I think the trigger for designing my own system was reading through Lamentations of the Flame Princess and realizing that the attributes that you roll, actually never are used in the game. Their only purpose is to look up modifiers in a table and after that you simply use the modifiers.
This offended me in two ways. First, there are easier ways to just generate the modifiers such as rolling three fudge dice and add them together. Second, rolling under your attribute is a very clean mechanic, and before reading through the game I assumed you would want to do that.
But beyond how they are used, the attributes in by D&D doesn't make much sense to me. I decided on using four attributes, Physique (which includes strength and constitution), Dexterity, Wits (which includes intelligence, charisma and wisdom) and Willpower.
These forms a sort of a square with the attributes being divided on two axes: Phys and Dex being physical, and Wits and Will being mental, but also by Phys and Will being sort of brute force, pushing through, and Dex and Wits being more of finesse. Sort of like in Chronicles of Darkness, but simpler.
The mechanics for testing character (as opposed to player) skill will then be to roll under one of these four attributes on a d20. This can be used as saves (i.e. a second chance), or for situations where there just isn't any good way to reason it out.
The standard way to implement warring difficulties for this system would be to have various bonuses and/or penalties to your roll or stat. But I don't like that. It seems to get to finicky. To much math. Now some simple addition and subtraction isn't hard, but it is a tax on mental resources that I would prefer to spend elsewhere. Also, a +1 on a d20 roll is just to little to care about. I guess one counter argument is that I don't have to have a scale of 1 to 20, I could reduce it to 1 to 10, and have a +1 bonus mean twice as much.
And that is actually a good argument. I have to say, how to do rolls is a subject I'm not 100% about. It might change. But what I'm currently leaning towards is to use advantage and disadvantage. I hear this mechanic comes from D&D 5, but I haven't actually read those rules so they may or may not be the same as what I'm thinking about. What I mean is that with advantage you roll two dice and choice the best, with disadvantage you roll two dice, and the GM chooses the one that is worst for you. For me I would add that you could have double or even triple (dis)advantage as well. Although after that I think simply having actions auto succeed/fail is better. And of course a disadvantage and an advantage cancels each other out.
I think this system has a number of advantages. The bonuses and penalties are large enough that I don't have to think about how many points of bonus to give. It will practically always be just one. But it still allows for more incremental improvements of the character attributes. Another positive is that it forces me as a GM to tally up all the bonuses and penalties before the roll. (I think I have a tendency to just wing it afterwards, which makes me susceptible to anchoring effects.)
It has some negative points as well. The effect of an advantage becomes bigger the higher attributes you have. And vice versa with disadvantages. If someone reaches 20 in an attribute, they can do anything, no matter the difficulty. And if you have a bunch of effects giving advantage, and a bunch giving disadvantage, there is going to be some counting anyhow. It might also be confusing to have many dices be bad sometimes and good sometimes.
I think I will have to test it out to see how it works.
Another point where I want to question the D&D norm is on the mean value of the attributes. Rolling 3d6 creates values with an average of 10.5, straight on the middle of the range from 1 to 20. This has two effects. First an average character has 50% to succeed at an action of normal difficulty. That might intuitively seem correct, but it is really arbitrary. Also, if you ,like LotFP, never actually roll under the attribute, this point is void. The second effect is that there is just as much space devoted to being worse than average as to being better than average. This sounds really weird for a game about slowly gaining power and working yourself up in society. And in practice you see this. If you look at the rolls actually made in LotFP (saves and skills) you start of with less than 50% chance to succeed.
Actually this is a combination of two issues, both what should the average success chans for a skill roll be for the average citizen of the game world, and how powerful should starting player characters be. I think there is a tendency to view starting player characters as somewhat average for the world, as that is the the kind of beings you see most of the time, even if that is not intended by the game. I don't for example think Arneson imagined that every cleric in Blackmore could cause miracles to happen, it just so happen that player characters who are clerics are some rather exceptional clerics. And likewise, that player characters on average has strength 10.5 shouldn't be read as implying that the average human has strength 10.5. Or at least that isn't necessarily so.
So the average starting values will be less than 10. I'm thinking somewhere around 5-7. So take that value (perhaps 6?) and add a number (4?) of fudge dice, and you get a nice normal distribution of values stretching from 2 to 10. This will leave people plenty of space to raise the attributes without hitting the godlike levels of 20.
Also I will not have separate save or skill values. Four attributes is enough dammit.
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Thursday, February 21, 2019
Arcadian Sunset: Inspiration
The idea for this campaign came to me during Gothcon 2018 (The biggest rpg convention in Sweden). I was running a Kult scenario at the convention, so I was reading that. I was also at the time starting to get into OSR, and read various LotFP scenarios. Now both Kult and LotFP describe themselves as horror rpgs, but despite this these scenarios couldn't have been more different.
