A subjective history of Swedish roleplaying games or How this blog got its name.

Considering that I'm a Swedish role player writing a blog in English, I realized that is might be an idea to write something about Swedish rpg's in general. I don't remember exactly when I first played a roleplaying game, but it must have been sometime between 1989 and 1992. The game was Drakar och Demoner Expert. A game heavily inspired by Runequest (using a licenced Basic Roleplaying system), and a name that ripped of Dungeons and Dragons. I played with two friends, although we didn't really understand the rules to be honest. But my friends soon tired, and I only got to play sporadically in the coming years. In 1996 I started junior high school (högstadie in Swedish) and finally joined a regular group, and began to broaden my horizons. We strted to play other games than DoD, such as Mutant 89, Neotech and Dungeons and Dragons. I also started larping at this time.

I think this was a pretty common experience for role players of my generation. DoD was a pretty early RPG, released in 1981, and thanks to good connections with toy distributors, RPG's really hit it of in Sweden. Drakar och Demoner became a household name in the same way that Dungeons and Dragons did in America. Äventyrsspel, the company behind DoD had a near monopoly at this time, with probably like 90% of the market. The second game they released was Mutant, a post apocalyptic game with mutated humans and animals. For a long time those two Mutant and DoD was the two big games that EVERYBODY played. Now, my first interaction with Mutant was in the form of Mutant 89, where the post-ap style had started to drift into a Judge Dread inspired cyberpunk thing.

This era came to a sort of end when Äventyrsspel released Kult, a contemporary game of gnostic horror that, well, probably shouldn't have been distributed to toy stores in hindsight. Äventyrsspel lost a fair number of vendors because of this, and a moral hysteria began to rage. But Kult was popular, and was translated into many languages. This prompted Äventyrsspel to consider foreign markets, which makes sense seeing how they would be hard pressed to expand further in Sweden. As a move in this direction they released new editions of DoD and Mutant, (Mutant Chronicles and Drakar och Demoner Chronopia) with new more "edgy" settings inspired in part by Kult, but also by foreign franchisees  like Warhammer 40 000.

It was my impression at least that Chronopia was really disliked by the fans, with most continuing to play in the old setting Ereb Altor. Mutant Chronicles was more popular, perhaps because it was the third setting for Mutant in just 4 years. Äventyrsspel really invested in the setting, with two collectible card games, a miniatures games and a board game. But despite this, Äventyrsspel lost customers and declared bankruptcy, except for the electronic games department, which became Paradox Interactive.

At the same time Äventyrsspels greatest competitor, Neogames, rose in prominence with their fantasy game EON. EON for me reached a peak in the quest for greater realism in games, which had dominated through out the 80's and 90's. In practice these rules was often far to cumbersome to actually use, which pushed people into adopting a more freeform style.

As I said Äventyrsspels games based on Basic Roll Playing dominated in Sweden during the first two decades. This meant that gaining XP for killing monsters or such was a completely foreign concept. In general treating rpg's as a challenge for the players to overcome was not really a thing. I think linguistics may have played a role as well. The Swedish word "spel(a)" means both game(ing) and play(ing), so the literal translation of Roleplaying game would be "Rollspels spel", which sounds redundant, and instead we simply called them "rollspel". But that term in it self only implies that you are playing a role, not anything about challenge, competition or such.


During the nineties larping became popular. It started with tabletop role players acting out fantasy larps out in the woods, and just as with the tabletop games, great focus was on realism. But rather than realizing this through more and more arcane rules, larps developed to have as few rules as possible, with everything being acted out, if at all possible. At the turn of the millennium the state of the art have moved away from fantasy, and larps are being considered as an art form, with lots of experimental settings. Larp was at that point more popular than tabletop games.

Influence from the larp scene comes back to the tabletop scene. Especially at conventions freeform roleplay took of. One off scenarios without any formal rule system, often with more serious themes, become common. The games start to focus more on relationships, specifically between the characters. And all other things are cut away. No npc's. No fantastic settings etc.

Personally I had started university at this time, and left my hometown. I played some games at conventions and was heavily involved in Vampire Larps (these tend to form a rather distinct and isolated subculture of Swedish larps).

In 2005 I moved to Lund, in large part due to all the friends I had gained from here during all those conventions. and I returned to tabletop games with a vengeance. At this point Äventyrsspel was no more, and Neogames made boring games. So we played American games like Fading Suns, and White Wolfs games. This is sort of a dark age for Swedish roleplaying games.

But somehow we rose from the ashes..

