Popping In and Out of the Genie Bottle

I am going to be playing in a new D&D campaign that my friend Mark is running. He invited me to join his campaign that's launching in a couple weeks. I'm excited at the prospect, because he runs really fun games, but there was a schedule conflict. His game is every Monday, but I have a commitment that will keep me away every second Monday. The existing event is my Amber campaign I run twice a month, and neither game could easily be rescheduled.

So it seemed I was going to have to decline the invitation. Having a player miss 50% of D&D sessions is pretty rough. Either somebody else would have to play my character half the time, or we'd have to just kind of handwave/ghost my presence. It would be quite the narrative headache.  Unless...

The solution I hit upon was that I'll play a Warlock with a very demanding Genie Patron. (This Warlock subclass is in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.) In the sessions where I (the player) am not there, my character will have been drawn into the Lamp, and is performing some task for the Genie. One of the other Party members will pick up the Lamp, and hang it on a loop on their backpack. Then start of the next session, I pop out of the Lamp, and grab it off their loop. "Hey guys, I'm back! Sorry about that, the Patron insisted I help them out, but I'm totally free now. What did I miss?"

It's bending the rules a bit, as per the Genie Warlock rules you can only be in the Lamp for an hour or two, but that's the PC's limitations. It's a small and harmless house rule for the Patron to not be limited the way the PC is. 

So now I just have to figure out what flavor of Warlock to be. We'll be starting with 3rd Level characters, and we'll be in Faerun using the 2024 rules, but the GM is pretty permissive about what books you can use. So I've built a couple variations, and am still trying to figure out what I want to play. What I'm theorycrafted thus far includes:

Idea #1: A gentle water-giant, native to the Moonshae Isles, but wandering about seeking places of natural beauty and power. 

• Species: Firbolg. (From Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse. An 8-foot tall Fey who can talk to animals, and cast disguise self or turn briefly invisible)
• Genie Type: Marid. (Water genie. Lots of weather spells on their list. Fog. Cone of Cold.)
• Background: Moonwell Pilgrim. (From the recent Heroes of Faerun book. Druidic Magic Initiate, specific to Moonshae Isles region of Faerun)

The "Lamp" might be a canteen, which I open and submerge whenever I find a really special body of water, so that the Genie can draw some in to add to their collection. I see this as a really chill, zen character, cataloguing sacred springs and the like for the Marid's inscrutable reasons.

Idea #2: Someone who died in a rockslide or earthquake that a Dao created or felt responsible for, so they unearthed him and used a Wish to restore his body to life. (Or, maybe the Dao is a bastard who just wanted a pet, so they crushed someone to make one.)

• Species: Reborn (From Van Richtens Guide to Ravenloft. Basically, this is a non-evil Undead, with some memory-issues / plot-hooks. Kind of like "The Crow".)
• Genie Type: Dao. (Earth genie. Standout early spells are Sanctuary and Spike Growth.)
• Background: Rune Carver (From Bigby Presents Glory of the Giants. Gives access to Comprehend Languages and then a smattering of other 1st-level spells.)

The "Lamp" in this case might be some sort of runestone or stone tablet. Or, it might be an Urn, since I'm reborn. 

Rune Carver seems like fun from a roleplaying perspective as being another thing the Genie taught me, and/or an explanation of what I'm doing when I'm in the Lamp being busy in the off-weeks: carving runes for the boss. 

That said, I'm not 100% convinced Rune Carver (or rather the Rune Shaper Feat it includes) is worth it mechanically. It gives you more spell variety than Magic Initiate, and even gives you 2 spells per day. It's just that one of those two is Comprehend Languages, which might well be irrelevant all campaign. I think the two Cantrips of that more-common Feat are probably going to be more generally useful in most some campaigns. It's a strange trade-off, hard to weigh against the other option, which does admittedly make for interesting decisions. I worry Rune Shaper will result in recurring negative play experience. "Hey guys, technically, if we take a Long Rest now, I could have the right spell for this situation tomorrow" Thing is, that better spell is still just 1st level. It seems like a tall order to convince the rest of the party to camp down early so you can swap out a 1st level spell. Ironically, this would be a better choice if we were playing from 1st character level instead of starting at 3rd level, as the extra spell is proportionally bigger the lower your character level. I'm probably worrying about nothing, as the overall package has a lot of upsides. I keep going back and forth about it.  EDIT: The more I think about it, the more I think it's probably actually really strong.  

I made both characters, but I'm not sure yet if I'll play one of those, or take a third stab at it.  I do really enjoy making characters.

One thing that came into clarity for me while making these characters is that I'm really not a fan of most of the Backgrounds in the 2024 PHB. It's a little weird that they bug me as much as they do. Because they include a combat-relevant Feat, they are indisputably stronger than the identically-named Backgrounds they replaced, but the rarely used social connection mechanics those 2014 Backgrounds had were what made me love the Backgrounds when 5e first came out. 

When I mentioned my character ideas to the DM, Mark said he's open to most 3rd-party content. So I'm now a little tempted to break open Crooked Moon, because I feel like it had some really weird Species to play in it.

Bound by Bind

Played Ironsworn again this weekend, after nearly a month break. Hadn't intended for the gap to be as long as it was, but October was really damn busy.  

So the other day I break out my notes from the Ironsworn campaign, and see that part of my character's status was that my "Bind" ritual was inactive. Bind, for those not in the know, is a seemingly very powerful Asset for a character, as it potentially gives you +1 to any (or every) Stat while active, and the range on the five Stats is just from 1 to 3. There's not a lot of granularity there, so +1 is potentially quite significant. Don't believe it: Bind is a trap for new players, and you don't want to get suckered into taking it as one of your three starting Assets. 

There's plenty of restrictions in place to keep the Bind from living up to its potential. You need to acquire various animal hides to use it: the rules don't say if you start with any, and you may discover that Boars and Bears are shockingly difficult for a starting character (especially a wits-based Ritualist type) to defeat. Once you have the needed pelts, you still need to make a Wits roll to activate it in the first place. If that succeeds, it has a roughly 17% chance to deactivate whenever you use it. Reactivating it again requires not just another Wits check but also you have to be outdoors at night. If your plot is chugging along during daylight hours, or your character is exploring an underground dungeon, once it turns off you're potentially stuck without it for a few sessions. I can unhappily report that suddenly losing a point in a valuable stat in the middle of a battle or delve is a recipe for disaster. What's more, if you fail the roll to reactivate it, you have to then roll on the Mystic Backlash Table that can complicate life further. 

In session 10 of the game, my Bind ritual deactivated. Because of where and when my character was located, it wasn't possible for him to try to reactivate it until session 12. Unfortunately, I failed the roll to activate it... and this began a long, long string of failed activations and narrative reasons why I couldn't try again for a while. The Mystic Backlash Table literally told me that I couldn't try again until I'd acquired a rare component to augment the magic. The session I just played this weekend was session 28, and my Bind has been inactive every consecutive session since session 10. So I really want Bind to be usable again at this point. In my last few sessions before the break, I'd undergone a quest to get those components (a quest that was made all the more difficulty by being down a stat point at its outset). At the start of this 28th session, I do all I can to set-up the Bind activation roll, Sojourning to raise my Momentum, doing the Secure An Advantage move to get +1 bonus on the following roll, and engineering a situation where my Demeanor (from the excellent 3rd-party Ironsworn Demeanor Deck that I picked up on DriveThruRPG) is applying to the roll as well, giving me a +2 bonus total beyond my normal activation roll (so a +4 total since Wits is my second-highest stat). 

So, of course, I fail it again, and get another nasty Mystic Backlash result to go with it. The Sojourn and Secure An Advantage were both Strong Hits. If I'd used either of those rolls on my actual Bind Ritual roll, it would have been a great success. So damn frustrating. 

Anyhow, I guess I'm whining to the internet as a warning to others who are browsing the Ironsworn Starting Asset choices and considering picking up the Bind Ritual. Don't do it. I mean, maybe, MAYBE, if your Wits is your best Stat and you are also taking the Ritualist Path Asset for the +1 bonus that gives, and you choose to start your character off with a free Boar Pelt and always lead with Bind Boar for Wits before trying the others... With all that lined up, maybe it's okay. Maybe. But then you've spent 2/3rds of your starting Assets trying to keep Bind from backfiring on you, and you've also saddled yourself with Wits as your main stat which means you're no good in a fight and have to take some other Wits-based Ritual in order for the character to be able to do anything interesting. It just doesn't seem worth it, building a one-trick pony whose single trick can backfire for multiple sessions in a row.

 Right now, with my Wits 2 character who started with just a Wolf Pelt, I'm feeling pretty raw about this completely useless Asset. 18 consecutive sessions, more than half my total campaign thus far, without being able to use the thing. It'd be like playing D&D, and your GM only lets you have 1 spell, and then for 18 sessions in a row he says "sorry, you can't take a long rest this session either, so no spell for your first-level wizard". I know it's self-inflicted, my bad character creation choice, but I have to say that on paper Bind looks hella strong. I was actually a little worried at character creation that it was going to be too strong, and that I might be playing the game on easy-mode. Boy was I wrong.

Weirdly enough, Bind is probably NOT an awful choice for an XP spend if you've already got a Wits-based Ritualist PC. You'll still hit long dry-spells where you can't use it, but if you've already got lots of cool things to do with your Wits (specifically starting with 2 other Rituals as Starting Assets and not getting Bind till later after you're more established) then Bind being streaky and unreliable is far less of an issue. When it's fully 1/3rd of what makes your character unique, that's when it's inherent fussiness is problematic.  

