Dworkin the Barimen, and my Tinfoil Unicorn Hat

 Weird Amber DRPG thing, well, actually a weird Amber novel thing, that I figured out today, and have never seen posted anywhere. 

**SPOILERS for some novels from the 1970s**

**Also: WARNING if you're a "young earth creationist", something I'm going to say below might offend you.**

 I have a theory on why the character of Dworkin in the Amber novels is at one point given the name "Dworkin Barimen", without any explanation.  It's weird that Dworkin has this random last name, given that all the other major characters he's related to don't have last names at all. Nowhere in Zelazny's novels or short stories have I seen anything that explains this, or even points it out, but it's something that has often bounced through my head as being weird. 

But first, other theories/explanations I've seen for this name:

1. House Barimen is sometimes trotted out by fans and GMs as a Great House of the Courts of Chaos. But that's not in the books anywhere. I just did a search on the text of all 10 novels, and "Barimen" appears exactly once, and in that paragraph we are told that Dworkin Barimen was an artist, priest, wizard or psychiatrist that Oberon hired from some Shadow, not Chaos.  That paragraph is obviously intentionally misleading, but when the character eventually shows up in the plot, we're never told by Zelazny there's a House Barimen. Corwin and most of his siblings seem to be pretty ignorant that the Great Houses of Chaos are even a thing.

2. The other obvious explanation that does get thrown around  is that "Barimen" is an Anagram of "In Amber". Roger Zelazny liked wordplay and clever nods, so maybe it's intended as an Easter Egg. If so, I'd say this egg is really more of a Red Herring. I mean, Dworkin's not from or in Amber, so much as Amber is in him. We eventually learn his origin lies in Chaos, not Amber (even if there's no evidence for a Great House by that name). Where this falls short is that it doesn't explain why the name is not used by anyone else in the series. If it means roughly "of Amber", why doesn't Oberon, King of Amber, use it? Why don't most of Corwin's generation act like that's a family name, nor do they know Dworkin's relation to their lineage? It's weird. (Also, just as a sidenote: I suspect concealing a revealing anagram in your name is not the sort of thing that will work out so well when the people you're hiding your mysteries from have lifespans measured in millenia.)

3. There's also apparently a magic artifact in a Philip Jose Farmer series called "the Horn of Shambarimen" but I've never read those Farmer books, so I don't know if it's an intentional reference, or even which came first and which might be referencing the other. 

Speaking of which came first, I was watching a youtube video today that debunked some horrible "young earth creationist" ideas. One of those ideas was for something called a "Baramin".  Coined (by creationists) by blending the Hebrew words for "created" ("bara") and "kind" ("min"), a baramin is a term they use to denote the groupings of creatures that God bid Noah to put in his ark.  As in: the ark didn't need to have 2 lions, and 2 tigers, and 2 cheetahs, and 2 pumas, and 2 leopards, and 2 lynxes, and 2 housecats etc, because obviously there's no way to fit 2 of every species on earth in a boat that's only 300 cubits long. So instead the kind in "2 of every kind" has to mean something other than species, if you're a biblical-literalist who doesn't accept the scientific consensus on evolution, but are still aware that there are many millions of species on earth today and that a cubit is not very big.

The neat little trick of interpretation of the words "2 of each kind" means the ark could instead just have 2 of the ur-example of cats, and somehow, magically* without evolution existing, those two cats were the archetype (now called a "baramin") from whose pairing all the extant species are produced, again somehow magically without evolution*. The video really tore the concept up and pointed out how silly and scientifically useless the Baramin concept was, and how all the scientific data supports speciation by way of evolution over time. I agree. Really not my area of expertise, being just a guy who watched one rather critical video on the topic of baramins, but I'm sure someone will stumble across this post and try to fight me over it in the comments section. Have fun with that.

*: I will grant you that what I'm presenting is almost certainly a straw-man of what actual biblical literalists and creationists believe. I do that because I'm not here to argue politics or religion, I'm here to acknowledge that an obscure term relating to Noah's Ark and religious philosophy is absolutely the sort of thing that Zelazny would love to allude to when writing the Amber books. 

Roger Zelazny loved mythological references. There's a ton of them in the Amber novels. There's a magical king named Oberon. A murderous brother named Caine. A magic tree named Yig and a thoughtful crow named Hugi. 

Those are myth-references are obvious, but sometimes Roger's a good bit subtler. Here's an example: in his ride to the apocalypse, Corwin is visited by a jackal and two birds (one made of blood and screeching like a bird of prey as it approaches, and the other the aforementioned talking crow). These 3 animals following him are a loose but definitely intentional riff on the "beasts of battle" trope from Old Norse and Old English poetry (Beowulf, etc). In such works, soldiers headed to war would be followed by a wolf, an eagle, and a raven: three animals that feed upon the bodies of the dead strewn about a battlefield, thereby foretelling the grim scene these men are headed into. If you see 3 such animals (a canine and two birds) in close succession, that's Ye Olde Narrator warning you that things are about to get real. (Or, at least that's my understanding: I am not nearly as well-read as Zelazny was.)

But despite all that Mythological riffing, there's really no Flood Myth to be found in the Amber books. There's storms that seem apocalyptic, sure, but no flooding, no boat-building, and they don't deluge for prophetically-long times. Which is kind of weird, given how much hay mythologists and conspiracy theorists alike make about the commonality of Flood Myths in nearly every culture. That motif should be Zelazny's bread and butter.

Not only are obscure religious and mythological references scattered all though out the Amber books, but the dialogues of Corwin's hellride to the end of the universe are packed full of Freshman Philosophy topics. The core concept of Amber casting Shadows is a cheeky riff on Plato's cave. 

So the idea that he might have chosen to slide in a subtle Easter Egg nod to a controversial stance on scientific and philosophical issues, which comes with a built-in connection to Noah's Ark, well, let's just say it just seems very Roger to me.

Which is why I think it's possible that Dworkin Barimen might be an intentional nod to the baramin concept in young earth creationism. Zelazny, being well-read and quite thinky, may have stumbled across the term -- it was coined in a creationist book from the 1940s, so the timeline works. If so "Barimen" is not only an anagram of "In Amber", it's also a homophone for a word that refers to creationist concepts. Zelazny did like his word play. 

Dworkin created the universe, and is the ancestor of every character in the books -- except the Unicorn, which according to jewish folklore (and Shel Silverstein) didn't get onto Noah's Ark. (Why didn't the Unicorn get on the Ark? Because it ran off with a fellow Ur-example, the First Man. I started typing that as a joke, but on reflection, that may well be the crazy idea that inspired Roger Z in the first place, for all I know.)

All of which means Dworkin Barimen may well be a title, something akin to "Dworkin the Progenitor" or "Dworkin the Archetype", rather than a family name. In which case, this title only belongs to Dworkin, not his descendants. 

At least, that's the crazy nonsense I'll be going with the next time I start up a new Amber DRPG campaign.

Side note: Wow, I went nearly a year without posting on this blog. 2023 was hella busy, and sometimes kinda awful. More on that some other post, perhaps? 

I buried the lead in a tangent.

Earlier today, I wrote a lengthy rant about 7th Sea and why I chose to reduce the damage of duelists instead of increasing the damage of non-duelists. In a rambling tangent buried deep in that post, I said this:

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.

Thinking back on that, I realized this point was actually far more important than I presented it as, and I probably should have led with that statement.

The internet is full of two years of 7th Sea posts about why Duelists are unbalanced vs non-combatant NPCs, to which the most common rebuttal is "Duelists should be vastly stronger than non-combatants".

Those rebuttals are absolutely right, but they are also entirely missing the point.

Duelists have dedicated at least one of their two Background choices to being a bad-ass in combat. I entirely agree that compared to another character that hasn't chosen any significant combat options, the Duelist should be very potent.

The problem is there are several other character creation options that cost the exact same as being a Duelist (by which I mean it takes one of your 2 Background choices), and every single one of them is significantly under-powered in comparison to the Duelist.

If someone chose Cavalry and Mercenary as their two Backgrounds, they've doubled-down on combat-capable character concepts, but those two Backgrounds combined together contribute far less to their damage output or chances of emerging victorious from a battle than the single choice of Duelist that another player took.