The Kult scenario, like most Swedish convention scenarios included a number of player characters with their dark secrets, as well as a list of scenes to go through and some npcs. The OSR scenarios on the other hand say nothing about the pc's or what scenes can take place. Instead it describes places and npc's. So apart from describing npc's, these scenarios don't even touch each other.
They don't even contradict each other, as they just don't talk about the same things. You could possibly even combine two scenarios, taking the characters from one and the places from the other and populate by npc's from both.
So this is what I intend to do, more or less. I won't combine two existing scenarios, but instead I will write a new one, but with the components you would see in both. Except perhaps the list of scenes.
When asked what characterize OSR one often answer is that it is about exploring environment rather than exploring characters. So in that sense I am investigating a synthesis here in exploring both.
Another inspiration for doing this hybridization was the novel Ringworld, which I also read in past year. It is a story about four people going on an expedition to an ancient ruin, so in that way it is really in the old school style. But exploring the ruin is only half the story, the other half being the exploration of the characters themselves, their secrets and their revelations.
But it should be noted here that its about exploring the characters, rather than expressing the characters.
I'm thinking here about a thing that I have come to dislike about the trad style. That far to often, players make characters by themselves, and then the party consists of a bunch of individuals without any meaningful connection to each other. This often translates to an rpg experience where the different players take turns expressing their character, rather than having a meaningful interaction with the other players.
This can be remedied somewhat by having the players meet up and discuss their characters relations before having them make the characters, but people tend to have a picture of what they want to play before that point anyway. And especially if you as a player is familiar with the system and/or setting, it is hard to not think of potential characters ahead of time.
Both OSR and the convention scenarios do away with problem, but in different ways. In the old school style, your stats are mostly randomized and the actual character is developed during play. Other method is to have the GM create characters. I'm very partial to this, as it allows for some really interesting asymmetric relationships, that aren't initially apparent.
A potential problem in combining character driven story with OSR is the high lethality of the later. In the Kult scenario I run, all of the story was really about the character, and driven by their dark secrets. In particular one of the characters dark secret. If that character had died the scenario would basically have been over.
This isn't an acceptable situation for any old school gaming. The story should be able to go on, potentially even if all pc's die. I have thought about two ways to combat this. First, simply have redundancy. This means having far more pregenerated characters than you have players, and also don't hinge anything about a specific character. The other way I'm going to use is to allow every character that dies, to somehow convey their dark secret. Either with their dying breath, or perhaps with a not left behind.
The Kult scenario, like most Swedish convention scenarios included a number of player characters with their dark secrets, as well as a list of scenes to go through and some npcs. The OSR scenarios on the other hand say nothing about the pc's or what scenes can take place. Instead it describes places and npc's. So apart from describing npc's, these scenarios don't even touch each other.
They don't even contradict each other, as they just don't talk about the same things. You could possibly even combine two scenarios, taking the characters from one and the places from the other and populate by npc's from both.
So this is what I intend to do, more or less. I won't combine two existing scenarios, but instead I will write a new one, but with the components you would see in both. Except perhaps the list of scenes.
When asked what characterize OSR one often answer is that it is about exploring environment rather than exploring characters. So in that sense I am investigating a synthesis here in exploring both.
Another inspiration for doing this hybridization was the novel Ringworld, which I also read in past year. It is a story about four people going on an expedition to an ancient ruin, so in that way it is really in the old school style. But exploring the ruin is only half the story, the other half being the exploration of the characters themselves, their secrets and their revelations.
But it should be noted here that its about exploring the characters, rather than expressing the characters.
I'm thinking here about a thing that I have come to dislike about the trad style. That far to often, players make characters by themselves, and then the party consists of a bunch of individuals without any meaningful connection to each other. This often translates to an rpg experience where the different players take turns expressing their character, rather than having a meaningful interaction with the other players.
This can be remedied somewhat by having the players meet up and discuss their characters relations before having them make the characters, but people tend to have a picture of what they want to play before that point anyway. And especially if you as a player is familiar with the system and/or setting, it is hard to not think of potential characters ahead of time.
Both OSR and the convention scenarios do away with problem, but in different ways. In the old school style, your stats are mostly randomized and the actual character is developed during play. Other method is to have the GM create characters. I'm very partial to this, as it allows for some really interesting asymmetric relationships, that aren't initially apparent.