Oh yes and the name? Well Drakar och Demoner had ducks as one of its races. I don't think any of us really thought that they made much sense in the world of Ereb Altor. We wanted a serious fantasy experience and the ducks only made us think of Donald Duck. Perhaps it was because we where children. I have discovered that I care much less about appearing child like as an adult than as a teenager or preteen. But somehow anthropomorphic ducks are still a source of annoyance for me, and my regular gaming group seems to love teasing me for it. So when we was to register a team for Gothcon (an RPG convention), my boyfriend asked me what we should name it, and I replied "It should at least be no fucking ducks in the name", and he took my words somewhat literally. So when I started the blog I thought, heck why not, it is a fun name.

Oh, and I should probably apologize for all the errors regarding Swedish gaming history. It is just straight out of memory, with like zero fact checking.

Arcadian Sunset: Aestetics

Today I wanted to talk a bit about the kind of feeling I want to evoke in Arcadian Sunset. In short Arcadian Sunset is a game of mystery, horror, comedy and the bizarre.

One of the principles of OSR is to not have a prepared story, but simply offer up a setting a let the players do what they want of it. When doing a mystery the excellent Three Clue Rule tells us to not make any red herrings, as the players without doubt will create their own. In a similar way D&D as Straight Man tells us that we don't have include jokes in our settings to create humor, it will come on its own.

Horror and comedy is to me closely connected. They are both often results of the contrast between the normal and the abnormal. They rely on imagination and surprise. Which is probably why among bad movies, horror movies are the most popular, as when the horror fails, it often turns into comedy. As such I think there is a great plan to include bizarre absurdities, play them seriously, with horror being the A plan, but comedy a just as good plan B.

But as the LotFP Referee Book points out, for the bizarre to feel weird, it must be contrasted with normality. Viewing the dungeon as mythic underworld, OD&D becomes an expedition from the world of normality into the abnormal, and then an escape back to normality. I think this concept is a key. The Gonzo vs. The Weird talks about this distinction as well, with weird tales being mostly about an intrusion of abnormality into the normal world, while gonzo being about normal characters intruding into an abnormal world.

My plan is to do a bit of both. Weird investigation in the normal world, and gonzo exploration in the abnormal world. Or at least provide the option for both, as there is no telling what the players will do, but I hope having two different modes to alternate between will give a nice pacing to the game.

A game design blog I follow, even though it isn't about rpg's, is Making Magic. It of course helps to have an interest in Magic, but just in general Maro speaks a lot about fundamental rules for designing games, and in particular how mechanics interacts with the fiction of the game. One distinction he makes is between top-down design, and bottom-up. In this context, top-down means going from an element of fiction and creating game mechanics for it, while the bottom-up means starting with a game mechanic and finding a justification in fiction later. Role playing games tend to do the former, which makes sense, but I think it is a good idea to have in mind the later as well.

One example of this in rpg's is showcased in the Aesthetics of Ruin, to great effect. The existence of ruins is bottom-up. They are not there because the fiction demanded it, but because they gives us monsters and treasure, and a chaotic system to interact with for the pc's. But even if the presence of ruins is in the game is for the sake game mechanics, that is no excuse to not integrate the ruins in the setting. Top-down and bottom-up is not a one way street, you need to go back and fourth.

Another way to look at this is in the distinction between fantasy and science fiction. To me science fiction is about making one (or more) unreasonable assumption and see what kind of story it would reasonably lead to, while fantasy is about making a story and fill in whatever unreasonable assumptions that is necessary for getting there. But in practice most works tend to include some of both. If you write a sequel to a fantasy story, you will need to see what kind of story the unreasonable assumptions in the first story would lead to.

So when you introduce ruins to your setting, for the pc's to explore, you need to think about what must have happened to create those ruins, and what other things would reasonably follow from those events. And as it is a game, you need to create game mechanics for these things too.

So there you have it. Arcadian Sunset is a game about normal characters intruding in an abnormal landscape in ruins, intermixed with investigations of bizarre beings that might be either horrifying or hilarious.

Ten million* different ways to do skill checks in RPG.

There are many ways to do skill checks in roleplaying games. So I made this system of tables so that you can generate your own system. Basically start with the Narration table and randomly choose one of the results listed, then replace all bold words with content from the corresponding table. Repeating until you get a description of the method. Some of the tables says something like Randomize( stat ), this means to replace stat in the resulting expression with what ever it was you where randomizing (or computing or rolling etc).

* It is actually a bit more than ten million.

Tables

Narration:

1. The player describes how to do it, and the gm decide if it will work.
2. The player makes a check, then narrate their success/failure
3. The player makes a check, then the gm narrate their success/failure
4. The player makes a check. On success the player then narrate how they do it. On failure the gm narrate what happens.
5. The player makes a check. On success the player describes how to do it, and then the gm decides if it works.
6. The player describes how to do it, and if the gm decide that it could will, the player makes a check.
7. The player describes how to do it, and the gm decide if it will work. If the gm decides that it doesn't work, the player makes a check anyhow.
8. The player describes how to do it, and the gm modifies difficulty based on description, then the player makes a check.