A character who took Duelist and Courtier would do at least double the damage of a character who took Soldier and Assassin. That's what really bothers me about it.

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.

A Tale Of Two Forums

"A couple years ago, White Wolf released this RPG called Scion. I started a campaign the first chance I got.

At first, I loved it, but I was really bummed how long it took them to release new material for it. Six months out, all they had was one rulebook, and a super-short demo adventure. Their release schedule kept falling apart, and it was frustrating, too, because that first book was at best 1/3rd of the setting and rules. PCs in Scion have a primary stat called that can be rated from 2 to 12, and the first book only covered characters with a rating of 2 to 4. It took them nearly a year to get the second and third books out, IIRC.

Anyhow, I was running the game for that whole time, and a good while later. There were things I loved about it, but the more I analyzed the game, the more it fell apart. I eventually came to the conclusion that the core mechanics were broken, and that later books just compounded those problems. Of course, I was emotionally invested in the game by then, so when I thought about these things, I got fired up.

I spent a lot of time at the Scion forums, posting various house-rules and what have you. What I noticed though, was that I spent less and less time coming up with cool new things to improve my gaming experience (and those of others I interacted with on the forums) and more and more time just venting about the rules and the company. There were things they were doing wrong with Scion, and I just had to let everyone know.

Every topic that came up on the forum, I figured out some way to bring it back around to the things that pissed me off about the game and the direction it was going. I got quite cynical. I knew that I was no longer being helpful to others, and that I was probably just coming off as troll. There they were, trying to post all their cool ideas about a game they loved, and I'd just come along and rain on everyone's parade.

Then, just over a year ago, White Wolf rebooted their forum software. Everyone that wanted to post on the new version of the forum had to build their account all over again. Knowing, as I did, that I had long before ceased to gain enjoyment or serve a useful function at that forum, I declined to make a new account. I just walked away.

Ever since that, I've felt better. Other facets of my life improved, because I was no longer voluntarily subjecting myself and others to my own negativity."

I typed that up at the FFG WFRP forums today, and have not yet decided whether or not to post it. The WFRP 3rd Edition forum has several rather obnoxious posters, who just troll the place, taking every opportunity they can to bitch about the new edition. Half the time they're screaming about how angry they are because the game has only had three releases in 6 months, whereas 2nd Ed has years of sourcebooks. The rest of the time they bitch about how "it's a board game, not an RPG" because it uses colorful cards. Edition wars are part and parcel of the gaming experience, but this is pretty extreme.

And I'm left wondering why the hell do these people think we care? I wish they would just move on, and not linger around a forum that is intended for the enjoyment of a product they don't like. I mean, it's not like there isn't already a really good forum for 2nd Ed WFRP, and for people who just want to rant about how much they hate 3rd Ed. It's called Strike To Stun. And yet, even when they're getting me all fired up by trolling at the only good 3rd Ed forum, I can understand where they're coming from, because my own Scion experience was so like what they are doing.

Eventually, you just need to break the cycle.

I'm glad I finally found the strength to move on and leave Scion behind. I hope they find the strength to do the same for Warhammer's forums. If you hang out at places where people like the same things as you, you'll enjoy your life a lot more, and feel much better about yourself. If you insist on trolling places where other people enjoy things you hate, you can only make everyone (yourself included) feel worse. That's my 2 cents, anyway.

Deputize Yourself

The Trail of Cthulhu RPG has a two-page spread of advice for players, and my favorite bits are:

"the best way to fail is to become defensive and do nothing.... Instead, talk through the most obvious options, quickly pick the one that seems the most appealing, and then execute that plan. Will something horrible happen? Of course it will - it's a horror game! Something horrible will happen no matter what your plan is. "

and

"Passively playing the good citizen won't save you. You must carry the ball into the enemy's court, and part the dark veil of the unknown. A few moments of reluctance is understandable and realistic. More than that is boring."

Sound advice. Frequently, players get "analysis paralysis", or are so fearful of the consequences of action, that they just sit back and let the plot happen. In a game I'm running, at least, that's always a mistake.

Think of it this way. If the player does something, it's got at least three possibilities:

1. Paying off! It's the solution to all your troubles.
2. Ineffective! Despite your action, things keep on the same track.
3. Disastrous! Something bad happens, and you feel like it wouldn't have if you'd not done anything.

Now compare that to what will happen if you do nothing. In this case, there's only one possible outcome.

1. Disastrous! The Big Bad already has plans, and I guarantee you don't want them to happen.
   

Trust me, what I plan to do to your character is far worse than any complications you're likely to get yourself into by taking an action. A Big Bad with wimpy plans that can be survived by turtling or dragging your feet ain't a Big Bad at all. The main plot, left unaltered by player action, will always end in the worst possible situation.

An example drawn from Session 5 of my Trail of Cthulhu campaign. My wife (who previously would often over-analyze RPG situations) took the TOC advice, and Deputized herself in the most recent session. 4 NPCs were hauling stolen artifacts into a warehouse. So, armed with just a two-shot derringer and the "backup" of a 60-year-old NPC librarian, she stormed into a warehouse to face four individuals she suspected might be possessed by aliens or demons. It was a very tense scene, and nearly went south at one point, but by quick thinking (and quick acting) she recovered the truck full of artifacts, and got out without having to fire the second bullet.

Had she dithered and wimped out, even just to sneak back under cover of darkness, the world might have ended in the meantime. I mean, it is Cthulhu, and I have a track record.

To Sandbox, Or Not To Sandbox

A sandbox campaign is one where the whole world is realized, and the players can go anywhere and follow whatever paths or play style motivates them. In a sandbox campaign, the world is (or isn't) a scary place, and challenges exist independent of PC level - if the map reads "here be dragons" you'd best not go there if you aren't prepared to deal with dragons (or just aren't high enough level).

The opposite would be a structured narrative campaign, where a particular plotline is presented to the players, and they are encouraged to address / pursue it. In the narrative campaign, the universe scales up with character growth. There's probably a Big Bad, or other real dillemma the campaign revolves around. Said Big Bad probably sends minions after the PCs in the early stages, and the PCs don't get to face him until they've leveled up or accumulated the mystical MacGuffins needed to defeat him. If the players try to jump the gun, or meander far afield, the GM discourages this behavior with methods subtle or overt.

I've done both, and tend to shift between the two modes depending on what kind of game I'm running at the moment. More often, I do the Sandbox treatment for campaigns, and scripted narratives for one-shots and short-shots, but that's not how I run things 100% of the time.

I've run several Amber campaigns over the years. Sometimes, I put a major plot on the grill (the imminent destruction of the universe is the classic Amber trope) and put the players on a clock. Other times, I've just created a backdrop, and left the players to their own schemes and motivations set against that backdrop. Both tactics have resulted in really good campaigns, as well as less memorable ones. One of the neat truths about Amber is that if the players want to make it a sandbox, they can do so. They have the power to travel to any world they can imagine, so the GM has to really understand his setting and be prepared to improvise.

Continuum was another game where the Sandbox status was pretty much in the players hands. I definitely presented them with a plot, especially in the more structured second half of the campaign, but the ability to teleport and time travel at will meant I had to be prepared for massive deviations from my plans. On top of the usual sandbox requirement of knowing where my NPCs were at all times, I also had to know when my NPCs were at all places. That was a fun challenge.

That middle ground is also occurring in my current Trail of Cthulhu game. There's a definite mystery plot afoot, but the PC has uncovered other things not related to the prime mystery. The PC in this game lacks the ability to travel parallel worlds or span the ages, but I've given her a map of Arkham, and her choice to suddenly drop in unannounced at various locations has definitely thickened the plot and stirred the setting. My wife (the player in the campaign) has been told out-of-character that this is Arkham, and at any given time many schemes are in motion. Big threats, of the "Cthulhu awakes and devours the eastern seaboard" variety, will be foreshadowed and made a part of the prime narrative. Lesser threats, but ones still capable of driving the individual PC mad or killing her, may be scattered through-out the setting. If she goes around kicking in random doorways, she'll complicate things, but it may also be fun. Behind that door might be a potential allie you can rescue, or maybe the barely-contained elder horror that will just rip you apart. For a game base in Lovecrafts cold / uncaring / non-humano-centric / atheistic / alien universe, this sandbox of danger approach seems particularly fitting.