A potential problem in combining character driven story with OSR is the high lethality of the later. In the Kult scenario I run, all of the story was really about the character, and driven by their dark secrets. In particular one of the characters dark secret. If that character had died the scenario would basically have been over.
This isn't an acceptable situation for any old school gaming. The story should be able to go on, potentially even if all pc's die. I have thought about two ways to combat this. First, simply have redundancy. This means having far more pregenerated characters than you have players, and also don't hinge anything about a specific character. The other way I'm going to use is to allow every character that dies, to somehow convey their dark secret. Either with their dying breath, or perhaps with a not left behind.
Sunday, February 17, 2019
OD&D and Tactical Transparency
One of the cornerstones of OSR is tactical transparency, or system agnostic challenge. Or as I like to state it: The players shouldn't need to know the rules to overcome their challenges. This is something that tends to make OSR the opposite of indie storygames, which are neither challenge based nor system agnostic. Storygames tend to use meta techniques to promote good storytelling (Such as bonus dies you can use when you really want to succeed with a roll). This is anathema to tactical transparency as the meta techniques are, well meta, and therefor not something that the character is aware of. So to use them strategically you need an outside perspective rather than looking at it from the perspective of your character. This isn't a problem for a storygame as you simply don't need to apply strategy.
Another thing that is popular in OSR is the original Dungeons and Dragons rules, and the early adaptions of these. But the thing is that they do include some meta techniques, foremost experience points, and secondary hit points.
It is often claimed that the point where D&D jumped the shark and left old school territory was when the primary source of XP became killing monsters rather than finding gold. I don't disagree, but I think we need to realize that XP is a meta currency. Your character is not aware of how XP is handed out in the system, or even that they exist. XP exists in the game as an additional motivation. It promotes a certain kind of story telling. I think one of the reasons XP for gold rather than XP for killing fits better into the OSR style is that gathering gold is a reasonable objective no matter if you get XP for it, while killing monsters, is more debatable. Strategies like "we need to find an additional 5000GP so I can level up enough to cast a resurrection spell", is certainly not system agnostic, but they are a consequence of how XP and leveling works in D&D.
The other part is hit points. These are not as meta as XP but I still think they are worth discussing. Discussions about what hit points actually represents in D&D, seems to be something that crops up periodically, and everybody have their own opinion. Most seem to agree that it is not simply how physically damaged your body is, at least not on higher levels. A level ten barbarian being able to take multiple ax wounds to the face seems to be ridiculous to most, even though it feels like people accept it more and more after having played computer games like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy there you literally whittle down on the enemies hit points, getting in hit after hit. So in practice it seems to work like some kind of meta currency that you spend to avoid getting hurt? In any case it doesn't seem to line up very well with how our universe works, and leads to rather system specific solutions, like ignoring certain threats because you know you have hit points to spare.
You can see this in other early rpgs such as BRP that they tried to get away with the more abstract parts of D&D as these didn't facilitate tactical transparency. Unfortunately this tended to result in a lot of bloat, and more complicated systems, rewarding system mastery above system agnostic competence.
I would hope this is something that the OSR community could work on. To hold fast to our principles and question if and how our traditional mechanics support them, or oppose them. To continue the spirit of the early roleplaying games, while still questioning their methods.
Another thing that is popular in OSR is the original Dungeons and Dragons rules, and the early adaptions of these. But the thing is that they do include some meta techniques, foremost experience points, and secondary hit points.
It is often claimed that the point where D&D jumped the shark and left old school territory was when the primary source of XP became killing monsters rather than finding gold. I don't disagree, but I think we need to realize that XP is a meta currency. Your character is not aware of how XP is handed out in the system, or even that they exist. XP exists in the game as an additional motivation. It promotes a certain kind of story telling. I think one of the reasons XP for gold rather than XP for killing fits better into the OSR style is that gathering gold is a reasonable objective no matter if you get XP for it, while killing monsters, is more debatable. Strategies like "we need to find an additional 5000GP so I can level up enough to cast a resurrection spell", is certainly not system agnostic, but they are a consequence of how XP and leveling works in D&D.
The other part is hit points. These are not as meta as XP but I still think they are worth discussing. Discussions about what hit points actually represents in D&D, seems to be something that crops up periodically, and everybody have their own opinion. Most seem to agree that it is not simply how physically damaged your body is, at least not on higher levels. A level ten barbarian being able to take multiple ax wounds to the face seems to be ridiculous to most, even though it feels like people accept it more and more after having played computer games like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy there you literally whittle down on the enemies hit points, getting in hit after hit. So in practice it seems to work like some kind of meta currency that you spend to avoid getting hurt? In any case it doesn't seem to line up very well with how our universe works, and leads to rather system specific solutions, like ignoring certain threats because you know you have hit points to spare.
