3d6 sucks in Risus

Following a really rocking' game of Risus Primeval last night, some discussion came up concerning the dice mechanics. This prompted me to run some numbers this morning. Oh, the numbers I crunched. My brain is sore, and it mostly just confirmed my suspicions, but at least now I can actually make non-anecdotal arguments to defend my position concerning the character generation system.

In Risus, a character typically starts with 10 dice to be divided amongst their skills (known as clichés), with a limit that no skill may start with more than 4 dice.  So, you see a lot of 4/4/2 or 4/3/3 builds, spotted by the infrequent oddball builds like 4/2/2/2 or 4/3/2/1 or even 3/3/2/2. I'm here to tell you that anything other than 4/4/2 sucks horribly, and should be avoided at all costs.

Risus features two types of rolls. Generic rolls vs a static target number to see if you succeed at some standard task, and then there's combat. 

Let's look at the non-combat rolls first.

According to the rules, rolls have a difficulty of 5, 10, 15, 20 or 30 (20 or 30 just sounds crazy to me, given that the hard-cap for a PC whose maxed out a trait is 4 dice at character creation and 6 dice after much XP spending).

Difficulty 10 is meant for things that should be challenging for a professional, and 15 is for "really inventive or tricky stunts".   Then the GM is vaguely instructed to sometimes lower this if a given cliche is particularly appropriate, but only a handful of examples are provided and no real advice on adjudicating it. In my experience, this means most GMs don't really adjust the numbers much. Even if they do, as a player reading the rules you feel really motivated to get at least 3 dice in anything you ever want to do, because the rules state that 3 dice represents professional-level skill. Sounds like you want 3 dice, right?

Wrong. Here's the first wrinkle. Most GM's never have you roll against the lowest difficulty, which is specifically 5 in Risus. Someone at the table is going to have 4 dice in something (in fact, in my experience, nearly every PC has 4 dice in something) pertinent to the roll. The first time the GM sets a "5" difficulty, people grab their 4 dice and someone asks "why are we even rolling this?"  There's a social pressure then to not roll vs difficulty 5 on 4 dice, as it just feels too silly. Most GMs pretty much default to difficulty 10 for average tasks worth dicing for, because it  feels fair regardless of whether you got 3 or 4 dice to roll, and is a lot more interesting than difficulty 5.   Perhaps some other number would be better, but 10 is nice and round, it shows up in the rules, and really who wants to deal with a sliding scale of improvised values in the middle of a fight?

So now 10 is your routine average difficulty, even though that's not really what the rules say.

• Chance of succeeding at difficulty 10 on 3d6: 63%
• Chance of succeeding at difficulty 10 on 4d6: 90%

So 4d6 is a good deal better than 3d6 at routine standard tasks, but 3d6 is still plenty respectable. 3d6 feels professional.

Of course, in a typical gaming scenario, not everything is routine. GM's frequently want to make something a little tougher than average. Players also frequently come up with crazy ideas, and it's very normal for the GM to respond to that by raising the difficulty up one step. Officially, one step up in difficulty in Risus is a 15.  But as it turns out, a 15 is terribly hard to score on 3d6:

• Chance of succeeding at difficulty 15 on 3d6: 9%
• Chance of succeeding at difficulty 15 on 4d6: 44%

So the 4d6 character is still reasonably proficient, but about half as likely to succeed as they were on a difficulty 10 challenge. Most GMs (and most players who have a 4-die stat) could live with that.

The PC rolling 3d6 however, is nearly guaranteed to fail at that test that's just 1 difficulty level above "normal".  Already 3d6 is starting to suck, and we haven't even gotten to our first fight scene.

If the GM realized how low the odds were on getting that 15, they probably wouldn't use it as a difficulty very often.  Chances are the GM hasn't realized how hard the 15 will be. Most people aren't that good at intuiting actual odds, that's how casino's make money after all. We remember the big successes more than the day-to-day failures. While gamers are often more math-savvy than the general public, we've all been kind of brainwashed by years of D&D optional character generation rules teaching us that a 15 stat isn't all that unusual.  Don't believe it.



Combat:
Combat in Risus has a somewhat infamous death spiral. If you fail a roll, your dice pool shrinks for the rest of the fight.  Combat uses contested rolls, so each round one side of the fight grows weaker, while the other maintains their strength.  It's in such a combat that 3d6 clichés really become a liability.

Two hypothetical characters (or players), Alison and Brad, are about to have a duel.  Alison has a relevant cliche rated at 4 dice. Bradley's cliche is only 3 dice. What are the possible outcomes of the first round? Most of us would correctly deduce that Alison's got better than even odds, but how much better?

Alison's 4 dice are in fact 4 times more likely than Brad's three to win the first round of the fight. I ran the numbers on it this morning, and was a little surprised just how dominating that extra die is.  Here's the results of round one:

• 75%: Alison (with 4 dice) rolls higher than Brad. Brad drops to 2 dice next round.
• 19%: Brad (with 3 dice) rolls higher than Alison. Alison drops to 3 dice next round.
• 6%: The rolls are tied.

Risus doesn't actually address what happens when there's ties on a combat round, so the GM is left to figure out what to do on the ties. Most GMs have both sides reroll, either as a new round or as just a second roll in what is technically the same combat round. If that's the case, the 6% is replaced by:

• 4.5%: The rolls tie initially. The GM calls for a reroll, and Alison wins it.
• 1%:  The rolls tie initially. There's a reroll, and Brad wins it.
• Half a percent: This round of combat takes 3 or more rolls to resolve. It's likely Alison wins eventually.

I've seen a few GMs try other tie-breakers to avoid delays from rare consecutive ties. Usually these tie breakers are either "highest stat wins", or "highest single die wins". Either of those basically make the 6% tie chance into another case of Alison's 4-die stat delivering a win. 

So there's about an 80-20 split in favor of the 4-die character. And that's just round one, where the difference in stats is just 1 die.

Round two now deals one of two situations.

It's 80% likely that Alison won the first round, and is still rolling her 4d6 against Brad's now weakened 2d6.  Her odds of winning the second round have just shot up to 96%.  Brad's hosed.

The other 20% of the time, Brad will have gotten lucky and won the first round. Alison's 4-dice are knocked down to 3. That means both characters are rolling 3 dice. Even though Alison lost once, she's still got a 50-50 shot at winning the second round. If she does, she's retaken the advantage.

So a true break-out of the full results of the 4-dice vs 3-dice fight are basically thus:

• 80%: Alison trounces Brad without ever taking a hit.
• 10%: Alison takes an unlucky early "wound", but still manages to win the conflict.
• 10%: Brad defies the odds and comes out the victor.

And that's assuming that Alison only has the one 4-die skill.  If Alison's build is 4/4/2 vs Brad's build of 3/3/2/2, she can essentially soak up one bad roll without it diminishing her attack strength.

Even if Brad's got the second-best build, 4/3/3, he's still likely to come up short in a fight.  Let's see how that 4/4/2 vs 4/3/3 conflict plays out over several rounds of combat.

Rounnd 1: Alison with 4/4/2 vs Brad with 4/3/3. Both characters roll 4 dice.
50% A wins round 1: Rnd 2 is A4/4/2 vs B3/3/3. A has advantage.
50% B wins round 1: Rnd 2 is A4/3/2 vs B 4/3/3. Even dice next round.

Round 2: Number of dice adjusted by who won round 1.
40%: A wins rnds 1 & 2. Rnd 3: A4/4/2 vs B 3/3/2. A has advantage.
10%: A wins 1, B wins 2. Rnd 3: A4/3/2 vs B3/3/3. A has advantage
25%: B wins rnd 1, A wins rnd 2. Rnd 3: A4/3/2 vs B3/3/3. A has advantage.
25%: B wins rnds 1 & 2. Rnd 3: A3/3/2 vs B4/3/3. B has advantage.

Round 3:
32%: A wins all three rounds. Rnd 4: A4/4/2 vs B3/2/2 A has advantage
8%: A wins 1 & 2. B gets lucky on round 3. Rnd 4: A4/3/2 vs B3/3/2. A has advantage.
8%: A wins rounds 1 and 3. B wins 2 Rnd4: A4/3/2 vs B3/3/2. A has advantage.
2% A wins rnd 1. B wins rounds 2 and 3. Rnd 4: A3/3/2 vs B3/3/3.  Even dice, but breaking in B's favor.
20%: B wins 1. A wins rnds 2 & 3. Rnd 4: A4/3/2 vs B 3/3/2. A has advantage.
5%: B wins rnds 1 & 3. A wins rnd 2 only. Rnd 4: A3/3/2 vs B4/3/2. B has advantage.
5%: B wins rnds 1&2. A wins rnd 3 only..Rnd4: A3/3/2 vs B3/3/3. Even dice, but breaking in B's favor.
20% B wins all 3 rounds. Rnd 4: A3/2/2 vs B4/3/3. B has advantage.

So at the end of three rounds:

• There's a 68% chance that Alison (who started with 4/4/2 stats) has a strong advantage of being able to roll 1 more die than Brad can.
• There's a 25% chance that Brad (who started with 4/3/3 stats) has a strong advantage of being able to roll one more die than Alison can.
• There's a 7% chance that they're rolling the same number of dice next round, but that Brad has a minor long-term advantage that may allow him to outlast Alison.

Even if we count Brad's long-term advantage as being as potent as rolling an extra die immediately (which it's probably not), that still means the 4/4/2 build as having twice the chance of the 4/3/3 build at winning a protracted battle.