My current Deadlands game, however, is shaping up the opposite way. Mainly, this is because of a player in the campaign being allergic to cats. We like this guy a lot, and we wouldn't dream of excluding him. I have two cats, so if we want him in the game (and we do) the game must be hosted elsewhere than my home. That means I have to keep things simple. I don't want to have to haul a huge assortment of minis, sourcebooks, campaign notes, and NPC sheets around. My first session I had to drag twice as much stuff as was really feasible for the long run. I've been trimming and reorganizing since then. The best solution is to keep everything simple, and have the PCs on a single coherent path. Then I only have to know about the next town on the trail, not have memorized every nook and bad guy of the entire Dakota Territory.

Feast or Famine

In December and January, I was essentially campaignless, and that's pretty unusual for me. My Scion game had wrapped up late last year, and I needed a break from plotlines and houserules. Sarah and I had a little Land of the Lost solo-campaign going, but it never really lived up to it's potential, so we kinda let it fade away too. Gaming got so thin, I started "playing" the enormous time-sinks that are Ogame and X-Wars, and designed half a dozen flash games on PlayCrafter. My only RPGing in most of January or February was playing in the weekly one-shot, and I ended up missing two or three of those. GMing withdrawal set in, and I was feeling kinda miserable and low. I even started contemplating dedicating big chunks of time to unlocking the mysteries of Wii Fit.

To get out of my funk, I ran TROOPS.

Then all of a sudden, I'm in over my head with RPGs again. I'm currently prepping for two campaigns I've been asked to run starting in the next week or so. In the background I'm simmering ideas for another TROOPS installment, as an encore's been requested. I also find myself committed to helping plan the next Emerald City Game Fest (which will be awesome, and I'm happy to help, I'm just pointing out I had two fewer other obligations when I volunteered). I have three half-designed PlayCrafter games now on hold, and I'm not sure when I'll get back to them. The last time I checked in on either of my sci-fi time-sinks was 57 hours ago, and I see I've been probed at least 14 times since then (but still not attacked).

Feast or Famine, y'know? Best solution is to hop back in the saddle. Fractal nature of the universe, and what-not. I guess the stars are right for gaming! Speaking of Cthulhu, the game systems I'll be running are:

• Trail of Cthulhu
• Deadlands Reloaded

LARPsploding

A couple of buddies of mine are playing in a Vampire LARP here in town, and last night it was one of many topics of conversation. They revealed to me that they'd just recently (despite having been playing for months) learned two very odd rules of the LARP's setting.

1. There are no bombs. Explosives just don't make it into Seattle, as the police and border patrol are really good at finding them.
   
2. There is no internet. No windows, either. Computers have a DOS prompt and a monochrome screen.

The game is indeed set in the modern day, they tell me, and people have cellphone cameras in-character. It's hard for me to wrap my brain around these decisions. I've never played with this particular LARP group, so it's possible there's some mitigating circumstances I'm unaware of, but from my vantage point this just seems like so much crazy talk. As a result, my response (below) may seem kinda crass at times, for which I apologize.

---

The "No Bombs" rule I can kind of understand. I played in a game once where some yahoo exploded Elysium, killing several characters and doing Agg damage to just about everyone. I certainly felt like he was ruining the game. So, I can see how a blanket ruling that you just can't smuggle bombs into the city might seem appealing.

But what did my friends do this past month when their request for a bomb was turned down? One of them took his action for the week to purchase a huge amount of gasoline. The other took his action to buy bulk supplies of packing peanuts. Dissolve styrofoam in gasoline and, according to the Anarchist's cookbook, you get low-grade napalm. Since Vampires have an unnatural fear of fire, it's in some ways better against them then explosives are, though I'm sure it's stinkier and requires greater quantities for the job than C-4 would.

My point is, that while there's plenty of reasons that blowing up Elysium is bad, you can't stop it by claiming there's super drug-sniffing dogs at the edge of town. If you try to limit such game-breaking activity via in-character constraints, it only encourages players to get creative. They saw it as a challenge. Given only an in-character rationale, they might crash a plane into Elysium, or a tanker-truck full of home-made napalm into the Prince's haven, or they invest in Police Influence in hopes of making confiscated C-4 go missing from the evidence locker. The explosives are merely a symptom, not the underlying root cause.

There's certainly uses for which Explosives are non-broken. Your vampire wants to build a new Haven deep in solid bedrock - explosives are the way to do so that doesn't break the Masquerade. He wants to defend that same haven with booby traps that will be active even while he sleeps - there's very little even arguably wrong with that. He wants to wage a messy resource war by blowing up buildings that other players have Influence connections at - depending on the scope of what he's doing and whether or not it'll bring DHS and BATF down on your city, it might or might not be acceptable. He wants to boobytrap several other player's Havens so as to vaporize them without warning - that's probably right out, or at least the victim needs some sort of chance to spot it.

And that intent is exactly where the issue is. When a player tries to do something that will ruin everyone else's fun, it needs to be stopped. Rigging Elysium to explode falls into that category, but so would breaching the Masquerade on live television. Are you going to rule that "within the setting the FCC prevents all live broadcasts", just so you don't have to worry about that? Probably not. So why should bombs be treated any differently?

Saying "no bombs" is easy, but it completely misses the real issue. The better way to deal with it is to ask why the player wants the bombs. At that time, explain to them that for the sake of verisimilitude you'll give them access to the bombs, but that it makes you, as the Storyteller, uncomfortable. Make it clear to them that if they intentionally create a situation where their bomb plot succeeding is clearly at odds with the enjoyment of the rest of the group, your decision will be easy. As GM, you have an obligation to provide a fun experience for as many of the players as possible, even if it means his carefully orchestrated plan failing spectacularly.

If you have that conversation, those otherwise likely to nuke Elysium will reconsider it. If you aren't blunt about it like that, they'll just find some dastardly alternate way to sew chaos and devastation, because they think it sounds like fun.

---

The other part makes no sense at all to me.

The lack of internet, Windows, everything you expect about home computing, etc, is a pretty major deviation from "it's set in modern day". I can certainly think of reasons for deviating from reality like that. The game is set in Seattle, after all, so maybe backstory of one of the first PCs or NPCs involves killing Bill Gates or some other past action that prevented Microsoft from ever existing. Or maybe the GMs just didn't want to deal with all that potential Computer Influence (for which the default rules of the game don't really have a system) and Industrial Influence so they eliminated the elements of the local setting that would have required it. They may even have held back computers expecting some player to want to be the Gatesian pioneer in that arena, but the players just missed it and nobody has pursued that opportunity.

But if you're going to deviate from reality like that, it needs to be front-and-center. The description of the LARP is no longer "Vampire: The Masquerade", it should be "like Vampire: The Masquerade, in a slightly altered setting that's like the modern day except with seriously stunted computer technology and no internet." It shouldn't be possible for multiple people to be playing in your LARP for 3+ months without having been told about this alteration that's absolutely vital to understanding the head-space of a modern character. I suppose it's possible my friends missed this detail, but they were adamant to me that there were no clues: never told it before, nothing in hand-outs they'd been given or on the LARP's website.

Suspension of Disbelief may require some ripple effects coming from that setting variation, as well. Camera-phones seem like a stretch if there's no computer revolution predating them, and no way to upload and share your photos. If computers still have the old monochrome screens, why would cellphones have color displays? If not for the advances in technology for home computer's monitors, we wouldn't have flat-screen plasma TVs. Colleges wouldn't have big Computer Science departments, and the departments they would have would have diminshed computing resources - so Education Influence gives lesser benefit than it did before. Same for Health Influence, because a stagnated computer industry means reduced tech for life-saving, and all the records must still be paper-based and hard to search. Sweeping alterations to the setting pour forth from this decision, but it sounds like they haven't been taken into account at all.

