On the Nature of a Cruel and Uncaring Universe

An ongoing topic of discussion amongst fantasy gamers - well, mostly D&D players - has been the concept of "evil races" or even "evil monsters", and the belief that such things are socially, historically, narratively, or ethically impossible. It's an interesting discussion that often turns vitriolic as people on both sides dig in, especially around the idea of evil races where there's just so much space to talk past each other in the various play styles and types of fantasy. How much of it is narrative, how much of it is simulation, how much of it is gameplay, to look at the old Threefold Model. 

Lets say your want your heroes to be facing an existential threat to their civilization. So you take Nazis, you reskin them as Orcs to make it fantasy, and bang. It's always ok to punch Nazis, and always ok to kill them when they start the war. There's no appeasing them; only the complete destruction of their ability to threaten anyone around them will be sufficient. In a gameplay sense you have introduced adversaries that provide moral clarity to the combat. In a narrative sense you have actualized the threat of fascism into a physical form for you to engage and (hopefully) defeat. But in a simulationist sense, well, are all the orcs fascists? Are there good orcs? Why is orc culture like this? Underlying it all is the belief that there must be a way to engage past the wartime footing and get to the root causes of why the orcs are fascists, undo that, and convert them to "good"; you can't just kill all of them. 

Well... yes and no. In wartime the goal is completely destroy their ability and willingness to make war. And that means a LOT of collateral damage. Many accounts exist of, even as the Allies were rolling into their territory and the war was clearly lost, 'good' Germans bemoaning the fact that Britain was supposed to have given up before the USA entered the war, sparing the Germans all this strife. Rooting out fascist ideology required the obliteration of the German state, de-Nazification of its politics, and a generation of work that's outside the scope of a fantasy adventure role playing game. At best, the PCs would need to deal with the combat aspect of the threat, and then leave the complete reconstruction of Orc society to the kingdoms that they act as heroes for, if you want this to be a simulation of that reality. This is, of course, a complete back projection of contemporary morals onto the ostensible 'age' of D&D, but that's a minor concern compared to the deformation of 'history' caused by active divinities, various arcane magic, and dipshits claiming there were only white people across Europe before the age of colonization, so run with it if you like.

But if you don't want to deal with that, it's why you make them Orcs, and not people. Orcs aren't real. Orcs are the actualized threat. They are monsters. They are endlessly cruel and completely uncaring because that is their narrative and gameplay function. And that's OK.

This a roundabout way to get to my main point: You are allowed to actualize threats into things that can be fought and killed. These things are monsters. They don't need a real world reason or explanation or tragic backstory. They are embodiments of real threats. You can have dire wolves stalking the deep dark forest as the actualization of the fear of starvation, or of getting lost and dying in the forest itself. You don't need to explain the circumstances that caused this particular wolf to turn to human predation. It is there because the woods are scary and dangerous. 

Because deep dark woods in an era before human action had wiped out most of the apex predators, and there wasn't contemporary medicine, and accurate maps were hard to come by, and food identification was a hard won skill, ARE DANGEGEROUS. Big Bad Wolves in European fairy tales are the embodiment of that. 

There's a great bit in Larry Niven's Beowulf Schaffer stories (Collected in the book Crashlander) where Schaffer is berating an Earth born companion for his ongoing terran-centric worldview, because the cold of space absolutely does not give a shit about you. Earth is your kind and loving mother where the gravity, air content, temperatures, etc. are all inside your tolerances, as are the pathogens and foodstuffs. In SF, Earth loves you and keeps you safe because you grew up inside it. But that's not the case in Fantasy.

In Fantasy, myth, faerie tale... Earth is dangerous. The woods are dangerous, storms are dangerous, the ocean is dangerous, food is dangerous, the very soil under your feet is dangerous as earthquakes can't be predicted or ameliorated. In the pre-science world, mythologies were invented to put a scaffolding around that chaos, to give us some hope of understanding it and transmitting what we learned about it from generation to generation. And in those myths, threats were actualized into Monsters. Things the heroes can defeat with stealth and cunning and steel (or bronze, or really big clubs...). 

If you have actualized the earthquakes as trolls, then when the trolls rampage through they cannot be reasoned with, any more than the earthquake can. Sometimes they come, and destroy the village. But we're in myth, maybe there's a god of the earthquake/trolls, and really the issue is he's angry because we... STOP! Stop centering humanity. The universe isn't cruel, but it is uncaring. The earthquake/trolls didn't happen because you cut down the magic tree, or moved into this area, or whatever. It happened because earthquakes happen. The god of the earthquake/trolls just likes having trolls attack places, sometimes, if it's in the mood - better than the NFL, and it's bored. It is chaotic, and maybe evil. 

Yes, Myths are built around the belief that surely something we can do will stop the earthquakes! In this model, you can stop the the earthquake by killing the trolls, as the trolls are the earthquake. That's the something you can do. 

Not everything is simulation. Sometimes in gameplay and narrative things that are ethically OK to fight and kill is good design. Fantasy is like that. Sometimes let yourself have the fantasy.

The End of an Age

In the summer of 2019 my daughter and two of her friends were attending a summer theater camp, and then coming over here on Thursday afternoon to "play D&D" (actually 13th Age). They told me what they wanted to play in broad strokes and I made up a default Half Elf Bard, Human Cleric, and Wood Elf Ranger in advance and them them know that they were the newest acolytes of a druidic circle in Brinham Wood, left behind to keep an eye on things while the others dealt with a catastrophe elsewhere. They fleshed out these PCs during the first session, becoming 

• Lyria: Having played in, and been chased out of, every port city in the human lands, this former member of the elf queen's court is versed in elvish sagas and has a voice so pure it makes plants grow.
• Maria: Possessed by a demon as a child, the monstrosity was exorcised by bathing Maria in, and feeding her, silver dragon blood. Blind and prophetic, she has an innate connection to Birinham Wood and its Sidabras River, as that is the sleeping body of a great silver dragon.
• Hosiery: Having lived several human lifespans, she is currently a member of the Elf Queen's order of Hamster Knights, who fight against cruelty (and constrain Drow rapaciousness), riding their giant hamsters to battle. She invented socks. 

I found a very simple adventure in an old issue of Dungeon Magazine (The Fountain of Health by Ann Dupuis: A straightforward ruined building turns into a labyrinth in the jungle setting, which might be re-skinned a little for a collapsed chaos estate), updated it for 13th Age and they spent 2 weeks completing it. There were then another 2 weeks following up on the various plot threads in it. And then camp ended and we were done. Everyone had fun.

