, maybe that will help modify the roll).

The general idea is that characters are generally competent to carry out the plans that their players make, for the most part.

Anyway, for the second point, here's a list of games that I have come to think have really stood the test of time, as it were. Games that I still like on the whole. A lot of these games work a lot better if you apply the above idea:

Amber Diceless Roleplaying
The Arcanum
Call of Cthulhu (up through 5.5E or so)
Chivalry & Sorcery (1E and 2E, though there have been some recent unofficial versions based on those that are great too)
CORPS (2E)
Cyberpunk (2013 and 2020)
D&D/AD&D (up through 2.0E/Rules Cyclopedia; after that, it gets weird; retroclones and similar variants elsewhere)
Empire of the Petal Throne
GURPS (3E revised and 4E)
In Nomine
James Bond 007
Kult
Lace & Steel (I think; I only played it once, still it looks good)
Lords of Creation
Pendragon (I prefer 4E, unlike other people apparently, but the other editions are great too)
Rolemaster/Spacemaster (I guess they're calling the good edition "Classic" now)
RuneQuest (never met a version I didn't like, yet)
Space 1889 (the GDW version, and I actually like the system; it's pretty much the only time other than WEG Star Wars that I don't mind dice pools)
Star Trek RPG (FASA; I can't say that it's great, but it does the job well)
Star Wars (West End Games; one of a very few dice pool games that don't suck)
Star Wars (WotC, though it isn't as good as the WEG one; nearly the only use I have for D20 system)
Stormbringer (4E is the best, after that they messed it up)
Swordbearer
Top Secret (original, the 1981 second edition, and the Companion)
Traveller (classic LBB77/LBB81/TTB/ST and MegaTraveller)
2300AD (I actually like the system)
Unknown Armies (I can't run it, apparently, but the ideas are great; maybe I'd be better at running it today)
Villains & Vigilantes (I haven't played Mighty Protectors yet, so I can't speak to that edition)

Games that I haven't played, but look good:

Big Eyes, Small Mouth (specifically Sailor Moon, Ghost Dog, and Revolutionary Girl Utena)
Celtic Legends
Dungeon Crawl Classics
Guardians
Hârnmaster
Silent Legions
Stars Without Number (I'm pretty excited by the Revised Edition)
Starships & Spacemen (2E looks better than 1E)
Swords & Wizardry (White Box mainly, but the others are OK)
White Star (S&W: White Box in a galaxy far away that isn't Star Wars we promise)

Games that would be good but need development:

Fantasy Wargaming
Realms of the Unknown

You'll notice a distinct lack of White Wolf games, Shadowrun, and Burning Wheel. That's because dice pools are dumb, in general. No Hero System because it's just too scattered for me these days. Also no Savage Worlds, which I might be being unfair about - I suppose that I have to play it more. And no goddamned FATE.

I might have missed some. If I didn't include your favorite system, ask me why I didn't. It might be an oversight.

NOTE: As time has gone on and I remember more games to include, I have been adjusting these lists slightly. I've also removed one because the author chose to associate themself, even if outside of gaming, with alt-right personalities. The alt-right may be "just joking" about their white supremacy, but I don't find it funny. I've removed another pending the reaction of the company to abuse allegations in regard to a particular individual.

The Lord of the Rings, Power Creep, and Notes Toward a Manifesto

There's been a minor surfeit of blog posts about Middle-Earth lately (a couple of days ago, something like four different posts happened within a few hours, and it seems that none of the bloggers had been communicating with each other over it). It's interesting to me because I've been re-reading the Tolkien books since the beginning of the year, and re-watching the extended Lord of the Rings films (Jackson really should have stopped there). I continued on that cinematic retrospective by re-watching a bunch of '80s-era "barbarian fantasy" films, but that's another story. In any case, I am not sure why there's been such a surge of Tolkien in the gaming blog community lately, but I have to say that I'm happy to see it.