Or, again, I suppose it's possible there's some factor I'm unaware of, which the three friends playing in the LARP weren't able to explain to me.

---

I'm not just some random crackpot here ranting about how someone else's campaign sucks without a leg to stand on. I've got some measure of experience at this sort of thing. For several years, I ran a LARP. It was set (initially) in 1850, and at the end of every 4-to-6-month story arc we'd advance the timeline by 10 to 20 years.

Up front, in big letters on the character-creation packet, it indicated that this was an alternate timeline and an alternate setting. It went on to mention there was no Camarilla nor Sabbat, the werewolf NPCs were non-cannonical and didn't worship The Wyld, the Tremere-Salubri backstory had been altered, and we're using Koldunic (not Vissitudinal) Tzcimsce. Don't assume anything is true about the secrets of White Wolf's setting except for very basic things every neonate would know, such as names and archetypes of the clans, general vampiric strengths and weaknesses, etc. For the sake of the story, our out-of-character goal was for Albuquerque to become the most prominent city west of the Mississippi, and certain PC actions have resulted in Tesla defeating Edison, but other than that, you could generally assume most of history played out largely as the history books record it. Feel free to ask the STs and/or heads of the households if you have questions about anything specific.

This caveat did a good job of introducing the players to the setting, and prepping them for the notion that our game was non-standard. When and if something came up that someone wasn't aware of, they generally rolled with it, and weren't afraid to ask the GMs "what would my character know about this?" 9 times out of 10 the answer was along the lines of "Nothing. You've never heard of it before. Steam-powered cyber-werewolves are not an established part of the setting, it must be something new the evil railroad barons whipped up. Now you know something the other players don't - hopefully it won't eat you."

Skill Challenges

I found an interesting post (and comment thread) at Tales of the Rambling Bumblers, concerning Skill Challenges in 4th Ed D&D. If you're familiar with the latest D&D incarnation, and have some time to kill, it's a good read.

The basic mechanism is ... a Skill Challenge of a particular difficulty: you need to score N successes before M failures (N >M in most of the examples I’ve seen) or you fail. N and M, and the difficulty of the skill rolls (DC in D&D terms) are determined by the difficulty of the Skill Challenge.

After a bit of rambling, he narrows in on about the "M-Strikes Rule", singling out the fact that if the group fails M rolls they fail the challenge as a whole, regardless of what the Mth roll was about.

The example challenge involves catching some Kobolds, and you can roll Nature to track them or Athletics to climb a tree and spot them. If a PC loses sight of the tracks, if it was the Mth roll, then the other PC can no longer roll to climb a tree. That's a bit odd - logically, climbing a tree to spot the kobolds is the sort of thing you'd do if you lost their trail, not necessarily the sort of thing you could no longer do because you lost their trail. Because of interactions like that, he's a big critic of the system.

I absolutely agree with him that the "M-Strikes Rule" is the fatal flaw of the Skill Challenge system. Suspension of disbelief is easier if individual actions had their own consequences, as opposed to an overall success/failure ticker (where-in, as you point out, my failed history roll stopping us before you can make your climbing check). It would make more sense and be less metagamey. In that sense, I feel "M-Strikes" does much to undermine the very thing that skill challenges are trying to accomplish.

That said, it'd be very difficult (and might even require a book of it's own) to balance all those possible consequences of every individual action. One of the design goals of the Skill Challenge system is to provide rules by which skill rolls and logic puzzles can be rated and compared against each other and against combat encounters to determine relative degree of difficulty and appropriate XP awards. 4E's Skill Challenges system is attempting to do for problem-solving, skill use, puzzles, and role-playing what 3.X had done for traps.

In other words, the designers want to give out XP for using your skills, but they don't want it to be a flat rule in which the danger or difficulty involved had no impact. (25 xp per skill roll would be trivial and pointless to track at mid-to-high levels, 200 xp per roll would be way too generous at low-level.) Nor do they want it to be a tremendously complicated system, where ever possible factor and consequence needs an entry in some gigantic reference section.

Yet within those constraints, they also needed some element of danger and/or chance of failure. Without some way of doing so, Skill Challenges would become a source of easy no-threat XP, and large sections of game mechanics would buckle under the weight of that overflowing XP chalice.

So they hit on an abstraction - that abstraction being the "M-Strikes Rule", and the Complexity Rating - to determine when you fail and the consequences kick in.

Just like hit points, M-Strikes isn't realistic enough for some people's tastes. As I said, I'm one of those folks who'd rather have detailed consequences stemming from specific actions rather than an overall out-of-character ticker.

I wouldn't have made the decision that 4E's designers did, but I can still see why they made that call, and why they felt it was beneficial to go there.

While I'll probably never use the M-Strikes Rule as written, I still think the core idea of Skill Challenges was a step in the right direction. It provides a framework that is a good starting place, encouraging the GM to make your skills not just something you roll once every 3rd session, and empowering the player to role-play a character whose Intelligence and Charisma exceed their own. Provided, of course, that the GM has a flexible mind and isn't too inclined to say "no" when the PCs come up with unique actions and solutions that are outside the script of the Skill Challenge.

1 Hit = 1 Wound

One area of Savage Worlds has consistently bugged me: that being Damage. Here's why:

Most of the game is really fast and simple, and practically math-less. Unless a die explodes, you never do anything more complex than adding +1 or +2 . When a die does Ace, you can generally stop counting/adding somewhere around 8, as there's rarely any benefit to going above a single raise. 

Damage, however, breaks that rule/generalization. Getting a higher roll on damage means doing more wounds, which in turn means it's far harder for the enemy to soak the wound away.  Even if one wound was likely to kill them, you still are encouraged (by the system) to keep rolling and adding as high as you can to get an unsoakable total. Getting to 40+ on an open-ended 2d6 happens more often than you'd think, as it turns out, and takes forever to roll and count it out. 

From my first play of the system, I wanted to simplify that damage roll in some way, but I wasn't willing to do so till I had a some experience with Savage Worlds from the GM's seat.

Well, I've now run about 13 hours of it, all very combat-intensive (old-school D&D-esque dungeon romps), and I'm even more convinced that my initial instincts were correct. Damage rolls have some serious potential to bog the game down.

On top of that the spectre of the one-hit-kill looms pretty large. The owlbears and the dragon both came pretty close to doing just that to PCs in my most recent session, which would have sucked. (The PCs dropped one big badass NPC in a single hit as well, but that's rather less of a problem.) I want there to be danger and risk to the PCs. I'm okay with it being random. I just don't want it to happen in the first round of combat, or without warning, or as a result of a fluke die roll where the main character (a PC) gets killed by some two-bit extra. 

Some GMs would just fudge the dice - for me, with my Magic Tournament Judge background, and my Amber Diceless background, I don't see the point in ever lying about the dice. If I wanted something to be a foregone conclusion, I wouldn't roll. I roll all my dice in the open, unless I'm rolling for something the player shouldn't know - like, say, the results of a "Detect Lie" spell.

So, I've come up with a really simple house rule to solve what bugs me. Here it is:

Any single attack can only do 1 wound to any single foe. 

Only exceptionally deadly forces can break this rule. Exceptions would include Heavy Weapons, such as Rocket Launchers, and Powers intended to represent really big and dramatic earth-shattering magics, and really nasty traps in the second-to-last-room of the dungeon. Your typical Bolt or Blast won't do more than 1 point, nor will the swing of a mundane sword by the beefiest hero or villain. The GM has the final say on what can circumvent this rule.

I think that's sufficiently elegant and easy to remember. Obviously, it's only meant for fairly cinematic campaigns, as it lacks gritty realism. It does, however, have many benefits for campaigns concerned with story and character:

1. This greatly speeds up the damage process, as the GM can tell the player the target's Toughness, and once you hit 4 more than that number, there's no need to keep counting. Less math = faster combat = more excitement.
   
2. It also makes it very clear when a PC is really in danger of dying. Players can act bravely and heroic, at least at the start of fights, with no fear of character death. You'll have lots of warning before getting greased, unless the GM throws something special at you (like the nastiest of Grimtooth's Traps, or a rocket launcher ambush, or the fight with a dragon that starts with a breathweapon inferno), which he should do only when dramatically appropriate. 
   