The Covid hit, and to keep the kids from never seeing each other outside of school I restarted it: every Friday afternoon from when I finished work until dinner we played on Roll 20, eventually adding two more players and three more characters:

• Amy Packsister: daughter of the local bakers, she frolicked in the woods with wolves as a child before being captured by slavers, sold to demon worshipping pirates, and eventually escaping to home with a reservoir of rage but boundless optimism. Human Barbarian. 
• Azeroth: A human wizard, trained at the Archmage's academy, and solider for the Crusader in the defense of Harrowdale, this stalwart eventually died and trapped his soul in hell to defend the people of the sinking tower-city of Quag. 
• Axar: a Star Elf, wanderer of the Overland, duelist, vitalist, and master of the magic of the concordant spheres, the Priestess foresaw that his path lay with the Guardians of Brinham Wood.
• (This is not counting the time the party split up during the Quagmire adventure and we ran a chunk with Amy and Lyria and Hosiery with two other temporary PCs, and then Maria and Azeroth with 3 other temporary PCs, one of whom is also in Hell, or the Demonweb to be more specific.)

Last weekend we ran our final session of this game before the kids, now adults, go off to college. It's been 5 years of mostly regular play: vacations, drama programs, and other things kept us from playing every week but I figure we got 25 sessions per year on average, in fits and starts. I may have had games before that clocked more hours total (these games were almost all 2-2.5 hours, aside from the half dozen times we got everyone in person for an afternoon, difficult since Amy's player joined during Covid and was 90 minutes away), but none lasting this long, and it has been amazing. The session ended with their spelljammer, bereft of power, tumbling end over end into the Tannhauser Gate, a Star Elf artifact to bridge dimensions, on their way into the Demonweb to affect a rescue of their lost allies. 

We will not play again until holiday break. It is my hope that we can meet 3 times a year (once in December/January, twice in the summer) until everyone graduates. 

James Maliszewski has several pieces up at Grognardia about the need for lengthy campaigns, citing the aggregation of events that make a campaign unique, give it its motive force, and make it feel real and alive. 13th Age is very much not an old school game of the sort that James is discussing, and it is designed for a "change the world at the end of level 10" campaign.  But since I had no idea this would last that long, nor did I have any real plans for what SHOULD happen, I was just grabbing content that had been lying around for a while - sometimes as a personal challenge to make something out of modules I owned but hated - and strung them together. (Matt Coleville has a nice discussion on the values of that here.) I went from The Fountain of Health to something I just made up on the spot to trying to salvage one of the all time stinkers The Terrible Trouble at Tragidore to the Siege of Harrowdale adventure that Pelgrane put on Roll20 for 13th Age to more stuff I made up surrounding the coven of Hags who were their nemesis before putting in The Wayward Wood by Leonard Wilson from Dragon Magazine, which I had hoped to use because it's built off the Brinham Wood joke, and finally more stuff of my own creation. This took them from levels 1-4, and they made significant changes to the politics of their central woods and it surroundings.

They finished this in August, 2021, completing the Adventurer Tier in 13th Age.

Once that was done, I had years pass, asked the players what the characters were doing, and picked what was next from that. Quagmire, another of the highly uneven TSR adventures was next, modified to build on the players choices till now to make it feel organic, took them off their home island and radically changed the campaign, upping the stakes and seeing a PC death. They returned having to deal with the politics of where they started, and a simple task of apportioning healing from the Fountain of Heath took them into a war in the Underdark, and from there to the desert-landscape of the Hollow Earth from which dwarves originated, using the Dungeon Adventures module The Kingdom of Ghouls by Wolfgang Baur as a foundation. Returning with their political problems solved, having upended the religious practices of the Dwarf King's court, and and carrying eggs holding the blessings of Blibdoolploop, they became the agents to avert the resurgence of the hag coven as I finally made use of Rahasia, one of the first modules of the Hickman revolution. 

These trials completed, they realized they has wasted enough time... their friends in the Demonweb needed rescuing. Their research turned up three possible paths into the Demonweb and the settled on Tannhauser Gate, the artifact that was the core of the Star Elves phyrric victory over the Grievance of Eden (this is all from Axar's players provided backstory, though I gave it the name Tannhauser Gate because none of them have seen Blade Runner yet....), giving them a reason to enter the Overworld, which in this game was Wildspace and I used Steve Kurtz' module The Sea of Sorrow, again from Dragon Magazine back in the day, as the baseline. 

They finished this last weekend, completing the Champion Tier in 13th Age, they are now Epic 8th Level heroes. 

Am I gonna use Queen of the Demonweb Pits next? It's another famously uneven module, so I might - I recall some parts as being quite good. I doubt that it was prepared for the PCs to enter with a flying ship and a small mercenary company of Giff eager to claim land in Hell. 

The linking thread from session 1 to now is... their choices. The aggregation of individual decisions to pursue this or that thread, deal with this or that enemy, until they found themselves here... Diving into hell with a mercenary company of Hippo-Men warriors at their back on a mission of mercy. And what thy do once they are in the Demonweb, directly facing Lolth's minions and her manipulations of their world? I have no idea. We play to find out. 

Last session the after doing a deity impersonation to convince a colony of former Drow on the dark side of a distant world to follow them to a recently revitalized colony on the light side and ignore the 'divine commands' of the broken communication array of the destroyed castle on the moon overhead, they remembered that the colony was settled to contain a deep evil inside the planet. 

Maria: "Whelp, running away from our problems has always worked before!" 

Hosiery: "Like when I decided to not check out what that cambion assassin was doing and it killed the princess? that worked out great!"

Lyria: "Hey her ghost on her ex-fiancee's ship eventually forgave you!"

This, these exchanges, with someone in 2024 recalling something that happened in 2021, and everyone remembering what happened, and what it lead to, is why they play. To see what happens next. Their not remembering that they maneuvered the cambion assassin to drag the hag responsible for the princess' death to the Demonweb where she will be waiting for them is why I play....

Because according to them I am a bad person who does bad things.

D&D 5.5, and the long shadow of optimization

Someone on Mastodon linked to this article on the rules hacks that are already proliferating in D&D 5.5 that reflect back to the Mike Mearles comments on 3E Prestige Class optimization. It's clear that the problem hasn't gone away, and likely has gotten worse. 

The concept in the article is that there's a combination of rules to carry a shield and a scimitar (which has the just the right properties for this) to attack, attack again, then switch your current scimitar for another sheathed scimitar and attack again with the dual weapon feat because the dual weapon feat doesn't specify that the second weapon has to be in your other hand and to speed play the game now assumes a 0 cost for drawing a weapon. 

This is, to be generous FUCKING NUTS. The intent of the rules is absolutely clear and that they didn't think to hyper clarify is on the player trying it, not the designer.  