I love my Ironsworn character, and I love the game, and my weird plotlines and the worldbuilding I've done. Ironsworn is so good... but I also know I'd love it that much more if one of my main powers wasn't consistently borked for more than 50% of the campaign.

That 3rd-party Demeanor Deck that I mentioned is pretty cool, and so is the Motivation Deck by the same author. They both reduce the overall difficulty of the game by just a smidge by each giving you an extra power, nearly as good as another Starting Asset, but with a distinct feel and MO that's different from any of the existing Assets. I probably wouldn't have started using those decks if it weren't for this feeling that a full third of my character creation choices were a trap. The same goes for the option rule for "learning from your mistakes" that objectively makes the game easier by taking some of the sting out of a series of failed rolls. I like a good challenge, and especially want solitaire games to be difficult so I have to play sharp and clever to "win". So it's really rare for me to adopt something that specifically makes a solo game easier, but with a third of my eggs bound in one unreliable basket, I eventually felt like I had to dial the difficulty down a notch or three.

In solitaire play you are your own GM, so of course you can also "fix" the "problem" by just going easy on yourself narratively, taking care to describe situations where trying again feels reasonable and/or your plot deadlines are always significantly after sunset, etc. If you really want you can even just arbitrarily fudge a die roll without any other players at your table complaining about fairness. Those sorts of gimmicks just aren't my style, though, and I want to have to work for my victories. In fact, the feeling that the game's structure itself provides conflict, surprise and challenge is a big part of why Ironsworn feels so engaging and rewarding to me, when most other solitaire RPGs I've tried have failed to keep my interest beyond one or two initial sessions.

 

Ironsworn: Wolf and Cat, log 1

 I recently started playing Ironsworn, and I think I'm going to post my game logs here.  

Character:

My character is Oddi Ice-Chosen. As a child, he nearly died after sinking beneath the ice of Bitter Lake. He was rescued by Kasju Frystgrotta, a Firstborn sorceress who invoked some ancient tradition to basically claim him as an apprentice for 12 years, and just took him away from his family. Kasju is his best friend, but she's also the cold-hearted monster that kidnapped him, so some component of that friendship is manipulative and Stockholm Syndrome-esque. About 10 sessions into the campaign I discovered (because Ironsworn likes to surprise you) that there's more to this backstory that I hadn't originally intended, so Oddi's parents actually shoulder a fair amount of the burden and blame for their kid being taken away. It's complicated.

Mechanically, Oddi's stats are:

Edge:3     Heart: 2    Iron: 1    Shadow: 1    Wits: 2

So he's fast and clever. His stats were actually a little different than that for the first few sessions, but I found that my original stats didn't really capture what I wanted the character to be. I'd accidentally made him stronger physically than intended, and worse with people. After a couple short sessions I realized that the fiction and mechanics were misaligned, so I swapped to the stat array above, and everything flowed much better thereafter. 

For Assets, I chose:

Path: Storyweaver - Oddi's head is full of myths, legends, folktales, and the secret teachings that Kasju has passed down to him. He tells tales and speaks in parables, and sometimes gets mechanical bonuses for it. It also means that I'm constantly doing little bits of world-building by inventing Heroes and Gods for my version of the Ironlands, which a hell of a lot of fun.

Companion: Cave Lion - His pet's name is Sammutisel, and he's a ferocious kitty.  

Ritual: Bind - Oddi knows how to invest the power of the moon in his enchanted wolf-pelt, which makes him much better at fighting and general speed and agility (aka Edge)... until I roll a "1" and the magic goes out of the pelt for the rest of the day, at which time things generally get painful. In theory, this could be combined with other pelts to gain boosts to my other stats, but early in the campaign I tried to get myself a bear-pelt and nearly died when I failed, so that may not happen again for a while.

His starting Vow is about a weird prophecy that was probably too abstract, and if I had to do it over again I'd chose something a bit more concrete and solvable. I'm like 16 (short) sessions in, and only have 1 XP at this point, so lesson learned: make your initial situation more actionable and straight-forward next time. None the less, I'm having a lot of fun.

Setting: 

The Ironlands are basically a low-fantasy version of Scandinavia, with the humans being vaguely-nordic / vaguely-viking, with a bit of magic and "here be monsters" scribbled liberally across the map. There's a system where you customize the world a little before play. Rather than lay out all the choices I made in that, I'll just list 2 elements that chose that I feel are most relevant to my tale thus far. 

1) I chose to make the monsters a little more rare than default, I think. My character's "mentor" is the Firstborn sorceress who saved his life and also kind of kidnapped him. She's a bit like Circe from the Odyssey. That style of rare semi-divine semi-monstrous witch-people is how I see the Firstborn in my version of the setting. There's ruins that suggest they were once more numerous, but I don't expect to end up in a village or city of elves ever, because I think there's probably a few dozen of them on the continent, all of whom are impossibly old and powerful. 

2) There are Iron Pillars of unknown origin scattered about the countryside, with poorly-documented supernatural qualities. This is one of the standard options for Ironsworn, and it seemed really neat to me. Some people fear the pillars, others swear unbreakable oaths upon them.

 Prologue:

I wrote this before the first actual play session, just trying to get a feel for the character and his janky starting Vow. It's entirely scripted, and doesn't involve any actual gameplay. Here goes:

It begins with a vision. Oddi Ice-Chosen is in the room of fire within the ice, the steaming pit in the frozen cave. He is naked, leaning over the sputtering geothermal vent, Kasju Frystgrotta clutching his hair in her icy ancient talons to hold him back from plunging facefirst into the steaming hellhole. Tonight, they hope to see that which has been denied for 2 years and 10. Tonight, aware that their time together would soon be at an end, she rode him harder for a vision than ever before. This is not their usual sweat-session followed by a dance under the moon or a dip in the cool. This is prolonged staring into the mouth of the volcano and daring the gods to punish them for the audacity of wanting to understand. This recklessness has even Sammutisel wound up and pacing in the corner of the cave, growling, sometimes hissing back at the geyser-mist.

Oddi's mind is swirling and fevered, thanks to the fumes, and the blood. Thanks also to the boiled-root potions, and the heedless daring of the ritual. It starts with the same visions as ever before, the ghostly glimpses never in focus. The point of this, Oddi thinks, is to coax up more details of the Great Ruler, the mighty King that will one day unite all the Circles of the Ironlands against the Great Evil and usher in an age of prosperity. Oddi is not that Great Ruler destined to arrive. He was hopeful at first, feeling special and chosen, after his descent into the frozen depths of Bitter Lake. But as the visions accumulated over 10 years and 2, it became clear that his lot is the footnote of history. He is not the chosen king, but one day he will be the advisor to that Great Ruler. The wizard who helps to place His Majesty upon that Royal Pillar.

Always, the face of the Great King is obscured. The throne and crown upon the pillar are clear enough,  the baldachin that hangs over and surrounds them is vivid despite Oddi never having seen one with his physical eyes. He see the mighty army that marches at the Great Ruler's back, feel it's marching shake the earth. Meetings and maps, tales and advice, spells and suggestions -- a million tiny details pop randomly into clarity. but the Great King himself is always out of focus.

Tonight, despite pushing harder than before, the Great King still remains a distant image at the corner of the eye. Someone else is at the center of the vision tonight. A terrible soldier in strange armor lumbers into the main view. Dark and menacing, monstrous and inhuman, alien and ironclad. It has a strange sigil on it's shield, a painting of an open wound or a blood-shot eye, surrounded by flaking pallid flesh. Once or twice before he'd seen this warrior moving about a battlefield at the edge of a vision, seen at a distance or an angle its strange metal and too-detailed heraldry as it cuts down the footmen of the Great King. Oddi's face now red and feeling scalded from the mineral vent threatening to explode, he sees not the King at all, but only this foul and bloodsick warrior.

Most of the shields that Oddi has seen with his physical eyes are just simply painted. Quartered or striped, maybe marked with the runes of the people of his birth. The Bloodsick Warrior's shield is transformative. Limbs and organs painted so vividly they seem to be alive, like the shield itself is a disemboweled vampire in its pain-maddened death-throes and bloody thirst.  It kills and it feasts and even when bit by a hero's blade, the monster leaks new evils into the world. The shield is a warning.

Oddi Ice-Chosen gasps, the hot humid gout of musty air filling his head with fever-pain and images of entire Circles slaughtered. The Bloodsick Warrior leans back, coiling to unleash a body-shattering blow coming right at Oddi's head with its stolen blade. The hammered metal glints in the light from the ritual fires in the cave, or entire villages put to the torch in the dreamland. In that gleaming fire, Oddi Ice-Chosen suddenly knows that blade. It's a sword he hasn't seen in 2 years and 10. His father's sword. Oddi cries out, and Kasju lifts his almost molten body out of the fumes. He shudders and collapses into her frail-looking but anciently-strong arms, their sweating bodies pressed together until they stick. She of ice, he of fire, steaming where they couple.

"Home!" he gasps, and behind them the geyser sprays a deadly mist to the area where he had been just a few moments earlier. She rolls him over and presses her frost-cold almost-human brow to his. The vent sputters, a Cave Lion growls, and the Firstborn sorceress whispers that she longs to know what he saw. Her exquisite inhuman flesh always has a faint irridescent shine, which time spent near the vent intensifies. The moisture and residue, and poor lighting of this part of the cavern, completely concealed the tears in the corner of Kasju's eyes, so that even face-to-face, Oddi was unable to recognize them. In their more than a decade together, he'd never seen her cry.

