Terminally Incoherent

Do you like to roll a lot of dice when you play RPG games? This is not really an invitation to discuss the Big Model or the GNS Theory. You can discuss them but be aware that my attitude and personal opinion of these schools of thought consists of a single word: “Meh…” I looked at the GNS stuff and I find myself smack dab in the middle of the 3 distinct player groups. I’m equal part narrativist, part simulationist and part gamist which I think breaks the system. I think Ron Edward’s theory is really well thought out and really boring at the same time. I don’t dismiss it as useless though. Some of the indie games it influenced look interesting. I never played any of these newfangled narrativist things so I can’t really say how they would work.

I grew up playing RPG games the traditional way - the GM was God Incarnate, each player controlled a single character and had no creative input on the game world. That’s what I know, and anything else seems weird and a bit scary to me. When I was growing up the big divide between players had to do with dice.

Our flame wars had to do with whether or not do you roll dice and how often. I think it was around the time when White Wolf coined the word “storytelling” to indicate the GM’ing style of their World of Darkness line and we took it and run with it. Our regular GM was a firm believer in Storytelling with capital S as the ultimate way to run his games. He was also a big fan of Amber Diceless. Whatever system we were playing was therefore “amberized” by which I mean “made diceless”.

I told this story to a buddy from a gaming group I joined much later, and he seemed perplexed. “How do you play without dice?” he asked. I didn’t know how to answer this question. You just do. You declare that you want to jump over the ravine, the GM looks at your character sheet and makes a judgment call based on how well you described the action.

“I jump over the ravine” is probably a fail unless your character is a circus acrobat or an Olympic medalist in the long jump.

“I take a long running start, and when I’m in the air I stretch my hands out in front of me to catch the ledge if I’m falling short” is probably a success unless you are a short legged dwarf wearing a plate armor and a backpack full of bricks.

My friend shook his head in disbelief and murmured something about railroading and lack of random chance. He was appalled that my former GM could simply not allow certain actions to be taken. When I played with that that guy though, I didn’t care. We had fun, and were more interested in participating in the cool, fast paced stories he devised for us. Were we railroaded? Perhaps, but it didn’t really matter. I guess that could be tagged as narrativist style of play - I don’t know.

The dice-loving buddy of mine, and me were talking about this while driving to play a Ice Spacemaster GURPS campaign with copious amount of dice rolling, and looking up rules in one of the 8 GURPS rulebooks the GM owned and had sitting on the table at all times. There was nothing wrong with this style of play either. And I enjoyed it just as much as the amberized games in the past.

What I liked about the diceless sessopms was their free wheeling, fast paced gameplay. Without complex rules to slow us down we could usually close a complete chapter of a longer campaign in a single evening. And by that I mean get a quest, get implicated in a major political intrigue, get arrested, escape from jail, expose the evil plot, defeat the bad guys, clear our names and claim our rewards. All in one evening - sometimes two. In my experience this sort of thing is almost never possible with a dice-heavy gaming - combat alone bogs everything down and always takes forever. What I like about this kind of games however is their unpredictability. There is something exciting about dice based combat situations when you know you character’s life depends on whether or not you can make the next roll.

My ideal environment probably lies somewhere in the middle. Stuff like social interaction, spot checks, intimidation and etc are best done diceless. Randome encounter tables are definitely out. Simple physical actions or simplistic combat can be done diceless but the important, risky, difficult and exciting actions are probably best left to chance to get your adrenaline pumping.

My brother on the other hand caught the Amber bug, and refuses to play anything where the dice are involved. The aforementioned gaming buddy never understood the diceless concept and probably never will. Which I guess is fine.

Which camp do you find yourself in? Do you like diceless Amber like game play? Do you like lot’s of dice rolling and rules lawyering? Or are you somewhere in the middle like me? Or perhaps you can rephrase my discussion in terms of Big Model and GNS and shed some new light on this? I’m familiar with the theory but I never really pondered it long enough to apply it to my own gaming patterns.

Recently I realized that traditionally evil races such as Orcs, Goblins, Kobolds and etc. in RPG games rarely have fleshed out social backgrounds, or detailed descriptions of daily lives. It’s as if every member of each respective evil race was a male warrior, whose only desire in life is to wander around in the wilderness hoping to bump into a party of adventurers he could fight. The have no other ambitions, goals, dreams - they do not form families, they do not raise children, hunt or grow crops. All they ever do is raiding human villages, looting, pillaging and raping innocent women (I mean, that’s where you get all these Half-Orcs, no?).