The core lesson is that you can't write rules to stop someone from trying to be a jerk. No rule set can be so perfectly written to avoid any potential from abuse by the players unless it gives the players no rules to abuse. That's one of the big advantages to the older versions of the game/OSR/NSR style where the GM is constantly making rulings based on the immediate facts on the ground and not arguing with the overlapping interpretations of what Robin Laws called Crunchy Bits. And I get the joy of crunchy bits. I do. But there are reasons why my preferred systems are very low on the crunchy bits: even 13th Age - which has a ton of powers the PCs can have - is designed to limit crunchy bits in any one attack to one so they don't stack. 

This is absolutely a "the rulebook doesn't say a dog can't play basketball" level of nonsense. That there are people out there who even think that they should be allowed to do this, or that failure to stop them from maliciously misreading the rules means the rules are broken, is just sad. 

Don't do this people. And if you're a DM, don't accept this. You don't need this at your table. 

On the new edition of D&D being out

So the latest Players Handbook for D&D dropped, and I'm starting to see reviews on YouTube and other places. I just wanted to drop a piece of advice on how to manage the critics responses to the new game: 

Posting on the comments to reviewers that "they had decided in advance to never like this game" is not helpful. It's not insightful. And it's almost certainly not accurate - but even if it is, D&D does not need you to weigh in to defend it's honor. 

No game is for everyone, but D&D is in a unique space in there are SO MANY different play styles for it, and so many different mechanical sets over the years that are not just other edition of D&D but modified editions of D&D with different names. (For example, I'm a 13th Age fan myself for high powered epic heroes with court intrigue, but use Basic/Expert D&D for a sandbox dungeon crawl, high exploration & problem solving game.) That leaves WotC either trying to build a game that does everything poorly (in comparison to other models and retro-clones that hone in on their specific play styles), or leaning into one style at the detriment of others. 

Everyone who reads the game brings their own sets of expectations. I know that 5E isn't for me - I tried it in 2014, it didn't click with my preferences, and I set it aside for things that did after stealing some ideas from it - but I can hear reviewers comments and know that they are doing their best from their experience to explain what works and didn't work for them. And that's incredibly helpful. It tells people who share their preferences what works and what didn't. 

And maybe the stuff that they wanted doesn't work for you, but it got you to think about what dies work for you. And that's also incredibly helpful. 

There isn't a war on. Edition wars are nonsense. Play the game you want. But any of the reviews are going to tell you something about the game, even if that thing is "someone else thinks this could be a problem, I should keep an eye on it even if I don't agree."

Most Wanted Wrap Up

That's finished! Thanks to the esteemed Mr. Hite for kicking me into gear for finishing that up.

The intent of the Most Wanted Conspyramid was, well, there were a couple. One was to apply some new gaming technology to some of the old classics.

Another was to specifically design parts of a campaign that would reward detective style heroes - Batman and others like him are really popular but a lot of the time the focus is on their gadgets and badass martial arts skills rather than their detective chops. Building a massive conspiracy into the campaign gives them an in play reason to exercise those skills. (This also makes these sorts of skill based heroes dramatically useful around their more powerful allies.)

Finally it ended up feeling like a cosmic campaign. Being able to have what look like three different level one node plot threads - the drug gangs and the crazy vigilante hunting them, the cluster of more standard super villain tropes and the 'lets have an honest misunderstanding first' magical streets wanderer feel like the usual super-hero kitchen sink stuff. Then as the PCs start working their way up things get connected more and more.

Hopefully there will be a few moments of "dammit, the MEDUSA guys are behind it" followed by "Holy Cow, Leo has taken over US Military Intelligence, Zodiac is trying to take over all of Africa" or "Oh Bugger, Motivator already rules the world." I would love the big endgame, the taking down of Motivator, to feel like the end of Promethea, Tom Strong, or Planetary, where the world really is saved, completely different and better.

Where Optimism Wins.

Wouldn't that be nice for a change?

Rogues Gallery 2

Continuation of the Rogues Gallery list from yesterday....


6) Found Foes: You have an exploratory nature or something else that leads you to foreign countries or fantastic realms where you inevitably upset someone's evil plans and get them to swear vengeance on you. Their powers could be anything, and are likely quite potent. (Example: the Fantastic Four vs. Namor, Anhillius, Psych-Man, the Skrulls, Mole Man)

7) Neighborhood Watch: The old neighborhood (or country, or planet) hit everyone in different ways. Your foes are those who grew up in the same circumstances you did - perhaps with the same teacher - but turned out different. Their powers are likely similar to yours in the main.

8) Common Element: Your foes all share one common element - all animal based, all have mutated heads, all based on classic elements, all monster-related, all from children's stories, all madness - that makes them visually/stylistically similar but doesn't say anything about their motives or themes.

8.1) Animals: Spider Man vs. Doctor Octopus, Vulture, Scorpion, Lizard, Rhino

8.2) Facial Deformities: Dick Tracy vs. the Blank, Flattop Jones, Pruneface, Rughead and countless others (Plus see Detective Double, earlier in this blog)

8.3) Elements: based on air, water, earth, fire, wood, metal and perhaps storms?

8.4) Madness: Batman vs Joker, Catwoman, Mad Hatter, Poison Ivy, Clayface and lots of others.

8.5) Monsters: thematic versions of Vampires, Werewolves, Mummies, Re-animated men, ghosts, etc.

In any event the intent is for players to get a card that gives them inspiration for who their character is based on who they fight. I'm not sure how well it would work in practice but I'd love to hear ideas.

Rogues Galleries

Since I'm working a lot of scattered things at the moment I wanted to codify some ideas on Rogues Galleries. I am thinking of my Sticks Improv system for non-fantasy genres. In order to quick build super-heroes I want one of the stacks to be 'rogues gallery', roughly a third of which will be 'team only rogues gallery'. This both captures the distinction between heroes who work primarily with the team (Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, Wonder Man) and those who have their own books (Iron Man, Cap, Thor) and helps define aspects of the heroes who do have their own rogues galleries.

The rogues gallery (if referenced in play) should be 5 villains, at least 4 of which fit the theme. They could be interpreted in many ways - maybe the animal themed villains rely on technology (like Spider-Man's rogues) or they're all wixua masters/sorcerers in various animal styles.

Since the text has to fit on business cards I have to keep these as pithy as possible.

