Showing posts with label OSR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OSR. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 3, 2025

Worlds Funsome and Free: Understanding Open Role-Play Adventures

The following is mainly available in various pdf and text formats on my itch.io page, but some folks also like having it available in blog form, so here tis'.
 

 

What is This About?

At its most essential, Open Role-Play Adventure – ORPA for short – is tabletop role-playing achieved primarily through open discussion and impromptu judgments, rather than through recourse to pre-codified rule systems, as it was done in the earliest days of the medium before such systems existed. Very often this style of play prioritizes the evocation of a world as a believably living place, experienced vividly through description and collaboration – representational game mechanics used only as discretionary tools in the cause of that, not as the focus of play in themselves.

 

Core Precepts

There’s no such thing as an ORPA rulebook – it’s a practice of play, through which  one may approach any setting or campaign premise, not a category of product or a school of design.

When organizing a campaign by this practice, the main purpose is to convey a credible world and bring it to life through aesthetics and description, rather than by simulating it mechanically.

In play, the first recourse for resolving game events is discussion, negotiation, and judgment. Abstract or representational mechanics may be taken up to enhance those methods, but never to replace them.

Authority over play (both in terms of lore and rules) arises solely from the people at the table, directed by a fair referee trusted to make final decisions, rather than from the sanction of a third-party text or organization.


ORPA Step-by-Step

Much of the following section is based on writing by Alyx Ghazarian on their blog Underground Adventures.

Start with a world to explore, not a rules system. Take any book, movie, or show that excites you as your “sourcebook.” Even a setting from a traditional RPG if you like. Or make up a world yourself, on your own or brainstorming with your players.

Ask how things work in this world. What do people eat? Who would be met along a road? What do they celebrate? What do they mourn? Where do problems come from? Who’s expected to solve them? Draw maps. Make lists of interesting places, people, things. Note situations going on that characters may want to get involved in.

You’ll want oracles to help fill out small details when they come up. Make or find random tables on interesting subjects – cargoes a caravan might be hauling, names for spaceport taverns,  villages with peculiarities, names of people, things to encounter in the wilderness.

Introduce the players to the world. Not all of it at once, only what’s directly relevant at the start of play. Then, make characters. Ask questions of the players, have them write down their answers. On simple index cards, not fancy character sheets. Where is their character from? How did they get where they are now? What are they particularly good at? What do they want to achieve? A bit of description, a few notable proficiencies, some equipment, but keep it brief. Use words, not numbers.

To commence playing the game in earnest, present the players with a situation that will compel them to respond.

As you play, prompt the players to ask questions about what’s around them and what’s going on. Answer in ways that expand the world. Convey information fairly so the players can make meaningful decisions. When you need details for an answer, use an oracle.

Don’t push a story to happen, don’t try to follow a plot. Explore where events lead naturally. Nobody knows what will happen next – that's what makes this kind of game unique.

When it comes time to decide how something uncertain turns out, ask yourself, “given the nature of this part of the world under these conditions, what most likely occurs? How does who the characters are and what they’re doing change that?” It’s good to open up discussion to the table, but don’t dither – settle the matter and get on with the action.

Be sure of the characters’ intentions behind what they say and do, and that they understand the stakes before you make a ruling on the consequences. Be impartial but firm.

Go ahead and roll dice if you want, it’s fun! But only ask questions of the dice you’re willing to let them answer, and commit to those answers. 
Use dice in simple ways at first, just one or two six-siders – “The ancient text is really obscure, you’ve got a 1 in 6 chance to decipher it” or “it’s a big door, but you’re really strong, a 7 or better on two dice forces it open.”  The simpler the rolls, the quicker the flow of the game. Don’t get side-tracked calculating exact odds or nailing down every variable. Stay fast and loose, fast and loose.

Do you want more detailed rules to help figure out what happens? Let them emerge naturally, making them up on-the-spot. But remember, the world and making it feel alive comes first.

Do you need ideas for rules? Ransack any game, not just RPGs – pluck whichever ones catch your fancy, but just those, don’t pull in whole systems you weren’t looking for.

Don't worry about fitting new rules together with old ones, that’ll sort itself out. You’ll forget the ones that don’t fit, and come back to the ones that do, and think up ways to draw connections between them when you need to.

When you think of a better rule, or find one somewhere, use it as soon as you want. If you feel you didn’t need a rule for something after all, drop it. You’re not obligated to keep to a set system.

Avoid “rules speak,” both at the table and in your notes. Refer to things how someone on the world would speak of them, don’t worry about nailing them down objectively – at the table, everything is subjective.

As the Referee, portray a credible world and convey the information needed by the players to interact with it in a fitting manner.  Weigh all factors of events in the game, listen to the players’ reasonable responses to those events, answer their questions about them, and judge the outcomes in a manner that is fair both to the characters and to the validity of the world you’re playing in. If you use a rule to decide something, what it says happens is still your responsibility.

As a Player, you are responsible for your own fun. Express yourself, immerse yourself in the experience, encourage others, let the table know if something bothers you. Don’t look to your character sheet for answers. Imagine what you would do in the situation, and act on it. Pursue what interests you, go where the excitement is. Trust the referee and your fellow players.

