Madonna of the Blogrush

So, I have completed my first semester of graduate school and I just need to make a post. The blog’s not dead, but my spirit is marred by long hours and few games. So here’s a short blogrush: a couple of different small ideas to consider as I begin actually  writing the next article. These are all scraps from attempts to flesh out the next new article so mileage may vary. 

1) So I had a thought: maybe instead of the Long Rim being a long, trackless steppe, maybe it’s actually a great rip in the earth, that the Long Rim is made up of gorges and canyons, karst/standing stone canyons and steephead valleys, with the difficulty in travel being the canyon walls and the various cliffs and pools of water and caves you have to travel through to get to different locations. In this alternate Long Rim, there’s still a straight line of city states, and navigation is still easy since it’s either forward or back and the sun shines directly down, but the complexity in travel stems from what’s on the next leg of the journey and there are always spelunkers looking for the next path forward. I was reading about japanese canyoning, called “sawanobori”, which inspired this idea. I was also inspired by the level design of the garbage game Anthem and the cover of an RPG book that I can’t remember the title of. I think it’s worth consideration, especially as it moves me away from just ripping off UVG.

2) When I get to the end of my day, my go-to meditation game is Death Stranding. The story was okay, given typical Kojima wackiness, but it was the world and the gameplay that really inspired me. The gameplay loop of seeing what packages people left in the shared locker, planning a route to deliver those packages, trying to deliver the furthest package for the most likes… Hell, I don’t even do orders anymore: I deliver other people’s packages to them. I’m the deliverer for deliverers.

As I was delivering these lost packages, however, I was thinking about how to incorporate the things I enjoy about Death Stranding into my OSR games. So much about the game has an OSR feel already: a normal dude, challenges in enemies and environment and geography, different tools that can be used for different approaches to the central problem, and most of all, the point crawl. (I’m of the opinion that one of the best modern OSR movies is Triple Frontier, a movie that revolves around moving mass amounts of treasure in the form of dollar bills out of a dungeon in the form of a drug lord’s mansion. Getting the treasure is one thing, but transporting the treasure over the Andes? That’s where the magic happens.) Death Stranding is a point crawl, less like the massive distances of UVG and more in the vein of Slumbering Ursine Dunes (“Points on the map represent encounter and site areas that are roughly spaced out 150-300 yards from each other.”). 

But before I dive into that, let me just say that in a game where moving items of variable weight and size might be important (maybe the players are all porters and couriers), I believe Knave and other slot based encumbrance systems are probably the best. The ability to say “Okay, there are four eight-slot items that need to be delivered” and allowing the players to decide what’s the best way to transport them (“Players will come up with weird justifications for how they are going to rig up rollers, ropes, and pulleys to drag heavy things long distances. This is good. Encourage them.” [UVG 149]) is interesting to me. Maybe even a Veins of the Earth style encumbrance system, but instead of Charisma only offering an equipment slot more, the more inventory you have the higher your Charisma modifier (“Wow! That’s a lot of cargo!”).

It’d be fun for a one shot or small adventure, but I’d have to clarify the rules a bit.

3) In my house rules, I still use the Splendid (or Sinister, depending on your point of view) Six stats that all retro clones and big game wannabes use: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. However, continuing to dive into other systems, a question gets asked: why six stats? Why not four? I began this massive list writing out all the games and all the attribute names and numbers and comparing them to retroclones, but as interesting as that investigation was, it doesn’t answer the question very well. My system, being an OSR game, must be able to be played across modules and settings. I keep to the Six because it reduces the amount of “deboning” someone would have to do to run a module in the system. If a check calls for Charisma, you don’t have to do any additional work, just call for a Charisma check.

4) There are multiple ways of generating EXP in tabletop games. Most assign monsters EXP that players earn by defeating them. Some assign gold an EXP value, leveling up characters for returning treasure back into the economy. However, the most important way to generate experience for advancement is (in the Long Rim) exploration.

Pointcrawl. Three points to a region. There are tables for regional events and encounters, like UVG. The three points represent locations on the usual caravaneers path. It’s dangerous, but less so than just cutting through the wild. There might be roads, and road wardens, and tolls, and all that nasty civilization. These points are outposts, boomtowns, maybe a grand oasis city. The dungeons and other sights are left for the players to explore, to mark on the map. Finding those points earns experience.

Luke Crane wrote a game called Miseries and Misfortunes. To advance in level, there is a list of things you have to do, depending on the Mentality. Because it’s Luke Crane, it’s basically just a lifepath from Burning Wheel which is in turn an improvement on the career skills from that warrior goddess Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st Edition. For example, if you’re an Explorer, to level up your Explorer Lifepath, you must “journey to a new place outside your home country”, or “learn a new language”. Do those things, and you level up.