"The family you took me from," he says, focused on his own pains and losses. "They're in great danger. The whole village, all of Forgotten Despair. I have to go help them, try to save my family." He rolls over and starts to stand up.

"Not so fast, my love." Purring like the Cave Lion that watches them the edge of the room, Kasju slides her long cold fingers along his neck, pressure more than a caress, but not what would normally seems like a threat either. To his tender heat-marked skin, her icicle claws are almost as sharp as Sammutisel's.  She pulls him closer and whispers in his ear "I told your family that if I saved your life, I would take you as my apprentice for 2 years and 10. That means you belong to me for 3 more days, and most importantly 3 more nights. Only when I'm done with you, can you go save your home."

 Session 1:

This is a really tiny first play session, coming as it did on the tail of character creation and that overwrought prologue.  Date: 7/26/2021. 

A few hours later, I, Oddi Ice-Chosen, pack up my belongings, and try to sneak out while Kasju Frystgrotta is sleeping. Sammutisel stalks me, the great cat knowing something is wrong.

Secure an Advantage. Strong. +2 momentum.  (Moves and die-rolls will generally be recorded like this in my log. Minimal rules baggage so the reader can understand what's happening if you're familiar with the game, but hopefully not too disruptive to the narrative. Name of the Move, then Strong Hit / Weak Hit / Miss as appropriate, and any interesting benefits or consequences. Then back to the narrative.)

I fool myself into thinking I'm getting out without Kasju noticing, 2 days before his apprenticeship is over, but she's well aware. I slip out of the cave, and down the trail a hundred yards to the clearing where an ancient Iron Pillar points to the heavens. A swearing post. Sammutisel comes loping out of the underbrush, getting ahead of me and cutting off the path that leads back to the village of my youth.  Thinking I've been caught and am about to be dragged back to the cave by the talons of cat or firstborn, I sprint to the swearing post. Getting there before anything can drag me away, I declare a Vow to the heavens "I promise I will fight to save the village of Forgotten Despair from The Bloodsick Warrior, the sword-stealer who bleeds monsters, or I will die trying! Now it's too late Kasju, you can't keep me here forever. Oath-breakers magic is tainted, so I'm useless to you if you don't let me go."

Swear an Iron Vow: Strong. +2 Momentum. I know I must head South immediately.

"Oddi, my love," she says sweetly as she steps out from a tree, with leaves dying in her hair and a wolfskin wrapped around her shoulders. "You were never my prisoner. We are both fate's prisoners. Go. Go to your parents. Go to Forgotten Despair, with my blessing. Do what you can for your birth-people. Sammutisel will go with you, to keep you safe, and help you save those that you can. And take this too," she says, removing the wolfskin cloak and exposing her opalescent Firstborn flesh, frost forming on it in the evening breeze. "Remember what you left behind, and think of me whenever you dance the moon's magic into it."

I take it. "Thank you. I will... miss you. You have been..."

"I am... And this is not goodbye, not forever. There are 2 more days of our contract. You can travel now with my blessing, attend your emergency and fulfill your vows. Know though, that the arrangements such as ours are not easily sundered. Not long after your family honor has been satisfied, fate will bring us together again for at least the 2 more days I am owed, and maybe the 2 nights as well if we are lucky."

Undertake a Journey from Frozen Cave of Zhan to Forgotten Despair. Formidable progress track.  Weak Hit: spend 1 supply. Get to a Waypoint.  

It's an exposed archway of rock that I can use as a bridge over the river. It's trickier than I remember, as I've always had Kasju with me when crossing it before, and she's so light on her feet. If I slip, it will be into water, but we are close to the rapids. I get out my vine rope, and tie it to the tree at the top of the cliff so I can't be swept downstream.

And that's as far as a I got in Session #1, just the first waypoint of my first journey. Nothing terribly exciting yet, but I was already hooked, and I did another short session the next evening, which I will probably blog here in a few days. And if you read my previous post where I was gushing about how this solitaire RPG feels like collaboration, you're probably reading this first session now and wondering what the heck I was talking about. This is just bad fan-fiction, nothing that special. True, this first session was just me scripting away, and kinda clunky because of that. The magic happens in later sessions, when the game jumps in to ruin Oddi's day and insist the narrative goes places I wasn't expecting. It's gonna emulate the hell out that GM.
 

Table for 8

 I just ran my first Amber Attribute Auction in more than a decade. I had invited a large group of players, but as of this morning, only 3 had confirmed that they'd definitely be playing, and one of those 3 said he unfortunately was probably going to have to miss the character creation system. 3 dependable players is enough to run a good Amber campaign, but it's not really enough to run an Attribute Auction, so I spent a good chunk of the day unnecessarily prepping for how I might handle character creation for 2 or 3 in a way that would allow me to seamlessly add another player or two at a later date. 

For those unaware of the intricacies of Amber, the auction has 4 major Attributes (Psyche, Strength, Endurance, and Warfare) and player bid against each other to be "1st Rank" in each. This is fundamentally broken with less than 4 players, and can easily fall apart even with 4. Basically, if one player manages to be first rank in 3 of the 4 attributes, you'll potentially have some very painful balance issues should those characters come to cross purposes. So I was worried.

Needlessly.

When the appointed time arrived, people just kept showing up to the google hangout and Roll20. I ended up with 7 players!

The auction went smoothly, despite my being a decade out of practice. If anything, my being rusty may have actually helped. I didn't oversell the attributes, so people had enough points to get Powers. Here's the Attribute "rungs" we ended up with:

Psyche rungs: 4 / 7 / 10 / 12 / 17

Strength rungs:  1 / 3 / 6 / 7 / 8

Endurance rungs: 5 / 7 / 10 / 12 / 15 / 16 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20

Warfare rungs: 2 / 5 / 7 / 10 / 12 / 15

It's kind of "weird" that 1st Rank didn't cost more than 20 for anything, and that Endurance was the highly competitive stat. Neither of those feels "normal", but they don't strike me as problematic either. Nearly every character ended up with Pattern, so they'll be able to move around the universe easily and they have reasons to interact. They're all cousins, and they have a vested interest in the prosperity of Amber.

This current batch of characters just feels like they are going to be so much easier to build stories for, than the crazy mixed-up groups of disconnected characters at the start of all my previous campaigns. No inexplicable enigma characters without a connection to either Amber or Chaos. No worries about anyone being "Shadow Lame" and unable to travel to the worlds where the plots are. No one caught in the unfortunate bind of having 60 points of Psyche and no Powers to use with it. This seems pretty great.

My only concern is in running a game for 7 players, especially a game like Amber where those 7 players are likely to frequently scatter to the ends of the universe. It's going to give me a serious workout each session, but thankfully we're only meeting every second week and I'll have plenty of time to catch my breath on off weeks. Should be fun. Wish me luck!

Putting A Finer Point On The Sword

A couple days ago I posted a set of house-ruled Dueling Maneuvers for 7th Sea 2nd Edition, which dramatically reduced the amount of damage a Duelist could do. This cut it down to about 150% to 175% of a what a non-Duelist PC could do, instead of the 300% to 500% of a non-Duelists damage output as the official rules-as-written would have it. Since then, I've been reading additional other posts on forums and blogs with other people's house-rules and alternatives for exactly that same situation.

It seems most people's solution is to scale up the damage done by non-Duelists. Usually this is achieved via providing a 1-, 2-, or 3-point Advantage that gives non-Duelists access to Slash (and in some cases Parry and/or a few other Maneuvers). Adding a single Advantage seems like a far more elegant solution than completely rewriting 5 or 6 maneuvers and several of the Style Bonuses, so I can see the appeal of going that route.

That said, here are the reasons why I chose the larger-scale revision, and in particular why I chose to lower Duelist's damage output instead of raising non-Duelist's effectiveness.

Reason #1: I'd rather slow the death spiral than speed it up.

In 7th Sea 2nd Edition, a PC has 20 health boxes. 20 points of damage drops a character. A typical non-Duelist starting character is going to deal 2 to 4 points of damage per Round. A starting Duelist, on the other hand, under the core rules,  is going to deal somewhere between 10 and 15 points of damage in a turn. Which means a duel to the death is probably 2 Rounds in length, and if there's a min-maxed or "high level" Duelist on one side of a fight, PC death could happen in a single Round. Each player only rolls dice once per Round. This just seems really short and fast to me. There's no time or warning for a player to realize their out of their league - if a non-Duelist accidentally picked a fight with a major (Duelist) Villain, they'd be dead before they realized the danger they were in. Should a PC stir-up trouble, I want them to have a chance to flee, or an opportunity for other PCs to jump in and save them. Such an escape is just not likely if a battle to the death can happen in one or two die rolls. That is the single biggest problem I have with boosting non-Duelists up to Duelist levels of damage. It seems safer (from a campaign perspective) to slow everything down instead.

The other side of that coin is also mildly troubling. It's not nearly as big a deal if an NPC gets cut down without warning in one or two die rolls, but it still definitely complicates the GM's ability to plan a balanced and exciting fight scene or develop an ongoing storyline with a memorable recurring villain. I've read a fair bit online where GMs have said they needed to throw Brute Squads of 20 or 30 nameless NPCs against the PCs to keep their fights challenging. While that makes sense for a big battle at the end of major story arc, it seems less than ideal for the bread-and-butter of your standard session.