 

Historical Context

Open Adventure Role-Play has hitherto been widely known as FKR, a term coined in 2015 by Mike Monard, one of the first ever players of D&D, in resistance to mounting assumptions that he identified with the OSR scene: 

"I am not now, nor have I ever been, part of the "Old School Renaissance." This is because I've simply never stopped playing [Original D&D] the way I always have. No rebirth involved. However, one of the bases of Braunstein, then Blackmoor, then Greyhawk, was the concept of "Free Kriegspiel," where the referee's judgment is the supreme authority, not a set of written rules. This fine tradition has all but died out. It needs desperately to be brought back. Therefore I hereby announce the launch of the "Free Kriegspiel Renaissance," or FKR. And yeah, it's pronounced exactly the way you think. So come on, let's be a bunch of FKRs!" 

Before Monard co-opted the term for a rude joke, "Free Kriegspiel" meant a type of war-game developed in the military academies of 19th century Europe – "kriegspiel" literally being German for "war-game." Originally, it was a tool to teach strategy, tactics, and logistics to officer cadets. But those cadets too often pursued technical victories through exploits of the abstract rules of play, rather than learning how real battles actually worked as intended. To remedy this, the idea of running the games entirely subjectively was introduced, Free as in "open-ended," the progress of the simulated battles determined not by blind rules, but by the moment-to-moment independent judgment of experienced officers overseeing the game as referees.

In 1967, avid hobby war-gamer David Wesely experimented with Free Kriegspiel approaches for a scenario set in Braunstein, a fictional Napoleonic-era town. The scenario’s opening preamble involved lone agents of different factions vying to influence circumstances leading up to the arrival of two armies, expected to be followed by a standard battle when those armies at last met.

At first Wesely regarded his scenario a failure because, rather than pursuing strategic goals, the characters became embroiled in petty rivalries and never got around to the actual battle. But the players loved the immediacy of playing distinct characters rather than military units and clamored for more. Soon further “Braunstein” games were organized by Wesely and his peers, leading to variations in other settings, including a medieval fantasy duchy named Blackmoor – run by a young fellow named Dave Arneson, who introduced the game to another war-game hobbyist, Gary Gygax.

Practices developed by Arneson in his Blackmoor game would be emulated by Gygax in a fantasy campaign called Greyhawk, leading directly to the creation of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974.

The original iteration of D&D conceived of play following the same broadly open-ended approach as previous “Braunsteins.” But the authors, writing for what was expected to be only a small audience of war-gamers already familiar with such practices, neglected to state this outright in the text. Thus, when the game spread to a far wider multitude entirely unfamiliar with war-gaming and Free Kriegspiel in particular, new players were left to bridge this conceptual gap on their own, focusing on what explicit rules text there was, imposing objective interpretations onto subjective systems. Even as the original pre-D&D role-players (such as Mike Monard) continued in their free-flowing style, methodically passing their practices along through direct demonstration, a separately parallel (but larger) audience of tabletop role-players coalesced around the expectation that rules formulated by “official” designers were of central importance to play – which turned out to present a much more lucrative market for game publishers, pulling the hobby away from founding precepts.

The composer of this document feels the joke behind the name “FKR” has worn thin, and further that it leads too often to confusion with actual Kriegspiel, still played in the original Prussian style in many places. Thus the alternative title, Open Role-Play Adventure.

 

Not Necessarily “Rules-Light”

A prevalent assumption about ORPA/FKR is that it’s just another kind of “rules-light” role-playing, but Justin Hamilton, on his blog Aboleth Overlords, deftly disputes this: 

"The FKR movements tend to primarily focus on very small rulesets – often stuff like “d6 roll for low” or contested 2d6 rolls, just because these kinds of rulesets allow the referee to really focus in on rulings..."

"So from the outside lots of people are starting to assume the FKR means nearly no-rules roleplaying games. But if you look at Kriegsspiel itself, or even the kind of rulesets Arneson seemed fond of writing – sometimes there are a lot of rules. And this to me is important to note. It’s not the amount of rules."

"FKR to me is purely a relationship to rules. If your table is composed of a referee who portrays the world opting to use rules as a tool however they wish, and players portraying characters responding with what they would do if they were in whatever fictional situation the ref is describing – that to me is FKR. It doesn’t matter if the ref is using a single coin flip, or if they decide to sometimes opt into Mythras, or their own hack of Advanced Squad Leader, or anything else. The amount of crunch doesn’t impact the FKR-ishness, it’s if the table is focusing more on the fiction over the mechanics. This is obviously easier with light systems, but if the ref feels like using something heftier “behind the screen”, that’s a perfectly valid approach." 

It also doesn’t matter want kind of rules are used. David Wesely and his peers drew from war-games because that’s where their familiarity lay – thus why D&D had so many mechanics copied from old naval fleet games. If you’re more familiar with boardgames, draw from them. Or card games, or theater, or African storytelling traditions. Whatever works for you.

 

Appeals of the Style

It offers an escape from gamification – a chance to Play as in Celebrate, not Play as in Compete. Most anyone who’s run a typical role-playing game has known the frustration of seeing players respond to every situation, no matter how expressively presented, by numbly pouring over the numbers on their character-sheets like dull accountants managing cost-benefit ratios, looking for the “correct” mechanical solution (1). Even ostensibly narrative-focused role-playing games are vulnerable to this, often representing story elements through currency that players can still come to regard in transactional terms. To paraphrase Campbell's Law: when a quantitative abstraction becomes the primary means of interacting with an in-world factor, players will come to only think of manipulating the abstraction rather than engaging with what it originally represented. The immediacy of an assassin flashing a razor-sharp knife inches from your bare throat is dulled when that becomes merely a defense check roll with a -2 penalty against 2d8 damage. 

