jack

I started this roleplaying game as the first ongoing campaign I ever seriously tried to run over a year ago. It started in Heffers rpg nights, then tried out another venue once or twice, then moved to my house, now online.

Online worked surprisingly well, but does seem to suffer from scheduling being treated more casually than an event you need to physically go to. Hopefully coming close to a climax now, although I hope to meet up with the players in person when I can to reminisce.

They have explored the underlabyrinth, defeated its challenges, communed with the gods. One player, before the very first session, invented a tragic backstory with his character's parents and governess dying and her running away to become a thief, and we eventually brought some of the repercussions forward, his character kept researching the events and uncovered there was more to them than it looked like, and she kept working towards revenge. Various time shenanigans were discovered and the characters parents were discovered to be alive after all.

Then the quest was closing in on the bad guy who'd been involved in the killings, now the annoying corrupt town guard, and a possible additional shenanigan to additionally save the governess (which was rather harder for both practical and paradox reasons). Now they ended up in the past, got ambushed by the bad guy, defeated him before he could run away, got a relevant infodump, snuck into the keep she lived in, planted the known-about message to her parents and tried to leave a message for her governess saying "here, use this to fake your death on day xxxxxx" and... it worked.

It was a learning experience for both of us but I'm really proud of how it turned out. When he originally invented the backstory neither of us expected his parents or governess to be saveable, but when the time shenanigans appeared he suggested it and I thought it could work, and worked out what they'd have to do, and weren't guaranteed success, but pulled it off very well.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1116930.html

Some spoilers for both groups of players (telling you stuff the other group found out, and confirming which of your guesses were right.) If you're interested in what went on behind the scenes, please ask me and I can talk through a non-spoiler version (or if you read this by accident, let me know, it's not a big deal as long as I know).

I talked about the puzzle rooms before, but I'm going to go through in more detail, to compare the amount of type of prep I did to that of other GMs reading.

What I wrote down

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I don't usually write up in this level of detail because obviously, it takes a lot longer than it did to write the planning! But it's interesting to do sometimes, so I can consciously notice what I was doing explicitly, and what I was implicitly doing in the background.

When I was less experienced, I would have needed to write down a lot of the specific things that here I just kept in my mind. Or if I was writing an adventure for someone else to run, I would have to spell out the extra detail I only verbalised now, because a lot of the good things about the encounter were the general idea of how it should play out, not the specifics.

Although even then, a lot of what went well was because I knew the players and know how to slot appropriate connections in as I went along. A published adventure can't easily do that. The best you could do is list the treasure as what was definitely there, and then offer the GM to fill in whatever felt appropriate, with some specific examples for them to use if they didn't have a better idea. Things like, here's some prompts (for things connected with the room, for things with an interesting backstory, for things that are of particular interest to the players somehow)

In terms of "puzzles" I think the most important thing is to give the players some experience of "trying different approaches and seeing what works", but make sure that the encounter being satisfying doesn't rely on them being able to figure it out logically. And single-answer puzzles are usually bad for this, unless you build an adventure about them with going asking different NPCs what they think the answer might be, etc. In this case, because I wanted a like-Labyrinth-film feel, I went as close to "single answer puzzle" as I could.

I think I learned how to do it better in future. Partly by using puzzles sparingly, but mostly, how to do it well when it comes up. Now I think of it, some of it is sleight of hand: it's giving the *experience* of solving a puzzle, but actually, having a fallback so it matters less whether you SUCCEED or not, as long as you give it a fair try.

Of course, that's for *most* DnD games where the PCs are supposed to be reasonably successful. Sometimes you want to play a gritty deadly tomb of horrors dark souls game, in which case you can go for "they may never solve it and that's ok, it's up to them if they want to push their luck or not" approach.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1101966.html

PLOT DEVELOPMENTS

Both groups learned some significant facts about the background of the world. The way the labyrinth sometimes connects different places in time, and the kobold legion they encountered had taken advantage of this to flee a post-apocalyptic future into the past, in the hopes of setting up an endlessly looping permanent kobold civilisation without the "and then the world expires and all is blackness until the beginning comes round again" bit.

And which gods think approve of this and which don't.

And both had some more extended contact with the kobolds (in reluctant negotiations or capture-and-interrogate ways). And both found some of the macguffins they'd been looking for.

PACING

The last couple of sessions have been pretty fun and satisfying (a few previously-mentioned frustrations aside), but I feel like, not quite as satisfying as I'd hoped. The one with the "investigating how the fungus creatures got in to massacre the mines" I think was still the best, I think because it had a lot of intermediate goals, but the more recent sessions have all been reasonably good, even if not perfect.

This is my first longer campaign, really. I wrote myself into a corner a bit. I originally hoped the players would just find hooks and challenges in the labyrinth, and explore off their own bat, finding new areas and getting money and levelling up being the rewards. But it didn't work out like that.

I naturally built up the things that were going well and sidelined the things that weren't clicking, so that made the game go a lot better. But that meant a lot more NPCs, plot, etc than I originally intended. Which is good, because it went well. And has mostly settled down to needing "not much prep". But partly it means that I'm crafting more of a story and less of a sandbox, which the original design is less suited to.