Just how big of a deal this advantage ends up being has a lot to do with the GM, and what the stats are of the challenges they throw at the players. PC healing rates are totally a matter of GM Fiat in Risus.

Even with a very generous GM who hands out free heals after every conflict and doesn't put you up against NPCs with lots of dice or back-up stats, there's still never a situation where you'll regret a 4/4/2 build. Some GMs might be easy enough you don't _need_ to go 4/4/2, but there's never a downside to doing it. Risus' clichés are so open-ended (you can use "hairdresser" in combat), and the "penalty" for using an inappropriate skills is so unthreatening (it's actually an advantage), that you should have no trouble coming up with just two big cliches that cover everything you really want the character to do and a minor 2-die stat on the side just for flavor.

The basic rules give no advice on how to handle the implications of the math behind rolls, nor does it give any good advice on how to stat out NPCs. Heck, one of examples in the rulebook casually throws out a horde of rats that roll 7 dice, with not even the slightest mention of the fact that 7-die horde is a TPK waiting to happen.  I just spent this huge article talking about how much better 4 dice is than 3, and I assure you 7 dice would be a damn spot better than that.

A few other numbers that may be useful as data points:

4 dice beats 3 dice 80% of the time.
4 dice beats 2 dice 96% of the time.
4 dice beats 1 die 99% of the time.
3 dice beats 2 dice 90% of the time.
2 dice beats 1 die 90% of the time. 

The Other End Of The Microscope

I've played four games of Microscope so far. After this most recent session (admittedly, about a month ago), I feel like I've learned a bit about how to get the most out of the game. Sadly, in order to learn and improve, we had to fall over a few times.

I'll start with nutshell summaries of the four games, in order of when I played them:

1. Alternate History / Steampunk: Leonardo da Vinci's craziest inventions all work, which leads to floating Italian city-states ruling the world.
2. Science Fiction: The trials and social upheavals of a generation ship on it's centuries-long voyage to a new eden.
3. Urban Fantasy / Secret History: A conspiracy to protect the unwitting masses from their own imagination in a dark world where popular literary characters can sometimes spontaneously come to life.
4. Epic Fantasy: A "bigger-is-better" take on high fantasy with city-sized dragons, meddling gods, and the infamous 'Goarcs' (Goat-Orc Hybrids).

If I had to rate them in terms of enjoyment/fun/coolness, the literary urban fantasy world was the best, italian steampunk was a very close second, and the other two were tied for a distant third/fourth.

In the two games that didn't work as well, the players weren't really seeing eye-to-eye, and we were all over the map thematically. It just didn't come together as it should, which I'm thinking probably means our palette wasn't refined enough.

Good Palette, Bad Palette: Less Is More

(For those unfamiliar with Microscope: the palette is a list of thematic elements that the players nominate for inclusion or banning during a particular session of the game. The palette is constructed first, taking a couple minutes at the start of any game of Microscope.)

Not surprisingly, the best games are the ones where the setting was most clearly defined. Microscope really shines when the players are on the same page: riffing off each other's ideas, and reusing characters or concepts. As near as I can tell, there are two ways to achieve this:

• Alternate History (with a defined sub-genre and deviation point): A setting that looks like Earth, or like Earth until a particular event or time. This gives you a common well of ideas to draw from, and ensures everyone is picturing roughly the same images in their mind. The trick will only work if everyone has some grounding in the history, theme, or sub-genre you're proposing. Steampunk Renaissance (and the world that would evolve from it) was easy to grok, but a more obscure era or culture might not have worked so well.
• Really narrow palette: I believe you could make any setting work, provided the majority of the palette were "no" statements instead of "yes" statements. Confusion and vagueness are the enemy in Microscope, but too much freedom can likewise be disruptive. You want a couple of cool simple ideas to play with and explore. The game is at its best when you explore an idea and its ramifications thoroughly, and when individual characters or events get revisited and built upon. To quote an art teacher I once knew, "restrictions breed creativity". A large number of "yes" statements encourages people to just keep adding new eras ("periods" is the game-term, IIRC) and events that exist in isolation from the rest of the narrative, trying to shoe-horn in anything from the palette that hasn't yet been introduced. If you leave the field open for just about anything, you end up with an ugly mish-mash that doesn't hold together conceptually.  

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. In our epic-fantasy game, we had dragons, demons, gods, eldritch abominations, chimeras, kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, goat-orcs, elves, amazons, heroes, wizards, humans, and undead empire, and yes, even dinosaurs.  Most of those things made one or two appearances, and then were left by the wayside.

Early on, we had a notion that monsters would occur mostly as one-offs, the way they do in Greek myth, where there's one minotaur, one hydra, three gorgon sisters, etc. But that was expressed as a "yes" option in the palette, and it was followed up by another "yes" that we could also include races of monsters if we wanted. Which meant the number of races in the setting kept creeping up. You know how I said that there were orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, kobold, and goat-orcs in the setting? Want to know all the established facts about them? Curious what the difference was between a kobold and a goblin?  Here's all we knew:

• Orcs got a well-defined culture, especially for a one-shot. They had dinosaur-riding shamans early in the timeline, who were then overthrown by magic-hating orc-amazon heroines. If you were playing an orc, you had some backstory to play with and have opinions about.
• Goarcs were created by a wizard who magically crossbred goats and orcs. Some where centaurian, others were goat-headed orcs, and still others were a random mix of goat and orc parts.
• Humans were also made by wizards, not gods. In an inversion of an established fantasy trope, humanity was created by breeding orcs and elves.
• Kobolds had big families with lots of children.

That's it. Nothing else was defined about these 5 supposedly different species. There was a goblin army, and a hobgoblin army, at two different wars in the same period, but we never got a description of them. There was even a scene where one player was a goblin and another was a kobold, and one of the two players didn't realize they weren't the same species till the scene was over. Other than orcs, they were all effectively interchangeable. 

An aside about Goat-Orcs: Alas, the Goarcs were introduced too late in the game to get used. We all responded to the concept, but they didn't get proposed until probably half and hour before we folks had to start heading out to their buses. Had the Goarcs shown up 2 hours earlier in the night, they would have defined the game. If we'd had Goarcs early on, I doubt anyone would have bothered with Goblins, Hobgoblins, Kobolds, or other generic fantasy races.
I fully expect that Goarcs will show up in other games we run, and not just Microscope, either.  I may just need to write a Goarc RPG.

What's the point of having all these races if you don't develop them? At least in D&D, you've got game mechanics and illustrations to differentiate them. In microscope, we had nothing. If the player needed a threat, plot device, or faction for a new scene or event, they'd just name-drop a generic fantasy monster race and leave it at that. Since we're not a D&D group at all, I'm guessing we had different people picturing different editions (and games) versions of these monsters, at least to the extent that they were being pictured at all. Mostly they were a blur in the background.

I'm going to contrast this with the gods. If there's one thing we did right on the palette of that epic-fantasy game, it was Peter's awesome restriction of "no" to there being more than 5 gods. I should note that 5 was also the number of players. This restriction ensured that people wouldn't just throw out gods casually, or mix pantheons. All of the gods that showed up were unique creations. You'd give them a cool name, a description, and a large purview / dominion (like "Goddess of Ice, Suffering, and Childbirth") that suggested even more about them. Only 3 of the 5 possible gods entered the narrative, but the two that got introduced early on showed up again and again. They rocked.

I strongly suspect that similar limitations being applied to other areas would have worked wonders for this game. If there was a limit of roughly the same number of fantasy species as there were players, then we would have reused species instead of paying lipservice to them. If wizards were defined individuals, not just a race or profession, we might have ended up with them being a bit more flavorful.

The more you reuse something, the more definition it gets. Confusion and vagueness are the enemy in Microscope. The whole point of the system is to keep narrowing in and discovering new things about what you've already looked at from a far. When allowed limitless freedom and left to their gut-instincts on a blank canvas, we end up just throwing around cliches, tropes and buzzwords, doing the same old thing we always have. When you have a limited palette is when the really interesting revelations come up.

Black Crusade / Broken Chains / Free RPG Day

This past Saturday was Free RPG Day, and my local game store asked me to run a demo in their store of one of the free modules they'd be giving away. Sounded like fun, so I signed up to run the introductory scenario "Broken Chains" for the upcoming "Black Crusade" RPG.

Before I dive in to what I thought of Broken Chains and Black Crusade, I'd like to take a moment to thank Greenlake Games. They were really invested in the whole Free RPG Day concept. They had tons of product to give away, and packed gaming tables into every square foot of space they had available. They were especially nice to us GMs. I walked home with a stack of freebie adventures, a commemorative d6, and a coupon for 25% off my next purchase and a free Iron Die. Very cool of them.

Now on to Broken Chains and Black Crusade...  

• SPOILER WARNING - Plot points of the adventure (as well as mechanics of the game) are discussed below. Read at your own risk.

Black Crusade is the next iteration of the ongoing Warhammer 40k RPG. This version is from the point-of-view of renegades of Chaos. 40k has always had a thing for anti-heroes. One of the major conceits of the setting is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" perspective, where the agents of the Emperor do horrible things in the name of saving mankind from itself. Black Crusade focuses more closely on that aspect of the setting, by having the players take on the role of the legions of Chaos. The PCs in this game are the very demon-worshiping psychic psychotic heretics the rest of the game line is trying to save humanity from.

Black Crusade uses mechanics adapted from Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and Deathwatch (the three other 40k RPGs currently in print), which in turn use mechanics adapted from the 2nd Edition of the Warhammer Fantasy RPG. Now, personally, I would have preferred it had it used 3rd Ed Warhammer's rules, because I love the dice and it plays fast and easy. 2nd Ed is a bit clunkier and old-school-ier, and not nearly as familiar to me these days. 2nd Ed is grittier, but certainly not easier.