I touched upon this subject before when I talked about my experiences playing Horde character in World of Warcraft. As I said in that post, both Horde and the Alliance are good guys in this game. They are enemies because of their history, and their beliefs. Orcs are not some feral beasts in this game - just tribal people with a war-like culture. As you run around Kalimdor however you will see that war is not all they are about. In several places you can see Orcish kids running around and playing. Somewhere there is a house and inside there is an Orc woman preparing a meal for her husband and son. There is a dude in Crossroads who hires adventurers to search for his lost wife. You quickly get the picture that these green skinned creatures are not some bloodthirsty monsters - they form families, they love, they hate, they play with their kids and etc.

In that aspect WoW portrays Orcs in much more detail and in much kinder light than most RPG’s out there, including the pen and paper ones. Apparently I’m not the only person who noticed this. Go check out David’s post Orcs are not just Orcs at the Verbing Noun blog. He makes some excellent suggestions for fleshing out the traditional antagonist races in your RPG campaigns, and how to subtly subvert your traditional “go kill all the Orcs in the Orc camp” quest into something entirely different. Instead of a simple hack and slash, your company is faced with a moral conundrum.

The PC’s know that if they do nothing Orcs will continue raiding nearby villages. But can a good aligned company justify a preemptive raid on an Orc camp/village full of women, children and elderly non-combatants? How will a lawful good paladin feel about looting Orc war-chief’s body for that +2 Awesome Mace of Awesomeness if his an Orc woman is crying and pleading to take her husbands body and give him a proper burial?

Perhaps if the players stopped, and looked at how the Orcs live they would realize they are not just some barbaric, evil monsters. They are a race with it’s own culture, traditions, oral history, and a deeply rooted morality system which may seem alien to us because it is based on a different alignment.

It is a deliciously insidious idea - to start with a very traditional setup, and then flip it around and make the PC’s realize that perhaps they can’t become heroes without becoming monsters. They can feel the same way Robert Neville felt in Mathesons’ I am Legend (the short story not the movie). Humans will hail them as heroes, and saviors but amongst Orcs and their allies they will be despised and known known as ruthless butchers - a living proof of human cruelty and destructive drive that is causing the conflict between the two races.

In fact, if you think about it this seemingly random, one-off encounter may be spun into a lengthy campaign in which the PC’s must deal with the fallout and repercussions of their reckless raid. For example their legendary cruelty was a catalyst that helps to unite local tribes under one banner and an all out war is about to break out? How can they prevent it? Will they negotiate? Will they try to assassinate the leaders and instigators driving the Orc war machine? Will they be willing to give themselves up and accept punishment for their deeds in the name of peace? It could be interesting stuff.

Thanks to WoW and David’s article I will never look at evil humanoids such as Orcs, Goblins, Kobolds and the like the same way again. I will now always wonder what are their reasons for doing what they do. What are their daily lives like. How are their families structured. What values are important to them. And how can I make the PC’s feel like shit for killing them.

Of course there is the opposite approach. If you don’t want to deal with these moral quandaries, you can simply say that Orcs, Goblins and the like are inhuman, supernatural beasts who do not reproduce, do not form families and exists solely to participate in random encounters.

Have you noticed how most RPG games (both pen and paper, as well as video games) always seem to introduce some sort of additional game play mechanic to handle spell casters? In most cases wizards and mages always have an additional attribute or a pool of magic poits or mana which always feels sort of artificial. Casting spells is usually governed by a completely different set of rules than any other special skills and abilities used by non-caster classes.

I was playing WoW the other day and noticed that the game decided to give almost every single character class a mana bar and make their special abilities cast like spells. So when my hunter uses a poisoned arrow, or lays down a trap he is actually expending mana. It’s an interesting approach to extend the spell casting mechanic to other classes and creating a more unified system (but not completely - after all the Warrior has a rage bar instead of mana bar). I started wondering if doing it the other way around wouldn’t be possible.

In other words, why do we need that mana bar anyway? I know this is just a game mechanic that prevents the caster from expelling fireballs out of his ass like a little machine gun, decimating all enemies in his path. It represents mental fatigue of some sort and seeks to limit blatant abuse and inject some balance into the game. The idea is to level the playing field so that a PC wizard is roughly as powerful as PC warrior or PC ranger with the same amount of experience. It’s not logical in the terms of game world, but it tends to be necessary in terms of game play. However having a mighty wizard simply run out of fuel in the middle of a fight is not very realistic. Yes, the whole idea of magic is not realistic to begin with, but when I say unrealistic I mean that it forces you out of character and forces you into metagame discussion:

“Hold up guys, I just run out of mana and I need to sit down here and meditate for a while”

You could try to disguise this as something in-character by having the caster saying he is tired, but fatigue is usually handled by a different set of rules. The caster could still do a few cartwheels, and run a marathon - so it’s not like he is physically exhausted. Is mana depletion mental fatigue? Not really. A depleted mage can still function normally - he won’t be sleepy, or burned out. He is just out of magic juice. How do you role-play that? You could say that mystical powers have left you but that may imply a permanent loss of power rather than just a temporary one.