And partly, it means we've got lots of different story hooks or goals and not enough clear player-bought-into goals. If I did this again, I'd try to find a way to make clear progress towards goals (either with explicit missions with subgoals like "follow the clues" or "search areas to find", or with explicit goals for exploration like "level up when you find X thousand gold pieces").

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1101816.html

Both of my parties found the location of one of the MacGuffins, each hidden in a "challenge" room, i.e. a chamber in the dungeon designed in-character and out-of-character to present an interesting challenge and reward to the players.

One was a not-library filled with wooden boxes, which shocked you when you opened one, and a guide who partially answered questions about them, with the aim of finding the MacGuffin in one.

The other was a set of altars, bowls, and knives, with instructions to let a drop of blood into the cup on the altar, which produced various magical effects, and the aim of figuring out what was the "right" way to do that.

I'd really wanted to include things like this, as it's very appropriate to the underlabyrinth setting -- I was partly inspired by things like the Labyrinth film -- and a big DnD tradition.

I knew I was taking a risk because both the first two challenges were at the puzzle end of the spectrum, and this sort of puzzle is actually really hard to do well in a roleplaying game.

The problem is, if it relies on figuring something out, it's not really a roleplaying game, it reduces to the players pausing the game and figuring it out.

I think it works well when the puzzle connects to things in the world, where there's a puzzle to be solved, but the individual steps involve small relevant in-world decisions, like combat, or needing to successfully use a skill, or losing or gaining health.

I sketched these particular rooms out ages ago and then just pulled them out when the party found them, and was very pleasantly surprised how my off-the-cuff details worked out.

Both parties successfully navigated most of the puzzle. Gp 1 retreated when they were running low on health, but paid attention to the specifics and know exactly what they're trying next time. I really loved that they had a little chart correctly reconstructing most of my notes. Gp 2 got rather frustrated when it kept seeming they were getting closer but still not getting there.

I think there were some things I sort of did but could still have done better. I should have explicitly thought, "If they get stuck, what options are open to them? Is there an in-world way of getting hints for a sufficient cost? Or will going away and returning help?" And I deliberately tried to allow many indirect approaches to get useful information, but not instantly bypass the puzzle, but I could have been more explicit about what sort of things they might find out, so more of the things they tried I could have a helpful-but-not-insta-win answer ready.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1101400.html

Random snippets from the first game. The group bravely/greedily volunteered to venture into the Underlabyrinth, and find the South Mines which have mysteriously disappeared from their usual place in the labyrinth, hopefully soon enough to rescue the people working them at the time.

Logistical issues with the venue meant we weren't able to finish a proper delve, but it went reasonably well anyway. We couldn't find a good venue so will try playing as our house, which is hopefully fine now we've all met each other a couple of times, but wouldn't be good for a new group.

I was very pleased the way the flavour of a mysterious, shifting, subterranean labyrinth let me adjust things on the fly sometimes, and the mechanics for navigating from one "place" to another worked very well, giving the players a feeling of exploration and agency but always with some doubt. I need to tweak that to make it slightly smoother, but I think I know what I need.

Everyone including me was still getting used to the mechanics, but I managed to keep things moving and I think everyone started to get to know their character and how the commonly-relevant rules worked. I think I dropped the ball a couple of times when people wanted to do things I didn't quite know what helpful response to give and I'm hoping they'll have more of a chance next time, but most characters managed to do their thing.

The Cat Bard made good use of his climbing and jumping ability and leapt around the room, keeping out of range of trouble and throwing helpful spells onto allies. He had to dive into melee to try to rescue one character, and we had the "Attack of opportunity thwack! Yowl of outrage and cat is suddenly on the other side of the room".

The Shifty Ex-wizard-assistant goblin made an excellent job mapping the labyrinth and peppering enemies with crossbow bolts, dodging from stalagmite to stalagmite.

The Ex-Thief With a Mysterious Backstory took point on lockpicking and trapfinding with a concentration of the relevant skills, but constantly had to work round a unlucky hitpoint rolls.

The Druid did some good investigating via animals of nearby threats, and handled half the front line combat, but hopefully will get a bit more of a chance to shine next time.

The Grizzled Drunken Ronin showed off to good effect as one of the strongest fighters, and dramatically sucking the blood out of a target creature, or something, but the party survived the combat with normal attacks before any his exotic abilities came into play. I hope they will feature prominently in future fights too.

I've good ideas what the characters might find in future, both immediately, and relationships they might develop in downtime if they want. The "adventure in game time, research/investigate/shop in downtime" seems to work reasonably, although I will try to have some character building encounters in game time too.

Everyone heard rumours suggesting potential entanglements, dangers, or side missions, and took some of them up, and sensibly steered waaaaaaaaay clear of a couple of dangerous sounding ones that ended up close together.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1096644.html

1. Don't plan a sequence of things, plan things you can slot together.

Don't plan a series of combats, or a series of clues, or a series of social encounters. Plan enemy groups, locations, clues, interesting NPCs with their own agendas. Things will never go how you expect. But if you have that flexible preparation, you can present something appropriate in response, as opposed to just forcing the party onto the next step of your original plan.