The demo version reduced the mechanical complexity a little in various places, and I very intentionally played fast and light with the system myself. I cheated the initiative system a little, skimped on the die modifiers, and kept the combats short. Several of my players were clearly interested in taking it the other direction, however, and would have been happy to use the full system with all of it's many combat modifiers and special actions. In retrospect, I wish I'd anticipated that and spent some time refamiliarizing myself with the options available to them, as it may have enhanced the gaming experience for more than half the table. That said, I think everyone had fun, and at the end of the night I got thanks and hand shakes from strangers, so I don't think it bombed by any stretch of the imagination.

It's worth noting that this is a very lethal system. We actually only ended up with 1 PC getting hit at all during the game, but despite his thick Space Marine armour and his genetically uplifted Toughness stat, that single hit ate up about 80% of his hit points. Most of the PCs would have died from that blow, and it came as a surprise attack from ambush so it's not like anyone could really avoid it.

This brings up a few related issues I have with the game system.

I'm not certain the game concept is particularly well-suited to the high lethality nature of the mechanics. One can argue that in Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader, much of the crux of the game is in avoiding gun battles. It's a dark, deadly world and the PCs should try to manipulate situations so that they don't end up fighting except when they have a strong advantage (or no other options). They've got the authority and power to push people around a bit, and should be engaging in as many social conflicts as physical ones. Death Watch (the space-marine version of the 40k RPG) certainly features less talking and more action, but the PCs are compensated with power armor, heavy weapons, and redundant bio-engineered organs. Black Crusade features a mix of PC types - armoured Chaos Marines, wild demon-possessed Psykers, and social-oriented Apostate Heretics.  The gap between the combat-focused and social-focused PCs is pretty wide, and quite quickly lethal. As renegades, you lack the support and authority to leverage conflicts away from combat. And if the party has even one Blood-God-worshiping berserker in its ranks, the squishier characters aren't gonna have much luck avoiding fights.

The adventure did include some special threats intended to challenge the parties heavy-hitters, but as mentioned above my first die roll of such nearly vaporized the toughest PC. There's a steep curve to figuring out system balance and encounter design given this PC mix, and any mis-step is likely to result in quick character turn-over. So while I appreciate that some efforts were taken to address this in the adventure, I really found the system far too lethal and unforgiving for my tastes. What's more, there just wasn't any justification within the adventure for including the non-beefy PCs. 3 out of 6 characters were geared for combat, and 3 out of 6 were decidely not. Of those 3 non-combatants, only 1 really ever had anything to do in the adventure as written, and the other two completely lacked a moment to shine.

Now it may be that that particular gripe is well addressed and balanced in the main rulebook. I'm not sure how, given what I saw in the Broken Chains intro adventure, but it's possible. I imagine doing so would probably take some high-end social and support powers, but such powers just weren't evidenced in the sample characters provided with the adventure. The closest I saw in this adventure was a character who had the ability to add +1 degree of success to all her successful social rolls. This sounds impressive on some abstract level, but as near as I could tell it did nothing in the adventure. There really wasn't any point in the scenario where you needed a particular level of social success, and the abbreviated start-up rules didn't offer any suggestions of what the in-character difference was, either. The difficulty chart was of no help, either, merely telling me that a "challenging" roll was +0 and a "very difficult" social roll was at -30.

This was further complicated by environmental factors around the first likely scene in the scenario where a social roll was going to be of use. The PCs wake up in a derelict spaceship that's been drifting for generations; most of the people they meet are half-mad cannibals who attack on sight. The first NPC they meet who actually has any clues to what's going on is down in the bilges. He lives in the sewers of the ship, hip-deep in noxious sludge and dedicated to the God of Plagues. My players looked at the entry point to his lair, and the three socially-competent characters decided to wait outside. The  combat-specialist PCs, being Marines, were equipped with full environmental suites in their power armour. So the three beefy kill-happy PCs marched into the muck, and engaged in a "don't ask, just kill" policy. The NPC with all the info is non-human, disgusting, murderous,  and yet a push-over that "in no way is supposed to be a challenging fight". The PCs got the thing they new they needed from him and ripped him apart (long before any mention could be made of him knowing roughly what had happened on the ship in past 200 years and who had woken them from suspended animation or why).

Even had the PCs tried to get info out of him, a lucky Intimidation roll would have done it just fine, so again the Marine characters are all you really need. This is, sadly, a recurring theme of the adventure. I guess you need the fallen Tech Priest character for the first scene or two as well, but once the PCs have all their equipment back (they start unarmed), everything after that can be solved with nothing but brute force. Given this as the "introduction" to the game, I don't have a lot of faith that the finished product will feature mechanics or advice intended to make the squishy human / social characters viable.

For that matter, I gotta say, I don't feel this adventure was a particularly good introduction to the game. Don't get me wrong, I actually think it's great way to start a campaign, just lousy at it's role as a one-shot introduction to the setting.

Here's the plot: The PCs wake up from suspended animation in a prison ship, having missed the riot by 200 years. They have to battle generations of prion-infected cannibal savages, a couple of creepy demons, automated defense systems gone haywire, and eventually the team of Inquisitors who were also woke up about the same time as themselves at the opposite end of the ship. There's some mystery stuff going on in the background, but if you don't have time to explore the vessel in its entirety, that won't really matter. Eventually, the PCs make it to the bridge and battle the Inquisitor. Assuming they win, they can pilot the ship to the Screaming Vortex (or some other Renegade gathering) and gain a buttload of Infamy Points for "capturing" a mile-long Imperial ship. It's a great place to start a campaign, and early success will reward the players with a huge creepy ghost ship that can serve as a long-term plot device or setting. Other than a lack of balance for the squishy humans, it sounds and plays great.

Problem is, it gives you absolutely no feel for what the session of Black Crusade is likely to be like. I imagine very few sessions will start with the PCs waking up in a prison. The likely enemies of the PCs, Imperial troopers and citizens, are almost absent from the scenario. Part of the charm of Black Crusade is presumably going to be that you get to play the rebels and renegades, but that streak of rebellion was almost entirely non-existent in this scenario. It didn't feel like you were playing the "bad guys" either - every NPC they met was more depraved and less civilized than even the PC berserker.  There are two demons in the scenario, but no appreciable word count is spent on any sort of Faustian deals that would have illustrated that the "heroes" of this adventure are supposedly in bed with Chaos.

So there was lots of genericly 40k-ish theme and flavor, but nothing about the Broken Chains adventure made it feel particularly "Black Crusade"-ish. While reading (and later GMing) this adventure, the thought that crossed my mind was that everything but the first and last scenes could have been run identically for a group of loyalist Imperial PCs in Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader. Have the PCs be Inquistor Crane and his Acolytes, and make the encounter at the end be against a group of Chaos Marines who escaped from the hold, and everything in-between could be identical. In fact, I kind of suspect this adventure was first written (or at least brainstormed) as Dark Heresy scenario, and then converted to Black Crusade as an afterthought when it was realized that the marketing opportunity known as Free RPG Day would fall just a month or so before the Black Crusade release date.

I still enjoyed it (a lot, actually), but I don't feel it gave me any particular insight into what a typical session (or campaign) of Black Crusade will be like. Which means that as an introductory adventure to the upcoming game, it probably fails. As a generic starter-seed for a slightly atypical campaign of any of the four 40k RPGs, though, it's a success. Enough of a success, actually, that I regret running it as a one-shot. I kinda wish I'd hand-picked a play group and used a slightly expanded and modified version to start up a campaign of something. In our one-shot, we didn't get anywhere near the end of the adventure, but we did see enough of the ship that I couldn't reuse the concepts in another campaign without having to dream up a whole new ship and scenario. Whatch ya gonna do?

Character Builds and Differentiation in Remember Tomorrow

   In yesterday's post I discussed our recent play of Remember Tomorrow, a rules-light cyberpunk-genre RPG.  I found it entertaining, but structurally a little odd. I'm tempted to give it another try, to see if the counter-intuitive stuff would shake itself out with a bit more experience.  Before doing so, though, I thought I'd take a peak at the math behind the mechanics of the game.

   Specifically, I was curious how the various character creation options stacked up against one another. In Remember Tomorrow (hereafter shortened to RT), you have three character attributes: Ready, Willing, and Able. These stats are effectively interchangeable, as every time a conflict comes up you roll 3 dice and assign them after the roll each to a different attribute. At character creation you split 12 points between the three stats, with no attribute being above 8 or below 1. At first blush, it seemed obvious to me that a stat block of 8 3 1 was better than a block of 4 4 4... but would the math actually support that gut reaction? Is there in fact one character build that outperforms the others?

   I made a list of all the possible stat combinations for a starting character (8 3 1, 8 2 2, 7 4 1, 7 3 2, 6 5 1, 6 4 2, 6 3 3, 5 5 2, 5 4 3, and 4 4 4) and ran some computations on success rates and probability. Not surprisingly, the versions with the highest number (and beyond that, the greatest spread of values overall) have higher chances of scoring a single success. 831 gets a successful roll 87.4% of the time, where as 4 4 4 only succeeds 78.4%. Honestly though, that variance in performance was a little less than I was expecting. Ultimately, this is a system that says "yes" more than it does "no", and the odds are in your favor for getting a successful roll no matter what your initial stats are.