(1 “Joe, the next time you answer What Do You Do? by looking down and showing us all your bald spot, I’m bouncing the biggest die on the table off it.”) 

The experience is de-commodified. In a world straining under an increasing preponderance of commercialization, where once purely social practices are more and more assimilated into corporate revenue streams and advertising intrudes deeper into every spare moment of our time, ORPA offers a way to reassert the eminence of personal imagination. It’s home-crafted and self-reliant, a DIY folk-art experience. You don’t need any official materials – your worlds, adventures, and even rules are entirely yours to create and explore. Not to say that an ORPA table is purged of all flashy bits and convenient accessories – maps are useful, pretty dice are fun, and miniature figures are cool. But they aren’t the point of play – paper and pencils and your imagination are all you really need.

"The most stimulating part of the game is the fact that anything can happen. Nothing is impossible.(2)" The potential for tactical infinity is maximized. In nearly every other form of game – and mediums of expression in general – your potential interactions, and the responses of the work to those actions, is tightly curtailed.  In a book, your point of view is rigidly controlled by the author, the progression of events preordained. In a board-game, your choices are delineated by your current hand of cards and the layout of the board or some-such. Even most role-playing games, despite their comparatively open-ended nature,  impose such limits, often to focus creativity, but sometimes just to motivate you to buy the next book of power-ups. In ORPA, all things are negotiable and unscripted. 

(2 Tim Waddell, The Space Gamer #2 1975, "Reviews of Dungeons & Dragons")

 

Challenges of the Style

This won’t appeal to everyone. There are several things otherwise common in the contemporary field of tabletop gaming, enjoyed by many, which ORPA doesn’t feature – glossy books and other branded knick-knacks to show off, the challenge of system mastery and mechanized character-optimization, the satisfying click of multi-stage rules interacting, the thrill of filling up a character sheet with incrementally unlocked powers. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying those things, but there are plenty of other styles of play, with games written around them, delivering them much better.

It requires a high level of mutual trust – besides being socially comfortable with one another, and recognizing communal responsibility for their own fun, participants must accept (and demand) that the referee is an emotionally mature adult capable of negotiating fairly towards justified decisions, and that the players are similarly capable of communicating reasonably and accepting compromises. This of course is the case for any TTRPG, but ORPA needs that as the first and over-arching priority.

Your ORPA will vary. Beyond the core precepts, there’s no one right way to play. Everything about it is subjective, up to personal preference, developing particularly per the circumstances of each table. Meaning it can be difficult to translate games in this style between groups. Cultivating your own take unique from anyone else is creatively satisfying and fun, but it can also be isolating.

Because the Referee regards everything on a case-by-case basis, and rules aren’t cemented, the game won’t allow players to settle into grooves of prompted decisions along paths laid out on their character sheets. For players whose happy place is self-reinforcing loops, this can become very frustrating.

Players coming from mainstream TTRPGs may feel adrift without numerically definitive traits to ensure their characters’ effectiveness, or obvious levers for pushing and pulling on the fiction. Some may even feel vulnerable without explicit protections against potentially domineering referees. The potential for abuse does exist, as it will wherever a level of trust is presumed. But that’s not unique to this style. Adversarial GMing habits are toxic regardless of the game or school of play – even the most well-designed rule can’t solve belligerence or turn a bad sport honest. In the face of that, every player always has the most fundamental defense – to leave the table.

Be wary of commercial games marketed under an FKR label. Though usually well-intentioned, they’re erroneous, mostly just conventional OSR-adjacent rules-light systems following a buzzword (3). Unfortunately, even while repeating slogans like “rulings not rules” and “play at the world” they come largely from the sort of “text-first” assumptions which proliferated following D&D’s initial publication. To reiterate: FKR/ORPA is an approach to running any table, not a product type in itself, and it doesn’t start with any rulebook. 

(3 Heck, I’m no better, my first draft of this document was mostly a rule system, and it’s taken a dozen revisions to resist the instinct to present things that way.)

 

Ancillary Commentary

Explaining what to some seems an eccentric approach to role-playing games, my ever further move away from standardized rule systems, what this FKR thing is I’m always on about, and why I’m now calling it ORPA, was turning into an expanding lecture with a lot of “well actually I also need to explain…” Thus this relatively brief “How To” summary I can instead present to interested parties all at once.

How did I get here? I’ve never really been much interested in rules-mastery or min-maxing, always more excited by theme and immersion. I often experienced game rules as occluding presences, self-justifying intercessions into the campaign world, formalities to get through on the way to the actual fun of communal collaboration. To be clear, I'm not saying rules were always bad, but I ended up gritting my teeth through a lot of tedious play while the rest of the table insisted “the book says we have to do things this way.” When the OSR came about, its precepts of “world first” and “rulings not rules” struck a deep chord – and when the subsequent FKR followed those ideas to full adoption, of course I dove in.

Now some advice which seemed a little too opinionated to include in the main body:

In my estimation, people who read for lyrical pleasure are the best potential fit for ORPA, while those who pursue gaming mainly on competitive terms … not so much. Or to frame it more glibly: a good prospect for ORPA play can express well-considered opinions on several authors and has penned some decent fan-fiction. While a non-ideal one has cases upon cases of Magic cards but hasn’t read the flavor text on a single one. Keep this in mind when considering potential players from your local gaming community.