Pace too slow? You can have the goblin hit squad catch up with the party now, rather than waiting until the party get to the Expected Location For the Goblin Assassin Ambush. Player has a surprisingly effective way of finding stuff out? Throw one of the clues you'd expected to find later at them. Party not feeling challenged? Use some more of the enemy combatants they might not otherwise have encountered. Party flailing, not sure where the plot is? Let them find one of the clues you prepared. Party go somewhere you didn't expect? Have them meet one of the NPCs. Party talk to NPC? Have the NPC react in character, don't worry if that helps or hinders.

Soon you'll feel excited not depressed when the party do something unexpected and it will reveal interesting parts of your preparation you hadn't thought of instead of throwing it into disarray.

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Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1096430.html

I've blogged about this ages ago, but apparently I never made myself understood.

Imagine you have a few characters, probably lovable misfits, a tough one, a hacker, a disguise artist, etc. The GM is adjudicating something simple and in theme, say the hacker needs to bypass an electronic keypad and then the tough one needs to spring through the door and take down half a dozen guards.

Traditional resolution mechanics, used commonly in all of simulationist games, tactical games, and lightweight narrative-focused games, go something like:

* Decide how hard each of those are for a typical human
* Each character gets a bonus for how much better than a typical human they are
* Then you resolve it.

It's important that the players and GM all have a similar idea how difficult these things actually are for the players, or they'll get into an argument about the resolution. But in truth... most of them will have watched a LOT of movies about tough ones who take down rooms full of guards, and never ever seen it in real life. So when you get to the "estimate difficulty" part, it's easier to estimate "for the tough one, taking out six surprised and lightly armed guards is of moderate difficulty" than to estimate "for a typical human, is this challenging? extreme? superhuman? something else?"

I'm considering an alternative, something like:

* Look at the obstacle as described by the GM
* Look at the character's ability
* Adjudicate "OK, for your specific character, that's easy/medium/hard/nigh-impossible", and roll a die that says "you succeed on an easy/medium/hard/impossible" challenge.

If you have a simulationist system, the traditional method is almost necessary. It's also a lot more practical if you have lots of different small bonuses, because adding those to the player's achievement is easier than subtracting them from the difficulty. But outside those situations, in theory, that system has some advantages: the GM doesn't need to model the characters abilities, just how hard the situation is; it means players usually get big numbers or lots of dice which is fun. But I'm not sure I actually believe those.

In practice, in creating a fun experience, the GM probably has a better idea of "I want to provide the players with this much of a challenge" than of "I want the situation to be this challenging in the abstract". Especially if there's modifiers being thrown around, it's easy for a "choose a difficulty, and then the players get bonuses" model to end up with "whoops, the player can just always/never succeed at this".

For instance, the players try to bribe a guard. Everyone expects that to happen in heroic fantasy all the time, so the GM gives it a fairly low difficulty. Now the players want to disguise themselves as laundry attendants to escape the castle. The GM does the same thing. But it turns out there's a mechanic for bribing but not disguise, or vice versa, so the players get a whacking great bonus to one of them and not the other, despite both being what you'd expect from the genre. It means the GM and player's instinctive knowledge of what the characters can do can work against them if the mechanics don't perfectly line up.

But with the new system, appropriate difficulties happen automatically if people forget themselves, but you can still calculate them in detail when you feel the need. The GM can always just assume that as long as the hacker does the hacking and the tough one does the bruising, most challenges will be "medium", but they can throw an "easy" or "hard" in there if they want. And if they DO want to make things more objective they can use a rule-of-thumb of "for every notch above typical human you are, you reduce the difficulty by one level" without wiring it into the rules of the universe.

What are the advantages of that system?

One is, as I said, it's easier to adjudicate difficulty on the fly if everyone has a good idea what the characters can do but not what a normal human can do.

Also, if characters want to work outside their specialities it also works better. Maybe "jumping a gap", anyone can try even if only the athlete can be assumed to succeed, but "picking a lock" you can't do at all unless you know. Most systems force you to pick one or the other of those for all possible tasks (or choose two possible levels, as with DnD's "take 10/take 20" system and restrictions on some skills without training). In this system, the GM can adjudicate on the fly what obviously makes sense in the situation at hand, even if it means some tasks which are medium for the hacker are hard for other characters and some are impossible. Whereas with a traditional resolution, if two different players want to try the same thing, it's easy to have the results break everyone's expectation of what the characters can achieve.

And, it implicitly puts the variance under the GM's command, not only the mean. If one character has a special ability that makes routine something that is usually far out of the reach of other characters, the flavour might still suggest that they some of those tasks are easy and some are hard for them. In a traditional resolution mechanic, you *also* need to make sure those difficulties are out of reach of other characters, except for the times they actually should be able to do it with sufficient effort. With the new system, you can simply assign difficulties for the character with the special ability, and worry about the other characters only if they try something like that.

I'm not sure if there's actually any use for this system, but thinking it through helped me think how abilities and difficulties work.