   Of course, rolls in RT are not simple binary pass/fail rolls. Most are opposed rolls, and even the times where your roll isn't being compared to someone else's there's still the benefit of additional outcomes scored for a high margin of success. That's where 4 4 4 makes up for its initial obvious shortcomings. Stats of 8 3 1 will only get a triple success in 2.4% of all rolls, but stats of 4 4 4 will result in the triple success 6.4% of the time. While that seems like a small difference, in terms of impact on your average roll, it perfectly makes up for the increased chance of a single success. The mean roll is 1.2 successes (assuming no Edge dice or P-Cons) for all the possible character builds. There's none that is clearly better than the others. Those that are less likely to fail are also less likely to score big.

   So what's the best build? That depends on what you're after.  If you're expecting to make a lot of contested rolls, then the flatter distribution of stats will be of benefit, as it results in more chances of getting a triple success. So those who play very aggressively and antagonistically will be best served by starting stats of 4 4 4.  If, on the other hand, you're instead planning on playing a little more cautiously, relying on deals (and your initial introduction) to get early rewards without conflict, then you're better off with an 8 and using early successes to bump up your lower stats.  Either way, the distinctions are pretty minimal, with a particular build being only very slightly better than any other for certain purposes. So don't sweat it.

   Note however that having a 1 can be dangerous if you expect other players at your table to be very aggressive with Factions. If the notion of having to make a new PC mid-session is very unappealing to you, you might want to avoid having any 1's out of the gate. Personally, I'm leaning towards an 8 2 2 build and an early Deal scene, but it's hard to argue conclusively for any particular build when all the options are so balanced.

   At this point I'll just observe that yes, I'm aware of the vaguely munchkinly weirdness in doing a mathematical analysis of character builds for a rules-light highly-narrative game where one can swap PCs mid-session. I'll even grant that it's sort of missing the point of the system. But I wanted to know if the rules even worked mathematically, and I was pleased to discover they are indeed quite balanced...

   ...almost too balanced, honestly, since character differentiation just doesn't happen mechanically. Ready, Willing, and Able are all rolled for every situation. There's only one in-game factor that favors a particular attribute, and as long as you roll low (good) at least twice per episode, you can all but ignore it. The description of the attributes has only very shallow cosmetic impact (if any) on narrating your results. These facts combine to make all characters feel pretty much identical during the game. There is no concept of "character niche" in this game, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. That one character can be "Armed" with a mono-katana and another be "Armed" with the truth is on one level extremely cool, but also a little sad in that it sort of makes the flavorful stuff (including the tech and brand charts) less meaningful. The non-traditional structure of the game probably circumvents the usual troubles of character overlap, since the PCs will be operating mostly alone or in conflict, not in concert. As long as the fiction / narration is solid, this potential "problem" should be easy to work around.

Attributes	0 Successes	Some Level of Success	Exactly 1 Success	Exactly 2 Successes	Exactly 3 Successes
8 3 1	12.6%	87.4%	57.2%	27.8%	2.4%
8 2 2	12.8%	87.2%	57.6%	26.4%	3.2%
7 4 1	16.2%	83.8%	50.4%	30.60%	2.8%
7 3 2	16.8%	83.2%	50.6%	28.4%	4.2%
6 5 1	18.0%	82.0%	47.00%	32.0%	3.0%
6 4 2	19.2%	80.8%	46.4%	29.6%	4.8%
6 3 3	19.6%	80.4%	46.2%	28.8%	5.4%
5 5 2	20.0%	80.0%	45.0%	30.0%	5.0%
5 4 3	21.0%	79.0%	44.0%	29.0%	6.0%
4 4 4	21.6%	78.4%	43.2%	28.8%	6.4%

May the Blackbird be with you

Last night I played in a one-shot called "New Hope" that was sort of set in the Star Wars Universe, and used mechanics somewhat based on the indy RPG "Lady Blackbird".

It was set several years after Return of the Jedi, and the New Republic was every bit as as nasty as the Empire had ever been. Everything you recall from the movies was just Republican propaganda. It was an interesting twist on the Star Wars setting as seen through the perspective of The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." It was a good game and plenty fun, but could probably have used a stronger opening scene. The GM vaguely explained the situation, but since it's a game where the Players have a lot of narrative power, he left most of the details fuzzy at first. He was trying to leave us free to take things in whatever direction we wanted, but as a result, we had a really slow start. I think if he'd narrated the opening situation more forcefully and given us a memorable villain to really hate, the first hour of the game would have been a lot better.

The rules were really interesting. They were derived from or inspired by Lady Blackbird, which is an indy game I was ignorant of until last night. I downloaded it this morning and took a peek through it, and I can tell that New Hope customized and built on it quite a bit. Overall, I think the changes were good ones. That said, I kind of felt like the GM's backlash dice pools were just a little too small. I think they could stand to range from 5 to 9 instead of 4 to 8. It's hard to say for certain, because we had some really lucky rolls on the players part. I just think the game would have been in it's best possible light, if the PCs had taken 25% more damage across the board and had to start worrying about resources and situations. I was the only one really hurt badly during the game, and that was only because I took some very big risks and painted a target on myself. I was so intrigued by the damage system I intentionally left myself open to suffer more of it.

My favorite part of the rules were definitely the "hit points"-like mechanism, which were customized to each character and really made you agonize over damage. You had three rows of labeled boxes. The first row was more like traditional HP, or like a World of Darkness health boxes, in that they were labeled "Hurt", "Wounded", "Crippled" and "Dead" or something to that effect. Below that was a row that had to do with our social status and the level of pursuit, so they were "Recognized", "Wanted", "Hunted" and "Infamous", I think. Then the fourth row were customized to each PC. My character had a wife and family - their health and safety were 5 of my 6 boxes in the third section. When you take damage, it's usually 1 or two points, and you get to apply them to any empty box that seems appropriate. So in a bar-fight I'd probably take the damage as physical damage in the top row, but I might instead take it in the second row and narrate that I was now a wanted man for having killed the person I was struggling with. If my family was present during a conflict, I might knock boxes off of them and say they were captured or harmed in the battle. One of the other characters was a rich man, and he took damage to his wealth when he got backlash off a roll to bribe someone. Having these custom consequences for each character was pretty cool, and really spiced up the conflicts. I may just have to steal the idea sometime.

Overall, it was good fun, and I'd definitely recommend it if you like the free-form "story game" narrative approach to role-playing. The RPG it was closest too in feel (at least of RPGs I'd played before) was probably Universalis, and I imagine if you like that you'll probably get a kick out of New Hope (or Lady Blackbird). It had more structure than Universalis, but appealed to the same mental space and had a similar spirit.

You can download New Hope for free.

You can also download Lady Blackbird for free.

StarWarsderness of Mirrors

Last night I ran a one-shot of Wilderness of Mirrors, using the setting from Star Wars.

I replaced the 5 stats of Wilderness of Mirrors with five similar, but subtly different stats. The five attributes were:

• Droid - used for tech, repair, and computing
• Flyboy - used for piloting and acrobatics
• Jedi - used for The Force, Luke
• Princess - used to charm, inspire, and command
• Wookie - used to intimidate and battle

Effectively, I folded the "Saturn" and "Mercury" roles from the main game into each other, since my previous experience had told me that "Saturn" was too weak. I used Saturn's power, with general social-roll utility of Mercury. This left me with Mercury's special power sitting unused, and I realized that being able to tell a perfectly convincing lie was very much like "These aren't the droids you're looking for", so I added in the Jedi stat. The end result was that the five attributes felt much better balanced, instead of Saturn having the awkward "dump stat" status it has in the main rules. I was very pleased with that.

If you look at the attached character sheet I made, you'll notice I also tweaked the power of "Pluto". Stealth isn't really center-stage in the Star Wars films, it's got it's place, but it didn't seem it should be a central character focus. So, I made "Flyboy" cover acrobatics and piloting, with the modified special power to escape from any one tight situation. This is a slightly more frenetic and active version of Pluto's power, and it can be used in a ship. Again, I was pleased with the way it played out.

Overall, things went well. My only complaint involved my own memory issues re: the rules. The main rules are so simple, I didn't re-read them before play. I got about half way through the session, and then commented "I don't remember this being such a cake-walk for the players. I feel like the difficulties should be higher." That's when one my players (thanks, Erik!) stepped up and reminded me about the tokens/points the GM is supposed to get. Off the top of my head, I couldn't remember the rate the GM earns these Setback points, so we went with one every 30 minutes. Turns out that it's supposed to be one every 20 minutes, which would have been much more challenging, and probably far better to have the extra 3 or 4 Setbacks, but we had fun anyway.

As always with Wilderness of Mirrors, the GM just sets up a very brief mission proposal, and then lets the players roll with it. (The bulk of my game prep was making that character sheet.)

Players have a lot of narrative control, and you never really know where things are going to go. We started with the PCs having to steal the Death Star plans and convey them to Princess Leia. By the time all was said and done, the plot involved Wookie and Gamorrean porn stars, evil architects with brain-sucking Dark Side powers, lots of EVA (zero-G combat in space-suits), and an escape in a garbage scow. Very amusing... but trust me, the less you know about "the Wookie Wax", the better.

They said "Dinosaurs", not giant blooming Cockroaches!

At last night's weekly one-shot, my buddy Mark ran this awesome little Risus scenario inspired by a TV show Primeval. I'd never seen the show, but the premise is pretty simple: portals open up to the ancient past, dinosaurs pour out, and the PCs have to wrangle the monsters back in. Kill a dino and you might change history.

He said for player characters, we had basically four options.

1. Badass
2. Scientist
3. Badass Scientist
4. Some combination of 2 or more of the above.

That cracked me up.