There are a few other lesser concerns that lead to my approach. I'll detail them below, but honestly these are all much smaller deals than the tendency towards instant death in the rules as written.

(Minor) Reason #2: A new "leveling the playing field" advantage isn't part of any Background package.

During character creation, players pick 2 Backgrounds that tell their back-story and give them a starting collection of Advantages and Skills. If I were to add a hypothetical Advantage that closes the gap between Duelists and non-Duelists, it wouldn't appear on any of the current Backgrounds. So either I'd need to make new Backgrounds or edit the existing ones, or live with the notion that PCs who are non-Duelists but want to be good at fighting have to spend their bonus Advantage points on it, and so have slightly fewer customization options than the full-on Duelist. Not particularly horrible, but it does undercut the elegance and appeal of just adding a single Advantage to solve the balance issues.

Tangent: I prefer transparency during character creation
One of my pet peeves in regards to gaming is RPG systems with hidden bad-choices in character creation. 1st Edition 7th Sea had these in spades. If you sunk a bunch of character creation points into knacks, especially advanced knacks, it was a terrible waste of your time and power, as those were much faster and easier to raise via XP in just a  session or two. Also, Panache, which sounded on the surface like it might be the Charisma-esque dump-stat most characters could safely ignore, was actually the strongest stat in the game as it determined how many actions you got per turn. In the first 7th Sea campaign I ever played in, we didn't make our characters together, so multiple players missed both of these truths about the creation system, and spent the rest of the campaign feeling envious of my character. It was not a great dynamic, and I learned a lot from that experience. The goal is for everyone at the table to have fun, and that is far less likely to happen if one PC is vastly outperforming others.

Options that look strong or weak during character creation should not turn out to have radically different power-levels in play. You would not expect "Duelist" to be significantly stronger than Army Officer, Mercenary, Cavalry, Hunter, or any of the other martial-themed Background options, but it really is.

That is at the core of why I'm house-ruling the Dueling damage down. During character creation, it's not going to be obvious to most players just how much better a Duelist is to a non-duelist. I can warn them, but the gap is so huge that they are almost certainly going to underestimate the importance and regret it later. If I do successfully put the fear of Duelists into them, then the whole table will be playing Duelists, which erodes character niche integrity and results in everyone having the same skills. I don't want disappointed or envious players, but I also don't want a gang of cookie-cutter PCs with diminished individuality.

(Minor) Reason #3: A ranged combat character can't compete with Dueling.

7th Sea 2nd Edition has loosey-goosey movement rules... or really, no movement rules at all. In many RPGs, movement and ranges are tracked more explicitly. In such games, this often means that melee damage output defaults to being higher than ranged damage, as a trade-off for play balance. You can hit harder if you spend an action or two moving into position and are willing to risk the extra danger of being on the front lines.

This edition of 7th Sea has no concept of the "Front Lines", and explicitly employs mechanics such as Consequences and Brute Squads that affect the entire party regardless of (non-existent) positioning. Rarely will the Swordsman find himself in greater peril than the Archer. As GM, I can force that situation, but there's nothing in the default mechanics that makes it happen, so every time I do so, everyone at the table will know that's me actively working to make it harder on the melee characters. That's a well you can't draw from infinitely without someone crying foul.

Guns have a bit of a balancing factor built in to them to account for this: they always do a Dramatic Wound, which is almost as good as doing 5 damage. Those guns are black-powder weapons, however, so they take 5 actions to reload. A PC carrying a brace of pistols (a not-so-subtle fashion style) can almost match a starting Duelist's damage output for the first Round (and just the first round). A gun-using PC can't keep up later in the campaign as the Duelist improves his Weaponry skill, but for a shorter campaign, this is very close to balanced against Duelists. Duelists are still better, but with the rules-as-written the only hope of a non-Duelist to not feel useless in a fight is to carry multiple pistols.

A PC with a bow, or a bandolier full of throwing knives, just can't compete. If the game were entirely and completely set in just the Restoration and Golden-Age-of-Piracy era, I wouldn't worry much about that. Instead, it's more of a greatest hits of European history. A friend once described the anachronistic setting thusly: "7th Sea is set in the 100-year era between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Industrial Revolution". Yes, it's mostly Pirates and Musketeers, but other perfectly-valid character inspirations include Vikings and King Arthur and Machiavelli and Robin Hood. Unfortunately, that last archetype doesn't seem to have a workable model in the current mechanics. At best you could get a Signature Item (your prized bow) and the Sniper Advantage, but that still only buffs your damage output up to about 8 Wounds per Round, at the cost of a Hero Point each Round.

Tangent: I'm not worried about Pistols overwhelming my new Duelists
I've reduced the damage or Dueling, but not Pistols. For the record, I am not the least bit worried about that swinging balance too far in the opposite direction. While 7th Sea doesn't have a rigid Encumbrance system to limit PCs from loading up on pistols, it does have social etiquette. Unlike D&D where a guy in full armor sporting 5 weapons is normal, in 7th Sea someone carrying half a dozen pistols is going to look conspicuously murderous. The campaign I'm planning to run will have courtly intrigue as well as daring-do, and the need to be able to attend court will prevent players from packing too much heat. Maybe if I was running a purely pirates-in-the-wilderness style of campaign there would be more cause for concern, but I don't expect it to be a problem.

If you're worried about this being a abused, there's one very elegant and organic way to limit the effectiveness of carrying 3 or more pistols. Just require a Raise to draw a weapon, and a Raise to fire with your off-hand. (And remember, they already take 5 Raises to reload.) With that in place, Pistols are cemented in their role as a good-opening move but an inefficient long-battle strategy.

(Minor) Reason #4: To open up some design space for Signature Weapons

In 1st Edition of 7th Sea, there were all sorts of cool weapons for swordsmen. Puzzle Swords, Dracheneisen Panzerhands, Sidhe Weapons, Rune Weapons, Castillian Blades, MacEachern Weapons, Twisted Blades, and Pattern-Welded-Steel. Having a distinctive "hero weapon" was definitely a thing, and what style of weapon you had was flavorful as well as meaningful. Almost none of that exists in 2nd Edition, and the only thing really left along those lines is the "Signature Item" Advantage.

If you've got a Signature Item, and it is a weapon, you can use it to do bonus damage. This costs a Hero Point to activate. Most characters start each session with just 1 Hero Point and can only reliably expect to get maybe 2 more Hero Points in a session, so it's already pretty limited. I've seen some posts where people say Signature Item is how non-Duelists can compete with Duelists, but I don't buy it. If you do spend 3 Hero Points on three consecutive hits in the first round of a Duel you could indeed to Duelist levels of damage in the first Round. It's expensive as heck, both draining your per-session resources and costing 60% the cost of the Duelist Academy at character creation.  Despite that cost, it doesn't get your damage up high enough to kill the Duelist you're battling in that one Round (especially if they Parry or Riposte), so they'll rip you apart in Round 2 when you don't have any Hero Points left.

It's worth noting as well that a Signature Weapon doesn't level up with you. A Duelist will do more damage (nearly doubling it) as he raises his Weaponry, but a Signature Weapon is probably going to be same bonus your entire career. And there's a weird little wrinkle where a Signature Weapon is useful to a starting Duelist (it's probably +2 damage on a Hero Point spend) but has no impact on Duelist who has raised their Weaponry during play. So the GM can't really award a fancy sword as a treasure to a Duelist, gifting it late in a campaign as a reward for success, because it won't really do anything by then. (It's still a decent treasure for a non-Duelist, as written. The dynamic is a little weird.)

Other than that, a sword is a sword is a sword. 7th Sea is not D&D, and you won't find intricate equipment lists and weapons using different dice types or significant modifiers. This is both a good thing (it's liberating and rules-lite) and a bad thing (that the only type of "special" weapon is a generic special item that is identical in stats to all other "special" items).  Reducing the automatic damage output of a Duelist makes generic Signature Weapons more useful to Duelists (and to non-Duelists as it makes them much more competitive) and also potentially opens up the possibility that a GM could introduce a more specific weapon bonus without it just further aggravating the tendency for battles to the death ending in the first Round. Not that I've done anything with that just yet, and I might not ever, but it seems like there's more room at the table for that as a possibility if Duelists are taken down a notch first.



(Minor) Reason #5: So I'm not obligated to make all Villains be Duelists

A single PC Duelist, under the default rules, can murder any non-Duelist in two Rounds or less. The only reliable defense is the Parry and Riposte Maneuvers. I'd rather have the option of crafting Villains with any background (or Background) that fits the story, instead of limiting myself to only those who've been a Duelist Academy.

The Balance Of A Sword: Dueling on the 7th Sea

I'm looking at possibly starting a 7th Sea RPG campaign next month. I'm all excited to try out the new-ish 2nd Edition of the game, but I've noticed in the past that sometimes games by that designer (John Wick, not Keanu Reeves) have some mathematical and mechanical issues. The first edition of 7th Sea had a few bugs (Panache was way too strong, damage calculation slowed combat considerably, Swordsman Schools and Sorcery both probably cost more than they were actually worth during character creation, and Half-blooded Sorcery in particular was a disaster), but was still worth playing because the setting was so cool. I've complained at length about the balance issues and lack of niche-protection in the otherwise conceptually excellent Wilderness of Mirrors by the same author. John Wick writes great settings, and comes up with innovative mechanics, but I feel like sometimes he's doesn't take enough care with play-balance and munchkin-prevention. Or maybe his home playgroup is made up of such high-caliber players that balance issues are tertiary to the story and fun. We should all be so lucky.