And I'm still confused by the responses I got when I talked about this before, which were mostly, "If you think that, you should try FUDGE" which I mean, sure, a popular widely used system probably is a lot better than one person's random idea, but it seems so irrelevant, since FUDGE uses exactly the same traditional resolution order as DnD, so I wasn't sure what they were trying to say.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1094507.html

OK, after running a couple of sessions, my massive role-playing kick is ebbing a bit. Now I've been through enough obsessions to ride the wave a bit rather than just being confused. The important things are, finish off what I was planning and continuing to run sessions, which I will enjoy even if I don't have "absolutely must right this second" obsession, giving myself some space to do chores and passive relaxation like books and tv, and have a next "thing" ready, because if I don't have something I'm anticipating I lose all motivation for anything.

Or another way to look at it is, I've achieved what I never quite managed for embarrassingly long, of sitting down to GM some roleplaying with the confidence that I could advertise a one-shot and have it go well, and not worry that I can't manage to learn a new system and get my GMing up to a non-beginner standard at the same time. And now I can think about what I'm excited to run, stories and systems that I can hopefully build up to (DnD world with a rich history which I've developed, vorkosigan-esque roleplaying).

As it happens my second session running the superheroes was pretty fun, and introduced some people to simple 5e DnD mechanics when they'd roleplaying before, but not played DnD any time recently, and the players had pretty cool characters. But partly because the characters didn't happen to gel as well, and partly because I ran it on short notice, it wasn't quite as memorable as the first session. Oh well, I'm glad it was that way round, and now I'm more confident running variants on the theme.

And I did enjoy bringing one of the last session PCs in briefly as a cameo as a superhero much more experienced with these enemies: the dice were great at delivering deadly ninja effectiveness, but also in-character pratfalls :)

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1093713.html

There are some fairly sensible rules of thumb for "how challenging is this monster". Things like "this amount of hit points and armour class are roughly equivalent to this amount of hit points and armour class" and "if it has good saves, treat the effective hp as this much higher". And the same for attacks, and, how to use monsters with attacks stronger than defences and vice versa, and how not to depart too far from equivalence or you get monsters that are really boring (if they odn't do much damage but take forever to kill) or really swingy (if they do lots of damage but are very fragile).

But it seems like Dungeon Master's Guide always makes a dog's breakfast of explaining these. It presents a bunch of rules as a rigid algorithm and says "you can tweak it", whereas I feel like someone who understands the rules of thumb could have provided a template beginners could use. I may try to write that up, but in practice GMs usually use a lot of intuition to tune monsters and I may not have enough experience with 5e yet.

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Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1093462.html

GM: OK, so while Vapourwave's reconstituting himself and Rusty's repairing the mech and riding herd on the security system, you two...
Dr Weird: So I can just misty step through the forcefield into the cell with the interdimensional portal?
GM: Oh yes, I'd forgotten you can do that.
Dr Weird: Is there a control to turn the forcefield off?
GM: No...
Ninja: Not on the INSIDE
Ninja: There's a keypad next to it here on the outside, could he just have used that?
GM: Yes, that's what I was expecting.
GM: Although it's not just an on/off, you'd need to make sure you figure it out.
Rusty: But I could make sure he doesn't accidentally turn off all the forcefields at the same time?
GM: Indeed.
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Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1093265.html

One of the strange things about GMing is that it's a naturally ephemeral hobby. If you get really good at writing, you might write stories people keep reading years later. If you get really good at playing a musical instrument, you might play to larger audiences or at higher-profile occasions.

Whereas, if you get really good at GM'ing, you'll still only ever really do it with four other people, and many of the ideas you have will get recycled into an "ideas" folder because they didn't come in play.

Some people write modules or stream games, but that's not for everyone.

That's not bad, I just personally find it really hard to enjoy moments for themselves without wanting to save them forever.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1092882.html

Character Creation

Planning characters chatting online and then jumping straight into the session worked well. I've often ended up doing that unofficially, but I think I might make it my default. Planning actually benefits from some time to mull over ideas, mixed with talking to other characters and the GM, and often doesn't need much face to face time. If people are completely new to the system, then yes, you probably want to do that together, in what I think of as a pre-session.

Obviously that's when players are designing characters. For one-shots I'll usually provide a range of pregens to choose from, or maybe a mix-and-match set of character sheets with mechanics, and of fill-in-the-blank backgrounds.

Setting the Scene

I've been refining my skill at describing the setting, and giving the characters a clear motivation straight out of the gate. I still get hung up on it surprisingly often, but resolving to get my players to repeat back what I thought was important meant that I could notice and fix any holes before anyone got lost without a clear goal.

I also did ok at describing the rooms, in terms of scale and general contents. It's still not my best strength, but I was fairly happy.

Pacing

This is one of these things where if it's done well you don't notice but if it's done badly it can undermine everything else. But compared to many sessions, I did great, we finished almost exactly on schedule, with an appropriate number of fights.

What did I do right? I had a fairly clear idea of what would happen in each third of the adventure, and when that should happen, and took a five minute break to recharge at those points, and hurried things along when I needed to to fit those times. That meant that if I needed to, I'd be cutting short the introductory bit to get to the climaxes, not cutting short the climaxes. That doesn't work if the players actually haven't really succeeded the introductory bit, but if they've basically got the idea but just not worked their way through everything, I can fast-forward and say "you wrap that up without much more problem" rather than playing through more similar fights.