3. Lastly, it empowers the GM to have a finer degree of control over the length of encounters and the challenge they provide. In addition to the current distinction of Extra vs Wild Card, you could add in Henchmen (ala 7th Sea) that can take one wound just fine (well, a -1 penalty like a Wild Card would get) but are incapacitated by the second wound. Likewise, you could make a boss extra tough by  giving him 4 or 5 wounds instead of 3. 

Of course, it's not without some measure of troubles. Soaking wounds would become much easier, and that may have subtle ripple effects I haven't foreseen. I'm considering this corollary rule to keep that in check:

Possible corollary to "the 1 wound rule":

Soaking wounds is now a bit harder. Instead of soaking the first wound with a roll a simple success, and an extra wound for every raise, soak rolls would have a difficulty of 8. 

I might also consider a Legendary Edge (with Trademark Weapon and No Mercy as prerequisites) that would let you break this houserule with your Trademark Weapon. Spellcasting could get an Edge that mirrors that, or just have one or two "high level" spells/powers that count as heavy weapons. I haven't made the big decision on how (or if) to deal with it at the higher ranks, as so far I've run only Novice-rank games. 

Common gaming logic would be to give "higher level" characters access to more potent weaponry - but at the same time, it feels like high level fights need the "no one-hit kills" policy more than the low level conflicts. You certainly don't want you all-powerful wizard or two-fisted-pulp-hero to go down in one hit, after all. I'll try the rule out first for a few sessions before deciding whether or not to make it circumventable at the high levels. I imagine the call on that will have a lot to do with just how cinematic the campaign is. 

7 +/- 2; no more than 3x if it's magical

Here's a link to a cool blogpost at Delta's D&D Hotspot about the limitations to how our minds process information, and how those limits should be applied to RPGs. It's good advice, and I plan on heeding it in my own future designs. In a nutshell...

• The human mind can evaluate (and store in short term memory) between 5 and 9 parcels of information at a time. More than that leads to analysis paralysis (or just forgetting things).
• Therefore, no single step in character creation should include a choice between more than 5-9 alternatives.
• Likewise, no single die roll should ever have more than 5-9 modifiers.
• The more complicated the parcels, the fewer you can handle, and the exact limit varies a bit from person to person. So, to handle the lowest common denominator effect, you should really read "5-9" as "5, maybe 6 if it's fairly simple".
• Another, largely unrelated property of the human mind is that we tend to think of things as: one-time unique event, two-time coincidence, and three-times means there's a pattern.
• As a result, things that you want to feel exceptional or magical shouldn't happen more than twice in any single game session. If you can cast that spell 4 times per session, it no longer feels special.
• An exception would be things that happen 3 times, but with a long pause between the second and third iterations. Like a recurring joke in a movie, when the long-delay third riff occurs, you laugh heartily and say "I shoulda seen that coming!"

Okay, so that wasn't a nutshell - it was 7 nutshells, coming from 2 different nut-trees. But, as a result, it was still just short enough for you to grok the point. (Well, most of you, anyway)

compliance with stupid laws

White Wolf has posted new rules for fan sites.

As such, in order to keep posting content here about my Scion campaign, I'll need to provide a link to White Wolf, and some basic legal text...

Copyright White Wolf Publishing, Inc.

© [year] CCP hf. All rights reserved. Reproduction without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden, except for the purposes of reviews, and for blank character sheets, which may be reproduced for personal use only. White Wolf and Scion are registered trademarks of CCP hf. All rights reserved. Scion, Exalted, Vampire: The Masquerade and World of Darkness are trademarks of CCP hf. All rights reserved. All characters, names, places and text herein are copyrighted by CCP hf.

Overall, I'm none to happy about this development. Since I blog about a lot of RPGs, not ALL characters "herein" are copyrighted by CCP hf. Obviously, any vampires, demigods, or the like probably are. But trying to clarify what is and isn't is going to be a big pain in the ass. Even when I'm talking about Scion, it's not like White Wolf has an exclusive copyright on Thor, Zeus, and Tlazteotl, since all 3 are drawn from mythology and tradition that's at least several hundred years old. Certainly, white wolf has it's own unique flavorful take on those three characters, and some portion of it has and will influence my own thinking about them. So, yes, within the confines of Scion any reference to them is within the domain of white wolf's copyright. But if I were to blog about how I used Thor in my heavily mythological alien-grey film noir detective game "The Case Of The Stolen Thunder" that I ran more than a year before Scion released, his depiction would therein would have had nothing to do with White Wolf and owed rather more credit to Douglas Adams than to White Wolf. There's some grey areas (pardon the pun) there that the required legal text isn't flexible enough to parse.

I think this policy is a bad mistake on White Wolf's part, and a dangerous route for game companies to travel down. It's just going to generate ill-will amongst the players and fans, and reduce the number of fan sites out there, which in turn reduces the quality of gaming. Unlike the OGL, this legal notice doesn't let someone sell unofficial books of their own design. Instead, it just requires that if you want to blog "Man, I had so much fun playing in my Scion campaign last night" you have to include a copyright statement.

Personally, that seems unreasonable, yet White Wolf's site implies heavily that their lawyers will be contacting you if you make even passing mention of their products and fail to comply with this legal directive. Why spend the money on getting a lawyer to draft you a fan site policy if you weren't planning on suing someone. Man, this sucks.

By their very nature, RPGs are intended to be creative inspiration. They are not like a novel that you can be expected to "just" read - the rule book is intended to provoke you to tell your own stories. Overall, the regulation of fan sites flies in the face of that. Chances are, Larry Lessig or the ACLU could win a case against this, if either felt so inclined. Such a lawsuit, however, would probably be largely detrimental to the roleplaying hobby, so I hope it never happens.

I wish to maintain a friendly relationship with the industry which provides my primary means of entertainment, so I will comply with White Wolf's request, even though it strikes me as ridiculous that they requested it in the first place.

In an ideal world, White Wolf would drop this nonsense, and no other game companies would try anything like this again. But this is not a reasonable world, and as such we should expect the internet to become even more tightly constrained in future years. It, like so many other elements of our society, is rushing to a bottleneck that will result in Fascism, Revolution, or one proceeding the other.

Experience and Training Times

I posted the following to the Scion Forums today. It was in response to someone saying that the "Speed Reader" knack should have an extra benefit of allowing people to raise knowledge-based skills faster. It's pretty coarse as-is, but I may refine it into a more useful essay sometime...

In most RPGs, I neither require people to spend time training in order to raise their stats or skills, nor do I reward those who spent time doing so with bonus xp or free dice or the like. It's a little unrealistic, to be sure, but that extra level of realism doesn't really benefit the game more.

Generally speaking, I just accept that XP is an abstract medium that exists purely for purposes of game balance. It doesn't really model character development - instead it's a way to reward player participation and enable them to tune their PC after character-creation. I don't figure it is meant to approximate the way people actually progress in the real world.

For example, in the real world, if you chose to specialize in a particular field, you tend to lose some of your skill in other areas. While we're in school (college, training programs, etc) we have all sorts of knowledge that we forget later. I, in the real world, am not as good at math or oil painting as I was 10 years ago, though I've honed other skills in the meantime. You may be a great cardiovascular surgeon, but you're not as good a General Practitioner as a result. That's just a reality of life - if you don't practice your skills, they get rusty. I can't say that I've seen that modeled in gaming - the closest I've seen is aging rules, but even those most often just penalize physical attributes.

I wouldn't reduce a PCs skill by GM Fiat because he hasn't rolled it in several sessions, or because we skipped 6 months of downtime between scenes. Increasing his skills 'cause he spent those 6 months studying something (but didn't spend XP to back it up) is just the opposite side of that coin.


While I'm okay with the "skills are cheaper" school of knacks, I feel no compulsion to extend such benefits to other knacks just cause it might seem more realistic.

Honestly, there's just not much realism in most XP systems, and I have no problem with that.

In White Wolf games (and many other point-based, not level-based, RPGs) you can go from rank amateur to an award-winning pro (in the skill of your choice) in just a few sessions that might represent as little as a few days in-character, but in the real world that typically takes years of dedication and practice.

