Showing posts with label game-mastering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label game-mastering. Show all posts

Sunday, June 4, 2017

Casting Woo onto the Dice

The annual Pagan Picnic is this weekend here in St Louis. Though I long ago filed away witchcraft, wicca, faery magic and other pagan revivalism into the category of "benign bullshit," I yet still love to participate in gatherings dominated by such magical thinking and perspectives. The vibe is just so positive, the craftwork so sincere and the community so welcoming. I'll even buy the occasional Green Man or Artemis icon just to be supportive.

Official event photo, credit unknown

Another thing it quickens is a particular sense of nostalgia, one integral to my approach to roleplaying. I don't hear it often mentioned anymore, but some of the earliest adopters of Dungeons & Dragons after it got away from the war-gamers were Medievalists (SCA'dians, Renaissance Fest actors) and late-era bohemians, especially the one's heavily into Tolkien and pantheistic spiritualism. Though by the time I found roleplaying it was not physically present in the circles I gamed in, their foundational influence was still a big part of the culture. Articles and rulebooks would discuss running campaigns taking more-than-casual inspiration from history, ancient art and "personal discovery." It was an approach that resonated with me, much more so than play focused on combat or advancement-hunting, because it was reaching, however vaguely, for something sublime. Not to say it was dourly serious-minded; these were the folks who loved Monty Python, after all.

As far as I've seen, contemporary game texts don't really acknowledge that flavor of "Woo" anymore ("woo" meaning a soft, non-rigorous belief in magic, a bit of harmless irrationality). Sometimes I wonder if it all got drawn off into then used up by the Gothic aesthetic of the World of Darkness. Todays' tabletop culture seems largely dominated by hackers and collectors, builders of spreadsheets and action figure archives, not a tarot card reader to be found. Sometimes I ache to experience a game with a little old-tyme magik in it, and I don't mean a spell list.

Saturday, March 4, 2017

Comparing XP Awards

The Experience Point economy is, for me, one of the foundational aspects of Old School play. I'm far more likely to tinker with how XP is generated, consumed and flows than I am, say, the combat or magic systems. I'd even profess that most of the traditional parts of Old School design can be dropped, but as long as the XP system remains it still "counts" as old-school gaming. Well, that and reaction rolls, random encounters and morale ... basically, the real meat of play are those core systems generating interesting situations; combat is just a detail of negotiating the results.

But that's all to be hashed over more thoroughly another time. For now, I've been comparing formula for Swords & Wizardry, my preferred retro-clone (specifically White Box). Look, I even made charts!

The official "Rules as Written" S&W XP scale cumulatively gives more XP per hit die from foes with greater total hit dice. For example, an Orc's lone hit die is worth 15 XP, while each of a Warg's 4 HD is worth 30 XP, for a total of 120. Though it has a broad pattern it's an arbitrary scale without formula, simply bumping up the amount of XP gained per HD at inconsistent points by inconsistent amounts (it even dips down once at the 16 HD spot). It's a perfectly adequate emulation of the traditional scales from BXD&D and AD&D, that shrewdly cuts the fiddly additional "special ability bonus" and "XP per hit point" parts of those original systems (The RaW system simply counts special abilities as extra HD). But I find its arbitrariness cumbersome, slowing down bookkeeping as I have to look up each foe's XP value individually.

A common alternate method, derived from the original 1974 D&D rules, is to just give a flat 100 XP per HD of defeated foe. It requires no chart look-up, and many GM's like it because it gives low-level characters a comparatively big boost while throttling back the advancement of higher level characters. I dislike it because I think it makes minor monsters so valuable (a mere score of orcs is worth more than most dragons on the RaW scale) that it'll encourage characters to stick to hunting unchallenging rabble and minions after they should be powerful enough to take on bigger targets.

The third method on the chart, "HD² x 10," is a formula I came up with when running Stars Without Number, a game which has a very broad approach to XP rewards and no specific scale for foes defeated, something I found a bit too loose. I've since come to like it enough to port it over into other OSR games because it produces awards passingly close to the original scales (well ... it evens out in the long run) and since it's a consistent formula I don't need a chart to calculate awards. The only quibble (a minor one, but it might annoy some) is the numbers generated can scan as somewhat inelegant, such 810 XP for a 9 HD monster, or 1,690 for a 13 HD beast.


Monday, April 13, 2015

The Orson Welles School of Game-Mastering

Go watch This Video. It 'll make you run better role-playing games.

It's a documentary short, "F for Fake (1973) - How to Structure a Video Essay." I'm ... not entirely sure what the creator means by the term "video essay." Like most creations discussing the process of creation, unspoken assumptions and undefined terms clutter much of the landscape.

"Its just a typical variation of the Obtuse November Horse theme ... y'know, like anyone would recognize." 

Regardless of its intention, there's two great ideas in this essay with great applications to tabletop role-playing. (granted, more for a narrative style of play; the ideas may fit poorly with a game in a more old-school sandbox style.)

First is "Therefore/But." In any sort of chronicle built from scenes, its an easy mistake to just string those scenes along in an "...and then..." chain, where the order of progression doesn't matter and nothing really builds. Walking your character through town encountering a series of NPC's, experiencing their quirks and pumping them for rumors then trundling on to the next can feel like a trudge through a daily errand list, no matter how colorful those NPC's are. But if every scene has a consequence, a "Therefore ..." or a "But ..." at the end that changes how the character will interact with the next scene, it turns the events into a building drama. Put another way, "Therefore" equals Opportunity, "But" equals Consequence. You approach the Bailiff, offer him a drink, therefore (opportunity) he considers you an ally in his coming bid for re-election. You cross the neighborhood to talk to a pickpocket you know, end up saving him from some drunk mercenaries, but (consequence) get marked for later vengeance by the mercenaries.  Tie some strings between the Opportunities and Consequences of few scenes like that, you get conflicts to resolve and a narrative direction to follow, rather than just a series of incidents.

Consequence or Opportunity? Depends whether or not you're in the truck.

Second is "Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch..." The resolution of a story is almost always enhanced by the anticipation of that resolution, so you want to tease out the resolution a bit to maximize that anticipation. How do you tease it out? By jumping to another story just as the first one hits a milepost, and then teasing out the resolution of the second story by switching back to the first story, or even yet another story. Keep that up, and the audience gets to enjoy a lot of anticipation. In a role-playing context, this means you don't introduce the Evil Mastermind, set up a fight against the Evil Mastermind then defeat the Evil Mastermind all in one go. Much better to have some other evolving situation (daresay, something spawned by a Consequence or Opportunity) press into the gaps between those big beats. The Evil Mastermind appears ... but the Mayor wants to cut the Superhero Team's funding! The Evil Mastermind launches his great attack ... therefore the Mayor says superheroes are a menace! In this particular example, you're also trading between different flavors of challenge, the direct physical menace of the Evil Mastermind and the more mysterious machinations of the Mayor, contrasting them against each other. This is particularly salient to role-playing because, thanks to the objective-directed war-gaming origins of the medium, staying focused on the current crisis through to its bitter end is precisely how most scenarios were traditionally structured. Of course, advice intended for authorship isn't going to translate directly to the communal narrative-building of role-playing, but its a fruitful idea to start from.

I'm pretty sure this is all "Scriptwriting 101" and probably some version of it has already appeared in a dozen smart and hip gaming texts already, but this video lays out these great ideas directly and concisely.

This post felt incomplete without at least one more picture, so here's a context-defying psychedelic witch.