But in fact, I didn't need to do that at all. I was fairly loose with how each fight went on. When I thought it needed it I did encourage players to keep attacking for another round "same attack, roll, damage, ok next" style. But when an enemy was mostly dead or a fight was mostly over, I'd handwave it by letting the last enemy run away or be knocked out a couple of hitpoints soon or whatever.

Notice, there is an art to that. If the fight has juuuuust turned and the players were really looking forward to using their big abilities, it robs them of a lot of fun to say, "ok, you've got this one, we'll assume you win". You need to judge when the *players* are ready to end the fight. But I think I got the balance right.

There was one moment where the Ninja who builds up to a big attack didn't quite get to do it enough, but we handwaved things so he could even though that wasn't perfect.

I'd wondered if I'd have to keep encouraging the players to keep moving and not hang around faffing with one room before moving on, but they were really great at getting sucked into things sometimes but quickly moving towards the main objective whenever things flagged.

Acting and Characterisation

My players almost did me to shame, here, they all made REALLY GREAT characters. Rusty was great as the chief engineer of not-Tony-Stark, pushed into combat he didn't really want to be handling, and playing up the mechanic persona. Vapourwave's glam rock was utterly impeccable. Nova Ninja really brought to life the low-budget well meaning goofball. Dr Weird was a great aloof wizard.

So for a lot of it I just fed them straight lines and let them get on with it.

But I'm pretty happy how I fleshed out a concept to include a few serious moments, some slapstick, and a lot that was a bit silly but also worth actually fighting. And the environments worked well, the storeroom full of magical ingredients and the basement with different experiments behind forcefields made great settings for a variety of wacky shenanigans.

And planning the major characters but bringing them out when it seemed appropriate or the dice called them up worked very well.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1092670.html

Rusty: I check the computers. Can I access a general layout of the facility?
GM: Sure.
GM: Here's the main rooms, as I planned them.
GM: The basement is marked SECRET
Vapourwave: What's the most direct way there?
Vapourwave: As I'm effectively invulnerable in intangible form, I'll turn into gas and float straight there.
GM: OK.
GM: Also *rolls* *rolls*
GM: Previously unbeknownst to you all, a roaming blob monster from the extradimensional plane of custard was lurking on the ceiling and drops on Rusty as he pokes at the computer.[2]
GM: Rusty, fail a dex save.
Rusty: Don't you mean, "make a dex save"?
Rusty: Damn. Never mind.
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Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1092543.html

The plan

My plan was to design from scratch superhero concepts that were about equivalent to a 5e 3rd level character. I chose 3rd level because it's the level where most classes get their signature abilities, but is still simple enough for a beginner to play, and for me to adjudicate.

I know that transplanting to system to a different world sounds ridiculous, but I thought it made surprisingly much sense. 5e characters feel quite like mid-level superheroes to me. They bounce back from damage easily. They have an array of fantastic powers. The fights feel reasonably like superhero fights to me: a mix of chipping away and decisive blows, ending fairly quickly. In particular, it works if they're mostly specific powers you can use on the spot, whereas if your characters are known for "incredibly strategic plans" (like Vorkosigan Saga), it's harder to model those by rolling dice.

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Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1092267.html

Preface: As with most of my roleplaying transcripts, it is moderately fictionalised. Many of the cool ideas came from my players, and we really did get ourselves into the sort of binds described here -- but I've played stuff up and changed it around to make it fun to read.

GM: Blah blah superhero city blah blah blah
GM: Your mentors, and all of the other top tier superheroes and supervillains have mysteriously vanished overnight.
GM: No offence for what this implies about the tier of YOUR characters.
Nova Ninja: I have ninja powers, but 'm not so much a superhero, as I play one on TV.
Ninja: I arrive at the TV studio. No-one is there today.
Ninja: I adjust my name higher in the billing.
GM: Superhero dispatch calls you and says there's an urgent situation developing and of all the superheroes available, you're the one best placed to deal with it.
GM: She doesn't sound happy about it.
Ninja: I'm on my way!
GM: You drive off in your low-rent actor-mobile. It is full of discarded coffee cups and anachronistic cigarettes.
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Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1091944.html

Most new editions of DnD come with ideas where I think "oh, that's a good idea" at the time, but it's hard to see more clearly whether they actually made things good or not.

5e introduced Advantage and Disadvantage. Basically, if you're attacking or attempting something similar in any advantageous situation, from hiding, or attacking someone impaired, or a long list of other scenarios, you get advantage -- you get to roll two d20 instead of one and choose the better. It also "turns on" some special abilities like the rogue's backstab. Disadvantage is the same but you have to choose the worse.

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Balance for what timescale

I struggled to put this into words, but it seems like old editions of DnD were balanced for a campaign. There are all sorts of rules that only make a difference if you expect to play the same character through all the levels, classes that are weaker early on but stronger later or vice versa. More like roguelikes than most modern roleplaying sessions.

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Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1091489.html

I hosted a game of Microscope (collaborative history-building roleplaying-ish game) at Heffer's board games. I'm hoping to run some more traditional one-shots as well, but I thought this was a good introduction. I ended up with three others who all had great ideas but a spread of experience.