The closer you model character advancement on reality, the less fun the game becomes.

(There are exceptions to that statement, of course, and a game using the "winter season" concept from Pendragon can get away with things other RPGs can't.)

Underlying Assumptions

Interesting forum-conversation with Jesse Heinig of White Wolf. Jesse had expressed that when writing the new powers for the Scion Companion, he had a couple of default assumptions in mind. To paraphrase:

• Unless otherwise specified, powers don't stack. So you can't use the same power again and again to boost up further than you'd get from one die roll of it.
• Unless otherwise specified, all powers last till the end of the scene. The exception to this is a power that implies it's effect is instantaneous.
• Just because the rules don't say "ninjas can't fly" we shouldn't assume ninjas can fly.
  

I kinda argued with him a little, which wasn't really how I meant to come across. Basically, I think his points there are great, but I questioned why the published White Wolf rulebooks never state such clear simple rules. These are the underlying assumptions of all the White Wolf RPGs, but to learn them you had to read page 59 of one particular forum thread for their smallest game line.

Among other things, I said:

Jesse seems to be of the opinion that this stuff is just common sense, but I gotta say, in my 25+ years of gaming, not everyone automatically arrives at those same assumptions. I'm not trying to pick a fight. I'm saying that sort of advice and "rules of thumb" / "underlying assumptions" that he shared there would be immensely helpful to have in an official WW book.

I ran a LARP for a few years, with 40+ players for most of that time, and we had rules lawyers trying all kinds of crap (against which I generally stood firm). One argument I often had to disprove or over-rule was based on the fact that some powers don't specify exact limitations (such as duration) while others do - this can give the incorrect impression the ones that don't specify anything have no such limitations.

For example, if 3 die-adder powers state they last till the end of the scene and the 4th one doesn't mention duration at all, there's at least 3 ways to interpret it. Most players/readers/STs would conclude it also lasts for a scene, but some may think it lasts for just one action, and a few folks might even expect it was permanent.

Having a page in a book that I could have flipped to and pointed out that "any power that doesn't specify a duration is assumed to wear off at the end of the scene" would have saved me several cumulative hours over the years.

I thought this was revelatory enough of my "philosophy" and practice of how I game that I should mirror it here on my blog. It'll save me from having to right this all over again someday.

Me again, 'cause I'm unnecessarily verbose:

Thank you for answering those questions. There's some very useful observations contained in what you wrote. It'd be sweet if future editions of core rulebooks included statements to the affect of "Unless specified otherwise, powers last till end of scene, and multiple uses of the same power don't stack." Having such assumptions actually printed out where STs can point at it could save a lot of new players (and groups with rules lawyers) from confusion and frustration.

Jesse:

Interestingly, when I tried to do that in Mage Revised back in the day I was accused of "coddling" or "over-complicating" the rules.
It's nice for novice Storytellers, who may not yet understand that they have the authority to argue with the players and to set down their own rules. For experienced groups, it's usually easy for the ST to decide for himself. Of course, if your group has a bully who tries to make up weird justifications and argues with the ST, it can be nice to have a printed page to fall back upon . . . but that really falls into:
http://wickedthought.livejournal.com/768971.html

Me:

Whoever said that to you wasn't thinking clearly. Having a general rule like "unless otherwise specified, all powers last till end of scene" doesn't complicate the rules, it simplifies them.

Speaking as someone who spends a fair amount of his time bitching, please don't let that type of criticism get under your skin. The vocal minority are going to be the ones who are fairly confident about what makes the game fun (or not fun) for them - they'll bitch and rant up a storm, because they're invested fully and understand it well.

The people who need "all powers last till end of scene" are predominantly the newer gamers who aren't so confident about how to interpret it. For every one guy complaining that he's being "coddled" there's two guys silently thinking "wow, that rule just cleared some things up for me." Those newer players need the guidance, but they won't tell you that because they're self-conscious about their gaming experience. And since new players are vital to growing the hobby, IMHO they need to be taken into consideration when rulebooks are being written.

I hate to plug another companies product on your site, but there's this other game, involving medieval basements and winged lizards. I think it's relevant that they have, for about 8 years now, included really clear rules about what does and doesn't stack, and exact determinations for things like range and duration. Now I'm not saying you should try to emulate them. I am however, saying that the world has changed a lot since Mage: Revised released, and I doubt you'd get many accusations of "coddling" these days. IIRC, Mage Revised came out before 3.0 of that other game, right? The world has changed a lot since then. You could tighten up your rules a bit, and still be far less "boardgamey" or "over-complicated" than the competition.

More importantly, since not all RPGs under the sun function with the default assumption of "powers don't stack, and always last until end of scene", how is a player supposed to know that's how it works in White Wolf games if the books don't ever tell them as much?

Jesse Heinig wrote:

It's nice for novice Storytellers, who may not yet understand that they have the authority to argue with the players and to set down their own rules. For experienced groups, it's usually easy for the ST to decide for himself. Of course, if your group has a bully who tries to make up weird justifications and argues with the ST, it can be nice to have a printed page to fall back upon . . . but that really falls into: http://wickedthought.livejournal.com/768971.html

With all due respect to you and Mr Wick, that kinda over-simplifies the situation. I'm all for dropping a cheater, rules-lawyer, or jerk from your gaming circle (or even social circle). But sometimes it's not practical to do so at the first sign of trouble.

At a LARP, for example, if you've got 20 or 50 players (or more), the ST doesn't always get much face time with the players. As such, they can't always know if the person who's causing a problem today is going to be a continual hassle, or just having a bad day, or just new to gaming and needs to be reigned in once or twice so they learn the way the world works. There's a certain temptation to be draconian, since "if I lose this jerk I'll still have 49 players", but if you just start giving people the boot there's a good chance you'll turn away someone who just needed a 5 minute lesson on how things run in your game.

Another example would be an open game at a convention or a game store. In those situations you might not have the option to kick someone out, nor the time to teach them to be a better player.

If you game in a small town, the prospect of finding new gamers could be daunting or unrealistic.

I've also met couples that gamed together, where one was a great gamer and the other an idiot. You can't just drop one of them without running the risk of it souring the table for the other.

In all those cases, having simple concise floor rules and stated underlying assumptions helps the GM/ST defuse a bad situation and make the right rules call.

So, sure, it's great to encourage people to drop the dead weight, and raise the bar as far as expectations go. I know I'm a lot pickier these days about who I'll game with. But in the meantime, making the rules clear helps a lot, and as I said before, those newer gamers just establishing themselves are the ones who need the rulebooks and the GMing advice. Crabby old grognards like me are just gonna make up our own damn rules anyway.

Today, parts of what I said seemed a wee bit harsh, so I added / replied:

Rereading that with the clarity of a 24 hours to think about it, I realize I came off a little more aggressive than I intended. I'd hate for my real message to get lost there. I didn't mean to be accusatory or argumentative. Please accept my apology for the growly tone.

Here's what I should have written instead:

"I'm really thankful that you shared the insights you did concerning the assumptions you have in mind when designing powers for the game, Jesse. I'm glad you shared them, and they seem like a really good context for game design and GMing.
I'd be even happier if they were spelled out in a book, 'cause I think they'd be reach a larger audience that way and be especially helpful to casual gamers and new STs. Regardless of whether White Wolf publishes such things in a book, I'm grateful to have read them here at least. Thanks again for sharing what you did."

Update:

Jesse's response:

Pff. After developing Mage Revised, I can take it.

My point about bad players is, ultimately a line in a rulebook is not a fix-it for the root of the problem. It is handy for novice game groups, but if a group has bad players because they are so desperate for a game that they accept people who are argumentative, abusive, and exploitative, then the only thing that can stop it is a strong hand from the Storyteller. Players of that sort will always find exploits and justifications for their ridiculous actions. The Storyteller must ultimately be the one to say "No," whether it's because a rule supports his interpretation, or because he has decided that his authority is important for the sake of good game play, even if it goes against the published rules.

Yeah, I said it - sometimes the ST will make a ruling that goes against the rules, just to preserve the game. (Witness the many house rules of UO.)