It's interesting to me that Tolkien expresses one of the themes that I've been pursuing in gaming (a theme, sadly, which the industry as a whole has apparently not only abandoned but seemingly repudiated): the theme of the heroism of the small. By that, I don't necessarily mean small in size, though that is how it sometimes manifests in the literature, but the heroism of those who are not granted extraordinary powers (or those whose supposedly extraordinary powers are of such a nature that keeps them still within the realms of ordinary people).

I want to remember that a mere 4th level Fighting Man was given the title of "Hero", and that it only takes 8th level to be a "Superhero". These crazy ideas of 15th or 20th level (or more!) should be limited to actual gods, or at least demigods. The antics of the characters in The Order of the Stick should be remembered as those of outlandishly powerful ones, not assumed as the baseline for what player-characters are able to do.

I think that I first noticed this was happening when GURPS 4th edition increased the recommended baseline of character power (starting points value) by 50% over the previous edition, from 100 points to 150 points. Later, they decided that their attempt to return to the traditional "dungeon crawl" style of play, which was therefore based in large part on D&D and similar games, would recommend that characters start at the amazing level of 250 points, 2 and a half times that of "heroic" characters from the previous edition. When I would express disapproval of this in the forums or to GURPS bloggers, I would be dismissed lightly with variations of "it's fun!", and nevermind that I was sitting there telling them that it wasn't fun for me.

Of course, we're all quite aware that the 5th edition of D&D has steeply deprecated the low levels, getting characters to 4th level in about the same number of experience points that used to bring them their first level increase in pre-WotC editions. Previously, those first three levels were considered important, being, as the apparently apocryphal quote attributed to Gary Gygax has it, the characters' backstory (the earliest version of the quote found on the internet by people attempting to source it actually specifies the first six levels). Even if apocryphal, however, it remains true that it was at 4th level that the Fighting Man was first called a Hero. Now, though, those first three levels are just something to race through to get to "the good stuff".

As a brief aside, this is all related to one of the most obnoxious types of gaming story that can be inflicted on others: the "Natural 20". Somehow, the 5% chance has risen to some sort of magical power in gaming, probably due to critical hit rules being blown out of proportion. Clueless gamers have perpetrated countless boring stories about how this or that improbable thing happened in their game because they rolled a "natural 20", or sometimes a 1, and the Referee ruled that meant that something otherwise impossible occurred. The fact that one or two of these stories are actually funny only makes the rest of them that much worse, as the aforementioned clueless gamers are unable to discriminate between the good and the bad, which may be the very reason that they are clueless in the first place.

Anyway, this tendency in published gaming to move toward higher starting power levels, or quickly getting to them, has caused me to move back toward games that don't make those high-powered assumptions. Traveller, in its various incarnations, tends in that direction, so it's been very attractive to me. Well, in the original and MegaTraveller versions, at least. Marc Miller's Traveller (T4), too, and maybe T5. And GURPS Traveller was written before the game that powers it started to creep toward greater baseline assumed power levels. There are other games I've been moving back toward, too: Flashing Blades, Lace & Steel, CORPS, various D&D retroclones like Stars Without Number and Swords & Wizardry: White Box, or more variant versions like Dungeon Crawl Classics (which ranges widely in power across its 11 levels, but definitely hits the right notes for me before 5th level or so), not to mention actual pre-WotC editions of (A)D&D and its variants like The Arcanum. It doesn't mean simpler rules, either, since games like Hârnmaster are definitely in the low-power category.

Over on social media, I wrote, "I'm more interested in the sort of heroics that are performed by kids with six months of training in what end of the rifle a bullet comes out and then are thrown into the fray than in specialists who have constant elite training for years and then go on a tightly scheduled and planned mission once every couple of years. As it were." I think that sort of summarizes the issue. Special forces are interesting because their circumstances are extraordinary by design, but it's the common soldier in extraordinary circumstances who is more interesting than the circumstances. Frodo and Sam's, Merry's, or Pippin's stories were more interesting to me than Gandalf's or even Aragorn's. It was more remarkable for Eowyn to kill the Witch-King than it would have been if Galadriel had.