Though workable, I’ve found one-shots at conventions are not the ideal way to present ORPA. To shine best, the practice really needs a mutually familiar group of players in an ongoing campaign over multiple sessions where practices of the table have time to develop and accrue to taste.

As a referee, my most reliable tool for putting players into immediately engaging situations is the old adage, “Good, Fast, or Cheap, pick two.” Give them a chance to proceed but only by choosing from an array of potential costs. “You can power down the central core, but doing so means killing the main reactor. You can link your compu-deck to prevent that, but doing so will overwrite it. Or you can take longer to hack it all carefully, but those security-drones are getting close. Which will it be?”  I particularly like time pressures, they keep the pace up. Over the years, I’ve gotten far more productive use from this informal approach than I have from any precisely formulated rule mechanic.

Remember, the Perfect is the enemy of the Good. Rules-hacking can be a seductive preoccupation, and its easy for a Referee, especially one with a long-standing interest in game design, to fall into fussing over fine-tuning systems towards theoretical white-room perfection far past their actual play benefit. In practice, simple, direct and immediate resolution informed by mutually clear understanding of stakes and consequences is always more useful than any alleged mechanical nuance or long-term pay-off.

Worlds Funsome and Free: Understanding Open Role-Play Adventure

version 1.0

Composed by Ethric T.S.

Plain Paper Gamer

ethric-t-s.itch.io/

https://dice.camp/@E_T_Smith

Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Rusty-Bladed Veterans ... Revised!

I'd been meaning to get back to "Rusty-Bladed Veterans," my hack of "Searchers of the Unknown," and I've finally managed to do it.

If you're unfamiliar, "Searchers of the Unknown" is a clever one-page OSR rules option written by Nicolas Dessaux, built around the idea that if the referee can use a single succinct line of monster stats to portray an NPC warrior, you don't really need anything more for a PC. Nearly exactly two year's ago, I was compelled to offer my own variation, "Rusty-Bladed Veterans."  And now I've finally gotten around to sprucing it up a bit.

Click on this image to Download the PDF

Besides generally clarifying the wording, there are a handful of specific rules changes: 

  • Added range modifiers. The original document didn't really address ranged attacks besides listing them as a possible weapon choice.
  • Added an armor penalty to the cost of HP-based spell-casting, 9 - Worn AC. This gives another reason to go with a sparsely armored character.
  • Put some explanatory text on the Movement rating, also implemented a simplifying house-rule to movement I've occasionally applied to B/X.
  • Expanded the advancement range up to 8 Hit Dice
  • Removed the awkward in-combat healing rule. There really was no precedent for it in B/X, and it was a bit fussy to implement in practice. 
  • Removed the extra-attacks for higher HD. Again, because they weren't really authentic to the B/X style. I did however keep the bonus attack for killing a foe, because there is some tradition of that in old-school D&D, and it's an easy compensation for lack of room-clearing magic-users in the party.

More discreetly, I nudged things a bit to push an implicit niche selection: make a low-AC veteran if you want to be all about combat, go with high-AC if you want to be skillful or aspire to  focus on magic (or at least the ramshackle version that veteran's can manage).

Another issue addressed was how the original "Searchers of the Unknown" arbitrarily replaced some B/X procedures for the referee while leaving others unaddressed. For this revision, I went with the assumption that the "rusty-bladed" rules are entirely player facing, and the referee will be defaulting to the main B/X texts for resources and guidelines. 

As I said with the first version, for a one-shot or short campaign "Rusted-Bladed  Veterans" arguably has some advantages over original B/X, since it's much easier for players to jump in, and it actively follows an often-touted but rarely implemented OSR ideal: putting the emphasis on what the character achieves in play rather than what's on their character sheet.


Tuesday, February 19, 2019

A Brush with Zak-ness

It'd be a surprise to me if anyone reading this hasn't already seen the damning revelations Mandy Morbid has shared about her ex, self-styled bad boy of the OSR Zak Smith. If you haven't, here's Mandy's statement, and a corroborating one from Vivka Grey. Obviously, I believe Mandy, and firmly accept that it's impossible to deny any longer that Z.S. is utter garbage. Any continued tolerance or support for an abuser like him is unacceptable.

This post is mainly just sorting my emotions on the matter, and unburdening myself of some stuff. I will not try to address issues covered much more deftly by others, because I frankly do not have the depth or words to deal with them properly (go to Cavegirl's Game Stuff and Trilemma Adventures for people who do).

I feel compelled to confess there's one instance where my name sits on a credit page with Z.S.'s, the Expanded Petty Gods Companion. Not to oversell the significance, as there are hundreds of names on that project; just about everyone even tangentially part of the OSR over the span of that book's long development contributed to it, and we weren't collaborators be any stretch. Still, it's added a sour after-taste when I look at it now.

Other than that, outside of a few reddit exchanges, my encounters with Z.S. have almost exclusively been second and third hand. I didn't much care for his art style, his blog was too long-winded to keep my interest, and his books were too eccentric to suit my play style, so overall I didn't have much use for the guy. My own work wasn't nearly prolific enough to garner his comments, get me recruited into his camp or be marked as an enemy of it. Not that I was bothered by that; my casual read was he was best avoided, a typical self-declared iconoclastic artisté, more brand than substance, with an exploitative attitude towards those around him, as typical of those types. If I'd only known how bad it really was.