It sucks to live somewhere with no good gaming, but sometimes you have to ask yourself "Is putting up with the grief of a dysfunctional group better than just not playing a game?" My buddy Brandon just returned from a small town in Ohio, where he was in school for several years. He didn't have any game groups there because he didn't fit in with or enjoy the styles of any of the people he met at the local campus game store. For him, the decision was no gaming over bad gaming. Sad, but true.

Wonky vs Broken

Nerd aside: That title kinda sounds like a lawsuit, doesn't it? Like Mr Wonky is suing The Broken Corporation...

• Wonkiness isn't the same thing as broken.
• Broken would be wonky taken to an extreme and likely giving someone an advantage.
• Plain vanilla wonky isn't nearly as bad as broken.
• In some ways, I find wonky more annoying, 'cause it bugs you but isn't worth changing a bunch of things to fix.

In Context: Scion is generally wonky, but only certain specific elements of it are genuinely broken.

Analyzing Movies

This started over at repeated expletives. I was blabbing about classic Bond films (and how they hadn't stood the test of time so well) and a couple gaming-related thoughts crossed my mind.

Thought #1: Action films are full of wandering monsters, yet I shy away from them in-game. There's tons of scenes in film history that have only the slightest tangential connection to the plot. If kept short, these provide spice and action in an otherwise slow moment. But if they run long, you start asking yourself "why is this happening?" I don't use In Media Res often enough - it's a great tool to get your game started.

Thought #2: Bond always has the right tool for the job. Q gives him only the devices he'll need for the mission. RPGs tend to a polar-opposite dynamic: the PCs pour over equipment lists, or power lists, and tend to have lots of stuff they don't need in any given session. Is there a way around that? You could just give the PCs the gieger-counter shoes, laser wristwatch, and pants made from jelly that will solve exactly the encounters planned for the game. Such a solution would, however, just feel like railroading in an RPG. Why does it work in the movies?

Thought #3: In general, I need to relax a little more as a GM. I work really hard to prevent plotholes and maintain verisimilitude. Recently, I've noticed that I do a better job of that than all the 007 movies, the latest Indiana Jones film, Buffy, Star Trek, and the new Battlestar Galactica. That's not just me being cocky. I put way too much time and effort into my games. Anyone who spent this amount of energy would get similar (some would get better) results. It's like that M Night Shyamalan quote about how any reasonably coordinated (ie: not painfully clumsy) individual in decent shape could play at the pro level if they were just given two years to really focus on their sport of choice. Same concept - time and practice is what gets results.

A, B, and/or C

In my ideal world, I'd have 3 different RPG groups every week, or at least biweekly. (They need better names than what follows, but at the time of writting the following in an email to a friend, I didn't want to spend a bunch of time brainstorming names, so letters were good enough.

• Group A would be a serious method-acting group, where the goal was to tell an ongoing narrative as artfully and entertainingly as possible.
• Group B would be a more freeform group, where we tried different things. Everyone would try to resist getting too attached to their characters, and in general take the game a little less seriously. That grants the freedom to experiment.
• Group C would be somebody else's campaign, so I could learn from sitting in a players chair, and seeing what did and didn't work for them.

I've got a pretty solid Group A up here, meeting nearly every week with long-term plotlines and character development. I've been mainly getting my B and C fix just once-a-year of late, at Gwen Con.

Getting to blow off some steam via slightly off-kilter D&D in Portland sounds like Group B Heaven.

Of course, nobody with a real life ever has the time for 3 gaming groups*, let alone the social dynamics of hanging in three circles. It almost has to be 3 different circles, too, as there's some danger if you have too much crossover between A and B. Either you end up taking B too seriously, or A gets disrupted by B's lighter/experimental influence. It seems there needs to be at least one player in each group that isn't in the other groups for it all to flow naturally without the streams ever getting crossed. Of course, some folks who do have (or make) the time for 2 or more groups just pick A or B (as fits their style) and focus on it to the exclusion of all else. I bet that's far more common than the A/B/C pattern I try to follow.

*: Then again, some would argue I don't have a real life.

Elegance and the Heart of RPGs

Got an email today from an old friend I hadn't talked to in ages. He recommended I look at Primetime Adventures and FATE (the later of which I'd read when a different friend recommended it).

In replying to him, I ran through an overview of RPGs, and it helped me to put recent developments of my tastes in gaming into words. Most of the following is quoted from our email exchange:

In general, the more simplistic the rules set, the better the game. Simple rules let you focus on the drama, the story, and the characters. Every moment spent thinking about rules just undermines that. For my tastes, RPGs are primarily an acting / storytelling medium, with just a touch of game involved to handle dramatic conflict. I suspect the trick is to simplify the heck out of the rules, boiling every action down to no more than 1 die roll, and a structure simple enough to never require looking anything up during the game.

• I agree that FATE reads really good, but I have yet to play it.
• Amber works, it's just plain solid provided the GMs ego never enters the picture.
• Dogs In The Vineyard seems to work, but I haven't played it enough. Really just tested it a tiny bit. We'll likely be using it for Firefly later this year.
• Universalis is awesome (though best as just a way to set up a game run in a slightly different system).
• FUDGE's only real flaw was that the 7 words they chose didn't have an order that all minds settle on - if they'd just used numbers 1 to 7 the game would demo better. As written, it trips people up on the first session.
  
• GUMSHOE strikes me as amazing for Mystery games.
• Continuum worked great once I "dumbed down" most of the complexity right out of the system and just focused on the complexity of the setting.
• d6 Star Wars was decent as long you weren't playing Jedi - trying to emulate the lightsaber battles of the movies just breaks it.
• With the exception of 3 sections that contradicted each-other, old WoD LARP actually functioned pretty well (provided your disbelief wasn't ruined by the Rock-Paper-Scissors aspect). I think it was at the cusp of having too many powers - a neonate game ran well, but an elder game was a few too many rules to expect the players to internalize.
  
• And I've played (and crafted) some homebrewed lite systems that work really well.
• 3.X D&D (and this pains me to say, since I grew up on D&D, and I have a couple buddies who work at Wizards) doesn't do enough to encourage good stories. It tries too hard to be a tactical combat system, and it has way too many fiddly bits. It can be a good game, but in order for it to consistently be a good roleplaying experience, you have to really abstract the rules down to nothing (or at least to True20). I'm hopeful that 4th Ed will fix some of that.

My friend said this:

You know, I'm starting to believe that RPGs really aren't fun at all, and anyone who thinks that they have had a fun RPG experience is remembering wrong. :)
...
there's been nothing that I WANT to do in an RPG that videogames don't do better than tabletop games. :)

I suspect he included smileys for fear that I would react violently and argue vociferously.

But in a lot of ways, he's right. He's absolutely correct that video games can (and often do) a better job of immersing you in environment than RPGs - vids have picture and sound, which for all the attempts at GMing a good description, just blow RPGs out of the water 9 scenes out of 10.

It's certainly easier to find a good video game than a good GM.

And as far as tactical challenges, those are certainly better handled by video games (or maybe a really streamlined miniatures game) than by RPGs. So, you've definitely got a point there.

The one thing I prefer about RPGs which I don't have much faith in technology improving on, is the opportunity to act. I love up-close improvisational drama. RPGs allow me to do that without having to make a big production of it.

The problem is that then games like 7th Sea and Scion make the process of running it such a chore that you might as well go join some big theatrical production. Same thing with LARPing once you break 20 players with any frequency. It's all just too much work, and the GM ends up spread too thin.

Fiddling with byzantine rules, hiding behind a screen, rolling tons of dice and adding up successes to compare against difficulty charts, all of that just undermines the things RPGs do well: getting your friends together to share in a joint story where every one gets to contribute to the plot and the drama and the characterizations.

So far, I have yet to see an online or video game that actually gives me a chance to genuinely act. None I've played allow me to (at least) improvise in largely-unlimited directions. If you know of one, please send me a link, 'cause it would almost certainly have to kick butt.

Extended Roll Nightmare

*: That raises a whole other issue, that of Extended Rolls.

