OSRAW! Fight that troll, Willow!

Had a good conversation, post-game, last night with George. He's critical of Dungeon World, feels like it's not quite there (or maybe he'd be more strident about it than that!), and one of his particular criticisms was an issue of scale:

In a game of Dungeon World we played at a Jeff-con, the party's bard managed to use a move, Fascinate, to bewitch a frog-god and convince it to follow him to the ocean, where he would threaten to force the god into the sea and kill him (amphibians breathe through their skin; the GM ruled that gods are no exception here) unless the frogman armies left the city alone.

So, from a D&D/OSR perspective, the idea of threatening an amphibian enemy with salt water is pretty badass. Everyone at the table agreed it was a really cool plan, and the GM ruled accordingly.

The other side of the OSR viewpoint could be/would be, however: how the heck did a level 2 bard manage to use his magic on a frog god, just like that? I mean, whatever, but the status of god would matter more than the status of frog, just like how some kinds of undead are harder to repel than others.
Even if it'd be amazing to see the party cleric repel a nasty mummy-king right into a bonfire and watch him light up like a thing on fire, there's still that part of the fiction that says, "Yeah, but, isn't this adversary pretty powerful? Couldn't his incredible evilness deflect the power of this dime-store holy symbol?"

That gets me thinking about the role of levels in Dungeon World - pretty much any charm-related/mind control spell in any incarnation of D&D is going to address the monster's level or hit dice. Player-characters get stronger based on level, not just in terms of benefits like attack bonus and hit points, but intrinsically - the saving throw rolls get better over time 'cause of some inherent excellence that develops with leveling up.

In Apocalypse World, advances can sharpen or broaden a character, and they eventually lead to a character retiring from play. You can't get more than 10 advances before you MUST take the advance, "Retire your character (to safety), and create a new character to play."

Dungeon World has rules for going up to level 10, and it has some moves that don't scale at all to level (such as Fascinate). I think that a direction should be chosen - are levels going to matter a lot more, or are we going to use them only for the vibe they give? I think either option would be cool, but at this point it feels like one of those is not happening. I wasn't particularly bothered by it in play, but it's an interesting notion: there are certain things that low-level characters can do just as well as high-level characters. That definitely grinds against the spirit of D&D. If I have to gain 10xCurrent Level experience points to ding, it'd be nice if it counted for a bit more.

I think the scaling issue could be fixed just by including info about levels, for monsters or for PCs, in a lot more moves.
On the other hand, what if "level" is just a misnomer, just a colorful term, and leveling up is really about gaining more abilities, not necessarily more powerful ones. But, in DW, that does depend on the class: any of a bard's moves can be bought any time you level up, whereas the cleric has some moves for levels 2-5 and some for 6-10.

At the same time, this is all entertaining a particular argument. How I really feel is that it's way too hard to level up in D&D, given the benefits that affords you, and especially when compared to AW.
It might make more sense to flatten the xp requirements for leveling, just making it 10xp/level, or some other flat but high-enough amount that it doesn't happen too fast but you do get to do it often enough that it feels actually possible.
Pre-3rd edition D&D is clearly a game about having almost nothing to work with and getting through a tough spot regardless. The level-up rules are a carrot for extended play, but really, I've never actually played in a D&D game long enough to go up a level. Especially in its OSR incarnations, D&D play seems to mainly be about having the pluck, courage, and sheer good fortune to make it through some really tough scrapes intact.

I don't know if a game like AW, with all kinds of ways to improve your character and to show off your powers, is really suited to capture this particular form of D&D. I think that a sweet fantasy adventure game is perfect for AW, but more for capturing what folks like me wanted D&D to be (a way to live out 80's fantasy flicks and Dragonlance novels), not what it actually was.

My recommendations: flatten the xp advancement, put in stuff about retiring your character, put in stuff about the intended scope or length of a campaign (somewhere between a 2-hour epic and a season's worth of TV), make dungeons a part of play and not the point of play (think Moria in LotR, rather than the module adventures of yore), and dispense with the whole monster-level-thing.
If we change up monsters like that, then various benefits of leveling wouldn't make sense anymore: HP gains, bonuses to the attack roll, or really any improvement that doesn't come from stat gains or new moves.

The other road (keep levels and the design ethos they bring to the table) is totally fine, of course, but I think DW is currently in a sort of middle ground where neither approach is really being explored enough. I think DW is an awesome project, and I want to give it another shot before I put any work into making OSRAW (Old School Revolution - Apocalypse World).