1) Dark Reflections: Your foes are the same as you, only on the other side. For example, if you're a inventor for your country they're inventors for rival countries, or inventors who work for any country; if you're a combat badass wandering the west, so are they.  (Example: Iron Man vs. Mandarin, Crimson Dynamo, Titanium Man, Justin Hammer, Melter)

2) Ideological Opposites: You represent a particular ideology or national identity and your opponents represent opposing ones, or threats to yours. Their powers could be anything but not more potent than yours, and in at least some cases they're similar. (Example: Captain America vs. Red Skull, Batroc, Tarantula, Flag Smasher, the Secret Empire)

3) Thematic Obsessives: All of your foes are obsessed with mastering something specific to them, and that obsession has led them to crime to fund that obsession. Their crimes aren't (necessarily) themed, just their methods. (Example: the Flash vs. Captain Cold, Captain Boomerang, Heat Wave, Rainbow Raider)

4) Masterminds and Cats Paws: You have one or two mastermind-type foes who have built allies to use against you over the years, many of whom are now free agents. You're likely very physically capable, and the cats paws may resemble your powers. (Example: Thor vs. Loki & Enchantress + Absorbing Man, Wrecker or the Executioner)

5) Invaders and Thieves: You are the protector of a country, planet, pocket dimension, etc. Your foes are those who would plunder its resources or usurp its leaders (who might be you). Their powers could be anything but not more potent than yours, and in at least some cases they're similar. (Example: Aquaman vs. Ocean Master, Scavenger, Black Manta, Stavors Markos, Admiral Strom)

Final Thoughts on 5E

Crossposted from my Facebook feed

I like to think I gave it a fair shot. We ran 4 sessions and took the characters from 1st to 3rd, and I used the intro module with just minor modifications. It just didn't fly. Here were my problems:

1) Character stats give minimal differentiation and not enough skill: There was a big push for simplicity in reducing the number of skills, giving a saving throw to each stat, and having all skills and attacks use the same proficiency modifier. This in and of itself is not a problem, though the decision to reduce all of the bonuses made it hard to have a character stand out in a skill since the 1-20 range of the die swapped the 0-6 range of stat bonus + proficiency. That made it hard to use stats and proficiencies to enforce niche protection.

2) Character powers are too fiddly: Every class has lots of little powers and distinctions and branch points that everyone has to remember. Our fighter forgot his action surge. We all forgot the halfling’s luck ability, or the chaos sorcerers’ probability shifts. Everyone had to keep looking up class powers. Every arcane damage cantrip had a follow up condition. These million fiddly buts ran directly counter to the simplicity implicitly promised in the other half of the character rules

3) The combat and adventuring rules were too simplistic: there was a whole bunch of stuff that we kept stopping to look for in the rules (like charging) that were just gone. But not all of them – lots of things were now DM discretion for advantage and disadvantage, but a lot of other things still had specific rules. Pick one or the other guys.

4) Spellcasting felt wrong: The design read as being innovative in several ways but it grated. My personal sense of fantasy meant that the unlimited use combat cantrips felt wrong - I know there’s an argument for giving spellcasters attacks that are as reliable and damaging as hitting someone with a staff, but it doesn’t sit well with me and felt too super-hero. The Cleric’s player kept getting confused as to whether she should be further selecting from her spell list. The concentration rules hindered a lot of clever ideas. The saving throw changes made it much more likely that magic would fail. There were so many minor tweaks of existing spells that all of our existing system memory was actually counterproductive. I love the ritual rules, and the new rules for daily charges on devices, but all told the bad outweighed the good.

5) The healing rules are whacked. Not only do PCs get lots of healing quickly, not only is there no good dramatic possibility for wounds, but there is so much healing potential in the party (fighter’s healing surges, ranged healing spells for the cleric, the paladin laying on hands having a ton of effect with no negative HP) fights went on way too long at the end. Add in the swinginess I mentioned earlier and we ended play with a way to long fight where PCs getting hit took them for 4 to 0 points, and they then got healed to 4 points and went right back to fighting, but the swinginess of the dice means that for 6 rounds no one hit anything and we just went round the circle over and over. The clear tactical advantage of some actions meant that circle covered the same territory time and again.

All told we had some nice bits in the mini campaign, but any future D&D will be done in 3.0 (for me) or Pathfinder (for Jay) or a modified Basic Set if I want something without the crunch. 5E, in trying to satisfy everyone, ended up neither fish nor foul. I passed my PHB onto Jason’s family and the basic Set box onto Kris and Nick. It’s not something I’ll come back to.

YMMV.

Card Stack Improv

After some feedback from the players I'm not going to try to adapt 5E to my card stack system next month. We'll be sticking with the 3E model, which is a natural for the multi-classing in that mechanic.

After the card stack part of things I ask the players to turn to the person next to them and define their characters relationship, then repeat with the other player, so that every PC knows two other PCs but not all eight or nine PCs. This keeps a degree of party coherence but allows for inter-party conflict as well.

In the first session we did 6th level heroes where one group of questers were petitioning a group of established town-based clerics and thieves for help on something and ended up uncovering a centuries old curse. The second session we did a diplomatic meeting 12th level heroes and political players who uncovered evidence of a planned invasion of the lands under their control who had to plan out how to confirm the threat and counter it. Both were clearly D&D at various stages of play, but had very different feels.

This time around I'm repeating the 'everyone gets to draw geographic features on this map' aspect from the second game but modifying it so that pairs of heroes (the first relationship) are responsible for one quarter of the treasure map. This lets everyone have a say in the sort of adventure they want to engage in and the types of threats they have to face. This certainly makes my job more interesting as I have to improv what those challenges actually are based on the details on the map.

I might also say the second relationship discussions are by definition weaker, lacking a shared motivation for getting the treasure. This will all but guarantee some inter-party conflict when they actually get... whatever it is they're after.

I think I'll try to work this out with 9th level PCs, who in my analysis of the classic O and AD&D design are iconic without being political, just starting to move into politics, land clearing and gaining groups of followers. I think I may institute some new damage mechanics to keep Fighters and melee combat impressive without taking tons of dice rolls (abstracting multiple attacks to greater damage and ability to divide damage between targets). I really want the Fighter heroes to feel like John Carter, Conan and Fafherd - more than capable of moving quietly, donning quick disguises and performing impressive physical feats - rather than armored Arthurian knights since that better fits the treasure map through dangerous terrain goal I'm aiming for here.

Thanksgiving Randomness Continued

In the same vein as yesterday, here is another hero and another rogues gallery to populate the odd corners of your game world.

Skye Montana, otherwise known as the Judge, was born in her eponymous state by a family who magically bound her to the spirit of the place. Possessed with a mountain lion's fiery heart and piercing eyes, she also has a spirit brother she calls the Wild Wind. Wild Wind controls the weather, whisper secrets of her environment to her and travel away from her to explore other places and return with information. When she turned 20 Skye was recruited into The City, an extra-dimensonal space that helps to guard civilization across the multiverse. Serving out a 3 year term of duty she has returned to her own world older, wiser, perhaps a trifle more bitter and worn down but certainly more powerful to act as earth's supernatural defender. (Weather Control, Heightened Senses (increased hearing and detection, clairsentience), Animal Powers - Lion (ht. strength+10, ht. charisma+15, ht. endurance+8), Dimensional Travel A - the City, Reduced Charisma -6 from City bitterness).