Now, sure, it won't be every low-powered game that has some kind of amazing result, but that's sort of the point. If every game is "remarkable", then they start to get lost in the forest of remark. See above about the "Natural 20" type of story, where any 5% chance becomes the one in a million longshot. That doesn't elevate the once-in-twenty, it devalues the one-in-a-million.

I don't expect that this will get rid of the high-power style of gaming, and I don't think that it should. I just want there to be a place for more human scales of game.

Tasks In MegaTraveller And What Roleplaying Games Really Are

Yeah, this is the model I was trying to evoke, sort of.

I've had a number of articles sitting in draft form for a long time now, so I guess I'll just publish them, maybe polishing them up a little first (or finishing them, in some cases). I will note that, with this particular article, some of my ideas have changed a bit. Mostly in reaction to the excellent "Classic Traveller: Out of the Box" series, and especially this article and its sequel, I am less certain that the "task chain" idea is necessarily the best idea, though I do still think that it was a useful innovation (and it may still be the best idea for the way I want to play - this is something that I am still working through in my head, so don't take my current indecision as a final attitude). Even more, though, I am questioning the baseline assumptions of MegaTraveller in regard to assumed skill and other asset levels. According to some designer's notes in Challenge magazine and elsewhere, the DGP crew were assuming a base skill + attributes and other bonuses of +4 for a competent character. Any further development along the MegaTraveller line of design, such as I am working on, is going to have to tackle that assumption and assess it in practice. To a great extent, I would like to get back to the simpler characters of classic Traveller, but with the better systems support (such as the expanded variety of "task chains" I discuss in this article) found in MegaTraveller - but this is now digressing in some ways from the point of the article I had written here. So, without further ado, let's get on with it, shall we?

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These seem like two different topics, but I am really using the one as a way to talk about the other. I am increasingly fond (even beyond my original preferences for the edition) of the ways that MegaTraveller chose to do things, even as I am not always fond of the particular setting decisions made or the failures of the game's production. The edition earned its nickname of "MegaErrata", with the current consolidated errata for the edition weighing in at 69 pages, a book in itself.

One of the useful formalizations that MegaTraveller brought to the game was the "task", a unified format for describing methods of resolving actions in the game. Tasks were broken down by difficulty, usually one or two assets that promoted success, and various complications and risks inherent to the task, along with the amount of time that attempting the task takes. Along with this, the game included formal rules for retrying failed tasks, and this was where the Jack of all Trades skill was given its moment to shine, since characters would have to come up with a new approach to failed tasks (so that they aren't doing the same thing and expecting different results), and the skill gave characters a leg up on that as a way of modeling the flexibility and broad knowledge of such a Renaissance person. Helpfully, the game also included a realistic assessment of the benefits of having computer assistance with tasks, the effects of working quickly or cautiously, and so on. It's an elegant system that has many deep implications regarding the nature of the game, and even provides insight into the nature of roleplaying games generally.

One of those implications was never explicitly spelled out, to my knowledge. Tasks were sometimes presented in what might be called a "task chain". These are the flowcharts and stepped procedures that the game used to break down complex actions into discrete tasks that would be checked in order, and that could be varied to provide the players' characters the highest benefit. It's that last element that makes the task chain really useful in terms of playing a roleplaying game.