Over time his infamy grew, mainly due to the people he pushed out of the OSR, people whose work I liked much more than his, and was sad to see go. But I regretfully admit I didn't take it all that seriously. This is a hobby where petty drama is common, where edition wars are bloody affairs and people have formed bitter enmities over different ideas of how Magic Missile works. It's not easily apparent when, this time, "this guy's a monster," isn't just hyperbole. So as the pro-Zak and anti-Zak camps got louder and more entrenched, I just shrugged and let my attention drift elsewhere. All of which, I realize now, came from a position of unquestioned privilege. I didn't feel personally threatened by Z.S., so I had the luxury of ignoring him. And I didn't understand that for vulnerable people that wasn't an option. To everyone for whom my support would have helped even just a little, I sincerely apologize, and promise to do better.


I did have one nearly-direct interaction with Z.S., late last year. One of the consequences of the controversy that erupted when Stuart Robertson declared he'd prefer his popular OSR logo no longer be used by people known for foul moral stances (loud and ugly were the answering protestations of "muh free speech!") was me throwing together the Honourable OSR community on G+. It was a slap-dash and impulsive project, but with the bulk of the loudest voices in the (now defunct) existing G+ OSR community taking positions somewhere between "no politics" and "you ain't no boss of me," I wanted to make a firm statement that the OSR should actively disapprove of petty fascists, and promote those who felt likewise to act on that belief. It's still around and so far it's been a modest success.

Anyway, one of the first precepts of the Hon. OSR was that applicants for membership would be reviewed. And of course one of the first in line was Z.S., who tries to force an ear into any channel that might be talking about him. "I was expecting and dreading his application," I confided with the moderators. As said earlier, I didn't understand how truly vile Z.S. is, to me he was just a loud and needy personality who rubbed lots of folks the wrong way. It was doubtless that if he came in, lots of other members would immediately bale out ... yet he was a name, tempting to let in as a influencer. Ridiculously and shamefully, I almost convinced myself to let him in under the justification that it'd be a way to keep an eye on him. Fortunately, one of the first subjects raised by the members of this new community was how terrible it would be if Z.S. was part of it, so it was obvious he had to be rejected.

 And immediately after that rejection, this showed up:

Meet "Zarzonia."

Odds are that's not actually Z.S. in the picture, but that is definitely a very silly wig. And it's a damn weak attempt at a sock-puppet. "Zarzonia" was a brand new G+ account with no history, whose only activity was applying to the Hon. OSR. Even the name is a disdainful act of cartoonish deception, "hello I'm Za ... uh, I mean ... Za-rzonia, yeah Zarzonia." The mod who received this request didn't even need half-a-moment to reject it.

Ironically, this clumsy attempt at gate-crashing was the experience that really convinced me to start taking the accusations against Z.S. seriously. Seeing him be so openly petty made it a lot easier to pay attention to the testimonies of harassment and vendetta against him.

Regarding the re-asessment (and hopeful reformation) of the OSR in the wake of Mandy's statements, I'm hopeful but reserved. Mandy turning Z.S.'s own narratives against him has been particularly powerful. Further, demolishing Z.S.'s reputation removes a big justification for the complacency that has plagued the OSR community; "you could have done something about Zak, If you believed women" is going to be a cutting rebuke for a long time. But as mentioned above this is still a field that, when pushed not long ago, largely stuck with a deeply flawed idea of what "free speech" means.  it's encouraging that condemnation of Zak has been so swift and universal. There's practically been a stampede of people trying to distance themselves from the shitpile. But on the other hand, that's an easy path to choose when everyone around you is already on it. What matters is who and how many learn to to be more personally discerning, and to listen and believe much sooner when victims start speaking up.   

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Veterans of the Rusty Blade

[Edit from 2021: there's a new revision of "RBV" available]

Every now and then, I'm compelled to circle back to the vast cooling deposit left over from the early 2000's D20 eruption, and poke through it once more for salvage. "There's so much here," I think as I pry apart compacted layers of feats with a geology hammer, "so much meticulously crafted work, all free for the taking. There just has to be something I can make from it." 

As is usually the case, the affair begins with The Core Elements Toolbox, an obscure 2005 work by James D. Hargrove and Butch Curry that tried to distill the d20 SRD down into an intense liquor of fast easy role-playing. It doesn't quite work at that goal, for reasons I can't fully articulate, but that may be why I keep coming back to it, trying to figure where the fix needs to go. Which leads me to rifling through the standard SRD's (Fantasy D20, D20 Modern, D20 Future and the "true romantic" SRD derived from original Blue Rose). And it's usually around True Romantic that the fatigue starts to grow, since even that lightened version of the system is a lumbering mechanical behemoth compared to the systems I generally prefer, and I start to doubt if anything D20 can be redeemed.

So then I bounce out to Mocrolite20 to get some breathing room. Which is refreshing at first, but by laying bare the core bones of D20, Microlite rather starkly forces me to (again) realize the central problems with that whole school of design. Mechanical character optimization and min-maxing as a primary mode of play, lunk-headedly linear resolution and modelling, and constant built-in roadblocks and speed-bumps intended to wring player initiative through a sieve of incremental advancement. Somehow, the whole manages to be both burdensome yet insubstantial, a expansive act of running in place to look busy.