Likewise, in the game Carcosa, finding particular hexes with cool things in them, such as the titular City of Carcosa, earns EXP. More EXP is earned from partaking in certain actions within the hex. If you find the City, you get EXP. If you spend a single night in the city (and all the bad stuff fires off), you get more EXP. I will admit I couldn’t find exactly where it says that in the Carcosa rules, though (I feel like I am stealing this from somewhere). 

Leveling up here is the same. Each point has a list of things you can do, each ramping in difficulty. Let’s say there’s a region called Great Lake. There would be a list of tasks you can perform to earn EXP to level up. An example of a simple task would be fishing in the lake, for something like 1 EXP. An example of a difficult task awarding lots of EXP would be like a high level Pathfinder encounter, or something with lots of steps, like “walk along the bottom of Great Lake in a diving suit and don’t get eaten by the giant anglerfish that lives down there”.

How do characters find out about EXP opportunities without just getting the table with the list? Quest givers, rumors, and travelogues.

A quest giver is just a dude who wants to hire the party to go do a thing. The task is probably one that awards a decent amount of EXP. You might be mistaken into thinking that this is quest or milestone EXP, that by doing the thing asked you get the reward, which is EXP. This is incorrect: the task doesn’t care, it’s binary, it’s either completed or not completed. Whatever circumstance arises that allows the player to complete it, it either is finished or not. It’s kind of like the separation of money and karma(?) in Shadowrun: you can take the high paying job from the corpo-terrorist that earns less karma to level your character with, or you can help the little old lady at the soup kitchen for beaucoup karma. It also speaks to the multiple advancement opportunities Shadowrun characters have. Regardless, even if the party decides to stab the quest giver in the back or ignore them, the task still exists for EXP. 

A rumor is just that, a rumor on a table that players can get by spending treasure. Fill in your favorite carcousing or rumor rules and run wild.

A travelogue should be like the Field Guide to Hot Springs Island: carve out some time to write some fiction for your table. Take you DMing to the next level and really create something for your players. Be somebody.

At first, I wanted to use Dungeon Crawl Classics for the advancement criteria of my house rules, maybe a little less harsh, with level 10 being something like 500 EXP total. But then I remembered I’m moving to a more level-less system: instead of each level being harder, at 20 EXP, all players have a chance to update their stats, and my extension their Might.

There’s a secondary to this: time and the seasonal EXP requirement. If you gain experience by fishing in Great Lake, if you get there in winter and the Lake’s frozen over, you lose the opportunity to earn that experience until the spring. Time is a modifier on travel and experience: travel is easier and hard during some seasons, and tasks are open and closed depending on the season

5) On one side of the scale is Into the Odd, a game where death is almost instantaneous with combat, where the usual second or third roll of combat is figuring out if you are dead or unconscious. On the other side is D&D 5E, a game where death is exceedingly rare and is normally the result of a player not being aware of the massive amount of tools available to them not to die (healing spells, resting and hit dice, death saving throws). I want this to be a game that sits in the middle: on the one hand, I as the DM should not need to be terrified of dishing out damage for fear that a wayward strike will kill a character outright. The system is designed that no character insta-dies, but each turn of combat is important (a couple of hits wipes out your defenses, a couple more cut into your attributes, maybe one or two land on your Soul). On the other hand, a character is not a superhero who can tank all damage without fear or consequence. As wounds mount up, you become less and less effective (without healing), until you start taking damage that will stay with you forever.

The goal of this is simple. I want the players to care about characters, and a character that is cordwood doesn’t get a lot of love. On the other hand, I don’t want the character to be bulletproof: going into dungeons to seek out treasure should be neither safe nor routine. I want the opposite response to a 0 level funnel: you care about your character not because they survived when four schmucks didn’t, but because the character sheet shows you all the experiences you’ve had. Remember when you got that stutter fighting that monster?

6) Man, what is up about looking at black and white squared maps of dungeons that transfigures elements in your mind to that place of zen and tranquility, of seeing and imagining and being on the cusp of experiencing something new?

7) The story does not appear at any point in the game designer’s rules, the DM’s planning, or the player’s backstory. The story appears at the table. The story does not trump the rules. The situation does.

I’m toying with the idea to try something new. I’m going to record myself reading a book, and then record myself talking about the book. I’m going to upload that here. They’re not going to be RPG books for the most part, just books I want (or need) to read. Looking forward to having something to show.