In a sense, a roleplaying game can be thought of as a random event generator, with the events generated being used to drive the players to make choices that, combined together, outline the events of the game that are constructed into a story. In the earliest games, the random events were of two main sorts: encounters and conflict resolution. This is fine, but leaves an emphasis on combat as being the main source of events due to complications. Some games choose what we might call "diegetic" (referring to the film distinction between diegetic sounds that originate from elements within the story, such as music playing on a radio, and non-diegetic sounds that are used to help illustrate the story, such as the score) considerations as the primary source of events, while others look to "narrative" considerations of pacing, action, and so on. There are also "game rule" considerations, which are those that relate to the game rules specifically, as distinct from the diegetic and narrative considerations, such as the tracking of abstract "hit points" and similar elements. These last typically intersect with the first two considerations (such as when hit points are understood as a marker of the narrative importance of the character, or when they are used to represent the physical toughness of the character).

MegaTraveller decided to expand resolution to provide potential event complications from various failure points in normal activities, and provide tools for the Referee to easily and quickly outline unusual activities. Combat is the main task chain that most players are familiar with, and is usually one of the more detailed elements of any given set of roleplaying rules. It consists of a set of tasks that can be chained together according to player choices which affect game state variables (character and equipment damage, resource expenditure, and so on). MegaTraveller further outlined a number of other task chains, though mostly in third-party materials. Digest Group provided the most of these, from medical procedures (in a series of articles in Travellers' Digest) to exploration (in World Builder's Handbook), all the way to various starship operations (in Starship Operator's Manual, Vol. 1). The Keith Brothers expanded on some starship operations related to starports in a pair of articles in Far and Away magazine. In each of these, the procedure is broken down into discrete steps, each step presented as a task. The steps might rely on different assets to promote success than other steps, which is how complex activities requiring multiple assets were best modeled, rather than incorporating all of the assets into a single task roll. Frequently, the players are also given choices as to the specific order of some steps, skipping steps to cut corners, and other methods of modifying the details to achieve the precise levels of risk and reward related to the task chain that they are willing to take on. Failure at any given point in the task chain has defined effects that introduce complications into the game with which the players will need to deal. Task chains also include the random encounter tables and similar normal event generators, as in the starship task chains where certain steps include checks to see if pirates or customs inspectors show up. In a broad sense, a campaign can be understood as one long, complex, and somewhat freeform task chain (in which case, the "campaign frame" I've discussed elsewhere can be understood as the specific task chain being used) into which a variety of other task chains are fitted.

Those complications generally take up some amount of resources, whether that is time, equipment, medical treatment, money, ammunition, or whatever. Each complication introduces an effect into the ongoing campaign and alters the precise trajectory that the characters take as a result.

What players need in order to feel like they are playing a roleplaying game rather than just rolling dice is the ability to make choices that affect the outcome of activities. This is incorporated into the task chain by allowing the specific order of events to be altered with appropriate consequences, the configuration and nature of risks to be determined (such as protecting an injured character behind a defensive line of healthy characters, adding to the risk of the latter while minimizing the risk to the former, performing a task hastily, saving time but risking failure, or the like), determining the allocation of various resources, and so on. In addition, the players can introduce a particular task chain by attempting to resolve a situation using a given method. Interacting with a person encountered might involve an interpersonal task chain, a combat task chain, or some other sequence, and the specific choice of which to use and the results that come from it will have an impact on the subsequent events in the campaign.

Because task chains can introduce a number of story elements autonomously, without significant Referee input, they are a very useful tool. They allow the Referee to concentrate on higher-level aspects of the setting, such as ongoing plots by recurring NPCs, setting events, and domain-level activities, while still keeping the players' characters grounded in the specific events that affect them. The Referee has a number of predefined task chains related to common activities (approaching and leaving a system, combat, medical care, trade- and commerce-related activities, wilderness travel and exploration, and so on) and only has to worry about unusual activities (changes to encounter tables due to setting events such as a coup d'état in the area, for instance).

This concept of task chains provides an alternative or complement to the common concept of breaking a roleplaying session into "scenes", modeled on traditional fiction. Certainly, MegaTraveller made use of that concept of scenes as well, with the system of "nuggets" for presenting adventures as a series of scenes or scene clusters that flowed into following events depending on how the nugget was resolved. Nuggets were never formally incorporated into the game, though, and were mainly a way to think about the structure of scenarios. In practice, the nugget method pushed scenario designers toward linear, or "railroad", adventure styles, so they seem like a net liability.