Everyone else was excited by acted scenes, which produced some of the most memorable ideas, but I still prefer microscope when you just don't do that and everything is events and periods.

It took some time to get going, I'd thought we were all on the same page with what the Narnia prompt, but when it came to choose the bookends (which in this case were inevitably the beginning and end of the world), we already got widely divergent ideas which told me we needed more discussion of tone and theme (i.e. what if anything goes into the palette) than I'd expected. Like, someone wanted "world created by gods", someone else suggested "accident in a multiverse laboratory", someone wanted religious allegory but different, someone else wanted no religious allegory, it was hard to reach consensus, even though once we started playing we quickly converged on a fairly consistent vision.

We did negotiate some of the restrictions well: a discussion of what we didn't want eventually ended up as "no post-18th century technology" and "no planned expeditions to other world" because we had an intuition for what was out of place (we didn't want the Narnia equivalent of "we go and change history by importing earth technology" even though I like that story in other settings) but it took some time to agree what counted and what didn't. And that discussion delayed actually getting into positive ideas.

I think we were just unlucky we ended up with a premise that took different people in different directions, I'd hoped that would be a lot simpler to agree the ground rules, because that means all the actual gameplay is put on hold. But I don't think we could have done better, I think if we'd tried to curtail it we'd just have ended up with the same debate later on. I might try to be more specific in future prompts, I deliberately left it somewhat open ended to pique people's interest, but if I'd chosen something more unambiguous, we'd probably have taken our cue from them.

It's hard to describe the history so it sounds interesting to people who aren't playing, a lot of the magic is in the little characterisations about people or characters felt about particular events, but I did write up a summary:

World formed on back of sleeping titan Mythios, and birth of first heraldic beasts.

Mara, from earth, sacrifices herself to create the orb of dreaming in the dreaming depths, in the hopes of keeeping Mythios asleep as long as possible and possibly preserving the people from Mythia after their physical existence ends.

War between the Rider Artolian and the Eagle Simnos. The unicorn temple is nearly destroyed.

Lenora, a girl from earth, is tutored by Karthas, the inheritor of the eagle archetype, and founds an empire, despite accusations of tyranny and opposition from artolians.

Irena, a woman on her deathbed, arrives in Mythia, and is imprisoned by Lenora, but with the aid of the "Plucky Companions" steals the Sceptre of Grandeur and escapes, fulfilling the three prophecies and destroying the myth of Lenora's uniqueness as a destined one.

Irena eventually inherits Lenora's mantle and unifies the empire with the rest of the world in an age of peace.

Artolian's old lieutenant, Lannios the unicorn, chafes under the new peace and launches an expedition to seek the orb in the dreaming depths. Opposed by the two-headed lion Alura who long considered those her own domain, Lamnios' treacherous companion Etios the great frog evades them both to claim it.

Irene stores her soul in a dream orb to allow her to fulfil her prophecied destiny in the closing days of the world.

Additional humans appear, but this causes Mythios to begin stirring, presaging his awakening and the end of the world.

Two destined humans together wake three heraldic beasts into new gods with a shared desire of preventing Mythios' wakening, but otherwise unfortunately divergent goals and intentions. Further gods follow, including Lannios the unicorn.

One of first gods is Etios, the new frog god of dreaming. Lannios cultists, in culmination of long but obscure plans, destroy Etios, returning the orb of dreaming to the physical world.

Lannios struggles with the first three gods, and the struggle awakens Mythios who washes the world away. Anyone's survival is unclear.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1090355.html

Inspired by playing an apocalypse world inspired system at the one-shot on Saturday, my brain started thinking about roleplaying systems again.

Apocalypse World

This is the system where you roll 2d6 (possibly adding a stat or a bonus), and on 10+ you succeed, and on 7-9 you succeed but with an inventive drawback that keeps things dramatic, and on 1-6... well, I'll come back to that. There's hundreds of different settings based on variants of this system because it's easy to adapt to any setting.

As best as I can tell by reading around online, the intention of the system is to take a more narrative approach to resolution than DnD like games have. I want to be clear about what I mean by that, because both types of progress get muddled together in most games. By mechanical, I'm thinking of systems like DnD where the GM is expected to set up a situation and let the players explore it, and alters it on the fly to a greater or lesser extent, but by and large the results of a player action are some physical change in the game world known to all.

By contrast, the narrative resolution is more like, the player describes what happens, and as long as it doesn't depart what's physically plausible too far, you roll some dice to determine, "does the character mostly proceed, or does something that make you say uh-oh happen?"

E.g. in DnD, it makes a big difference if you have a short sword or a long sword because it affects how much damage you do. In dungeon world, it's not that granular, instead, you're expected to describe your character -- whoever they are -- facing off against some orcs, until conflict happens where the result isn't obvious, when the dice determine what happens. But the specifics could be anything, "having the orcs flee" or "killing them" uses much the same mechanic, as does, if you fail, it doesn't mean "miss", it means, the gm gets to ratchet up the tension, e.g. "your sword swings wide, the orc looms over you" or "you trip and drop your sword" or "you stab the orc, but suddenly, you hear a vast drum sounding from deep in the mines, DOOM, DOOM..."