The Scorpion is a man gifted with extraordinary power but an inherently untrustworthy nature. Having found a suit of spirit armor that he can don to give him protection, super-leaping, increased strength and an enervating ray blast. Finding that opened his mind to the multi-verse and let him see peoples thoughts, finds their weaknesses, command their obedience and even override their body's automatic functions. He was meant to be a champion of the City but his natural contrariness made him sting them. Now he runs a criminal empire on Earth, but no one knows his ultimate goals, which betrayals are part of that and which are just him following his nature. (Heightened Charisma, Telepathy, Weakness Detection, Psionics - autonomic override, Armor B Item (Ht. Strength, Speed Bonus) Devitalization Ray item).

Whisperer is a mystic who has mastered the languages of the material world. All metals have pledged themselves to his command and not not harm him, and he can convince other physical objects to move for him with a little bit of effort. He can command the matter of his own body for impressive feats of physical prowess and whisper to the minds of humans to alter their emotions or reduce to see him. Whisper uses this great power for personal gain - after all, even with all this power a man still need to eat! and live in fancy penthouses! To his credit he does not use his powers to coerce women into his bed - he uses more conventional methods to acquire his companionship. Still, he will accept payment from less than savory people for doing things they require. It's a shame that Gaia has pledged her favor to so faithless a man. (Magnetic Powers, Telekinesis, Willpower, Emotion Control, Invisibility)

Owl-Woman-Monster is an incarnation of the ancient Native American monster. Capable of highly controlled and precise flight she is all but unbeatable in the air. Her breath contains a pheromone that at the very least slows if not paralyzes those around her and either paralyzes or kills those she actually bites. Despite her name the only part of her that does not appear human is her feathery hair, which she can hide with some effort if she wants to mingle with normal humans before hunting them. A creature of magic she is very hard to kill, having returned from 'being destroyed with no body found' at least twice in classic comic book fashion. (Flight, Ht. Defense. Ht. Expertise with all attacks while airborne, Poison/Venom)

Denton Crystal, the Man with the Diamond Brain! Sometime in the 1800's an inventor in the American West who built a device that crystallized his mind, making his thoughts flow ever more smoothly. With this genius he built a device that would heal any wounds and extend life, and other that would transform a body into indestructible crystal. Trying to sell his inventions to the robber barons for a quick payout he was derided and driven off as a snake oil salesman (since they didn't work on, well, everyone. Mostly just on him and people who shared some genetic markers with him). Swearing vengeance on society for turning down his 'gifts' he turned to crime, Over the last 150 years his natural brilliance has dimmed a little (though his device still makes him one of the smartest men in the world) and his musculature has faded some, but his hatred for the soft brains is undimmed (Ht. Intelligence Device, Regeneration Device, Chemical Power Device, Reduced Strength).

Thanksgiving Randomness

This year, aside from the usual health and family stuff, I am thankful for Villains & Vigilantes. Sure I'd played games before that and a lot of games after that, but V&V was a real breakthrough game for me in that not only did it produce really cool, memorable gaming experiences but it also made enough internal sense for me to take it apart and figure out how it worked and why. That pocketwatchability made the rest of my gaming career possible.

One thing I would do for fun on snowy days was roll up 26 characters in V&V and build a campaign setting around them. This ended up being very useful as I could populate somewhere the players had never been with an interlocking web of heroes and villains to drop into world-history conversations, making the world feel more lived in. In the big shared comics universes there are other heroes, other teams, other things going on that the PCs aren't involved in, and V&V's random character creation made it easy to capture that.

So on and off I'll presenting a hero, his rogues gallery and their likely crimes for GMs to use to populate the places of their world that the PCs don't inhabit, either for worldbuilding backstory or crossover opportunities.

The White Elephant is the hero of the metropolises' theater district. By day Drew Moore is a fight choreographer and special effects theater technician, but since he was gifted with a really ugly statue that grants him the ability to grow anywhere from 9-20 feet in height and extend his wings for super-hearing and flight he spends his nights fighting the criminals who prey on the theater goers and the theaters. In addition to carrying a tusk-shaped club to wield in combat he's a bit of an inventor, using his knowledge of light and sound design, costuming and electronics to find ways to out-wit his foes. (Size Change- Growth, variable up to x3, Body Power - extended ears act as wings and triple hearing, Heightened Intelligence A +6)

Wixua is a madman obsessed with Chinese martial arts movies. White Elephant's still not sure how he gained his ability to fly, his mastery of esoteric martial arts styles (which include chi-punching people at a distance) and ability to deliver staggering amounts of damage, but we do know that he continues to attack, kidnap and threaten people in and around the theater district. Wixua is actually driven by the spirits trapped in an ancient construction deep under the district, but he doesn't understand their demands entirely - he just knows he has to keep following what commands he does understand in order to keep his powers. (Flight, Natural Weaponry +3/+6 with bonus power (chi can enhance initiative for next turn by +8 or be used as a 1d12 Power Blast, Heightened Attack, Special Requirement)

Pit Boss is a theater musician who sold his soul to the devil for power. In return he received a magical clarinet that can generate flames, cold, or hunks of stone that move at his muscial command. More importantly, he knows a spell that lets him infuse another person with a theater spirit, giving him a cast of rotating sidekicks such as the incredibly lucky Nathan Detroit, the dangerously accurate Annie Oakely or the deadly psychotic Sweeny Todd. Whenever Pit Boss returns its with a new sidekick and crimes that are thematically appropriate for that sidekick. (Pet, Flame Powers Item, Ice Powers Item modified so it makes cold or rocks with the density of ice.)

Fagan is a thief who runs a ring of young thieves, just as in Oliver. Fagan is blessed with incredibly keen senses, an ability to spot the main chance and perfect moment to strike and super-human strength that belies his slender frame. He also possesses a strange, alien device that lets him warp reality in inexplicable ways - he's not entirely sure how it works, or how to get it to do what he wants, but he has mastered using it to make himself ageless, invert gravity, create temporary tunnels through solid objects and other tricks to help him escape. He claims to have been the original Fagan who picked this object off of someone on the London streets and has been toying with it ever since. Depending on the game he could be a black-souled kidnapper or a greyer figure who offers the abandoned shelter and compassion; regardless you can always have the aliens come back looking for their gizmo.... (Heightened Senses, Heightened Strength B, Mutant Power Device)

Small Actor is a crazed, failed thespian who, despite his mastery of all the physical skills of a master dancer, acrobat, singer and magician is simply too flat, wooden and unlikable to succeed in the arts. Acquiring a drug that let him reduce his size he now preys on other actors and theater types - slipping around unnoticed he can acquire (or create) evidence for blackmail and extortion, acting as a procurer and dealer for their baser instincts and even go go far as murder. (Size Change - Smaller, Heightened Expertise (any theater related roll), Heightened Defense, Reduced Charisma.)