Rolling to hit vs. Memory Lane

I was just thinking about the time I gave D&D4 (Eberron) a not-so-charitable shot. The GM was very big on her Overarching Plot, see, and wanted to just kind of bring us up to speed during the first session.
I was unaware of this/didn't care to cooperate.
In my introductory scene as a priest of the hearth-goddess, I nearly got into a screaming match with some lord over the ethics of my assigned quest. This was not because the GM was playing him in any particular manner; I was trying to get an angle going for what my character was like, and "religious fanatic" seemed a good one.
Wouldn't you know, the GM was downright puzzled at my overacting. I had assumed that if I was placed in a scene, I was free to do as I pleased in it, provided I didn't just wander away (which would, legitimately, be kind of unfair). But it felt like I was supposed to just keep hitting the "A" button, as it were, to scroll through the NPC's dialogue.
Not down for that.
Second occasion of my ridiculousness: the War-forged member of the party gets some guff from a city guard. I ask him his superior's name, and he gives it, but the guide leading us around the city informs me immediately that "That's just how things are in this town."
I shoot back, "I am a man of the gods! I cannot stand by and allow such petty outrages!" (or some such high-flown diction)
He shakes his head at my naivete. I, the player, grind my teeth a little at being stone-walled... again.
Anyway, I ended up going a little crazy later on in the session while some of the other players (5 of us, altogether, I think) have a very extended conversation about... stuff.

I told the GM afterwards that this wasn't the game for me. Her response was a polite version of "no kidding." I had wanted to give it a try, and I accept that D&D4 can be a very different experience than this (whether it's to or not to my liking is unknown, yet).
But, looking at various story-games threads about Apocalypse World, about sandbox games, basically about very character-centered, player-choice-matters games, makes me wonder what I could have been thinking to try something a bit more 1990 (i.e. the middle wave of AD&D, where GMs stopped practicing Old School Zen and started all that stuff that Ron gets anger-y about), knowing my own proclivities for Maximum Protagonism!

Anyway. Let this be a lesson: never play in a game just to be polite if you suspect you'll really hate it. Even if you might be pleasantly surprised, being pleasantly disappointed is just too much of a waste of not just your time, but the group's.

/out

Starting to like this idea of "Old School"

This is a pretty interesting (free!) resource: the quick primer to old-school gaming! It contains a few tips on how to compare and contrast (in the author's view) the different mentalities behind older (read: D&D circa 1979) and newer (read: anything you can buy at Borders) RPGs.

Incidentally, it's tied in to the Swords&Wizardry rules set. I'm tired and it's a little hard to explain (the word "Zen" gets used a few times), so I leave you to this sweet, free download.

0e D&D

Here's something I'm obsessing over, of late: Swords and Wizardry, the open-gaming-license version of "original" Dungeons and Dragons!

It's a Gamist design, through and through; what's more, their design ethos is this - simple rules means something customizable and easy to pick up; it also makes referees more flexible and able to adjudicate on the spot, rather than being trapped by complex design.

I. Am. Fascinated.

Download the core rules (and a whole bunch of other cool stuff!) right here. It's all free!

a (real) storytelling game of (actual) personal horror

I'm thinking of hacking Vampire: the Masquerade to make it more story-ful. I was inspired by the Background traits and a request from a blog-commenter over at Story By the Throat!, and realized how Background traits were the "way in" to making V:tM, and perhaps White Wolf games in general, *actually* deal with "personal horror".

What if, instead of coldly tactical names like Contacts and Allies, you had, respectively, much more emotionally relevant traits with names like "People Who Think I'm Human" and "Lovers and Close Friends"? Some traits could stay the same, like Status (which is inherently social), but most of them would need to change.

More examples - how about "Vampires I've Cowed Into Submission" for Influence, and "My Human Victims" for Herd? One more - "Purity of My Blood" for Generation: you're either too young to inherit so much power, or you've killed some very important people to get where you are, and either way, it'd make sense to develop a certain level of disconnect from the mud-blood monsters.

Anything, anything at all to make it easier for players to treat the subject matter more appropriately, and less like dark-clad superheroes! The way the rules are set up currently, it's all too easy for a player to be told by the GM and fellow players to act one way (as though he's playing a storytelling game focused on a personal brush with horror), and to be encouraged by the rules and mechanics to act another way entirely (as though he's playing Marvel Superheroes, but everyone has to be "dark and creepy" caped crusaders).

This is the sort of split mind that D&D has pushed onto people historically, although 4th Edition seems to have much more clarity of purpose, encouraging people to go ahead and min-max and have the most effective characters they can - they're going to need them! ^_^

I downloaded an odd little document - a list of each White Wolf game (Old World of Darkness) and all the background traits made available in that game, and finally, which book(s) each trait was mentioned in. Kind of a strange reference document.