With that in mind, I poked around the internet a bit looking to see what flaws my fellow gamers had identified in their 7th Sea 2nd Edition campaigns. The biggest complain I've read (aside from some folks just not taking to the more "story game" approach in the rules, or having been burned because they expected it to be more of a 1.5 edition instead of a completely new core mechanic) is about Duelists.

In short, Duelists are way too powerful. According to this article I read, a properly trained Swordsman from the Duelist Academy can do 3 to 5 times as much damage as a character with identical stats who just didn't take the Duelist Background. That's a problem, and a bad one. It's at least as big of a character creation land mine as the over-importance of Panache in the first edition. 

The problem seems to be mostly in Slashes and Ripostes. Both of these Maneuvers are significantly better than the default attack of any non-Duelist. Most starting PCs will do 1 damage per hit, maybe 3 or 4 damage total in a Round. A starting Duelist is will almost always do 3 damage per hit, and a total of 9 to 12 in a round while also preventing at least one wound to themselves with a well-timed Riposte.  When one character outperforms the rest of the party combined, it's a recipe for unhappy envious players.

The obvious power-level of the Slash and Riposte also have the side-effect of making the other Duelist options seem worthless in comparison. The only other option that compares favorably is the Lunge, but doing a Lunge ends your turn prematurely. Instead of providing interesting options and tactics to spice up duels, the strength of Slashes and Ripostes pretty much render the Duelists choices meaningless. The optimal sequence of plays for every Duelist in a sword fight is to Riposte against the first attack an enemy launches, use a Slash for the actions directly before and after the Riposte, and then a Lunge instead of a Slash for your very last action of each turn. If you're graced with the good luck of having more than 4 Actions to spend in a Round, you might throw in a single Bash, Parry or Feint, but this will be rare and you'll always know that these moves are inferior to every Slash, Riposte and your final turn-ending Lunge. That all feels like a missed opportunity to me.

I'm currently considering the following house-ruled Maneuver set for all Duelists. It reduces the overall bonus for being a Duelist to roughly a 50% increase in combat effectiveness, instead of the 200% to 400% increase that they receive with the default system written in the rulebook. Duelists have the following combat Maneuver options, listed in the same seemingly-random order in which they appear in the rulebook:

Slash: This is a basic attack, the same as any non-duelist can use. It does 1 Wound to the target. You may spend additional Raises to add damage to this attack, the same as a non-duelist can when they land an attack. Slash is the only Maneuver that is exempt from the consecutive-actions limitation on page 235 of the rulebook (you can Slash twice in a row, but cannot use any other Maneuver twice in a row without doing something else in between).

(Duelists will rarely use the basic Slash in this version. Their other options are generally better in one way or another. The only common exception to this is to use a Slash for a killing blow if your enemy starts the round close to defeat. When that happens, it will be worth it to dump a stack of raises into one large Slash early in the round to prevent them from striking back.)

Parry: This prevents a number of Wounds equal to your Ranks in Weaponry. Using Parry takes your action (and 1 Raise) and must be done immediately following the attack by an enemy that caused the Wounds your are preventing.  

(This is functionally identical to the Parry as written on page 235 of the rulebook, nothing has changed about Parry.)

Feint: This does no damage when activated. Instead, it puts the foe in a position that makes them more vulnerable. The next time your target is injured in this same Round, they take +2 extra Wounds. 

(Note that this house rule leaves the Feint at the same power-level it had in the rulebook provided you have another action to follow it up with (or an allied PC available to do the same), but I've made it just a little trickier to use. A Duelist needs good planning or a good roll at the start of the Round to get the bonus damage, and they will have to switch their tactics up from round to round. It's now usually, but not quite always, better than a non-duelists attack or an unraised Slash. Much like the new Lunge listed below, the two actions spent for a Feint+Slash are collectively 50% more damaging than two consecutive Slashes or two attacks from of a non-duelist.)

Lunge: Performing a Lunge requires 2 Raises (exactly). It does damage equal to your Ranks in Weaponry. (Unlike a Slash, this cannot be increased by Raises.)

(Note that there is no longer any restriction about Lunges ending your action. You can open your assault with a Lunge now, but it is no longer possible to spend extra Raises to increase the damage of a Lunge. The Lunge is now the only attack that does damage based on Weaponry Ranks. If your Weaponry Rank is 3 to 5, Lunges are better than Slashes. Most PC Duelists will start with Weaponry 3, so it's generally 50% better than a Slash in the early campaign. If you have enough actions available, a Feint followed by a Lunge can be very powerful.)

Bash: Does 1 Wound to the target. (Unlike a Slash, this cannot be increased by Raises.)  If that wound is not prevented, the next time this Round that target deals Wounds, their damage is reduced by your Ranks in Weaponry.

(If attacked with this version of Bash, if you can Riposte or Parry it's worth doing so to prevent the Bash penalty from effecting you. Note that a Feint preceding a Bash will boost it's damage up to the point where a Riposte cannot stop the Bash from landing and applying its penalty.)

Riposte: This prevents 1 Wound from an attack you just suffered, and does 1 Wound to the attacker in response. Using Riposte takes your action (and 1 Raise) and must be done immediately following the attack by an enemy that caused the Wound your are preventing. 

(Note that there is no longer a limit to how many Ripostes you can do in a turn, I just dramatically reduced the damage each Riposte prevents and does. Against non-duelists, the Riposte is pretty much always better than a Parry, but against a fellow Duelist the best defensive choice will depend quite a bit on what attack Maneuver they threw at you. Riposte effectively stops a basic attack, Bash or unRaised Slash, but is not a full defense against a Lunge or raised Slash or any attacked boosted by a Feint.)

 Hopefully that reigns in the power of Duelists enough to keep things fun for the other players, and also adds enough meaningful decision-making to each Round to keep the Duelist's player entertained and engaged. The idea was to keep the rules elegant, while enhancing the tactical variety from turn to turn.

Those house-ruled Maneuvers will require a few house-rules for specific Duelist Styles, as a few of the existing Style Bonuses give out too much bonus damage or interact weirdly with my revised versions of Riposte or Lunge. In general below, I haven't house-ruled any defensive powers, and have only worked to reign-in damage output. For balance reasons, I believe any particular Dueling Style should only add about +2 damage per Round, and getting even that much of a bonus should require the player to jump through a hoop or two to get it so it's not 100% guaranteed to happen every Round. Damage-prevention powers are less likely to need revision, because any PC willing to sacrifice offensive power and aggressive success to just concentrate on staying alive should be able to do so pretty reliably.

Aldana: Once per Round, when you perform a Feint, instead of adding +2 extra Wounds, it adds extra Wounds equal to your Panache.

Drexel: When the Metzger and Gerbeck stances talk about "additional" or "fewer" Raises, this is referring only to initiative order, and not any other effect. (I feel this is more a clarification than a House-Rule per se, but it's possible the original authors intended it to function differently with the old Lunge rules in a way that's not crystal-clear in the rules as written. Regardless of that intent, in my revised Maneuver system, it only affects initiative.)

Eisenfaust: Your Ripostes prevent up to 2 Wounds (instead of just 1), and inflict 2 Wounds on the attacker (instead of just 1).

Sabat: When you apply bonus Wounds from your own Feint to your own Lunge, instead of the usual +2 extra Wounds, you can apply +3 extra Wounds.

Those effects are intended to entirely replace the Style Bonus for the effected Dueling Styles, so the boosted Riposte mentioned for Eisenfaust completely replaces the "Iron Reply" text/ability, and the like. No other House Rules should be necessary to make any of the Duelist Styles in the core book play nicely with my revised Maneuvers.

On page 174 of the Pirate Nations book:

Lakedaimon Agoge: Your Lunges require 3 Raises to perform, but they do damage equal to your Weaponry Ranks +2. (This replaces the "Agoge Thrust" alternative-to-Lunge Maneuver rule, but does NOT replace the other effects mentioned for weapon type -- the benefits that you would gain a second of if you took the "Agoge Weapon Mastery" Advantage on page 150 of this book. On that note, I'm not convinced Agoge Weapon Mastery is worth the investment, even in the default rules system, but that's perhaps beside the point here.)

On page 195 of the Nations of Theah Volume 1:

Hallbjorn:  Your Feints are replaced with Slams. Slams do 1 immediate damage in addition to the normal Feint effect of setting up your target to take +2 extra Wounds the next time they take Wounds this Round.

None of the other Dueling Styles in the core 7th Sea 2nd Edition book, Pirate Nations or Nations of Theah volume 1 seem like they would need any house-ruling to work with these rules. I haven't read any of the other books, so I'm not sure if any of them have Duelist Academies or Swordsman Schools that need further modifying.

Hey, speaking of Nations of Theah, Volume 1... I couldn't help but notice that the page that mentions the Rossini Style (page 79) fails to actually provide a Style Bonus for Rossini. I'm not sure if that's a publishing error, if it got intentionally cut, or if it's lurking on some other page and I've just missed it. Here's a proposed house-rule for the Rossini special move if you also can't find it in your copy of that book:

Rossini: You may perform the Parry or Riposte Maneuvers in response to another character nearby being dealt Wounds, instead of just when you take Wounds. It still costs your Action and a Raise as normal, but it prevents Wounds to the person you are defending instead of to yourself.