There are different variations, but chances are that in the end you will have to break out of character anyway to calculate exactly how long you need to meditate/sleep to recharge your batteries. And I mean this primarily for pen and paper RPG’s where you actually play with other people. So if you don’t play those, simply consider it as metagame thinking. Every time the game forces you to think about spell casting restrictions and mana bars as game mechanic, the game looses immersion.

The problem here is that wizard characters have a whole separate system tacked onto their “normal” stats, necessitating additional book keeping and tracking. Their character sheet will always be busier, and more worn down from writing in and erasing mana points, or tracking their once a day stuff. In video games they will have additional menus for spells, extra bars for casting mana, and extra rules for resting/recharging. All this stuff usually won’t apply to non-caster professions unless you try to extend the system and make special abilities of certain classes into pseudo-spells like WoW (and I hear D&D 4e) did.

What if we make spells work like ordinary skills? They would require ordinary skill checks, and would have to be learned and trained just like everything else. There would be no special mechanic for remembering, memorizing spells and no extra logic or math to go with it.

Naturally we would sill need to have some sort of balancing mechanic. For example casting could be tied to regular fatigue rules (an most games have those so that the wizard would get physically tired when casting. Rather running out of mystical batteries he would simply get out of breath and need to sit down and rest just like the warrior who has been swinging his double handed axe of furious fury for the last hour.

If your game has no fatigue rules, a simple way to limit the carnage that can be caused by a cast-happy mage is to dip into his HP. Instead of fueling his spells via some sort of mystical power, the caster would simply use his own life force. The spells would be either powered by it, or alternatively the magical energy absorbed from the environment would be coursing through the wizard’s body scorching his flesh. The more powerful the spell, the more painful and risky it would be to cast. Using to much power, too quickly could be fatal. In systems where one gains HP at each experience level, this very mechanic could replace “spell levels” as well. Some spells would simply be beyond the reach of low level casters because they would not have enough HP to cast it.

I realize that neither of these solutions is perfect, and neither one may be applicable to existing systems. Still, an unified system without all the extra rules about spell casting, regenerating magic points, meditation and once a day abilities could be interesting, and potentially more immersive than what we have now.

I never played D&D. This is probably due to the fact that I grew up in Poland where D&D and AD&D manuals were not easily available. Besides, we had a home grown clone called Kryształy Czasu (Crystals of Time) had an unique (and by unique I mean stupid) fantasy setting and overly complex mechanics (and by overly complex I mean stupid). It is only notable because it is probably the first domestic full fledged RPG ever published. We did not play it because the game was widely considered to be “fucking stupid”. AD&D was sort of in the same ballpark and my gaming group never bothered acquiring the expensive rulebooks which were not printed in our native tongue.

Guess what was the most popular foreign fantasy RPG franchise when I lived in Poland? You will never guess. No, it was not the time crystal thing. It was not D&D or anything even remotely related. The most popular fantasy RPG on the Polish market at the time was Warhammer Fantasy RPG. Yeah, a game derived from that tactical miniature tabletop game. Someone got a bright idea to translate and publish it and it killed. I swear, everyone played it.

Me and my friend once decided to start like a little local RPG gaming club - we put out an add, secured a locale where we could meet and everything. Few people showed up, and we asked what games they played before. It was a wild scatter shot - everyone played widely different systems… There was only a single common system amongst all of us. We were all were familiar with Warhammer FRPG. So guess what game we played? Ok, we played Cyberpunk 2020 that day (with a beautiful TPK) but it was pretty much Warhammer from there on out.

It’s strange but the game was not bad. The rules were sort of crappy of course but they were simple. It was pretty much roll d100 under the attribute. If you don’t have the right skill, GM may force a negative penalty. Combat was pretty much lifted straight from the miniature game and was serviceable, if a bit simplistic. The system of professions and buying increases for your attributes for the XP was a total mess but we managed.