That is, you wait until something dramatic is happening, when both failure and success have interesting what-happens-next-s like a choose your own adventure book, and then you roll to choose one or the other.

The specifics vary between the variants, and I've only experienced one or two, and not any of the originals, so I can't speak with much authority here, but I think that's the idea, and it seems like a good one. So what's the problem?

It doesn't work

I'm sure I must be being too negative here. Thousands of people have played this game. Hundreds of people have written adventures for it. Some people must have found doing so successful. I'm interested to know if anyone (any of you?) feels like the game has worked well in a narrative way.

Because my impression is that lots of people have had really great games by basically ignoring the mechanics and hoping for the best, but that's not really what your mechanics for.

What problems, based on a fairly cursory investigation, do I see? Well, the mechanics that there are don't really fit the ostensible aim. In Dungeon World, the battle with orcs is supposed to be quite cinematic. But the rules encourage you not to resolve the combat at a high level of abstraction. You can't say, "we outnumber the orcs, we charge in for the slaughter, rolling?, mixed success, ok, they all die but one of us is wounded", the rules specifically call for the orcs to have a fixed number of hitpoints, and actions which attack cause a specific number of hit points worth of damage.

So lots of people have a problem of just saying "we attack" repeatedly, and all get dead if the GM is harsh with their counter-actions, or win boringly if the GM is benign. A good GM certainly CAN avoid that, but it seems like the dungeon world rules encourage you into the unhelpful behaviour, not the fun behaviour, and don't provide a lot of guidance.

Or suppose there's a battle and all the characters want to act at once. Is there a secret round mechanics where everyone gets to act, even though the rules don't specify it? Or it just a rules back and forth with "player action, GM action only if player failure, etc" with no mechanically-relevant actions by the opponents outside that, where the players are incentivised to let the hack-iest character keep acting and everyone else keep their head down and doesn't actually contribute anything? And just rely on "common sense" that having four PCs is better for defeating an orc than one?

And lots of the moves are weirdly specific. Like, a class has some specific possible action that gives +2 to something or other. Which often seems completely at odds with what you might expect to be able to do, and weirdly restraining. Like, I should just narrate? But then it suddenly matters that I have this very specific action?

And there's a lot of other things. The resolution is defined by specific success/failure values, modified by the player's abilities. And you can add other modifiers but that doesn't seem to be the standard. So if you're bad at talking ALL your talking attempts will be "probably fail" ones. That's dramatically appropriate. But you can't ever have some easier challenges -- it's either so easy you succeed automatically, or so hard you probably fail. So you've no way to get familiar with what's possible. And if you're good at something, all your rolls will be easy ones, there's no way to face a harder-than-average challenge unless the GM adds some negative modifiers to you.

Jack's rules of thumb for how heavyweight mechanics should be: Lightweight

If it comes up at most once a session, it should be extremely lightweight and it doesn't really matter how it works, the GM can just wing it and it's fine. Even crappy systems usually handle this fine because the GM will just fiddle things if it doesn't work and seat-of-the-GM's-pants works fine.

For most DnD games, most things outside combat, i.e. mostly skill checks, fall into this system. There's a big minority of DnD adventures where there are a lot of skill checks, but in most, it's just one every so often, so it only really matters that some characters are good at this, some are bad, the specifics, and whether the skills are well-chosen or should be merged together or split up doesn't really matter.

Jack's rules of thumb for how heavyweight mechanics should be: Less Lightweight

If it comes up repeatedly in a session, you need to make sure the mechanics you use to resolve it are fun when the players are trying to navigate through the system and succeed. That can be lightweight, but it at least needs to be consistent, and it needs to be well balanced without any gaping flaws.

That doesn't matter in every single game, but in most games, the players are rooting for their characters, and it's much much more fun if "the things that make the characters succeed" has a significant overlap with "the things that are fun for the players to have the characters do". If one ability is overpowered, you'll find out here. If there's too few possible actions and combat just comes down to "I hit him, he hits me", you'll find out here.

In DnD this is combat, and DnD puts a lot of effort into that. I think most games benefit from having some 'central' resolution mechanic like that, whether it comes up often or rarely, to give some weight to decisions because the players know that how dangerous the situation is actively determined, and not just up to GM fiat. And usually it rewards (some) player skill as well. Although you might count something like a "doom track" counting down to red alert/horrors break through/night falls/etc as the same sort of thing, that there are clear understood rules come up repeatedly, and the players understand when they're hastening bad things.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1087907.html

I correctly remembered that December is always busy even without something I'm working on, between yuletide fanfic exchange, plans, presents and cards for xmas, and many social events and hopefully have avoided over-committing myself too badly.

Roleplaying

On Saturday I went along to one of the Heffers gaming events -- they've recently started a roleplaying night on Mondays, basically a venue for GMs to coordinate and host one-shots or campaigns, but still have some roleplaying sessions at the regular board game nights, which now are utterly gigantic.

It was run by a GM I've seen on some of the rpg facebook groups around Cambridge but not met, but he was pretty good, he was good at quickly building a world, and did some great NPCs.