Combined with the system of various NPC types and other encounter rolls found in the basic game flow, task chains help define an approach to gaming that enhances the open nature of a roleplaying/adventure game.

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That was the article I'd previously written. I want to add that my idea of "task chains" is not limited to what we might conventionally think of as "tasks" in the MegaTraveller sense. An item like rolling for random encounters or events is part of a task chain, in the sense I am using it here, as are other events and items that aren't under player character influence. The point is that it is a resolution system that is a sub-game of the whole game being played. Task chains can consist of other task chains, such as the "main loop", as it were, of the basic game flow I mention and link above being an overall task chain, which can be composed of subroutines (again, as it were) of combat, finding cargo, landing a spacecraft, or whatever. I think that computer programmers will probably see what I am going for here pretty quickly, and others might be able to relate it to the general structure of a computer program as well. That said, it would be a computer program written in pseudocode, with the Referee and players being generally able to parse even the most abstracted "commands" in the loop, and to break them down into further detail as the situation warrants.

More Thoughts On Megatraveller And Such

The late John Berkey did some
cool spaceships

Yeah, I've been quiet here for a bit. Still dealing with some personal issues, but at least I've had some time to think about gaming again. Time to post something, so that you all can remember that I'm here!

I really love talking with the guys over at the G+ Classic Traveller group. They've given me a lot of things to think about in regard to the game, and pointed out places where later Traveller has changed things. For instance, it's clear that in the original release of the game, known as "LBB77" because it was released in 1977 (as opposed to "LBB81" for the revised version in 1981 and "TTB" for the slight revision from that which was The Traveller Book), there was much more emphasis on the sandbox elements and less on any interstellar imperiums or whatever (though the latter was still understood to be present in the background). Examples that affect this included the randomly-placed "Jump routes" or "spacelanes" of LBB77 that became instead the Referee-placed "communications routes" of LBB81/TTB. Interestingly, the communications routes, despite requiring more thought and effort from the Referee, have less impact on the game because the Jump routes determine where a traveller can get regular passage or a crew can buy pre-made navigation tapes. This limits the locations that the player-characters can travel to until they can improve their situation (either by getting the Generate program to make their own navigation tapes or somehow convincing a non-player ship to transport them outside of the normal shipping lanes, probably for a higher fee). The communications routes don't have the same impact on the game at the table, though extra rules found in, for example, The Traveller Adventure and other sources can allow the communications routes to have some effect.

MegaTraveller also made an assumption early on that greatly affected the way that game plays relative to the original version. That assumption was that a character attempting to do something would have a fairly high skill rating, such that the supposed typical character would be gaining a +4 DM from skill and attribute bonuses. That doesn't track with the original game, in which any level of skill above zero meant that the character had professional-level training in that area. That could probably be remedied by dropping all task difficulties 4 points, so that a Routine task is 3+, a Difficult one 7+, and so on (it would then be appropriate to add a difficulty level of Staggering between Formidable and Impossible, as Marc Miller's Traveller did). That could also mean that an average attribute of 7 could be re-centered on 0 instead of +1. Lacking a skill entirely would still increase the difficulty one level. In such a case, a Simple task would succeed without a roll (or perhaps require a roll if the total of all DMs is -4 or more, trying to get a total of -1 or higher), but could be increased to Routine or higher difficulty as usual for lack of skill or whatever. This change would also allow the character creation system to be scaled back to the original game's parameters, so that no "Special Duty" roll would exist to give even more skills.