The game was very well supported and there were dozens of supplements and campaigns available for it. In addition the Warhammer Fantasy Battles game was well established and had lots of background fluff floating around in various Army books and publications - and porting them into the RPG game was fairly painless.

Besides Warhammer I played Star Wars D6, Mutant Chronicles, Dzikie Pola, Vampire: The Masquerade, the already mentioned Cyberpunk 2020 and Spacemaster (but using GURPS not Rolemaster ruleset - I don’t know why, ask my former GM - but likely cause Rolemaster was a clusterfaq of confusion).

All of these games had fairly specific settings. D&D is on the other hand this incredibly huge… Thing with many planes of existence and various crazy campaign settings such as Spelljammer (BTW, what the fuck in hell were they smoking when they made Spelljammer?). So it is almost like several games in one. If you thumb through the Monster Manual without realizing that the critters depicted there come from a wide array of planes, that do not all reside in the same setting you may think that the D&D is just plain fucking nuts.

I’m probably late to the party pointing out the Stupid Monsters of D&D article that has been making rounds on the interwebs lately. This fun article plucks out the silliest and most retarded monsters from few dozen D&D related books and some of them are just plain hilarious. I think my favorite ones are Monkeybees and Duckbunny. And no, I’m totally not shitting you. Check out the page and see what I mean. Silly!

There is another series of posts in a very similar vein which starts here. In this one the author pretty much goes alphabetically through the 3rd edition Monster Manual. So it’s not just selective cherry-picking of some inane acid induced creations from 70’s which since vanished from the books. These are recent - and some of them are mighty retarded. Too bad the blog seems to have fizzled out and there have been no new posts from months now.

After looking through these articles I started thinking that perhaps I didn’t miss much by never playing D&D. This whole “let’s make as many monsters as we possibly can” philosophy can’t be healthy. I’m sure that a lot here depends on the GM and the setting you pick. I also know that D&D pretty much started this whole RPG thing we all know and love. It is also the only RPG game that “normal” people know about.

For example if I told someone I play Role Playing Games they would probably give me that “I really don’t want to hear about your sexual perversions look”. When I say “I play D&D” they instantly know what I mean, and simply give me “OMG, you are such a nerd” look instead.

Did I miss out by not playing this game? To me it doesn’t seem so - especially since I’m more into the Role Playing aspect of the game rather than into “Roll Playing”. I don’t mind rolling dice, but once you break out a grid with figurines and ask me how many squares I want to move, I’m fucking leaving.

Anyone here ever played D&D? What are your experiences with it? What other RPG games have you played? I’m writing all of this stuff because I want to see if any of my regulars (you know who you are guys!) has any clue what I’m talking about. I’m aware that this will probably be one of those posts with like a single comment that said “I know nothing of this stuff, but that article you liked to was pretty funny”. But hey, I figured that I’ll try.

If you ever played RPG’s (not on your computer) please sound off. Let’s see how many people we have here and what systems you played.

KOTOR 2 uses an interesting plot device to explain why your battle scarred, world weary Jedi character has such meager stats and force powers at the beginning of the game. In the original there was no such excuse because you simply started as a oridinary, human being and only gained force powers after going through the training on Dantoine.

KOTOR 2 on the other hand insists that you were a Jedi once, and that you are actually one of the last of the living Jedi knights in the galaxy. So why the poor starting characteristics? It turns out that you were exiled from the order, and the Jedi Council somehow severed your connection to the force. Ha! Clever stuff. Unfortunately while it does make some sense on the surface, and does make for a good story (why did they do it and how?) I don’t totally buy this explanation. It’s not very consistent with what we know about the Star Wars universe. If the Jedi Council had this power all along and could elect to neuter a Jedi knight at a whim by severing him from the force why was it done to your character (a virtual nobody), and not to the big bad Sith Lords that threatened the galaxy in the past? Someone is probably going to say they were to powerful to be dealt with that way or that the Sith training includes techniques that help one protect himself from such an attack, and I guess it is an explanation of sorts. Still it has not been addressed in the game yet. I will suspend my judgment on this until I finish the game but I’m not entirely happy with the forceful force removal idea.

On the other hand, I kinda like the idea of a failed, broken Jedi character. If I remember correctly the D6 Star Wars rulebook we used way back when (long log ago, in a galaxy far far away) actually included something similar as a playable character archetype. I think it was dubbed as the “Fallen Jedi”. The fallen bit was not referring to falling to the Dark Side though. In fact it was about failing more about falling. A fallen Jedi was simply a washed out failure and a nobody. The rulebook had this great sketch of a unshaved, unkempt inebriated drunkard slouching on a bar stool, with a drink in one hand, gambling cards in the other, the lightsaber hilt sticking out of some odd pocket of his jacket.