Scot is a witch, able to magically change her shape to any animal or to three different female forms of varying ages (something W.E. isn't aware of yet, as one of those forms is her alibi), She has an incredibly active brain that gives her a wild imagination, lets her shrug off lots of pain and gives her faster than normal reflexes. Most importantly she can shift in and out of the Dramaturgological Realm. She can reach into there to alter probability, enter it partially to become invisible, intangible, both or simply enter into it completely to disappear. Her plots are always about stealing the things she needs to perform versions of Shakespeare's plays in the higher realm in fashions that would let her rewrite the world. She's White Elephant's greatest threat and the one for which he is most likely to need assistance.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Versatile Single Powers

In general when I'm designing characters for supers games I like keeping them focused - a primary ability, a secondary ability, a career based skill and a hobby based skill is usually enough, if not too much. This design makes it really easy to slot the PC into a team with some niche protection (though don't get me started on the construction of bricks, energy projectors et al as being analogous to classes in D&D) and also leaves enough room for versatility in those abilities that the PC can 'fly solo' if needed.

Based on Wednesday's discussions on Big Hero 6 I wanted to toss out a couple of other 'single power' hero ideas have cropped up in my mind lately. There's something wonderful an potentially iconic about an ability that one can, with some creativity, turn into a truly versatile power. Here are some examples:

*Fish Skin*
In my Tri-Stat super heroes game The Aquarius Odyssey Asha wanted a fish based water breather. She ended up with two 'powers' - her secondary one was the classic super-strength and durability that so often comes with water breathing in the 'body designed to survive at ocean depths', but primary was that her skin could mimic the skin of aquatic animals as super-levels. This let her breathe water through her skin like a catfish, feel her surroundings like a shark, excrete a slippery oil to speed motion through the water and resist being grabbed (again like a catfish), generate light like any number of bio-luminescent fish, generate electricity like an eel and have invisibility-level camouflage like a octopus. The more we bothered to read books on marine biology the better this power could become. In V&V it might be Animal Powers- Fish but I prefer it as a single highly versatile Body Power.

*Customizable Mind*
I've been reading some Oliver Sacks essays and its always amazing seeing some of the breadth of what the human mind is capable of, and it would be interesting to have a PC who could take advantage of that, turning parts on and off, or just having a 'perfect' brain. The tales of the people who, after some brain trauma, can learn languages with great rapidity, or suddenly know how to play the piano and compose music and so on are well documented, but Sacks also comments on a man who lost his color vision but his black and white nightvision became incredibly acute, reading license plates from 4 blocks away and seeing with almost no light (mind you his physical eyes were unchanged; it's just how his brain interpreted the sensory data) and how the twitches of people with Tourettes have been clocked at 1/6th normal human reaction times. Again in V&V Speak someone with Willpower as a power could do a lot with this.

*Wings*
Call me nuts, but I've always wanted to play a PC who just had Wings (I'm currently using Angel as an NPC in my ongoing X-Men Play By E-Mail and having a blast with it.) Sure, on a base level all you can do is fly, but the musculature needed around the torso to make a pair of extra limbs, never mind wings, work would almost certainly give low end super-strength, Swans and geese routinely use wings as striking appendages that hit hard enough to break a mans leg at a range that puts them well outside usual punch and kick counter attacks. If the wings are classic comic book 'can do anything any bird can do' then they move fast enough to let the PC hover, but even without that such wings could generate huge amounts of wind with plenty of possibilities for it, and the character can glide silently. There's a lot to be said for a simple set of wings if you look closely enough.

*Light Powers Device*
One of my favorites, the Light Powers ability in V*V has a couple of standard uses, but I like the idea of having a device be a handful of devices, so the PC is carrying a versatile flashlight with IR and UV finctionality, a laser welding torch, a laser pistol, a handful of flash grenades, goggles with both light amplification and a flare device built into them, a suit that glows sptlight bright to prevent accurate targeting and so on. You can do the same thing with other devices but somehow Light Powers lends itself to this most readily in my mind.

I'm sure I could go on for a while, but the point is to build out your PC from a single logical starting point. V&V works best for this because most of its powers are cause rather than effect based. Effect based games leave me flat because players end up in standard configurations. I prefer figuring out what the power does, and then work out how you can use it. It's much more of a Marvel style than a DC style, but shortly I'll be discussing how I intend to use this for a DC Heroes game.

Big Hero 6 and Supers Character Design

I caught a showing of Big Hero 6 (It's good; if you like Supers you'll like it) and walked away with a couple of ideas on designing super-heroes. 

First is that the heroes in this are very focused (and if you've seen the previews I'm not spoiling anything): 4 of the 5 humans have better than normal physical stats, heightened intelligence and a single device. Hiro has a Giant Robot (or Animated Servant in V&V speak). Gogo has her magnetic wheels (Heightened Speed Device). Wasabi has his short range plasma generator (Disintegration Ray Device) and Honey has her chemical mixing kit (Poison/Venom Device is how I'd stat that). Our fifth hero, Fred, lacking Heightened Intelligence, has an armor suit his friends built that gives him 'monster powers' (Armor Device). This is very much in keeping with Marvel idiom of characters built cleanly around a single theme. 

As you can guess, I’d argue that V&V can build out a Big Hero 6 team very quickly and would be my go-to system for this. Not only does its random power generation work well when you have small number of powers to integrate, but it generally produces heroes who are both super and in spitting distance of the ‘man on the street’. That catches the vibe here really well.

It also fits for a team idiom where no one of the heroes has the classic super set up of Movement, Damage Resistance, Damage Delivery and Detective/Sensing Ability. Yes, Baymax (Hiro’s Animated Servant) has all of those abilities, but Baymax is still extrinsic to Hiro – he can be separated from him, have to recover him, lose control of him – which carries a different feel both in the narrative and in play from him having his own Iron Man style armor suit. That forces the heroes to work together and provides strong niche protection.

You can tell the design session for the characters was ‘everyone is a tech genius from the college Nerd Lab who builds their powers’. This is followed instantaneously by the special snowflaking of

Fred: can I be the non tech genius school mascot who hangs out in the tech lab?!?!

GM: sure Fred, we’ll let you be the school mascot.

Fred: Can the school mascot actually be a Monster?!?

GM: No Fred, the school mascot is not an actual monster. But the tech geniuses can build your normal person a monster suit.

Fred: Awesome! I’m a giant monster!