On that topic, one of the benefits of being a Scout in the original game was the high incidence of Jack of all Trades skill. While that skill is more clearly defined in MegaTraveller (and allows higher levels of the skill to have meaning), I think that it should be returned to its original place of value, perhaps by adding (in addition to the "free retries" ability) the ability to offset the penalty for lacking skill. Probably give a +1 to unskilled use (only) for every 2 full points of Jack of all Trades skill, to a maximum of +4 (requiring skill-8, so pretty unlikely anyway). Again, that bonus would be in addition to the normal MegaTraveller benefit of being allowed one free retry of a failed task per Jack of all Trades skill level (taking the normal amount of time).

Another area to consider is space combat. The system in MegaTraveller is, simply, horrible. It's a kludge of the Book 5: High Guard system (originally intended for large ship actions) mixed with elements designed to make it more useful for small ships, and it was not developed well enough for actual use. That is to say, it can be used, but seems ultimately unsatisfying for either small or large actions. In the end, I think that I'd like to draw it back and make it more like the Book 2: Starships system or Mayday, or perhaps the range band system in Starter Traveller (or project it ahead somewhat and make it more like Battle Rider, which has always seemed to me like the nearly-ideal set of Traveller starship combat rules).

Which brings up some issues of design. MegaTraveller draws on the expanded weapon types available in High Guard. I'd like to drop at least some of those, such as meson weapons and associated technology. It might also be useful to include a weapon design system, such as that found in Traveller: The New Era (TNE) or Marc Miller's Traveller (T4). This is especially true for missiles, which could do with taking some ideas from Special Supplement 3: Missiles in Traveller. The design system in MegaTraveller moves away from the LBB/TTB in a significant way, though, by falling clearly on the other side of the so-called "small ship Traveller/big ship Traveller" line. When players are tooling around in 2700m³ ships, but the military have 270,000m³ light cruisers, there is an overwhelming power differential that deeply affects the feel of the game. This also doesn't match the historical eras which the game tries to emulate. The age of sail saw merchant ships that were no smaller than their military counterparts, while WW1/2 era tramp steamers were roughly the same size as military cruisers. For example, the OCEAN class steamer was about 10,000 tons displacement, while the Pennsylvania-class cruiser of the pre-war era was around 15,000 tons fully loaded and the Cincinnati-class cruiser was less than 3500 tons! To be fair, the latter were slated to be reclassified as Patrol Gunboats if they hadn't been decommissioned. I'm still not sure how to address that issue. Whatever happens, though, it will mean some significant changes to the design system. It also means that I will have to consider how to handle ship benefits from character creation, plus mortgages and other financial tools related to running the tramp merchant game. GURPS Traveller: Far Trader would certainly be of help there.

Now for the more morose thoughts in this regard. I've been considering ways to write all this up, including the setting I have worked out, and sell it, but the specific details of Traveller's current licensing scheme seem to preclude it. Weird restrictions in the Mongoose OGL (you can't include the method to roll up characteristics, for example, which would prevent me from presenting the "genetic dice" necessary for the dynastic game that I eventually want to write up) and behavior that seems from my perspective to be somewhat erratic on the part of the original designer (I've heard that people have been billed for asking him questions - which rumor I can't check because I couldn't afford any such potential billing to find out if it's true or not!) combine to make it a minefield I'd rather not navigate, at least not alone. Another option would be to present the setting I have in mind through another system, but all of the other systems that seem even remotely suitable to my preferences are based on D&D, with character classes and such. Stars Without Number, White Star, Starships & Spacemen (either edition), and so on all seem to rely on elements that don't suit my setting and the aesthetic preferences related to it. I've been thinking that it might be time to dust off my old idea of retooling Flashing Blades for science fiction adventure. That might even be historically appropriate, since Flashing Blades drew pretty heavily on En Garde, GDW's first RPG. One possible problem with this idea is that Flashing Blades's system is more suited to swashbuckling action/adventure than the more gritty tone that infuses most of Traveller's various incarnations. If that becomes too much of a problem for me, I could always build it using one of the open-rule versions of the d% system found in RuneQuest, I suppose.

But I really wish that I could just use a properly-developed MegaTraveller as my basis.