The idea was simple - you were taught to be a Jedi but you were either never really good at it, or your personal opinions clashed with the Jedi code - or perhaps you somehow dishonored yourself. Either way, you have no affiliation with the Jedi Council anymore and your life went down the drain. Now you spend most of your time getting drunk trying to drown out the past. And if you are not drinking you hire yourself out to do odd jobs here and there in order to afford the booze. Even if you were semi competent at using force in the past, these days you are rarely sober enough to actually actually be able to concentrate.

Not so long ago, Shamus had an interesting discussion about the difficulties of running a Star Wars campaign when someone in the party insist on playing a Jedi. I think the washed out Jedi is the ideal archetype to stick into a more traditional party of smugglers and bounty hunters. He would have similar motivations and aspirations as the rest of his company - money, booze and loot. His social and political influence would be diminished since most of NPC’s would be able to tell he has no backing of the Council and essentially is no more than some hired gun with a toy lightsaber. Additional bonus is that this character could actually have a good excuse to dabble in the dark side powers.

But let me get back to KOTOR. The game did take a turn for the better after leaving the initial area, and the Telos Orbital Station section was actually fun and interesting. I liked how the game allowed you to either work for the corrupt Czherka Corporation, or against it by help out the Ichtorian planet restoration efforts. There were some interesting missions there, and I liked how they were all clustered in the relatively small area of the base. Since the same locales were reused, or previously blocked areas became available it made the base seem more dynamic and alive. It was much better than running in the endless corridors of the mining station fighting hordes nameless droids at the begining.

That said, the story I still makes me cringe at times. For example, nearly every time you board some kind of a ship or shuttle you either get shot down or locked out and end up trapped in the new area. When you start the game your ship is sealed off in a differed section of the station, and you need to run around for hours before you can unlock it. Then you reach the Telos Orbital Station, and your ship gets confiscated, and then stolen. So you board a shuttle to the planet surface, which gets shot down and you end up trapped on the semi-hospitable planet. Somehow you manage to find another shuttle on the surface, only to get shot down again, and ending up trapped in the polar region of the planet. WTF?

It seems repetitive, to the point that I’m now actually expecting it to happen every time I travel from one area to another. Furthermore the game seems to alternate between seemingly open ended game play mode and interludes of very linear progress and story exposition. Which I guess is ok. I’m once again at a point in the game where I can once again choose my own quests. I also did so many good deeds that my character’s portrait is actually glowing now.

The dialogs seem to be a bit glitchy in this game. Sometimes the game will randomly skip a spoken line and you notice it because they usually change the camera angle after a full stop. When a line is skipped you can still see the change in scenery, and it just quickly cuts away to the next scene/line. It doesn’t happen very often, but it is noticeable. Also, the timing is sometimes off when you talk with aliens that speak in their own language. It’s almost like that subtitle gag in which you hear a character speak in a foreign language for a full minute, only to see this lengthy tirade translated to a single word in the subtitles. This actually sometimes happen here - the subtitle says something like “I will think about this…” but the spoken part in the alien language seems to be going on and on and on. It’s a little bit silly.

As I progress through the game, combat starts to become more strategic and the behaviors/stances you set for the party members you are not currently controlling actually do matter. For example, on the surface of Telos there are big open areas with enemies scattered all over the place. I left all my characters in the aggressive stance only to watch them scatter in all directions and aggro just about every single enemy on the map. After that fiasco I tend to keep the old lady as a force support character, and whoever else I have in the party as ranged. This usually keeps them following my main character who is in aggressive stance and prevents them from doing to much aggro all around. When needed I can switch to these characters and give them direct commands. I just wish I could have more than 3 people traveling with me at a time - if for nothing else just to exploit all the different stances at the same time.

As characters go, there are few new faces at this point in the game. There is a Zabrak mechanic and an Echani fighter. While I don’t care either way for the former, the later seems interesting. While she was trained to shield her mind against the force, she seems to be genuinely interested in it. She also has interesting concepts on combat as a form of expression. If you ask her to train you she will insist that you both strip down to your underoos. Yes, this is a character that I can grow to like.

Despite all the complaining above, I’m actually enjoying this game. The story is slowly unfolding and the missions are interesting and not very repetitive, even if all but the most important NPC’s look the same using the 20-30 same models colorized in different ways. So far I haven’t been tempted to put it down which is a good sign.