GM: Fred, What’s your characters code name?

Fred: Fred

GM:

Fortunately no one else tried to special snowflake; more importantly by making being super-smart a requirement the characters have to differentiate on something else. Like Pendragon demanding that all of the PC be knights that restriction generates creativity – everyone is a different kind of smart, has a different take on their smartness and produces different powers from that. Something to keep in mind next time you’re building out a hero team. 

Decentralized Power in Character Design part 3

To recap, my conjecture is that decentralized power for PCs (i.e. power outside their immediate bodies) faded for a while due to desire for character immersion coupled with a desire for simulation. I expect the GM not wanting to handle dozens of NPCs that the immersive-driven player no longer wanted to handle had something to do with it. In fact, mechanics has a big part in bringing them back, at least for me.

Some steps back were pretty easy - having players spend character resources to get iconic/signature gear that works better than normal and can't be permanently lost was common in supers games but worked its way into others (Earthdawn's magic item system was built around linking you to your magic items in a way that both made them more powerful as you got more powerful and forced PCs to research the setting background for plot hooks...alas like much of ED it was a little too complicated for casual play; Feng Shui lets gunmen and martial artists have signature weapons they can't lose, etc.). That's all to the good, but it's not quite the same as having the power a of a local lord with a mass of troops that 9th+ level fighters got in early D&D.

Several games do let players buy rank in organizations and higher levels of resources for their PCs, but usually make control of those organizations cost prohibitive and find ways to minimize what resources can do (because hiring a team of mercenaries to take point on your battles is what _villains_ do...). A revelation for me was the Big Eyes Small Mouth system for Organizational Ties, where control of powerful groups was in reach for players - mind you those powerful groups were sometimes student counsels and the like depending on the game - as were groups of flunkies. In the playtest for Silver Age Sentinels Org Ties these really came into their own, where for the cost of a mid range energy blast you could make your character, say, Director of SHIELD or in charge of Wakanda.

Yes, these still required GM buy in (a surly GM could then try to force you to buy a countries worth of flunkies and massive resources and tons of agent level fighters) but it put the idea of playing a character who controlled a large, powerful group back in reach of the players. The idiom of the game still required that, like the Steranko Nick Fury or Christopher Priest's take on Black Panther, that the hero lead from the front, but that helped bridge the gap between immersive play and massive resources.

Later games, like FATE, reduced everything into Aspects that can be invoked in play, and that aspect could just as easily be 'Lab of scientists and flunkies' as it is 'genius scientist' as both let the PC do sciency stuff. That's even better in some ways as it pulls everything back into a single mechanic.

Which is what I was trying to go in Gaslamp Romance. I'll talk more on Monday as to why I did what I did for that and how I hope it will work.

Decentralized Power in Character Design part 2

As I commented Monday it's sometimes a bit of a jump for people to accept decentralized power (power that is not inherent to the characters' body) in role playing games. This is a little odd, since the original RPG had one stat - Charisma - that was dedicated to decentralized power and all of the character classes, but fighters especially - transition to that as a focus after name levels. 

I'm of course referring to henchmen, hirelings and eventually followers. The ability to hire people to come with you on adventures - people that barring morale checks were initially under the players control - was a major one in early play, and the game explicitly transitions fighters to commanding territories and armies once in the double digit levels. That the player would command resources outside of their PC and their gear was assumed.

However as more and more people played the game that decentralized power decreased. Like many game groups mine didn't do much if anything with henchmen and hirelings. Part of that was wanting to engage in more immersive play (and hence not be working the numbers for a henchmen and hirelings in addition to our PC) and part of it was either not understanding or not wanting to engage in higher level political play. D&D didn't help because non-fighters, and magic users specifically, accrued ever more personal power as they advanced past 9th level and never really entered the political realm of play that fighters held. If you _liked_ the dungeon/wilderness adventure paradigm then Wizard and Cleric were the classes to play after 9th level, which you can see in the number of high level Mary Sue wizards wandering around the early published campaigns. 

The first game (that I know of) that did anything with restoring decentralized power was Traveller, which had a chance of your PC starting play with existing political power, a ship or large amounts of cash, but aside from the rank those weren't permanently part of the character. You don't see that until Champions comes out and people can purchase powers with a limitation that makes it a device they can temporarily lose but always get back. Likewise you can 'buy' allies and contacts, but they are not guaranteed (relying on a random roll to appear in many cases) and controlled by the GM. Even with that the idea that the player would wield _reliable_ power through others - having troops to command, spies under their control etc. – faded away from game design. You can particularly see this in interations of the GURPS rules where even their Supers designs fought tooth and nail against the idea of Signature Gear even up through the early 2000s.

The reasons for this movement are twofold in my opinion: first was the desire for more immersive character play, and having to control other people breaks away from that. The second was simulationism: since in real life no one completely controls someone else there was the urge for more ways to insert GM control. I’ll look at these a little more later. 

Decentralized Power in Character Design, part1

A few years back it occurred to me that the best way to build the three main PCs in Star Wars _on equal points_ is as follows:
Luke: high competent in most areas, strong piloting skills, either have a game mechanics where newbie PCs advance faster than others or have a pile of points set aside to justify rapid advancement.
Han: strong in most skills, plus points for purchasing loyal super strong sidekick (whom Han's player would control) and kick ass smuggling ship.
Leia: high competent in most areas, strong in social and knowledge skills, plus points for purchasing the entire Galactic Rebellion, which (Leia's player would control).

That's right, Leis' player controls the rebellion. Of course she does. Like any good pulp hero she's both in charge and out on the front lines doing the most important tasks - like stealing the plans for the death star, or leading the assault on the force field generator, or making the executive decisions around fleeing their compromised hidden base.

This is part of the general theory that in a high trust game, especially with experienced players, the GM should place as much control of the setting onto the players hands as possible. Yes, it's easy to run a Star Wars game where the PCs are agents of the rebellion who are given missions to execute, but there's a lot to be said for letting the players dictate the course of events. That's how we run d20 Fantasy Games, for example - Ed Greenwood commented on the need to lay out a dozen or so adventure hooks across the general vicinity so the players have real agency - if they decide to skip Waterdeep and head south due to rumors that the red dragon killed off the sword coast left behind a hidden but now abandoned hoard in Calimsham then so be it. (Just have a few 'on the road to the adventure' plots lying about to occupy them on the way there while you build the horde out from the single sentence you started with.)

The trick here is to start thinking of the parts of the characters under a players control as not just their physical person, or the person and their iconic gear, or the person, gear and one or two close allies but their entire spheres of influence. As I'll discuss over the next few posts that's can be a difficult transition to make.