Check:

1. Compute skill then succeed if better than compute difficulty.
2. Compute difficulty, then succeed if better than compute skill, on failure, retry.
3. Randomize constant, then succeed if not better than skill worsened by difficulty.
4. Randomize constant, then succeed if not better than skill worsened by difficulty, on failure, retry.

Better*:

1. higher
2. lower
3. higher or equal
4. lower or equal

Retry:

1. you may spend meta currency to reroll all dice.
2. you may spend meta currency to reroll any number of dice.
3. you may spend meta currency to make a new check.
4. you may spend meta currency equal to difference to succeed anyway.

Compute( stat ):

1. Take stat.
2. Spend meta currency to improve stat.
3. Randomize stat.
4. Spend meta currency to improve stat, then randomize the result.
5. Randomize stat, then spend meta currency to improve the result 
6. Randomize stat, then spend meta currency to improve the result, then randomize the result of that.

Randomize( stat ): 

1. Roll dice pool equal to stat, and pick one.
2. Roll dice pool equal to stat, and add them up.
3. Roll dice pool equal to stat, and get one success for each value better than constant.
4. Roll dice pool equal to stat, and get one success for each value better than better than upper constant, but subtract one for each value worse than lower constant.
5. Roll one die with the number of sides equal to stat.
6. Roll die and improve the result with stat.

Dice Pool:

1. Dice size.
2. Dice size, exploding

Dice Size:

1. d2
2. d6
3. d8
4. d10
5. d20
6. d100

Die:

1. 1d20
2. 2d10
3. 3d6
4. 3d6, exploding
5. 4d100 - 2
6. 3d20, choosing the middle die
7. Three fudge dice
8. 2d10, subtracting the lower from the higher

Exploding:

1. When a die is rolled with max value, you roll an extra die and add its value.
2. When a die is rolled with max value, you roll an extra exploding die and add its value.
3. When a die is rolled with max value, you remove it and rolls two extra dice and add their values.
4. When a die is rolled with max value, you remove it and rolls two extra exploding dice and add their values.
5. When a die is rolled with max value, reroll it using a one step larger die.
6. When a die is rolled with max value, reroll it using a one step larger exploding die.
7. When a die is rolled with max value, you roll an extra die one step larger and add its value.
8. When a die is rolled with max value, you roll an extra exploding die one step larger and add its value.

Constant:

1. Just make up a number that seems to fit the context.

* If lower or lower or equal is better, then improve means decrease, otherwise it means increase. worsen means the opposite of improve. only roll for better once and use the same result for every instance.

Examples

The player describes how to do it, and the gm modifies difficulty based on description, then the player makes a check. Roll one die with the number of sides equal to 10, then succeed if not higher than skill decreased by difficulty, on failure, you may spend meta currency to reroll all dice.

Roll d6 equal to 3, and get one success for each value higher than 4, but subtract one for each value lower than 2, then succeed if not higher than skill decreased by difficulty, on failure, you may spend meta currency equal to difference to succeed anyway. On success the player describes how to do it, and then the gm decides if it works.

The player describes how to do it, and the gm decide if it will work. If the gm decides that it doesn't work, the player makes a check anyhow. Roll d100 equal to difficulty, When a die is rolled with max value, reroll it using a one step larger exploding die, and get one success for each value better than 13, then spend meta currency to decrease the result, then succeed if lower than or equal to roll d100 equal to skill, and pick one, then spend meta currency to  decrease the result, then roll d8 equal to the result of that, and pick one, on failure, you may spend meta currency to reroll any number of dice.

Conclusion

The system as it stands is a bit limited. It can't handle more than two degrees of success. No fumbles or critical hits or partial successes. If expanded with features like that you could likely generate billions of skill check systems!

But no, I don't really recommend you to use this system to generate rule systems. The point is rather to show how much variation there can be in how to do something as simple as skill checks. In particular I want focus on the first table Narration. It is in many ways the least mechanical part of the skill check, and something many rule books skip over, but I think really important. The different alternatives to a large part corresponds to different play styles. Number one of course being freeform. Number two would be Story Now game. Four corresponds to Apocalypse World. Seven has aspects of old school in it. (Saving throws can be seen as being allowed a skill check after having chosen badly.) Six and eight seems to be really common, but makes very little sense to me. For eight, I think that if the gm can make a good estimate of the difficulty, they can just as well estimate the outcome, and no roll should be necessary, while for six, it just results in explainable failures, and random gate-keeping.

The more I think of it I actually really prefer number seven. It allows you to play a character better than yourself, and to use player skill, while avoiding the problems of six.