You can see this in other early rpgs such as BRP that they tried to get away with the more abstract parts of D&D as these didn't facilitate tactical transparency. Unfortunately this tended to result in a lot of bloat, and more complicated systems, rewarding system mastery above system agnostic competence.
I would hope this is something that the OSR community could work on. To hold fast to our principles and question if and how our traditional mechanics support them, or oppose them. To continue the spirit of the early roleplaying games, while still questioning their methods.
Friday, February 8, 2019
The Analects of the Third Garden: The Trinity
I should perhaps mention my other big work. The Analects of the Third Garden is a supplement for Vampire the Masquerade that I published on Storytellers Vault about a year ago. It is supposed to be an in-universe collection of texts from a lost cult of vampires dedicated to Lilith and practicing Abyss Mysticism. It all started with a larp over ten years ago, where I thought about playing an abyss mystic. I thought that there wasn't enough written about it, and while Vampire do have a number in-universe texts such as The Book of Nod or Revelations of the Dark Mother, I never thought that they felt like the old tomes of lore that I envisioned.
So I sat out to write my own. I soon made the discovery that White Wolf never made enough material for Abyss Mysticism to fill a whole book (It is mostly just a collection of powers, and rather lacking in moral outlooks and such). I guess I could have used my own imagination, but I'm lazy and my imagination needs a starting point, so I decided to fill out this lack by mashing in other ideas. Primarily the Bahari cult, and Kabbalah. Now if you don't know, the bahari are vampires (and others) worshiping Lilith as the first vampire, opposing Caine and believing that all true knowledge comes from suffering.
At this point the project came to a halt and lay resting for many years, until I on a whim started it up again and like, started actually writing on it. It quickly expanded and shifted focus. The bahari stuff gradually took over the project. The kabbalah became mostly an influence on the style of the work rather than the content. The abyss stuff is still there, but honestly, if I would do it all over I would probably have replaced it with necromancy, and tied it in with the Lamia bloodline. I might actually do that some day, but don't hold your breath.
So why did I combine these three? well, mostly I just liked them, knew about them and saw that they fit different purposes for the work. The bahari, have a strong ethic, and every cult need that. The abyss mysticism have secret powers, which also is nice for making a cult interesting. The bahari tend to talk a lot about secret knowledge, but there is grave lack of examples of this secret knowledge. And finally kabbalah have the advantage of existing in real life, being hundreds of years old, and thereby existing in copious amounts in the public domain. (Later a fair amount of Wicca and Gnosticism was used for these parts as well.)
But there are also reasons that they fit well together. The abyss mystics is described by white wolf as reclusive scholars sitting in their chambers studying and writing letters to each others, and only reluctantly sharing their wisdom with their communities. It reminded me very much of how kabbalists relate to the wider Jewish community, or at least the stereotype of them. Kabbalah and Bahari goes even better together. Nearly everything about Lilith actually comes from Kabbalah. I have to admit that I wasn't really aware of this when I first started this project.
The meta history of the Bahari, or rather the Path of Lilith in Vampire is actually rather interesting. It started with The Dirty Secrets of The Black Hand, that introduced the True Black Hand, a super secret organization, consisting of various groups of vampires that where more or less inversions of other bigger groups. You had the emotionless True Brujah, that was the opposite of the regular overemotional Brujah. The Old Clan Tzimize who despised the use of Vicissitude. And finally you had the followers of the Path of Lilith, who being the opposite of the Nodists (the followers of the Path of Caine) instead venerated the enemy of Caine, Lilith. (According to the Book of Nod).
This version of the path wasn't that interesting, as it was mostly a copy of the Path of Caine, with Lilith substituted for Caine. The point where the path turned interesting was with The Revelation of the Dark Mother. This was WW's second in universe publication and dealt specifically with Bahari, in fact I believe it was the book that introduced the term. It positioned Lilith as the true creator of not only vampires but possibly werewolf's and mages as well. It created the central tenet of pain leading to wisdom. This has been reflected in every incarnation since then.
What people might not know is that much of the story of Lilith in Revelations is taken from The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a central work of Kabbalah, of course with the inversion of Lilith not being totally evil (But also not exactly good). Not much is needed for this inversion though as our sense of good and evil have evolved a far bit in the 1000 years since the Alphabet was written.
So, eh that is why combining Kabbalah, Bahari and Abyss Mysticism works great. With this clear I started scouring WW books for any information that could be used, as well as public domain works, like the Zohar, but also Abramelin the Mage, Gardner's Book of Shadow, The Poetic Edda, The Gilgamesh Epos. etc. I also used a big deal of influence from the Circle of the Crone in Vampire: The Requiem. They are clearly based on Bahari, but expanded, and honestly a bit more generic. None the less, a great source of ideas for Bahari.