Urchin Character Sheets

Doing a bit of spring cleaning today, I stumbled across some old Urchin character sheets. The character creation rules for the Urchin RPG require you to use a piece of trash for your character sheet, which is why these are on egg cartons, dog food packages, tin foil from left-overs, and old holey socks. In the game you play crazy people living in the rail and steam tunnels under New York City. Each character starts with 3 Talents, which are defined by the player. These talents are very open-ended, and tend to be both humorous and bizarre. Here's a photo of the party:

As part of my ongoing efforts to de-clutter my home and life, I am now going to return these character sheets to the trash from whence they were born.

Mos Philos

In Night’s Black Agents, every PC has one MOS. This stands for Military Occupational Specialty, which, while delightfully jargonized, is a little misleading. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the Military or your character’s official occupation. In a nutshell, an MOS is a once-per-session* automatic high-level success. You pick a single skill that you can absolutely rely on to save your bacon once per night*.

*: Recommended House Rule: The rules say MOS is once per session, but I’ve found that once per MISSION works much better, especially with larger groups. Once per Op means the players have to be a little careful not to just blow their MOS on something trivial, and in turn that frees up the GM to really make those MOS activations knock everyones socks off. The best reason to go with once-per-Operation instead of -per-session is that this discourages players from dragging things out. Someone metagaming the refresh system of a Gumshoe game like NBA can actually wreck your campaign. You never want a situation where the best play is to turtle up and do nothing until the end of the night because next week the PCs will all be back at full strength if they just stall out the clock. For my own campaigns I’ve moved all the end-of-session refreshes and processes to happen at end-of-mission instead, and I find it’s a strong improvement. Ops rarely last more than a second session back-to-back anyway, because all those MOS activations and Cherry benefits generally allow the PCs to shoot for the moon and stick the landing on any plan in just a session or two. About the only situation where I would consider moving things back to a per-session basis would be if I was running a campaign with just 1 or 2 players.  

I’ve seen three main philosophies or schools of thought for player MOS. Having seen them all in play, I think all are equally valid, though it took me a little while to get to that. Here’s three ways to pick an MOS:

1) Use it to strengthen the skill you plan to spend the most frequently. This is the obvious play for a super-shooty assault specialist. Putting your MOS in a skill you plan to lean on heavily provides you the freedom (and safety) of being able to blow all the points you want on every roll, knowing that even if you bottom out your best ability in a protracted conflict you still have one helluva trick up your sleeve.

Though I mentioned shooting, this approach actually works super well for non-combat skill MOS assignments. The notion of “master of disguise” is a very fitting one for the genre, but it can be very point-intensive in this game. You may feel that Disguise alone isn’t good enough, and before long your core concept is eating up your General Ability budget with the smorgasbord of Cover, Network, Infiltration, and Surveillance. Covering all the aspects of “master of disguise” can leave you feeling stretched thin, and those points all feel a little wasted when the current Op is some unsubtle smash-and-grab. Putting your MOS into one of those Abilities is a great way to ease that pain. You can then afford to specialize in just the Ability levels needed to score the most appealing Cherries, and know that a timely MOS will cover any oversights or point deficits.

Aligning your MOS with your best (or one of your best) skills feels very fitting, and makes good sense in- and out- of-character. There is no rule forcing you to pick an MOS in your best skill though, or even in a skill you've got any points in at all. Let's look at some other philosophies and options for MOS selection...

2) Use it to shore up a critical weakness. Here you’ll take a MOS in some action skill that you are otherwise incapable of using. The first time a player in one of my campaigns picked an MOS they didn’t have more than a point or two in, I was very apprehensive. On some level, it felt almost like an abuse of the system. But now I’ve seen it in action, and I’m a full convert.

One of the PCs in my current campaign took a Weapons MOS and basically no other combat skills. Once per mission* she can get the drop on someone and beat them into submission with a frying pan, but if faced with a protracted battle she’s more properly motivated to surrender and gather intel as a prisoner. It works out pretty well. She gets fun spotlight moments in the occasional fight despite being otherwise a non-combatant. That is all kinds of cool. The MOS mechanic allowed her the freedom to play a quirky civilian in a setting where that might otherwise be a lethally bad idea.


3) Use it to hand-wave past your least-favorite part of the genre. The entire point of Gumshoe is to cut out the tedious die-rolling and related frustrations that can wreck a mystery scenario… so there’s no reason you can’t apply that principle to any skill or type of scene that just doesn’t excite you.

For the sake of the argument, let’s say you just hate car chases. Maybe it’s the chase mechanics never live up to your imagination and expectations. Or maybe you’re bus-bound in the real world and couldn’t give a damn about cars. Whatever the reason, you’ve decided that you can’t stand car chases and don’t want to play that minigame. It may be counter-intuitive, but in that situation an MOS in Driving would be a great investment. It would allow you to short-circuit any chase or tailing sequence you want by just invoking your MOS to escape/catch-up/ram the opposition. If there’s someone else at the table that absolutely loves car chases, you can expect that there will be the occasional twice-in-one session chase scene extravaganza, but at least you only have to suffer through the second half of the double-play.  

(EDIT/afterthought: Depending on just how much your fellow players enjoy a car chase, you may find it fairest to instead suffer through a few minutes of it in the early part of a session, and then invoke your MOS if the scene really starts to drag or if a second car chase crops up in the same session. Your mileage may vary.)

Driving was merely the low-hanging fruit there, and the same principle can be applied to nearly any type of scene you don’t like if you just target the skill most likely to shortcut it. Hate shopping and planning scenes? A Preparedness MOS will get you the right tool for the job with no advance notice.  Can’t talk your way out of a wet paper bag? An Infiltration MOS will get you past the security check point and on to the fun parts behind enemy lines. Completely bewildered by technology, or bored to tears by hacking scenes? Digital Intrusion MOS cuts those down to a quick montage and a bare minimum of jargon.

The MOS mechanic is one of the great innovations of Night's Black Agents, and it does an amazing job of empowering the player to not just customize their character, but also tailor their gaming experience just the way they want it. That's a win for everyone.

5-Yard Penalty for Failure To LARP

I went to two LARPs last night, and completely failed to actually play at either of them. I'm frustrated with myself for my recent inability to come out of my shell. I am also absolutely puzzled at the unnecessary complexity of character creation at these two LARPs, and the lack of a good summary or tool for new players. I plan to got back, because the hard part is over and I might as well get some value out of the night I invested, but I imagine that there must be a large number of potential players who are just turned off and away by the initial hurdles.

Both LARPs were at the same location, and apparently they have a total of 4 LARPs that run there every weekend. Three use the old (pre-reset) World of Darkness setting, and one the newer (but still nearly a decade old) World of Darkness. I made characters at Changeling and Vampire, the other two games are Werewolf and nWoD mortals game.

Now, before I get into my gripes about the experience I had, I should temper it with acknowledgement that this may not have been the typical situation. The LARPs had just moved to their winter location, so it's possible that the venue transition may have shaken things up a bit. Also there was a big competing event this weekend (a 6-month special event at a boffer LARP called Alliance) that greatly diminished the player turnout at the Vampire game at least, and a couple of the Vampire Storytellers were either absent or late as well. Any of these factors may have reduced the effectiveness of the staff to facilitate a new players entry into the game.

As I said, both games use the old WoD setting(s). They don't use the oWoD LARP rules (Rules of the Night, or Shining Host), instead they use a home-brewed system called "Mod-Dot" that is effectively a filter applied on to the tabletop rules. One game uses Changeling: The Dreaming 2nd Ed + Mod-Dot, and the other uses V20 (Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition) + Mod-Dot. Mod-Dot, if I'm understanding correctly, replaces each dice roll with two rock-paper-scissors matches. These RPS matches function rather like FUDGE dice, in that they generate a plus 2 to minus 2 modifier to your base number of successes, which are derived from your tabletop dicepools by some similar formula (not sure if it's 1/2 or 1/3 x dicepool). If you win both or lose both of the RPS tests, that's essentially a critical and triggers another two tests so the modifier can range out to plus or minus 4 (or maybe further, I'm not yet certain what happens when you score two wins followed by two more wins). I didn't participate, and merely watched from a distance, so it struck me as a lot of work for such a strongly centered bell curve. By my math, you have a 78% chance of scoring with one success of your default result. Compare that to FUDGE dice which have a 63% chance of scoring within 1 of the median result. My one complaint with FATE (which uses FUDGE dice) has to do with the overwhelming strength of that bell curve, and here's a system that out-FATE's FATE. Or, so it seems to me from my outsider's perspective. I haven't actually played with Mod-Dot yet, and it's apparently functional enough for several local LARPs to use it for many years. At first glance, it strikes me as more complicated than both the tabletop rules and the old White Wolf LARP rules. I wish either game had a hand-out that covers the mechanics of Mod-Dot, because after 1 night in proximity to it, I'm still pretty iffy on the core resolution mechanic. That said, one does not LARP for the rules, one LARPs for the story, the setting, and the scene.

Unfortunately, I didn't know the Changeling setting all that well. I had emailed the Head Story-Teller a few weeks ago to ask about the game, and we'd exchanged some conversation, but I didn't really have a solid character concept going in. I'd suggested that I'd probably play a Troll because it was one character type I'd remembered from my ~2 sessions of Changeling experience over a decade ago. He encouraged me to not limit myself to a core book character, and showed me lots of Kith write-ups (more or less character classes for Changeling) that came from various sourcebooks or were derived from the old Arcadia CCG. Some of this he'd sent me over a week before, but it was the week where I got a promotion and worked overtime, so I had still had _so_ much to read at the session. There were several people (including the HST) willing to help me out with the process, but their approach was pretty much "let me read you a giant list of options", rather than either making suggestions or asking questions that actually narrowed down the giant pile of information I needed to sift through. After more than an hour of reading I fell back on the Troll idea I'd emailed two weeks back, in hopes that something simple and mildly familiar would let me actually finish my character in time to play or at least watch some scenes. Unfortunately, the wealth of expanded character options continued past basic concepts and into a huge Merit and Flaw list, plus I had to at least skim over the lists of Arts (special powers in Changeling, akin to Disciplines in Vampire, or roughly equal to spells or feats in D&D). Again, so much reading.