My three Cliches (the Risus system's form of attributes) were:

• Croike! I'm like that crocodile hunter guy!
• Parkour traceur
• Chemistry Set

The team was rounded out with an ex-special forces commando, a quick-thinking facewoman, and multilayered inventor type. We built our characters to complement each other, and the group functioned great as a team.

Mark did a wonderful job of handling the game, and it's mechanics. I've found that, despite being a light and simple system, the spiral of death inherent to Risus can really be a problem. Out of probably 8 games I've played of it, this was only one of 3 where the mechanics really shined, instead of hindered. It's a deceptively simple system, that takes a good GM to make it work - and Mark was up to the task, I'm happy to report.

To start the session off, we were called down to the Pike Market in Seattle, responding to an anomaly / gate that something had come through. We all had dinos on the brain, and as the clues amounted to some smaller critter, we assumed little compsognathses or the like.

Turns out they were trilobites, instead. This was a fact we discovered when I was dangling some bait over the hole in floorboards. Instead of a little lizard popping out, long exoskeletal tentacles lashed out and tried to pull me in. "Croiké! They said dinosaurs, not giant bloomin' cockroaches!" It was a great surprise, and really shook up our assumptions. Well done, Mark!

He did a series of short encounters, spread over several in-character days, as various gates opened. When all was said and done, we'd wrestled with trilobites, commandeered a DUKW from a tour group, swam with an apatosaurus, crashed an ATV into a smilodon, and exchanged trophies with primitive hominids. The plotline was simple, and largely an excuse for megafaunal havoc in the modern day, but it was a hoot. Great game, all around.

Two comments on Wraith: The Oblivion

Last night, my weekly one-shot group played Wraith the Oblivion. Two observations:

• I really like the concept of you playing two characters: your main character, and the shadow-self (like the devil on the shoulder) of another player. It was really flavorful, and it meant every player always had something to do.
• Both the mechanics and the setting were probably more fiddly than is ideal for a one-shot. (Having now played the old Vampire, Werewolf, Changeling and Wraith, I have to say that Vampire is the most accessible and newbie-friendly of the batch.)

Fate and d6 minus d6

The game I just mentioned in my last post was using a modified version of the Fate system. I have a quick observation on the mechanics.

We used a strange 2d6 roll instead of Fudge dice. One d6 was a positive die, the other negative, so a roll could range from +5 to -5. You add your aspects and skills to that. I've seen this mentioned as an optional rule in other Fate products.

Thing is, getting a +4 bonus on a skill is pretty big investment on your character sheet for a starting character. Which meant in an opposed roll, the guy who spent everything on this given skill might roll a total of -1, while the person who has no skill in it gets a lucky roll and +5 total. That's just really swingy. Not horribly broken, but yet, it made it feel like our skill specialities and character niches didn't really matter. Next time I play Fate, I'll definitely argue for the Fudge dice version.

Gumshoe Continuum

I've been a little quiet both here and at Arcana Wiki lately, because I've been prepping a new campaign. I'm running Continuum, which is a setting and concept I love, but which has kinda crappy mechanics. So I converted it over to the Gumshoe system from Trail of Cthulhu and The Essoterrorists.

Gumshoe handles high-level competence very well, which will slip past one major hurdle that Continuum faced in that certain actions were just too unpredictable. I remember a scene in my old campaign where someone fell off a roof, spanned back in mid-fall, fell again and spanned again, fell again and spanned again, and then finally got the roll they needed to stay on the roof. Now, probably that character in that specific instance should have spanned off and taken some mountain-climbing lessons, but I think the anecdote does a good job of illustrating that the Continuum mechanics are a little weird. It had no real tools for fine-tuning difficulties.

By contrast, the only problem with Gumshoe is that various traits refresh at different rates, which makes for a lot of paperwork. Given that Continuum is a setting that already pushes the envelope for paperwork burden, this is not ideal. Plus, since Continuum PCs can always span off for a good-night's rest, this meant that "refreshes in 24 hours" skills were essentially unlimited access, which would be broken.

The easy solution there was to put everything but Health and Stability on the same new refresh scale, which has nothing to do with sleep or the passage of time. Instead, all your skills (investigative and dramatic) refresh at the start of every session - no need to track anything but Health and Stability (and Frag and Yet since it's Continuum) from one session to the next. But of course, that meant the PCs needed fewer points in skills, so I had to really analyze and modify the character creation process.

So, for the past couple of weeks, I've been converting, then editing, game rules. I'm running the campaign via Skype (with players in Seattle, Albuquerque, and Chicago), so I set up a wiki to be our communal Spanbook, rules database, and setting reference document. It's been a lot of work, but feels well worth it already. We've started character creation, and our first actual session is this Wednesday.

Bride of Stankenfreen

On vacation a few days ago, I found myself GMing some improv roleplaying. Since I'd had some fun with my recent Stankenfreen's Monsters one-shot, I reprised it for a different group. Much as with the first play-through, it proved to be great fun, but somewhat hobbled by utterly flawed mechanics.

Before reading further, you might want to view my post from the first game of Stankenfreen's Monsters.

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Bad Mechanics:

Weird thing is, the mechanical flaws were different this time. In the previous play, the PCs were under-powered. Their skills didn't overlap much, and it was a rare roll that got +4 (the bonus from two bodyparts/skills on a single card). In this second game, the opposite happened. Most of the body parts were really broadly or metaphorically defined. As a result, nearly every roll a PC made had +6 or higher. Stop to consider the odds of rolling 11 or higher on 2d6+8... roughly a 97% chance of success. I'd say at least a third of the rolls were at those odds. Meanwhile, human NPCs were rolling 1d12+2. In all our various conflict scenes, I only managed to hit like four times.

The crit system for the game is flawed as well. In both sessions, curiously enough, double 1's were rolled twice. In the first session, John rolled double 1's twice. In the second session, Rob rolled double 1's twice. In neither session did anyone roll double 6's. For this second game, I increased the penalty of the critical failure, but it proved to be no better - despite getting two ticks on every card he had, Rob never lost a part.

I even tried to make the final conflict more interesting by putting them up against a boss monster - a rogue Stankenfreenian creation that had turned evil. While he took two parts off of one PC, he lost all 9 of his body parts before he could get a third action.

Beyond a doubt, this is the worst set of mechanics I've ever crafted. Yet both games have been incredibly fun, and the character creation process is a winner. One of the players told me this session was the most laugh-out-loud fun she'd ever had roleplaying.

I'm thinking that I may run it again sometime, but if so the die mechanics would need a major overhaul, probably a complete replacement. I'm thinking F# might be the way to go - but with Stankenfreen's character creation system.

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Amazing Characters:

The real joy of the game was, as with the first session, the player characters. I sadly don't have character illustrations this time, but here's the lists of bodyparts.

April's PC:

• The Feet of the Waiter
• Legs of a Dancer
• Vulcan Brain
• X-Ray Vision
• Hitler-style Face w/ Mustache
• Tusks of a Woolly Mammoth

April went to a great deal of trouble trying to get rid of her Hitler face. She kept trying to justify using it on rolls, so that she could assign ticks from rolled 1's to it, but never ended up with enough ticks to lose the face. The tusks apparently annoyed here as well, because she had one of the other PCs trim them. X-Ray Vision, on the other hand, was definitely appreciated and utilized.


Carrie's PC:

• Trunk of an Elephant
• Wings of a Bumblebee
• Vampire Fangs
• The Mustache of Luigi
• Heart of a Lion
• Lion'sheart

You'll note that Carrie was given the heart of a lion by two different players. Parts were created and assigned blind - nobody knew what anyone was going to get. Since she got two Lion hearts, she got +4 at a minimum for every roll where bravery or predatory instinct were beneficial.
During this session, I reused the Corwin-in-the-dungeon gimmick 'cause I thought it was cute. Carrie ended up using her Vampire Fangs to drain him, so I gave her the new part "Blood of Amber" which was rather potent.

Jeremy's PC:

• Lizard's Brain
• Toes of a Chimpanzee
• Breasts of a Prostitute
• Hands of a Pointilist Painter
• The Teeth of John Tesh
• Weight of a Feather

Poor Jeremy had probably the least-useful set of parts, and the least focus/overlap, but he was able to make them count in the final battle. Weight of a Feather was fun, even if rarely useful. He was constantly being blown around by the other PCs.

Sarah's PC:

• Elbow of a Tennis Player
• Amazing Spring-Like Jumping Ability
• The Spleen of Roger Rabbit
• Raven's Tongue
• Voice of the Siren
• Tentacles of a Squid

Jumping Ability wasn't really a body-part, but I was cool with it. It combo'd well with Squid Tentacles for acrobatic tricks. Voice of the Siren combo'd with Raven's Tongue (since Raven is a Trickster God) for potent crowd-control and smooth-talking. As a result, it won her:

• Ears of the Romanians (as in "Friends, Countrymen, Roman...ians, lend me your ears")

She then got in a fight with a crazed townsfolk that was trying to burn down the castle. From him she got the:

• Singed Scalp of an Arsonist

but lost her squid tentacles in the conflagration. In the final battle with the Big Bad, she lost her Voice of the Siren as well.

Christie's PC:

• Lips of a Latin Lover
• Super-Strong Hair
• The Claws of the Sloth
• Legs of a Giraffe
• Princess Sparkle Pony's Horn
• Owl's Eyes

Princess Sparkle Pony is this Unicorn that keeps showing up on Blank White Cards at Jeremy and Christie's house, so she was able to use the Horn to magically heal people (but not the Undead). One of my favorite images of the game was the idea of this 12-foot-tall giraffe-legged unicorn-horned character constantly leaning in with her lush latin lover's lips to make the other PCs a little uncomfortable.
At some point, the tips were trimmed off April's "Tusks of a Woolly Mammoth". After that happened, these tips were braided into Christie's Super-Strong Hair. It was part Wilma Flintstone, party improvised weapon.