Authority, conflict, and D&D

A few months ago, an old gaming buddy of mine named Marc, having listened to me at length about RPG theory, expressed an interest in playing D&D with me. I agreed, thinking it an opportunity to show, rather than tell, all the stuff I'd been talking about. Given that we're on opposite sides of the U.S., we resorted to playing over the phone.
A few ground rules: we used the Kicker technique, it would just be the two of us playing, we would use 3rd edition rules (sticking as close to play-as-written as possible), and there would be no GM, only two PCs.
That last bit was probably what got us in trouble, and what prompted me to think a lot about conflict, authority in the gaming group, and so on.
In the Mask playtesting campaign I've been running this year, I noticed that reliable sources of antagonism have given the game the fuel it needs to stay high-energy, to stay focused. Without dedicated antagonist characters, it's drifted into listless, low-key play that largely hinges on Exploration for its own sake.
This is essentially what happened in our D&D game, as you might expect. To start, we only had one Kicker, and it corresponded to his character, not mine. As a result, it was up to him, by and large, to drive play through decision-making. At least, it was supposed to be: I've managed to get pretty heavily into player-centered RPing, the sort of play where, as i stated above, it's up to the players to act as protagonists, making decisions that drive the plot along. Antagonism provides something for the PCs to push against, a sort of context for their actions. Without any kind of push-back against what they want to do, there's no tension; Lumpley has already explained the non-relationship between tension and winning the game here, so I will refer you to that link instead of elaborating here. But, on that note, antagonism isn't always personified. A target number to perform a task can be the "push-back" you need to give a little more shape to the story, but real-live enemies work better, and are much more interesting.
Anyway, we were going somewhere interesting, and I have to admit that Marc and I came up with some cool stuff (he's a nobleman's son who's given up his birthright for a career in music; I'm an elf-turned-mercenary who's hiding out from agents of my former king). The problem(s) were: inconsistent antagonism and very one-sided creativity. The two relate, of course; Marc, having had a bog-standard, GM-centered RPing career, kept looking to me to decide everything, but because I had a PC of my own, I had a conflict of interests to deal with. I could come up with where to go and what to do, and suggest new areas to Explore, but without anyone else dedicated to stopping me doing as I please, I hesitated constantly, afraid that I was "doing it wrong".
A big, big chunk of all this: creative authority went pretty much undiscussed, despite my efforts to the contrary. This happens a bit in my sessions of Mask, but because there's a fairly traditional, if player-centered, set of roles in place (the regular players mainly portray a single character each; the gm-player portrays nearly everybody else), I can always say, "Yeah, well, it IS up to you guys right now to decide what happens. It's right in the rules!"
Traditional roleplayers will want to push back against any attempts to empower them, of course; there's a vague, underlying notion that there is a "real" game world out there, but only the GM can see it, so he must relate it to the players in a manner of his choosing. Working with this false assumption, you have a range of benevolent-to-maniacal GMing styles, largely differing on the degree to which they a) share information with the players and b) manipulate player ignorance.
These may seem like the same thing, but they aren't. I daresay you could make a two-axis graph that has "level of information shared" and "level of manipulation" as the axes. Or, well, I suppose ignorance-manipulation is an inherently dysfunctional, Illusionist technique, as it's entirely predicated on the implicit assumption behind "sharing" information, i.e. that the GM is actually scrying the game world and revealing it, like the Oracle at Delphi, for the players. This isn't what's happening, and every opportunity you can take to show that the GM is making it up moment-to-moment (no matter how much prep is involved), the better it is for players, and the more likely they'll chime in and be creative along with you.

Okay, big money: this is all leading to a re-evaluation of the Wisdom stat in Mask: it occurs to me that there was something I was going for with it, a sort of "say, do I have any good dirt on this guy?" kind of resource that acted, a la Dune, like the slow knife to Wit's swift knife. To unpack that metaphor, think about it like this: in most games with physical stats, you have something like dexterity and something like strength. One is your finesse, and the other is raw power. That was my original, albeit vague, divisor for each "stat pair" (two social, two physical). In actual play, my "dexterity" stat, Self-Discipline, acts as a sort of social/physical hybrid for everything related to self-control (not responding to taunts; keeping your balance), Strength is purely physical, and Wit is purely social.
Given that, I'm free to experiment with Wisdom. Because Wisdom had no clear role, however, that left us with only three stats to go with the nine skills, and meant that sometimes stat-skill combos got shoehorned into uses that felt, at best, forced. Okay, okay: Wisdom's new function, which I've managed to implement successfully, is to create pure information about the Shared Imagined Space. While "I use my Strength+Banditry to torture him into talking" is certainly creating information about the SIS, it's doing it within the context of the stakes set for the dice roll.
To use the above example, a successful roll there would mean "I torture him, and he gives us the information we need". A failure would mean something akin to "He resists, or gives us bad information, or something else happens". Like usual. But if you used Wisdom instead (along with a skill, presumably), then success would mean "I introduce something relevant to the situation that is useful or interesting."
That was vague. What I mean is this: rather than asking the GM, a la Mother May I, if this or that fact is correct about the situation, you simply say, "This is true. Now, let's roll!" It's just like any other roll, in that respect: declare, roll, continue. But, instead of the stakes referring to actions and events, they refer to information about the events at hand. Because a standard stakes-setting roll works with what has already been established, but it's still so darn flexible, Wisdom actually doesn't/shouldn't come up all that often.
You can see I'm having a hard time defining this. Okay: if you, the GM, find yourself in a situation in which a player wants to find out information, ask/determine if they're looking for color or control. If it's color, you might as well agree to it. If the player is looking for control of the situation, and it hasn't been established that what they're asking is obvious, then the player should roll to make it true.
Hopefully that's clear, to you and to me.