The way character creation works in tabletop White Wolf games is that you get a small number of points to spend in each section of the sheet, followed by another pool of freebie points to spend wherever you want but at sort of an exchange rate (such as 7 Freebie points for a Discipline rank in Vampire). The character sheets didn't list the exchange rate. A person walked up and offered to help just as I was wrestling with that, so I asked them about it. They told me there is no exchange rate, just add 15 dots to things. I foolishly took them at their word, thinking they were one of the Assistant Story-Tellers since they were over there offering to help newbies fill out paperwork instead of playing in any of the many scenes going on elsewhere. I should have known better, but instead I accepted their word and my math got completely messed up. I finished my character right about the time the game was wrapping up, and only discovered then what a mess my sheet was.

Now, I had chosen the Changeling LARP because an acquaintance had invited me to it and the Werewolf LARP that followed it. He didn't show up to Changeling. I don't know if he made it to Werewolf or not. It was in the other part of the building, whereas there was a Vampire LARP in the same space where the Changeling game had just finished. I was a little let down to not get to play in that first game, and I only knew Werewolf a little bit better than Changeling, so character creation was likely to take nearly as long and involve almost as much reading. Vampire, on the other hand, that I knew really well from my years of running a V:tM LARP. So rather than head to the other area in hopes that maybe the guy who invited me would show up late, I decided to just do Vampire. Surely, I could bang out a character in a hurry.

But as I mentioned earlier, only a lone Assistant StoryTeller showed up to Vampire on time. A couple others were late, and I gather that at least one of the STs went to Alliance instead. The one that was there didn't have the needed materials to begin character creation. She did have character sheets, so I started planning and lightly socialized while waiting. The thing that held me back was the beads they needed to draw. This group uses a system to allow differing levels of character power and rarity while eliminating all danger of favoritism. You draw three beads from pools corresponding to the ideal mix for the campaign. If you get a lucky draw, you may start with extra XP, or be allowed to play one of the rarer clans or bloodlines. So I started mentally sketching out a Toreador, but had to wait to finalize it till the beads arrived. By then, there were four other new players, and only one copy of the rulebook. So while each step of the process took me a lot less time, I had to frequently wait my turn to look things up while these two guys read every single Merit and Flaw to their non-gamer friend they'd brought with. So slow.

As it turns out, my bead draws gave me completely normal starting generation and basic clan choices, so it started off as an easy build. However, I drew a bead that gave me a bunch of bonus XP to spend. So creation went in three stages: normal points, freebie points (using the various conversion rates as mentioned above) and experience points (using a totally different conversion rate). On paper, my character looks really strong, which is kind of funny as I was completely prepared to play a wimpy little Toreador for just the easy hook in to characterization that provides. And it may still play out to be wimpy, if the obfuscated values of the bead draws means that most characters already start with as many or more XP than I got. The overall power-level of the chronicle is not yet transparent to me.

And I guess that level of complexity and confusion is why I'm here griping about a game that I totally plan to play and enjoy. They said attendance was down because of the competing event, but it still seemed like a big group and probably a good place to game and meet new friends. I'm most likely going to have a lot of fun, but that's because I'm going to power through the initial awkwardness of it all and dive into character and plot. And all of this headache could have been made so much easier for new players. I find myself wanting to lay out a one-page summary sheet for each of these games. At the top it would say which rule books are considered canonical for that game, then explain the Mod-Dot success formula that modifies the engine in those books. Below that would be a listing of the three beads you draw and what options they unlock for that chronicle (and a statement about what percentage of the pool is each bead level). You'd know at a glance what kind of character you could make, how potent or rare they were in the setting, and where to go for more information on the game or rules.

In terms of my old crunchometer system, I had rated oWoD at a crunchy but playable c12 level, and the Mind's Eye Theatre LARP rules at a somewhat simpler c10. After this level of exposure, I'm inclined to eyeball Mod-Dot at around a c20. Thus far it is significantly crunchier and more complicated than I prefer, but I'll give it at least a few sessions for the plotlines or the playgroups to engage me. I used to have a lot more tolerance for needless complexity and the character niches that complexity carved out, but over the decades I've been shown repeatedly by games like Amber, Microscope, and PDQ that the best RPG experiences don't require complicated rules and fiddly modifiers. Good games are made from rich plotlines, nuanced characters, and the presence of good friends.

By the time character creation was all done, it was after midnight. The game had been running since 10:30, and would be continuing for more than an hour. About half the players were sitting around in the main room quietly playing with their phones or having whispered conversations, and the rest were off behind closed doors having private scenes. There was no obvious in-roads for actually joining a scene at this point. I was tired, discouraged, very hungry (hadn't eaten in over 8 hours) and a little grumpy, and I had a long walk home ahead of me, so at that point I bailed. I'll get a fresh start at the next session.

Munchkin Opposition

What is the point of the Opposed Check mechanic in Warhammer 3rd?  I only recently figured out the answer to that question, and until I did so, I hated the mechanic. Now, I realize it's kinda awesome and absolutely vital to the health of the game.

The point of that rule is certainly _not_ to provide results where both parties' stats have equal weight. Not by a long shot. Blue dice and purple dice just don't have anywhere near mirrored results, and really there is no accurate conversion ratio (because Chaos Stars complicate all the math). Even if they did equate better, the initiating participant in the challenge would still have the advantage of Green, Red, or Yellow dice, none of which are available to the opposing participant in the roll. The defender's stance makes no difference, and the defender's skills are devalued in comparison to the aggressors.

So there must be some other reason for using the opposed mechanic.

Having run a lot of math (see below), I've come to a likely answer to the above question. The answer is interesting, and it's a shame that the designers over at FFG never discussed it in something akin to one of those "Behind the Curtain" sidebars you sometimes see in D&D books. Why does the Opposed Check mechanic exist, and work the way it does? For the singular purpose of preserving character niche for those who didn't take a 2 in Fellowship and Intelligence.  It's main point is to ensure that the wacky non-combat careers in Warhammer (such as Agitator, Courtier or Scribe) actually have a relevant specialty that isn't easily encroached upon by the brute-force combat types just throwing 2 XP at a non-career skill.  Tangential to this, the Opposed Checks ensure that those who optimized their stats actually pay some trade-off for those 5 or 6 blue dice they're getting in their best areas -- there are some things they just can't do at all.

To elaborate: Warhammer 3rd is a game where characters generally begin with a high degree of competence. Starting characters can readily get above a 90% success rate from their best skills and actions. Even if something is well outside your focus, you've still almost always got a better than 50% chance of success for a standard roll.

There's two areas where this high success rate isn't true:

• one is Opposed checks by characters with a low stat,
• the other is arbitrarily high difficulty ratings used on plot-relevant checks specifically called out in published adventures. 

The later exist as speed-bumps to prevent PCs from whistling through a scenario due to dumb luck in a way that's not dramatically satisfying. If the PC does manage to short-circuit drama by grasping at straws / thinking outside the box / spamming some random skill at every NPC, the drama that was lost by short-cutting the plot is (hopefully) replaced by the thrill of having beat a high-difficulty (often 4 Purple) check.

The former, those Opposed checks when one side or the other has a 2 in the relevant stat, is there only to make sure that if you put a 2 in your Fellowship or Intelligence you will never succeed at a default roll of that stat. It does this to protect the character niche for those who did invest in Fellowship or Intelligence.  Tangential to this it also makes the person with the 2's occassionally and infrequently get brutally pwned by NPCs with high stats. Said pwnage is just the icing on the cake, it's not the main point of the opposed checks. The game already puts high success rates on the high-stat (N)PCs and if providing PC vulnerability was your only goal you'd solve it with something less like opposed checks and more like the elegant 1-purple of vs Target Defense rolls. There's easier ways to empower GM's manhandling of PCs, but there's not easier ways to protect character niche.

That's probably a good point to segue into all that math I alluded to. After I broke down the success-rate percentages of the official opposed check rule and the most common house-rule to replace it (many GM's use purple dice = opposed stat minus 2), I got a comment from one of my players that perhaps the problem with those numbers was due to the minus two, and the way it zero'd out the difficulties at the low end. If I did 1/2 or 1/3 the stat as purple dice, and any remainder as blacks, maybe that would fit a more reasonable curve. So a 5 in the opposed stat would always produce either 2 purple and a black, or 1 purple and 2 black depending on which variant I used, and a 1 in the opposed stat would always be a single black die no matter how high or low the aggressors stat was. That was actually pretty close to a house-rule I actually used in my first couple one shots, but had eventually dropped because I wanted to try a campaign with a minimum of house-rules to see how the game ran by the books.