Rob's PC

• Ears of a Bat
• Hyper-extending fully-controllable Tongue
• Hyena's Jaws
• Buddha's Knuckle
• Eye of the Tiger
• Eyes of a Child

Most of us pictured Rob's character with 4 eyes. He described himself as just having 2 - the eyes of a tiger cub. Turning a critical eye at the card now, I realize by the rules he'd have 3 eyes - two children's eyes and just one eye of a tiger. Speaking of Rules, Rob can rules-lawyer and munchkin-out like no one else I'd ever willingly game with. He makes it entertaining enough that we tolerate it, even appreciate it, at least in one-shots. I mention this because Rob was the only person I had to say "no" to during the game - he kept coming up with spurious ways to use 4 or 5 bodyparts on a single roll. The justifications were entertaining, so I usually let it fly.

Gene's PC:

• Skin of a Chameleon
• Legs of a Centipede
• Arm (just 1) of a Body Builder
• Liver of a Drunken Japanese Stockbroker
• 360-degree swiveling Neck
• Pouch of a Kangaroo
• Moebius' Splint

Moebius' Splint needs a bit of explanation. Moebius was the brand-new puppy that Jeremy and Christie got a few weeks ago. Within half an hour of getting this puppy, he'd broken his arm. The free puppy has cost them $1,500. Currently, Moebius is wearing a bright purple cast/splint. It makes one of his legs seem longer than the others, and it's a rigid object that smacks into people when climbs into their laps. All day, we'd been referring to it as his secret weapon. Gene interpreted this combination of cards to mean that 50 of his character's 100 centipede legs were in splints.

In addition to the PC's parts listed above, someone got this off an NPC:

• Strong Arms of a Pitchfork-Wielding Farmer

but for the life of me, I can't remember who got those arms.

The Big Bad
At the end of the game, the PC's had to do battle with Dr. Stankenfreen's Most Evilest Creation EVER. So, I gave everyone another blank card, and had them generate the body parts of the Big Bad. Thus did they face:

• Dragon'sbreath
• Vader's Helmet
• Mouth of an Asp (poison included)
• Picasso Face
• Blowfish-like Inflating Body with Spikes
• The Black Sulpherous Void That Was Dick Cheney's Heart
• Hung Like a Walrus
• Whiskers of a Kitten
• Will of Oberon
• Soul of Evil Incarnate

Despite having 10 body parts (3 of which overlapped - Evil, Oberon, and Cheney), and initiative, he went down in the second round. I got to deliver a post-modern monolog and use the dark sides of both the Force and Cubism, but to no avail. He went down with only minor injury to the PCs.

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Link to photos from the game. Probably not of interest if you don't know the players.

Stankenfreen's Monsters: More Than The Sum Of Our Parts

Last Thursday I ran a one-shot that started with something to the effect of: "You awake strapped to a laboratory table, having been shocked into life by the Lightning. In the distance, you hear your creator shouting 'My monsters! Come alive and rescue me!' as the angry mob of villagers drags him out of the room."

I used a home-brewed system for it, which was literally made-up on the walk to the game. I had a pile of index cards. Each player designed a body part for each other player, on cards which were then given out face-down so you didn't know what your monster looked like until you looked down at your body in the first scene.

The body parts were bits from people and animals. "Hands of a concert pianist", "heart of a lover", "eye of the hawk". That sort of thing. Here's the actual PCs, as drawn by their players:

	<- Sarah's PC, "Polly" Parts: Antlers of a Buck Hands of a Speed Typist Arms of a Wood-Chopper Voice of a Parrot Nose of an Ant-Eater
Laura's PC, "Cookie" -> Parts: Shell of a Snail Left Foot of a Great Tapdancer Bill of a Platypus Tongue of a Chef Claws of a Wolf
	<- John's PC, "Joe" Parts: Spit Glands of a Camel Hands of a Surgeon Hands of a Strangler Eyes of a Lecher Throat of an Opera-Singer Added via Surgery skills mid-game: Snout of a Pig (on the elbow) Hide of a Blacksmith
Mark's PC, "Jack" -> Parts: Jack Ass (Butt of a Donkey) Mouth of a Super-Salesman Tongue of a Snake Legs of a Can-Can Dancer Monkey Feet Added by feasting on an NPC: Evil Laugh of an Executioner

The best part was the parts. Everyone else made body parts for your character, and did so blind without anyone knowing what other parts you were going to get. We ended up with some pretty bizarre PCs as a result.

Beyond those parts, they also ended up with a set of "Eyes of a Curious Child", but instead of installing those on a PC, they used them to fix some blind NPC in the Vampire's dungeon (his name was Corwin, not that it matters).

The title of the body part functioned like a skill. Every time you took an action, you'd roll 2d6 and +2 for every body part you felt could help. ("Tongue of a Serpent" might help for sensing heat and scents, but also for tempting people like in Eden.) If your roll plus modifiers totaled 11+, you were successful.

If either die came up a "1", you'd make a tick-mark on one of the body-parts. If a body-part got 5 tick marks, it falls off. Double 1's is a tick on all your body parts, Double 6's means you've developed a soul. A soul changes your dice from 2d6 to 1d12. That means it doubles your odds of accomplishing unskilled rolls (2 in 12 instead of 3 in 36), and cuts your odds of taking tick marks by about a third.

Attack rolls were super-simple. A success killed a townsfolk, or ripped one part off a monster, depending on who was being attacked. The dice mechanics weren't amazing, but they worked well enough for a one-shot. In retrospect, modifiers didn't end up stacking as much as I'd imagined them to, so I probably should have had a lower difficulty. Dead townsfolk, by the way, became one body-part each, which basically made them into treasure.

The plotline involved rescuing the "good" Doctor Stankenfreen from the townsfolk. When that proved too easy, I added a second plot about the Vampires in the next castle over. Once you're a vamp, you're a vamp all the way. It was goofy fun, and not too deep.

Why I don't like starting at Seasoned

Thursday night I played in the second half of a really good Savage Worlds short-shot where the PCs were Seasoned-level characters. Before going any further, I'll reiterate that it was a great game and I had lots of fun.

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At that session, however, I made an offhand comment about really not liking the process of how you make an experienced PC in the Savage Worlds system. The other players questioned me about it, but I couldn't articulate it at that moment. On the walk home from the game, though, I realized roughly my issue with it.

My main complaint can be summed up as:

• The system actively bills itself as being faster and lighter than D&D, but the process of making a Seasoned character is much slower and more complicated than making the equivalent level of character in D&D.
  

This complaint has several corollaries and sub-points, which are:

• Seasoned looks on the surface like it's the equivalent of a mid-level character in most systems, but it's really just the equivalent of 2nd-level in D&D.
• The greater flexibility in Savage Worlds open-ended character system means the learning curve of making a good character is much higher.
• While Edges and Feats are equivalent in power, the prereqs for an Edge are often more like the prereqs for a Prestige Class.
• It's really easy to screw up the order of your advances, or take more than one Seasoned-level advance, which means the GM has to police the character creation process pretty heavily.
• Novice level spellcasters are pretty potent in Savage Worlds, but advancing to Seasoned rank almost never results in any increase in the power of said magic-users. It's the inverse of the "Linear Fighters, Quadratic Wizards" trope.
  

That's it. The rest of this post is just specific examples of those points. If those points made the case for you, feel free to stop. If you're unclear about what I mean by any of that, read on...

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At first glance, the 4 advancements of being a Seasoned PC feels like you're making a 4th or 5th level character. But you're not, you're making a 2nd level character. Here's how I came to that conclusion:

The power increase from going from starting character to Seasoned in Savage Worlds is akin to the power increase in going from 1st to 2nd level in D&D. A fighter gaining second level in 3.x D&D gains +1 to his attacks, +2 skill points, and a bonus feat. A Feat is roughly like an Edge, and the rest are basically the same as advancing 4 Skills (consider that +1 to BAB in D&D is like increasing both your Fighting and Shooting skills in SW). That's 3 Savage World's advances right there. The D&D fighter then gets a +1 to his Fortitude Saves, which, by it self isn't nearly as broad as +1 to Vigor in SW, however, he also gets big boost in Hit Points - his chance of surviving any given sword blow has probably gone up by 50%. The combination of hit points and Fort is roughly equal to increasing Vigor by a Die-Type in SW. That's roughly equal to 4 advances.

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Even if the above point weren't true, and you were making a slightly higher-level character in comparison, I feel that SW makes the advancement system more complicated then it needs to be.

Let's say, for the sake of the argument, I'm making a D&D character of moderate level - say a 5th level character.

In 1st or 2nd Edition, that really only takes about 90 seconds longer than making a 1st level character. You had to pick a couple of proficiencies (none of which have prerequisites, and most of which will almost never actually matter in-game), and if you're a 2nd Ed Thief you had to assign some thief skill points. More if you're a spell caster, because you have two more spell lists to read over, but I'll say more about that in a moment. The biggest time-sink is just spending your extra money.

The important point is that in D&D you don't have to make a 1st level character, then advance them to 2nd level, then to 3rd, etc. Instead, you just make a 5th-level character, and the charts are set up to let you just copy over the relevant info. Your character is at least 200% more powerful, with only like 10% more work.