I mixed this all together, and out came the Analects after a lot of work. It was a really interesting journey. In many ways it didn't feel like writing a story, but more like working as a historian, trying to figure out what actually happened. One amazing insight was that there was a pattern to the story. It's a generational story about children rebelling against their parents, and the parent going into exile. This exchange is actually repeated six times, which I certainly hadn't planed when I started.
So I sat out to write my own. I soon made the discovery that White Wolf never made enough material for Abyss Mysticism to fill a whole book (It is mostly just a collection of powers, and rather lacking in moral outlooks and such). I guess I could have used my own imagination, but I'm lazy and my imagination needs a starting point, so I decided to fill out this lack by mashing in other ideas. Primarily the Bahari cult, and Kabbalah. Now if you don't know, the bahari are vampires (and others) worshiping Lilith as the first vampire, opposing Caine and believing that all true knowledge comes from suffering.
At this point the project came to a halt and lay resting for many years, until I on a whim started it up again and like, started actually writing on it. It quickly expanded and shifted focus. The bahari stuff gradually took over the project. The kabbalah became mostly an influence on the style of the work rather than the content. The abyss stuff is still there, but honestly, if I would do it all over I would probably have replaced it with necromancy, and tied it in with the Lamia bloodline. I might actually do that some day, but don't hold your breath.
So why did I combine these three? well, mostly I just liked them, knew about them and saw that they fit different purposes for the work. The bahari, have a strong ethic, and every cult need that. The abyss mysticism have secret powers, which also is nice for making a cult interesting. The bahari tend to talk a lot about secret knowledge, but there is grave lack of examples of this secret knowledge. And finally kabbalah have the advantage of existing in real life, being hundreds of years old, and thereby existing in copious amounts in the public domain. (Later a fair amount of Wicca and Gnosticism was used for these parts as well.)
But there are also reasons that they fit well together. The abyss mystics is described by white wolf as reclusive scholars sitting in their chambers studying and writing letters to each others, and only reluctantly sharing their wisdom with their communities. It reminded me very much of how kabbalists relate to the wider Jewish community, or at least the stereotype of them. Kabbalah and Bahari goes even better together. Nearly everything about Lilith actually comes from Kabbalah. I have to admit that I wasn't really aware of this when I first started this project.
The meta history of the Bahari, or rather the Path of Lilith in Vampire is actually rather interesting. It started with The Dirty Secrets of The Black Hand, that introduced the True Black Hand, a super secret organization, consisting of various groups of vampires that where more or less inversions of other bigger groups. You had the emotionless True Brujah, that was the opposite of the regular overemotional Brujah. The Old Clan Tzimize who despised the use of Vicissitude. And finally you had the followers of the Path of Lilith, who being the opposite of the Nodists (the followers of the Path of Caine) instead venerated the enemy of Caine, Lilith. (According to the Book of Nod).
This version of the path wasn't that interesting, as it was mostly a copy of the Path of Caine, with Lilith substituted for Caine. The point where the path turned interesting was with The Revelation of the Dark Mother. This was WW's second in universe publication and dealt specifically with Bahari, in fact I believe it was the book that introduced the term. It positioned Lilith as the true creator of not only vampires but possibly werewolf's and mages as well. It created the central tenet of pain leading to wisdom. This has been reflected in every incarnation since then.
What people might not know is that much of the story of Lilith in Revelations is taken from The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a central work of Kabbalah, of course with the inversion of Lilith not being totally evil (But also not exactly good). Not much is needed for this inversion though as our sense of good and evil have evolved a far bit in the 1000 years since the Alphabet was written.
So, eh that is why combining Kabbalah, Bahari and Abyss Mysticism works great. With this clear I started scouring WW books for any information that could be used, as well as public domain works, like the Zohar, but also Abramelin the Mage, Gardner's Book of Shadow, The Poetic Edda, The Gilgamesh Epos. etc. I also used a big deal of influence from the Circle of the Crone in Vampire: The Requiem. They are clearly based on Bahari, but expanded, and honestly a bit more generic. None the less, a great source of ideas for Bahari.
I mixed this all together, and out came the Analects after a lot of work. It was a really interesting journey. In many ways it didn't feel like writing a story, but more like working as a historian, trying to figure out what actually happened. One amazing insight was that there was a pattern to the story. It's a generational story about children rebelling against their parents, and the parent going into exile. This exchange is actually repeated six times, which I certainly hadn't planed when I started.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)