Unsurprisingly, I always end my latest D20 tangent frustrated and jumping to some other project to clear my head of the affair. What I'm saying is, this is why I re-wrote Searchers of the Unknown over the weekend. So here's Rusty-Bladed Veterans.


Click the image to download the PDF

There's a lot to like about SotU, but I perceived issues with it. The language was loose at the cost of clarity. And while the stated goal was B/X style play, it introduced several eccentric elements leading to a much more combat-focused experience. Because I'd just been trudging through D20, it was clear that the original writer of SotU had carried over a few 3E-era assumptions upon creating it. All of which were things I wanted to change. Additionally, I aimed to make the rules thoroughly compatible with B/X resources without conversion; I wanted to be able to send a "Rusty-Bladed" party through B2 The Lost City using every line of the adventure's text as written. Also, I wanted to be able to run standard B/X classes alongside those characters, if it so happened old-hand players showed up for such a session.

On top of that, I threw in some elements from other SotU hacks I liked, the clever spell-casting system from Microlite20 and a means for characters to learn spells from scrolls (which weirdly I had assumed was already part of the original SotU; wonder where I picked that notion up).

I'm really pleased with how Rusty-Bladed Veterans came out. I dare even say I'd prefer using it over full B/X, since starting all characters on the same foot eliminates a lot of the disorienting disparities players have traditionally had to deal with (thief skills in particular come to mind, and demi-human abilities), doubly so for new players. Plus I prefer magical abilities earned as a consequence of play rather than as preordained advancements. I'm looking forward to seeing how this plays out at the table.

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Howls of October: the Blue-a-Jeun

It's October, and I've got a bunch of fearsome monsters for Swords & Wizardry: White Box I've been looking forward to sharing. Here's the first!

Sobbing in desperation, a wiry scar-faced man fled over the darkened twisty forest road, a pouch clutched desperately to his chest. Chimes of rich gems sounded every time the pouch shook. The wolf pack rushed through the brush on both sides now, and despair swelled in the scar-faceed man; only moments were left until he was entirely surrounded. But far worse was the singular lupine beast snapping at his heels with manifestly cruel glee, a living shadow so black it seemed to flash blue with every move. The man’s mind reeled from his manifest doom, cursing whatever spirit had led these wolves out to this normally placid country where their like hadn’t been heard in a generation. It wasn’t fair, he’d been so careful, planning the theft, choosing the escape route … he’d even shrewdly eliminated his feckless partner Geoff after the job, pushing him off the path when it looped around a cliff-face, if not killed by the fall to be helplessly devoured by the beasts of the forest … Suddenly the scar-faced man had a terrible realization and glanced back. The black-blue wolf returned the stare with uncanny familiarity, turning to hate redoubled as it lunged forward.

Blue-a-Jeun

Armor Class: 6 [13]
Hit Dice: 3, 4, 5, 6
Attacks: Bite (1d6+1)
Special: see below
Move: 18
HDE / XP: 4 / 120, 5 / 240, 6 / 400, 7 / 600

Original image by Nathan Siemers, modified by me,
When a wolf of jet-black pelt chances by fate to devour the flesh of one given over to hate, that spirit of ire takes hold of the wolf and turns it into a instrument of cruel retribution, becoming a Blue-a-Jeun.

This monster hunts at night, singling out one victim per evening, someone who the spirit believes betrayed or wronged them. Possessed of man-like intelligence, the Blue-a-Jeun will stalk shrewdly, easily bypassing traps and barriers that would confound normal wolves. 

The creature’s deep midnight blue-black pelt renders it nearly invisible at night, in shadowed forests or similar settings, granting it a 5-in-6 chance of attacking with surprise in such dimly-lit locations.

The Blue-a-Jeun gains an additional permanent Hit Die for each intelligent being it slays and feasts upon, up to a maximum total of 6 Hit Dice. Additionally, the Blue-a-Jeun gains the memories of those it devours, which it will exploit in future hunts. 

The Blue-a-Jeun is accompanied by a pack of normal wolves, 2 per Hit Die, who will sense and obey their master’s wishes.

Use in the campaign: The Blue-a-Jeun may be an old foe of the party, impossibly returned to inflict misery upon them. Or perhaps the adventurers will hear tales of a beast terrorizing a small village, picking off peasants as the antipathies of its spirit dictate, in which case the challenge is as much to deduce who to protect next as it is facing the monster itself. It is key for the Referee to express both the Blue-a-Jeun’s intelligence and obsession; it won’t risk its life carelessly, but neither will it  forget it’s chosen prey.

White Box doesn’t have stats for normal wolves in the main text, so here they are translated from the Monster Book

Normal Wolf

Armor Class: 7 [12]
Hit Dice: 2
Attacks: bite
Special: none
Move: 18
HDE / XP: 2 / 30




Friday, September 21, 2018

Genius: Yet Another Approach to Skills in OSR Play



Recently the G-Plus OSR community has been talking a lot about skill systems. So here's my current take on it.

Skills are a thorny subject in the context of old school gaming. Learning to embrace the freedom that comes from forgoing codified action resolution is one of the major experiences of old school play, and yet it can't be denied that delineated skills show up early in role-playing's history. And it can't be ignored that most people, when role-playing, expect to have defined skills on their character sheets.