The setting was just lovely, anthropomorphic mice gathering food for winter, and for the midwinter feast. Yes, we were derailed into a philosophical discussion about Owls and Mice both being sapient and what that implies for Owls :)

I played the stoic Head Chef. AK played the head of the woodland watch. The two other players played the incredibly bard-y minstrel, and forager with the lovely cart-pulling ferret. We sought the remaining fresh herbs, stood up to the burrow council, calmed a revolt, escaped a cat, caught and eventually reunited a thieving romeo and juliet couple, and muddled our way through plenty of slapstick hiding-from-the-burrow-council moments.

Aside

Oh gosh, I had to try so hard to drag my mind from the generalities (some discussed below) to the specifics which are probably much more interesting to read.

System

It was based on the apocalypse world system (roll 2d6, 7-9 = "succeed, but with caveat", etc) which I've played before and now have Thoughts about, which I'm not convinced worked great, but was sufficiently low-intrusive that the game worked great without worrying too much if the mechanics were the best.

The character generation was really excellent, giving pre-generated roles like Head Chef, Chief Forager and head of the woodland watch, but encouraging the players to give names and personalities, and fill in pre-suggested questions like "what animal pulls your cart" and "which member of the kitchen staff", and then a final question, asking "which previously mentioned NPC has been..." It was a very seamless way of encouraging the players, beginners or experts, to contribute to the world creation, and ensure that the NPCs were cross-linked into a society, not just a background cast separate for each player.

I'm assuming James gets the credit for writing those sheets, but many Apocalypse World variants do have excellent prompts of that sort, it's one of the things other systems could learn. I certainly do similarly even in fairly old-school DnD.

Note to self: "You're delving into the tomb of the lich emperor seeking a... what?" makes players remember the goal and macguffin a thousand times better than just telling them its jeweled sword of so-and-so.

Cambridge Polyamory Meet Winter Party

This was lovely. Amy rented Rock Road library, the events room, but also, just letting everyone have the run of the library if they felt like, which feels really lovely.

People brought v good food.

And we played the "write a phrase, try to draw the previous person's phrase, try to guess the previous person's drawing, repeat" game, which was absolutely hilarious.

Lots of lovely people, including some I haven't seen for a while and it was nice to catch up wit, including Steve who was moving away and doing his best to give away a lot of sci-fi and programming books first, including the interesting but provocatively-premised "compiler engineering in JAVA". I mean, JAVA is probably a fine language if you want to learn about compiler writing, but I wouldn't really choose anything but C or C++ for writing compilers.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1087525.html

Team non-overthink, don't read this :)

Fellow players and GM, thank you for bringing this to life! The write up is moderately fictionalised, as what's fun to play doesn't always correspond to what's fun to read, but I hopefully covered most of the key plot points. I may have some details wrong, point out anything you think should be corrected.

The setting: 1920s Berlin. Reeling from war, economy devastated, but glamour and social exuberance riding high. Fascists and communists clashing in the streets, and in the cover story of the mysterious mover-and-shaker Karl.

A mismatched band of opportunists in over their heads are orchestrating a heist from an aristocratic estate with an unpleasant reputation, on behalf of the suspicious and enigmatic owner of the Moka Efti nightclub, of several items which it seems more dangerous to posses than not.

Several vignettes play out.

Coiffurist

American girl-about-town Virginia disappeared with her 'coiffurist' for more than 48 hours, but is widely expected to turn up to the heist fashionable late with something the rest of the team forgot just in the nick of time.

Jermiah and Jackie

Small time conman and expectant father Jackie and young, unworldly but insightful mormon missionary Elder Jeremiah drop in to visit a chemist of questionable ethics in search of reliable dog-knockout-juice.

Elder Jeremiah: We're not going to kill any dogs, are we?
Jackie: Well, putting people to sleep temporarily is a dicey art, but I'd say we have a reasonable chance.
Elder Jeremiah:

Stopped by the police on the way back:

Police: Who are you?
Jackie: Jackie. Small time street hustler. I mean, respectable businesshuman.
Elder Jeremiah: Well, that's a very ecumenical question.
Jackie: It's ok. He's innocent. He's an american.
Jackie: Casually takes hold of the bottle of volatile chemicals
Jackie: I ROLLED DOUBLE ONE ON MY HIDE ROLL? DID YOU HEAR ME? I SAID I ROLLED SNAKEYES.
Police: What's this?
Elder (thinking fast): Sleeping draft for his wife.
Jackie: Whew.
Police: And can we see your bribes?
Police: I mean papers.
Elder: Here you are.
Police: That's a nice decorated cane you have there.
Elder: Oh yes, it is, isn't it!
Police: Are you looking to get rid of it?
Elder: Not really. Why?
Jackie: Oh, except that you were just saying, maybe it would make a good charitable gift.
Police: I could find someone who wants it.
Elder: Oh? Oh! Yes, right. Thank you. Indeed.
Police: And can we see the boot.
Jackie: Good job we're finally out of corpses.
Jackie: I mean, bribes.
Police: And don't let us catch you doing...
Police: Uh, whatever it was we stopped you for again.

( Read more... )

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1058839.html

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