Thoughts on the DC Television Universe

Had an interesting conversation with Geri the Murderous Librarian today about Arrow, Flash and Gotham today and the nature of the growing DC Television universe. She and I were not at odds but had different viewpoints on the Arrow series in part because of character interpretation - the Green Arrow of the TV show is clearly built off of Mike Grell's _Longbow Hunters_, the early 1990's interpretation of the character who works on an urban hunter vibe. I happen to like that interpretation of the character, while Geri's default the 1970's hippie version, who picks ideological fights, cracks jokes, has a boxing glove arrow and a generally lighter tone. Both are valid version of the character but I can certainly see her point.

Even without the general DC live action dictate that these characters are serious stuff and not childish super-heroes who crack jokes, DC's TV unit kinda worked themselves into a corner here - Smallville was a well done, popular show that was built on the theory that ti would never show Clark as Superman. As the show went on and the universe expanded that became harder to do, especially with more super-heroes turning up. The desire to have a semi justice league meant they needed to have a crystallization character.

This _should_ be Superman. But they can't have a Superman in the show's premise. It could be Batman, but Batman was decreed off limits. So they made it Oliver Queen - he's passionate, has resources, and can be made into a credible leader type. Except Ollie isn't the crystallization character - he's the irritant. The almost outsider who keeps forcing the rest of the League to defend what they're doing, to focus on the little guy, to point out worst case scenarios and otherwise start social conflicts. That's true whether he's the urban hunter or the loudmouthed idealist. That's the big tweak to the character. And the Oliver Queen in Smallville was popular. Popular enough to give him his own show.

But then they didn't build on the Smallville basis but re-set that type of Oliver in a new setting, which is now the core of the growing TV universe, inspiring the new Flash. And that decision just puts everything else a little off kilter. It should be Barry, or Hal, or best of all J'onn acting as the core of the team if the big trinity is off limits.

No real point to this, just some observations on how comics translate to TV. Ill do more later on how this can work for supers gaming based one existing properties.

Powers and failing to get it

I commented on this on my Facebook account but I wanted to touch on it here in more detail: Playstation Network is making a TV show of Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming's comic Powers. A slightly NSFW trailer is below.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/137990-Playstation-Networks-Superhero-Cop-Show-Powers-Gets-First-Trailer-At-NYCC

The further I get from this the worse a taste it leaves in my mouth, for spoiler-y reasons. So if you don't want me to spoil things for you stop reading.

In the comic Walker has secrets nested inside of secrets: we don't know at the start of the book that he's an ex-super hero who lost his powers. We have to figure that out with Pilgrim over the start of the book. But what Pilgrim doesn't learn is that Walker is relatively sanguine about having lost his powers because he is, more or less, sick of being immortal. He's been defending humanity since there's been a humanity, but his functional memory only goes back about 50 years. He was almost at the point of asking the person who invented the process to shut his powers off prior to the accident that took his powers away. It's not that he wants to die, but he wants to not be immortal any longer. And it's not that he wants to stop defending humanity, since he immediately becomes a cop.

This stance, having Walker be the less experienced cop to Pilgrim (albeit one with an insight into super heroes) inverts their relationship. Bloody hell, look at the names - Walker can't fly any more and Pilgrim is searching for more knowledge, it's not subtle here. That's bad enough, but the sort of thing TV does. But totally failing to get why Walker is kinda OK with not being a superhero, that he's not spending his time ranting about how much is sucks to just be normal, that's failing to get the entire core of the character. It's essentially Hollywood Screenwriters putting the easiest, most one dimensional gloss on the character. He gets flat, irritating and, well, the guy in the trailer.

Jim Cambias also pointed out that the guy is spectacularly miscast - Physically Walker is big and broad shouldered, the sort who you can see would once have been a classic super-hero. Emotionally he is earnest and well meaning. Christopher Reeve could pull this off, or anyone else who played Superman. (And again, Walker's hero ID, Diamond, had a big diamond emblem in the middle of his chest - who else has one of those...?) This guy? He lacks the physical presence, and the lies he's being given run against the core of the character.

All told I expect this is another instance of TV spectacularly got getting something that should be really simple.

Another Angle on the Forgotten Realms

After complaining last week about the size and scope of the Realms, and their hodgepodge, jigsaw puzzle world design it dawned on me that Conan's Hyboria had a very similar world design and it didn't matter there at all. Look back over the Conan stories and they'd open with him in pseudo-Egypt, or running from native tribsemen, or dealing with no-quite-vikings or what have you. The lack of highly realistic integration in Hyboria didn't matter. So why does it feel like it matters in the Realms?

I suspect there are a few reasons:

First, the more narrative the players are the more they want to detail every part of their PCs lives. You need permission in advance to just say "OK, in the last 6 months your adventuring company has made it from Waterdeep to Arm, and have taken command of a merchant ship heading south...." even thought that makes them appear more broadly competent and powerful in that these things can be glossed over.

Second, mechanically the game now favors rapid PC improvement. In earlier editions your PCs took a long time to move through the key levels of 5-9, and therefore could have several different stories at the same relative power level. That's certainly not the case in 5E, especially since levels 1-4 are your 'origin story'. I tried to run a Conan style game with Captain Fasaad where the crew of the Daud would arrive somewhere, have a adventure and move on, but each adventure had at least 13 encounters of her CR, so every adventure Fasaad would level up and, by the nature of D&D, become better at fighting. That perpetual escalation lends itself to a sort of narrative, where as Conan started damn tough and got a little tougher but a lot more broadly skilled. (At least with my players Fasaad also got more broadly skilled since the players never tight focused their skill points).

Third, the breadth of the Realms in any one area sell themselves to small location until you're on sweeping quests and then return home sort of play. It has a lot of politics and trade baked into it.

Fourth, Conan often starts adventures broke, and D&D places a lot of PC power in their gear, Players would freak if you kept taking it all away. This, at least, is something 5E should work against.

I think I'd be much more comfortable with the Realms in a Conan style, where I move from adventure spot to adventure spot with little bridging stories. I'll have to give it some thought.

A quick praise to pocket books

I have several large books of short stories and collected series lying on my bedside table to be read and find it hard to pick up any of them. Part of it is psychological, part of it is knowing how much of a pain they are to read on a plane. Heck, I find it hard to reread LotR just because the copy we have is the hardcover collected and it just weighs so damn much

Oh, for the days of the extra cheap Moorcock or Zelazny sized pulp novel again - the 150 page just barely a novel bursting with ideas and either filigreed descriptions or punch to the nose prose that drove the plot along. I have a complete, unedited Howard version of Conan collection on my Amazon wish list but I would almost rather the 1970's pocket books, just for the joy of tearing through it in an afternoon on the hammock. If only someone would release that collected Conan in 10 cheap paperbacks....