Anyhow, I ran a bunch more numbers, and here (after a weird gap that blogger insists on inserting before all tables) are the results:

Opposed Stats	original success rate	Purple = Stat -2	Purple = Stat / 2, Remainder = Black	Purple = Stat /3, Remainder = Black	1 Purple
2 opposed by 1	44%	75%	58%	58%	44%
2 opposed by 2	25%	75%	44%	44%	44%
2 opposed by 3	14%	44%	33%	44%	44%
2 opposed by 4	8%	25%	25%	33%	44%
2 opposed by 5	8%	14%	19%	25%	44%
2 opposed by 6	8%	8%	14%	25%	44%
2 opposed by 7	8%	4%	10%	19%	44%
3 opposed by 1	88%	88%	75%	75%	60%
3 opposed by 2	59%	88%	59%	63%	60%
3 opposed by 3	38%	59%	49%	59%	60%
3 opposed by 4	24%	38%	38%	49%	60%
3 opposed by 5	24%	24%	31%	40%	60%
3 opposed by 6	14%	14%	24%	39%	60%
3 opposed by 7	14%	9%	19%	31%	60%
4 opposed by 1	94%	94%	85%	85%	72%
4 opposed by 2	72%	94%	72%	76%	72%
4 opposed by 3	72%	72%	63%	72%	72%
4 opposed by 4	51%	51%	51%	63%	72%
4 opposed by 5	37%	37%	43%	53%	72%
4 opposed by 6	37%	23%	37%	51%	72%
4 opposed by 7	37%	14%	29%	43%	72%
5 opposed by 1	97%	97%	92%	92%	81%
5 opposed by 2	97%	97%	81%	85%	81%
5 opposed by 3	81%	81%	73%	81%	81%
5 opposed by 4	81%	63%	63%	73%	81%
5 opposed by 5	63%	46%	55%	65%	81%
5 opposed by 6	46%	32%	46%	63%	81%
5 opposed by 7	46%	21%	39%	55%	81%
6 opposed by 1	98%	98%	95%	95%	88%
6 opposed by 2	98%	98%	88%	91%	88%
6 opposed by 3	88%	88%	82%	88%	88%
6 opposed by 4	88%	72%	72%	82%	88%
6 opposed by 5	88%	56%	65%	75%	88%
6 opposed by 6	72%	42%	56%	73%	88%
6 opposed by 7	56%	30%	49%	66%	88%

See how every variant I tried* resulted in far more favorable numbers for those with a 2 in the relevant stat? It's a feature, not a bug. It was as if the designers had specifically chosen the official method just to screw with people who had 2's.  It's not monsters they're trying to hamstring, as a quick glance through the NPC stats and PC's Action cards will show you that even the most dim-witted beast has Willpower enough to resist any opposed check the PCs want to throw at them (it's almost always easier to stab a monster than to intimidate or charm it). The only rolls that these opposed mechanics specifically penalize are rolls only PCs ever make: haggling checks, all-or-nothing improvised social rolls, and intution checks to determine NPC motive. PCs with high stats are (as expected) very good at them, but PCs with low stats are terribly handicapped (far more so than a low-strength character swinging a sword).

* = (EDIT: running some more numbers, I just stumbled across a version that probably would work. More about that in a future blogging, as adding it here now would further bloat an already unreasonably-long post.)

Every character in the game needs a decent (at least a 3, and really it should be a 4) Toughness and Willpower, or else they'll spend most of the campaign carrying around a dangerous number of critical wounds and insanities, and slump over at the first sign of Fatigue or Stress. 2's in either of those stats will kill you. You also need either a high Strength, or a high Agility, to power your attacks. Wizards can get away with a high Intelligence + Willpower, and (at least some varieties of) priests can get away with a high Fellowship + Willpower. Between Strength and Agility, whichever of those stats you don't focus on, the other can be dropped down to a 2 with almost no associated downside or penalty. Likewise, each party needs a single character good at Fellowship, and a single character good at Intelligence, and everyone else could effectively dump those stats down to a 2 as well.

The opposed checks mechanic exists only to make that sort of min-maxing dangerous, and to reward the one person per party that decided to invest in the stats everybody else is ignoring. Opposed checks generate unfair results that double-dip on the stats and penalize those with 2's and 3's. Because the game fails to ever discuss the logic behind this, it strikes most readers as a bug. The moment you realize that Hans the shy dockworker can't ever pull a fast one on his coworkers, but Prof. Moriarty can always pass a Guile check vs Sherlock Holmes, you feel like you've just found a shocking loophole that the designers somehow missed. You didn't. That the system works like that was actually the entire point of their design.

There's one thing I'll say about FFG's crew: somebody over there (probably Jay Little) really knows their math. Words aren't always their strong suite, but numbers clearly are. The stance dice, and their complex interactions with the two sides of the action cards, are absolutely brilliant. There is a lot of very complicated math going on behind the scenes all throughout this game system, and so when I see something where the obfuscated math does something very pointed and unusual, I can only assume that it was put there for a reason.

As it turns out, if opposed checks it didn't work like that, there would be no downside to having a 2 in Fellowship. The game has such low difficulties across the board (outside of a low-stat Opposed check) that anyone can try their hand at any non-opposed check. If you're using the default difficulties for non-opposed checks (which is usually around 1 purple), anyone can reasonably do anything. "I absolutely suck at this" means I've only got a 62% chance of success. Unless it's an opposed check, that is.

While the game makes some nods towards Social encounters and progress trackers moved by "Influence the Target", the obvious truth is that most social situations likely to come up in play will be solved by a single roll of a single social skill. GM's might like the idea of building intricate social encounters, but it's a lot of work to do so, and is not an easy thing to improvise and still make it fun. The game is rather light in concrete examples of it in action, and off the top of my head I can't think of a single published adventure that has a really good one at it's core. If there is a good example, it's probably in the adventure from Lure of Power, but that came out very late in the game's development cycle.

This is Warhammer. The game has several-decades of reputation as the game where your party includes the dregs of the Empire. The party is more likely to be a ratcatcher, a blacksmith and a coachman than it is to be a knight, a wizard and a healer. That's a vital part of the setting and product identity, and FFG wasn't about to eliminate it entirely (even though they were interesting in making the game more cinematic and heroic than the previous editions). Part of the fun is being the unlikeliest of heroes. The spoiled nobleman fop, the illiterate peasant, or the malpracticing barber-surgeon that is thrust into the deep end and has to make do. Someone was going to draw those careers, and feel compelled to invest in non-combat stats just to be true to the character.

It's not fun for those players if everyone else (especially those lucky few who drew legitimate warrior careers) can sink those same points into killing things faster, and then still get by when forced to roll their one non-combat check of the session (because the difficulties are always low and success means the puzzle or social encounter is over). To make those colorful non-combatant careers worth playing at all, it was necessary to make 2s in non-combat skills suck.

The lengths the developers went to in the attempt to make these wackier careers worth playing is actually kinda cool and commendable. A vague framework of a social encounter system that takes a lot of GM prep time? That's to give the nobleman or agitator a chance to shine, and if you don't have one at the table the GM can skip it in favor of a single die roll. Obnoxious rarity and haggling system that relies on too many opposed checks? That's so merchants and conmen have an area where they feel needed, and if you lack that sort of character you can handwave it. Byzantine healing rules that involve a million die rolls? That's so barber-surgeons and physicians can be vital to the party, but if you don't have one, a liberal dose of GM fiat will whisk it all away.  All the clunkiest, most annoying parts of the rules exist just to make players of certain careers feel good. The only problem with all this is that FFG is so tight-lipped about design philosophy, they never actually say "skip this if you don't have a character at the table who cares about it."

Maybe I'm wrong and they don't intend you to skip them -- it could be that they expect high PC mortality rates to make all those careers relevant eventually -- but we'll never know because FFG never explains their motives or decisions.

---

Arcane Afterthought: Wizards and Priests sort of break this dynamic I was just raving about. They both use a non-combat stat as a combat stat, and so get a large number of spotlight moments both in and out of battle from that single investment. The game tries to compensate for this by making 1st rank spells and blessings weaker than default actions, so they don't come into power until late in the campaign. The game also makes them vulnerable to a bad channel/curry roll, so they have to invest in a second stat (Willpower) to fuel their effects. Intelligence has the most skills, so Wizards in particular are also subject to nasty miscasts (there are also thematic reasons for this, but that's beside the point) and minor restrictions on armor. Priests avoid those downsides, but require extra XP investment to unlock their "magical" abilities in the first place, so they trail behind wizards in the early game (at a time when wizards themselves trail briefly behind others in combat at least). None of which really manages to bring wizards or priests back in line with the other characters in a long campaign -- any Wizard (and any Priest of Rank 2 or higher) has tons more options and spotlight moments than a similar-rank scholar or merchant.

Honestly, the biggest thing keeping this in "balance" there is the low frequency of these character types. To be a wizard or priest, you have to get that one particular career card as one of your three random draws from the pile of 50 basic careers (and not have anything of greater personal interest on the other two cards). If none of the players get a lucky draw on day 1, it's a non-issue. If you have every expansion and follow the character creation rules as written, there's a less than 25% chance of even having an apprentice wizard in a 4-player campaign.

Obviously this mitigating factor goes out the window if the GM lets players pick any starting career instead of drawing randomly, but even then it's a least partially mitigated by the lesser chance of anyone playing the random non-heroic careers who get eclipsed early on by Priests and Wizards. Even in these circumstances, a min-maxed caster will eventually grow to be better than everyone else at nearly everything, but you'll get 20-30 sessions of balanced play before that happens.

So again, perhaps the designers just figured the game's high lethality and grimdark grittiness would prevent characters ever living long enough for that to be an issue.