In 3.X edition D&D, it's a little more complicated. Everybody has skill points, and you're looking at an extra feat (or three for a fighter). Feats have prerequisites, so it can take a bit more time building the character, and you need to have an idea what you want the character to be. But, over all, it's still probably at most 15% more effort, for a character who is at least 200% more powerful. Again, the most lengthy part of the process is probably picking out your magic items. (And again, this is assuming you're not an arcane caster with spell lists to consider - I'll get to that, I swear.)

In Savage Worlds, a Seasoned character is definitely not 200% more powerful than a Novice character - it's more like a 50% increase in power. Yet despite that far tamer power curve, the amount of work added is about a 25% increase. Nearly twice as much additional effort for about a quarter of the boost. I'll detail why it's so complicated in the next section.


I'm going take a quick aside to justify my math on Savage Worlds:

Building a character has 4 steps.

1. You assign 5 attribute points - but that's really just two decisions, which single attribute do you want at d8 and which one do you want at d4. Yes, sometimes you'll decide you want a d10 in an attribute, but you probably won't do it at this stage - the drawback of having 2 or more traits at d4 is much nastier than the benefit of having a d10. 8/6/6/6/4 is the most common split I've seen.
   
2. You assign 15 skill points - which probably takes rather longer than the previous step. On the other hand, some character concepts need just a couple skills. Some characters have to make do with a lot of d4s, while others just pick 3 or 4 skills and max them out.
   
3. You pick 0 to 3 Hindrances. If this is your first Savage character, that's tricky. But by your 3rd, you'll realize that half the list (at least) are bizarre things you'd only use for 1 character in a thousand, and you can safely ignore them. How many one-armed or blind PCs do you make?
   
4. Now you choose 1 Edge, plus possibly a few more advances, depending on how many hindrances you've picked. Edges are beyond a doubt the trickiest thing about character creation. Many have prerequisites, some of which aren't easy to get. More on that in a later section.
   

Counting each skill point, it's a total of 19-26 decisions, with the majority of the difficulty being in the 1-3 decisions that could involve edges.

If you want, you could bump that up by including the equipment decision, but honestly, vanilla Savage Worlds has no decisions to make in regards to equipment. Unless you took the Pacifist Hindrance, you get the best weapon and armor available for the setting of the game - SW lacks the extensive equipment lists of D&D, and there's nothing in edges or powers that motivates you to take a substandard weapon. Plus, weapons are expensive enough, you aren't going to have a bunch of back-up and contingency items as a starting character.

Now let's look at a seasoned character. I'm only adding 4 more decisions - but they're all akin to the level of complexity of the Edge decision - slightly more so, because they can be an attribute raise, various permutations of skill bumps, etc, in addition to being Edges. Because they can be used for skills, you could call it 8 new decisions. 0, 1 or 2 of which can be attribute raises - if the number is 0, you'll also get 1 Seasoned-rank Edge or Power. If the number is 1, then you may or may not get a seasoned-rank Edge, depending on when in the process you raised that attribute. The number of decisions is probably only up by 20% or so. However, you're more than doubling the number of really hard decisions.

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In D&D, advancement just flows from your class. It's a hallmark of 3.X - advancement can be really tricky (multiclassing, prestige classes, complicated feat choices, etc) if you enjoy that, but it has plenty of tools to speed it up and simplify if you'd prefer - there's some straightforward paths to advance characters along that, once initiated, make leveling-up quick and easy.

Savage Worlds has no equivalent, no obvious choices, no shortcuts. If you've got the time to spend on it, and a good solid understanding of how the system works, that's an advantage to Savage Worlds. It's really flexible, and you're never pigeon-holed or restricted. But unless you've mastered the system, and have a really clear idea of what you want your character to be like, it's just tricky. The system is opaque. There's no archetypes to base your character on. It's hard to figure out just how much better d10 is than d8. No yardstick by which to measure how proficient your character actually is.

Partly as a result, those advances in Savage Worlds take a lot more thought than their D&D counterpart. It's not just read one line of a chart, then pick two skills (as it is to raise a D&D fighter by a level). Instead, on each of those 4 advances that make up a rank, I have darned-near limitless options. I'm choosing between raising one attribute, raising 2 skills, raising 1 really good skill, buying a whole new skill, or picking one of over 50 Edges. In the D&D equivalent, 3 of those 4 decisions are made for me, and all I really have to worry about is what feat I'm taking... if it's a level where I get a feat.

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Complicating it further is the prerequisite issue. Yes, I realize there's prereqs in D&D as well, but here's the big difference:

• While Edges and Feats are equivalent in power, the prereqs for an Edge are often more like the prereqs for a Prestige Class.

Let's say I want an Edge that does something simple but potent - a boost to my skills. Both games have a Feat/Edge called "Investigator", that gives you +2 to rolls to find clues and get information from people. In D&D, it has no prerequisites. In Savage Worlds, it requires you to have a d8+ (so, above average, and a significant expenditure during character creation) in Smarts, Investigation, and Streetwise.

Similar things can be said about Acrobatic/Acrobat, Stealthy/Thief, etc. There's a few exceptions (for example, every Savage Worlds PC effectively has D&D's Power Attack for free), but in general the prereqs are higher and more fiddly in Savage Worlds. The result is, much more care must be taken when advancing your SW character. I think the worst perpetrator I've seen is the Texas Ranger Edge in Deadlands Reloaded, the cost-to-benefit ratio for that one is just wonky. It costs 2 Attribute Points, 12 Skill points, and Seasoned Rank to qualify - for benefits that comparable to (and in some campaigns less reliable than) the Charismatic Edge.

On a related note, many of the best Edges list "Seasoned" (or a higher rank) as a prerequisite. Starting at a particular level doesn't mean you get to take Edges of that level. It means you get to take exactly 1 Edge of that level - or exactly 1 Power of that level - or raise 1 more attribute instead.

If I'm gonna have 4 or 8 advances, I need to think ahead to decide whether or not I need the early advances to qualify me (by being prerequisities) for the better advances I plan to take after them. It's really easy to get 3 advances in, and then realize you're 1 skill point short of the thing you want.

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The fact that you only get 1 Seasoned advancement when making a Season character trips me up a lot - for my most recent character, I basically had to build him three times to get the order of advancements right. From looking at other PCs character sheets, I see I'm not the only one having this trouble. My wife had similar troubles with her character. The GM caught a similar problem on another PCs sheet last night at the start of the game - and he'd even goofed up and taken 3 such advances, not just two. Likewise, in my Deadlands campaign, 2 of the 3 players who took Veteran of the Weird West had made the same mistake as well.

One reason for this is that in normal character creation, you get to apply the steps in whatever order you want. This means you can finagle "extra" skill points out of the system by using your bonus points from a Hindrance to boost your Attributes before doing skills. Or you can buy up a prerequisite skill to qualify for an Edge before you take it. In making a higher level character, however, you first build a Novice character, then apply advances in order. It seems like a simple and self-evident difference, and the Explorer's edition book just casually drops it in a single sentence. But it's a fundamentally different paradigm, and causes all sorts of slip-ups. Switching between the two modes requires a conscious analysis/transition, but nothing in the text makes that clear - and so again and again I see people screw it up.

Policing the character sheets to prevent this extremely common mistake, however, is really time-consuming. There's a decided lack of transparency in character creation - the order is so important, but there's no good way from a character sheet to track the order without deconstructing your build. A legal Seasoned character could have between 3 and 9 Attribute points, and between 10 and 32 Skill points, depending on Hindrances and order of creation. There's 13 edges and 7 powers that are restricted to Seasoned rank, and any PC can only have one of them - but if so they end up with 1 less Attribute point. You can't eyeball that.

So much so that the GM is tempted to just let it slide. A character built without paying strict attention to that timing restriction while leveling up can be a little more potent. That's all, just a little - the various Powers and Edges that require a higher rank aren't really all that much more potent, and there's (to Savage World's credit) not many degenerate combos in the system. If you goof up and take two Seasoned Edges, it's not like you're going to overshadow all the other PCs and make people angry.

So, you want to just say "screw it". However, there's a slippery slope here. It magnifies the potential that a player who's more familiar with the system will have a huge advantage over someone new to the game, and opens a potential for point-weaseling and munchkinism. A mistaken extra Seasoned power or edge won't unbalance anything - but intentionally taking all your advances as Seasoned-rank ones might. Or taking Seasoned-Rank powers with not just your advances but also initial character build - that'll give you a significant step up. Exceeding the number of Attribute raises you take, especially if you also have a Power who's derived stats come from those attributes will give you a huge leg up. So, a mistake is not likely to cause any troubles, but waiving all restrictions probably will.

This is not an insurmountable flaw, not a game-breaker, but it is the sort of thing that just rankles my hide.

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Now, as promised, let's talk about Magic. One of the strengths of Savage Worlds is the simplified magic system. The spell list is much shorter, and in theory the trappings let you customize as you need without having to read an extra 150 spell descriptions. Even assuming that the trapping system does that (which it would if they gave a few more examples - there's not much guidance and no real tools for balancing it in the Explorer's Edition), we still hit an issue with the utter lack of high end magic.

Savage Worlds seems takes pains to avoid the "Linear Fighters, Quadratic Wizards" trope. Magic Users do not appear to suddenly jump out ahead of other character types in later stages of the campaign. At first blush, this is admirable and welcome - I am not a fan of that trope, after all. However, the more I build high-rank characters, the more I suspect they overcompensated and went too far to fix it.