Skills are definitely utilitous, from a purely procedural perspective. They offer quick clear means to resolve events and to define the capacities of characters. Unfortunately they tend to take the narrative away from discussion and negotiation, turning it over to the dice instead. And they curtail player initiative by discouraging any action that doesn't have a clear numerical advantage behind it. Players blanch at trying anything they can't calculate the odds on, designers try to get over this by expanding the skill list, until the track leads to something like Basic Role-Playing as implemented in Runequest where even such specific actions as drawing a map and appraising the value of gems are defined skills.  

But still, it's tempting to add skills to the game. Class options can be expanded handily simply by adding some skill to the regular classes. Rangers and Druids are pretty much just Fighters and Clerics with some Wilderness Survival training, after all. And it allows for slight variations without having to build whole new classes to accommodate them. No need to figure out a "Sailor" class when you can just add Semanship to any character. The trick is adding an option that by its presence doesn't imply everyday-incompetence in characters without the skill, nor demands that a whole host of numbers be added to the character sheet just to address edge cases.

Well ... I'm out of preamble chatter, so here's what I've got. I call my approach Genius, as in "He has a genius for weaving tapestries."

The core mechanics I've built Genius around I first saw in Christopher Cale's Backswords & Bucklers, his reinterpretation of S&W: White Box for urban adventures in Elizabethan England. I've since found it earlier utilized in Rob Ragas's alternate White Box thief class, the Treasure Seeker, published in Knockspell issue #2. I've yet to see it in an earlier source, so I assume, until shown otherwise, it's Ragas's invention.

Regardless of origin, the approach immediately appealed to me because it put the focus of resolution not on pass/fail, but on time, the most important resource of an adventurer, the passage of which is the danger intensifier of any adventure.  It doesn't really matter if you can unlock the door, so much as if you can unlock it before being discovered by somebody with reason to stop you.

 

Genius, a System for Character Excellence

Every character has aptitude in a non-combat, non-magical field of expertise. All characters start with 1 point of Genius to define as they choose. Characters of the Journeyman* class gain an additional point of Genius every two levels, all other classes gain 1 point every four levels. Points of Genius gained after the 1st level may be added to an existing field of expertise, or used to start ones new to the character. 
*The Journeyman is my take on the role typically filled by the Thief

Some potential types of Genius:
  • Wilderness Travel
  • Ancient Lore
  • Masonry & Construction
  • Religious Ceremony
  • Weaponcraft
  • Politics & Statecraft
  • Seamanship
  • Trade & Barter
  • Burglary
  • Taxonomy of Monsters
  • Forgery & Counterfeiting
  • Brewing & Cooking
  • Music, Dance & Theater
  • Alchemy

Defining Genius

A Genius should entail broad related areas of endevour, any one Genius enough to qualify as a full career in itself. A good rule of thumb is that any single Genius should imply at least two distinctly different kinds of activity. For instance, Seamanship entails knot-tying and ship-building, and Burglary entails stealthy movement and maintaining underworld contacts. Goals of action cannot be forms of Genius in themselves (Persuade, Intimidate, Deceive, Climb, etc.).

Casual use of genius always succeeds; a sailor can tie a quick knot, a ranger can find fresh water in a forest, a sage can name an ancient queen, all without needing to throw dice.

 

Resolving Challenging Use of Genius 

To check genius in a challenging situation, throw 1d6 twice. The first throw determines how many units of time the effort takes. This can be days, hours, turns or rounds depending on what makes sense for the situation (maybe even years!) but usually it’ll be turns.

The second throw determines positive or neutral results. Add the points of a character’s relevant Genius to the throw, and the relevant attribute modifier if the referee allows it. If the total is 6 or higher, the effort succeeds. Characters may subtract 1 from the initial time result for every point a successful throw exceeds 6. If after modification the time throw is zero or less, the effort requires only one unit of the next lower time increment (hours down to a turn, turns down to a round, and so on)

Characters only know if they succeeded or failed after the determined interval has passed. Conditions permitting, they may keep spending time to make further attempts at the same effort until they succeed.

If the attempted effort would require less time than is relevant to the current context of play (rounds when exploring a dungeon, turns when crossing wilderness) then don't bother rolling, just call it a success and move on.

 

Miraculous Results

If a character has enough of a bonus between Genius, attribute modifiers and magical benefits to guarantee success (+5 or more) they may try for miraculous results, literally fantastical feats beyond the ken of normal mortal arts. Simply subtract 5 from the total bonus and otherwise resolve the attempt as described above.If the character succeeds, they have performed a miracle, fit for legend.

A Miraculous use of the Textiles Genius; she's sewing together a cloak literally made from the laughter of children.

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Stupid, Stupid Luck

I rather like stories where serendipity plays as much a factor as skill and strength to win the day, and a growing amalgamation of mischance looms over all until something prosaic resolves it unexpectedly.

For example, I'm currently watching The Irresponsible Captain Tylor, a satirical anime poking fun at the heroic space-battleship genre, with a lead character who gets by mainly through blind fortune and refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of any situation.
By the way, this series is legitimately free to watch on youtube.
So of course I eventually mused how to implement this in an OSR fashion. Here's one possible approach.

Add a trait called Stupid, Stupid Luck. Every session, it begins with a value equal to 10 minus the character's current level. Yes, "stupid" being stated twice is vital to this mechanic. Vital.

In any given situation or encounter, the character may attempt to roll against their Stupid, Stupid Luck by throwing a d20. if the die lands greater than the current value, luck is against them and things get worse (probably in a non-lethal but embarrassing way) but they get to raise the value by 1d3 points.