Some RPGs are too vague. There's no answer offered to questions like "how fast can I run?"

Others are too specific, offering precise mechanical formula to derive speeds (and other minutia) in a way that results in there never being a contest because the character who's just one-point better always wins. These tend to suffer from one of two issues:

1. Disconnect from Drama / Disconnect from Reality: Difficulties are being set by formula, in a vacuum where the PCs stats aren't taken into account. Sometimes this results in a good plotline or obstacle idea being rendered insurmountable because the magic formulas don't perfectly match reality. Often this is a result of not enough (or too much) gradation in the stat range for a normal human. RPGs are at best an imperfect simulation, after all. As a result, it becomes very easy to improvise your campaign into a corner: If I say "the wall is made from bricks, and stands 50 feet high and 5 feet thick" it has a quantified difficulty to climb or topple, whose interaction with the PCs stats will be outside my control if I didn't do my homework first. Such a system encourages the GM to play "by the books" cause the players will notice if he veers to far afield.
2. Infinite Extended Rolls: The way around that is often presented as extended rolls. When I first encountered Extended Rolls, I thought they were nifty. It was a cute twist on dice mechanics. But it's very easy to go overboard. Case in point: Scion.

You knew I was about to criticize Scion, didn't you. While the above was a general rant about RPG mechanics and philosophy, the following is honed in on a single game, and in particular one system within it. I feel a tiny bit bad writing this. Conceptually, Scion rocks, but with every session I grow more dissatisfied with the mechanics. (With the exception of 2 strangely tense sessions, I really enjoy the setting and characters, so I intend to carry it through on my planned story-arc all the way to Legend 12 even if it hurts sometimes.)

There's a PC in my Scion game who's a bit of a weaponsmith. The game doesn't really offer any guidelines on how to handle that, especially pre-Godhood. The first weapon she made, I let it be a little too good - she got 11 successes, and since the best mortal weaponsmith couldn't score more than 10, I figured I'd let the dagger she made be damn good. Too good. It was quickly overshadowing the 3-dot Relic that was her primary weapon. I had to bump up full-fledged Relics a tad at Demigod in order to compensate.

Then I worked on that Hitori Hanzo system. This was an improvement in that it gave structure to what PCs could build, but it unleashed the ugliness that is Extended Rolls. The PC in question could make a 1-dot Sword in 8 to 16 hours and 1 to 2 rolls - that sounds just fine. She could also make a 5-dot Sword in about 72-88 hours of work, via 9 to 11 rolls. She literally can't fail, so there's no reason not to set her sights high. However, do we really want to just sit there rolling a two-handed dice pool 9 times when there's no drawback to failure? How boring. At that point, we might as well just say "you make a 5-dot relic every 80 hours, automatically". But if we do that, the PCs have a never-ending supply of beefy weaponry, and balance (between characters as well as PC vs NPC) becomes shaky.

And just in case anyone reading this doesn't know: an Extended Roll is really multiple sequential die rolls with their results added together. Typically it's used (along with a high difficulty) to represent lengthy processes, such as research, smithing, or warfare, abstracted out to a roll ever X days instead of fiddling constantly with daily minutia. The idea is that it occupies a middle-ground between "one roll summarizes your life's work" and "rolling once per combat round or discrete individual action". Often, though, these systems aren't aggressive enough. They either mitigate overall failure into non-existence, or they result in dozens of tedious rolls, or both.

So perhaps I could use the system in Scion: God. Maybe not. That system conveniently makes all Relics just involve 2 die rolls - one Intelligence, the other Dexterity. Planning the Relic, then following through. On the surface, it sounds great. But it has two problems.

1. The difficulties are 35 and 50, with no concise statement that it is or isn't and extended roll.
   If this is not an extended roll, it means that making even the simplest magic item requires 7 dots of Epic Intelligence and 9 dots of Epic Dexterity. She'll likely never be able to make a Relic on that system, as she lacks Arete and currently has no plans to ever buy the 9th dot of Dex. This doesn't fit well with the commonality of Relics in the setting - clearly it can't be that major of an ordeal to make a Relic, or else a PC shouldn't be eligible for 15+ of them in the course of attaining Godhood.
   If it is an extended roll, then, per the Hitori Hanzo paragraph, she can currently make a Relic if she just rolls about 7 times. Not only would that have the aforementioned balance problems, it contradicts the notion of Hephasteus and the Cyclopes making all the Greek items for the other gods.
2. No power-level differentiation. A 1-dot Relic has the same difficulties as a 5-dot Relic. The material components are the same unless the later provides access to multiple purviews. In fact, Purviews seem to be the only thing the author of page 79 of Scion: God deemed worthy of specifically addressing or restricting, despite there being things (speed reductions and unique powers) that are rather more directly potent than simply granting Purview access.

So, it's time to look at that drawing board again. I need a Scion Relicsmithing system that:

• Involves no more than 2 or 3 rolls per Relic.
  
• Differentiates between Relic powers.
• Has a chance of failure, especially if you ambitiously overstep your talent.
• Isn't restricted to being used by min-maxed forge gods. (Heph & company can make really good Relics, but he, Weyland, and the 'Clops aren't the only Relic makers in the universe. Or at least, they shouldn't be.) Such Gods should merely be better at it, being faster, or somewhat less prone to failure, or perhaps capable of making overall more impressive items.
  

Legend, Willpower, Avatar, and Titan

Trying to post something at the Scion Forum today, I nearly ran afoul of trying to distinguish temporary Legend points from permanent Legend rating.

• A character, with a Legend rating of X, has X-squared temporary Legend points.
• Many powers grant Legend, and others charge Legend. In most cases this means points, but there are a few things that temporarily boost Legend rating instead.
• However, it's terribly easy to accidentally not specify "points" or "rating" and those vague moments can get a little painful or confusing sometimes.

A similar problem sometimes occurs with Willpower.

• There are things (mostly powers) that trigger based on permanent Willpower rating.
• Other things (powers again, but also non-power mechanics) care about temporary Willpower points.
• Distinguishing between the two can sometimes be tricky.

Then there's the word Avatar, which can mean:

1. The top Boon of a Purview - the ultimate level of a field of godly power. (Note: sometimes players and forumites refer to the Ultimate epics as Avatars, but technically this is incorrect)
   
2. A character currently using such a Boon.
3. A birthright that allows a god to manifest with lower Legend (rating) for fewer Legend (points).
4. The sentient embodiment of one of the Titans, who can have 2 out of 3 of the above.
5. The words standard english-language meaning gets used occassionally, which in Scion would be roughly the earthly manifestation of a god, regardless of whether or not they used the birthright to manifest it, and regardless of whether they have and ultimate boons (in other words, it's still their avatar regardless of whether they have Avatar or any Avatars).
6. The physical body manifested from ichor by a god to be their earthly manifestation.
   

And, of course, the word Titan has similar issues. It can be:

• The world-sized embodiment of a primal concept. (Also sometimes known as a Greater Titan)
• Any of the many simultaneous Avatars (primarily 4th meaning, but also potentially the 1st, 2nd and 5th) of a Greater Titan.
• It's mythology-specific meaning, the primal beings from which the greco-roman gods were birthed. These would be just the Greco-Roman Avatars of the Greater Titans: Cronus, Ouranos, Gaia, etc. This is rarely used by the books, but it's hard to avoid when discussing the myths and characters that inspired the game.
  

---

Wouldn't all of the above be easier if they'd just used a thesaurus?

• Legend Rating could have determined "Myth Points".
• Willpower Rating could have associated temporary "Ego Points".
• "Primals", of which greco "Titans" are but a subgroup, could have "Avatars" (4th meaning only). Gods would instead have "Manifestations", with the option of purchasing the "Mortal Coil" (or perhaps even "Humility"?) birthright.
• The apex of Powers could be "Ultimate Boons" to compliment the games existing Ultimate Epics, though perhaps "Ultimates" and "Pinnacles" would preserve a distinction between them.

I think choosing to use multiple different terms would strengthen the game and remove much of the ambiguity and confusion of the rules. I fail to see what possible advantage all these duplicate terms and alternate meanings have. Does anyone have insight into why such decisions were not made?