There are 31 spells in Savage Worlds - 20 of which can be taken by starting characters, 7 that require Seasoned level, and 4 that require Veteran status. Invisibility, Quickness, and Telekinesis are all pretty buff (Telekinesis sickly so), the other Seasoned-rank spells aren't really worth it. Of those 11 "higher level" spells, four of them are even sadly redundant to lower level powers:

• Blast is only marginally better than lower level Bolt or Burst (and not a lot better than Stun, either).
• Fly and Teleport both have situations where they are superior to Burrow and Speed, but come with a lot more complexity and expense in the process.
• Greater Healing is really expensive, and in most situations not actually more helpful than Healing.

No doubt there are specific situations, plotlines and campaigns where these will pay off, but their the sort of situations that a GM has to specifically set out to create, or else it will never matter. Unless a PC has Fly, the GM is not going to make the story involve an impassable crevasse 20 table top inches long with no bridge. Buying the power creates situations where the power is needed - kinda circular, huh? In D&D, that wouldn't be the case - there's an established number of flying creatures, traps and magical tricks are common, castles dominate the countryside, etc, and plenty of reason to expect every wizard will eventually be able to fly. That setting has a need to fly built into it, but SW has no default setting.

When you take one of these advanced Powers, you really don't get you much more than the Novice powers would give you. I had Burrow and Bolt, I'd never be seriously tempted to pick up Teleport and Blast. In both cases, sinking the points into my spellcasting skill would be a better upgrade - it'd make my existing powers more effective. Since Bolt (SW's Magic Missile) takes the same amount of Power Points as Blast (SW's Fireball), and does the same amount of damage, there's not much desire to take both. Bolt can hit the same target three times, or hit three targets. Blast, the "better spell" can sometimes hit more targets, but it's gonna be rare to get more than 3 enemies in the radius with no friendly fire problems, and it can never do more than 1 hit to a single target. The sole real advantage it has is the reduced chance of rolling 1's and getting a misfire - but since the dice mechanics of SW are a little wonky, it's hard to say if that's really better than just spending the advancement (where you would have bought Blast) on raising your Spellcasting stat. Either method reduces the chance of scoring a critical failure, and the later method would improve all your other spells as well.

In D&D, picking up new spells is pretty easy. Spellcasters just naturally gain versatility as they level up, and you're happy that you have both Magic Missile and Fireball, because it didn't really cost you anything. In Savage Worlds, each new spell costs an Edge. That edge, "Extra Power" feels weak. The original Arcane Background Edge got me 10 power points, plus 2 or 3 powers. The new Extra Power Edge gets me just 1 power, with no power points. I've gained versatility, but have to spread my powerpoints thinner to use it. They didn't just do away with "Linear Fighters, Quadratic Wizards", they effectively inverted it - it's now "Linear Everything Else, Diminishing Returns On Magic".

Compared to D&D, making an experienced wizard in Savage Worlds takes a lot less time - and I applaud that. This character type is the only one that takes so much less effort in Savage Worlds. It accomplishes this because there's such shorter spell lists to read over. However, the cost of that simplification is that you can't really capture the feel of a high-level wizard. There's just no spells that boggle the mind, wipe out armies, or make everyone sit up and take notice.

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Well, I've rambled on long enough. The point was to just explain why I'm not enamored with making experienced characters in Savage Worlds. I don't feel they gain enough power to warrant the extra complexity. I'm pretty happy with starting characters in Savage Worlds, and feel my desire for elegance outweighs my desire for power. I'd rather play a starting character than have to worry about all that crunchiness.

Cartoon Goonsquads

Last week I played in a game of the Cartoon Action Hour RPG. Our setting was vaguely reminiscent of (a sort of bastardized blend of) Thundarr, Voltron, and the Superfriends, which is just about perfect given the name of the game. We had a team of teenaged superheroes battling against an army of stormtroopers and mecha from the collapsed ruins of Minneapolis. What more can you want?

I really loved the Goon-Squad mechanics. They were like Brute Squads in 7th Sea (in that they acted as a unit, and rolled just once per squad) or Extras in Savage Worlds (in that they took just one hit to eliminate) but went one step further player-facing. The Goon Squads in Cartoon Action Hour don't ever roll. Each turn they threaten a single PC, who rolls against their static value. A good roll defeats the entire squad. A bad roll means you have to face them again next turn (at -2), and a really bad roll means they've captured you. They do no damage, they just immobilize PCs. If another player defeats the squad later, you're set free / you recover instantly. Now, in general, I'm not thrilled with mechanics that knock players out of the action for one bad roll. However, when you consider how fast the combat went and how easily rescue could be achieved, it all worked really well.

I definitely got a favorable impression of the game and the system. Character creation looked a bit more involved than it really needed to be (we, thankfully, had pregens), but the game itself played very quick and easy. The vehicular combat rules puzzled me, but were more confusing than flawed. I imagine once you've handled a couple of vehicular fight or chase scenes, they'd be less troublesome. And the fact that no one in the system ever dies, and that exploding vehicles just expel the crew in humorous ways made weirdness in the vehicle system a non-issue. It's not like one critical hit was going to kill the whole party.

The GM did say that the original movement rules were a lot more complicated and involved than they needed to be, so he abstracted them down. Between that, the pregens, and the confusion over vehicle hits, it's hard for me to really rate the complexity of the system, but what I saw was plenty fun (and light) for a one-shot.

The Planning Stage in Wilderness of Mirrors

I bought Wilderness of Mirrors for one reason - because it does a really good job of modeling (in gaming) the planning stage of spy movies, caper films, etc.

In other game systems: This common element of espionage films is often a bit of a trouble in RPGs.

If there's one obvious solution (just one good way into the enemy base, for example) then there's a good chance the players will feel railroaded.

A GM who's conscious of that will come up with more than one way in - which means the GM does a lot of redundant prep work when they pick only a single approach. There's a chance that the players won't see one of the paths to success, or will value one as being much better than the other, and they'll still feel railroaded.

This results in the typical dungeon-structure showing up in spy headquarters, military camps, space stations, etc, because trying to hit the right balance is really hard - you want to keep the player's decisions meaningful, but not have to come up with a ton of work for yourself or bore everyone with a lengthy exposition dump. *

Ultimately, once you've given them the intelligence report on the site of the mission, it becomes a contest between the craftiness of the GM and the craftiness of the players. Often that contest involves the GM intentionally handcuffing themselves by leaving back doors that it's hard to believe the enemy overlooked, so that the players have a chance. If you don't, you run a greater risk the PCs will hit a wall they can't surmount.

This is going about things the wrong way - it's not supposed to be the players trying to outsmart the GM, it's supposed to be the Player Characters (who have different skillsets than their players do) trying to outsmart the NPCs. Really, James Bond shouldn't be at a disadvantage because the guy playing him doesn't know as much as the GM does about how alarm systems work. But I've ranted about that before. **

Wilderness of Mirrors avoids all of those traps. How, you ask? By not having the GM do a darned thing, and always assuming the PCs kick butt.

Between sessions, the GM only has to brainstorm a one-sentence description of the new mission. He can seriously just show up to the game with that sketchy little description, and absolutely zero additional prep work. ***

Each session starts with the planning stage, with the players collectively sketching out a loose map, and filling in details of how the defenses that have to be overcome. Each such defense or detail gets you a mission point award, which you'll use later to overcome those same defenses.

While the rules don't say this as clearly as they could, I believe you're supposed to run the planning session in-character. At least as much as possible. So it's not "Wouldn't it be cool if there were like those infrared beams, you know, set up like a web somewhere and we had to like crawl through them without touching them? Should we put that in, like near the vault room?" Instead you should be saying "Before he was captured, our Mole reported that an InfraWeb 9000 alarm system had been installed in the chamber outside the vault. We'll need to requisition the proper gear to see the infrared lines, and assign our most acrobatic agent to getting past that."

The point is, you're not motivated to come up with something really easy, or really hard - but rather to come up with something really cool that'll look and sound awesome when you circumvent it. The players should absolutely be proposing things that sound terribly difficult, but which they already have an idea on how to solve or slip past.

The difficulty to infiltrate the evil lair (or whatever the framework of the mission is) is beside the point. Your dice rolls don't determine success or failure, they determine narration rights. Success is assumed in most circumstances. If I roll poorly, I may still take out that guard - but the GM will decide his body is found by a random patrol 10 minutes later, and we have to act fast.

As with any good caper or spy plotline, the infiltration is only half the mission - getting out again is the tricky part. The setback points that the GM accumulates every 20 minutes are designed to make all hell break loose once you're inside. Expect something to go wrong, and a good chase or fight scene to break out in the second half of the night. By the same token, you might win the roll, and still choose to narrate a result similar to my guard example in the previous paragraph. Little unexpected twists get you "Trust Dice", as does betraying the group. (Gotta love the name of those Trust Dice.) Narrating a minor setback now can help arm you for controlled success at a critical juncture where it really matters.

This game is sweet.I'm very excited to try it.

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*: For an idea of my own on how to avoid the exposition dump, see: Discussion Cards. That idea works well with science anomalies / mysteries and for conveying situations where the Players lack info the PCs have.

**: Pet Peeves Regarding Attributes. Since writing those words 20 months ago, I've seen a few "hippy games" that let you use mental and social traits this way. Sadly they all seem to be games set up for one-shots only, either being very gimmicky or having no XP system. (Or both.)

***: Myself, when I get around to running this in a couple of weeks, I might actually spend 20 minutes before / between sessions. I like the idea of presenting a loose structure to the map, for the players to build off. Like just drawing a coast line, or the outlines of 5 buildings that are left unlabeled for the players to define. I'll then absolutely have the PCs do the planning stage in-character.