If the die lands less than or equal to the current value, luck is on their side and things align in their favor, preferably in a way that is non-violent and paradoxically mundane. The dragon that was about to breathe on them develops a distracting case of hiccups, the sprung trap turns out to have been accidentally loaded with harmlessly pleasant lilac powder, the ogre gang boss turns out to be an old football buddy. However, after the success the value of Stupid, Stupid Luck is halved.

In practice this should lead to a progression where the character depending on luck suffers several indignities only to end up on top at the end, smelling of roses ... or lilacs.

Ways to implement this could be as a character class for whom it's their main ability. Call the class, say, the Blessed Idiot using the Cleric's advancement tables. Or as a communal resource the whole party can make use of. For a truly bonkers game, every character could have Stupid, Stupid Luck, possibly even monster's and NPC's.

Monday, April 3, 2017

Mr. Miller's Remarks

Image originally posted by catsonkeyboards

Friday morning at Gary Con IX, I attended a seminar hosted by Marc Miller, lead creator of Traveller. It turned out to be a modest gathering, fewer than ten people, so Marc had us all pull in close and provided rare opportunity to ask him direct questions. In particular, since I've been reading the "Out of the Box" series on Tales to Astound, I was curious about the evolution of Traveller from a generic sandbox generator to a game specifically about the Third Imperium setting, and was able to put the matter to him directly a couple times.

Naturally, Marc mainly wanted to promote his current work, Traveller5, particularly a basic beginner-friendly version he'd like to produce, but he was still willing to share his memories of the old days.

I suspect some of these anecdotes are familiar to folks who've heard Marc talk about Traveller before; I certainly recognized some of his words as near-verbatim repeats of old essays of his. I'm no journalist, I was merely jotting down long-hand interesting discourse as it came up, so mostly these are the highlights of the talk organized roughly by subject, not by Q-and-A or chronologically, and quotes below should be taken as paraphrasing.

Creating Traveller


Marc Miller's inspirational reading was a stack of old coverless pulp magazines. As a young graduate he'd buy them one at a time from a local newstand when he couldn't afford any other entertainment.

The organization and format of the 1977 set of three "little black books" directly emulated the original 1974 white-box D&D set. "I'd finish a chapter then flip through the D&D booklets to see what part I should write next."

The distinctive minimalist visual style of the original set came about largely because the graphic designer (Paul R. Banner, I assume) didn't want to spend much time on it, as they were more interested in another GDW project they were working on at the time, the wargame Europa.

The iconic imperial sunburst was another example of graphic expedience; it was copied from the wargame Iliad: the Siege of Troy where it had represented the god Apollo.

Though the popularity of D&D was undeniable, the potential for a wider field of role-playing games was unproven, so GDW pursued their science fiction game with guarded ambitions. Traveller was an unexpected success. "We hoped it would eventually sell 2,000 copies, then we fast reached 10,000."

Growth and Development


The core game wasn't designed with expansion in mind, so its systems are largely self-contained. But when its popularity presented a market for adventures, GDW felt a structured setting was needed to give those adventures context, thus the Third Imperium was developed. [I wish there had been time to pursue Miller further about this process, particularly why he felt published adventures required a large-scale inter-connected setting rather than self-contained scenarios.] 

There was early resistance to the expansion of Traveller past the core game. Marc particularly remembers game reviewer Louis Pulver(?) complaining "I won't play a game the tells me what to do," when official setting material started to appear. 

Buyers demand expansions they'll never use, so designing for the market is not the same thing as designing for actual play. "They want thirty pages of combat rules, but will never run more than a brawl using five of them."

Traveller: 2300 / 2300AD was originally conceived as Traveller's replacement. Miller and GDW assumed interest in the original game would wane with age and a new game, built around then-contemporary 1980's SF aesthetics and more comprehensive rules, would be needed to keep the attention of modern gamers. There was some surprise when 2300 wasn't a hit while interest in Traveller remained steady.

Opinions and Insights


Things got a little fraught when discussion turned to modern SF literature and Marc's opinions of such. He talked about sampling current works, but still prefers straightforward action-and-engineering tales to esoteric socially-focused stories. The tension came when he openly referred to authors of award-winning stories that lacked ray-guns and spaceships as "social justice warriors" and some of the audience reacted negatively (me included) to the disparaging implication, to his mild surprise. He pointed out that he's proud to have broached non-binary gender in his latest Traveller novel, but the way he discussed it indicates he still feels that's a subject best dealt with obliquely. My interpretation of the whole uncomfortable exchange was that Marc Miller didn't mean "SJW" with the full vehemence that gutter-scum like the Sad Puppies and GamerGaters do, and probably wasn't fully aware of that context. He sees himself as liberal-minded, but in an old-hand way, "a little edgy."

Marc was refreshingly frank about parts of Traveller's publishing history that misfired. He dismissed High Guard for its long statline, too unwieldy to actually use in play, and said outright that Fire Fusion and Steel "didn't work."

I directly asked him for his reaction to players going back to a "three LBB's only" approach, who feel that the Third Imperium setting and its expectations make for a very different game than Traveller originally was. More or less, he shrugged and said it's fine if people want to do that, but he likes writing about the Imperium so it will continue to be part of his vision of Traveller.

Never did successful roll up a character with a Type S Scout. Source.