Like my other experiences with paper war games, Demons is extremely complicated. It took Dick and I a couple hours to figure out. When we finally did, we played for about an hour and realized we were playing wrong. Here are some pictures.

Rule “N”– ahh nerds and their non-access to boobs.

While I sort of get the sense that Time Tripper is a paper war game aimed at beginners (and the D&D crowd), if you’re like me and grossly unfamiliar with paper war games, be aware that they aren’t the type of things you bust out when you can’t find Jenga for your next dinner party. In addition to being really complex, the rules are far from lucidly written (bear in mind we had two people trying to figure the game out).

If you are up to the challenge, the game is a lot of fun. Though it is a war game, its warped sense of humor make a really fun play once you figure it out, or half-way figure it out like us. If you don’t think you’ll be playing the paper version any time soon, DewKid.com wrote a Java version of the game. While the Java version does all the calculations for you, its insanely tough (I can make it past 3 boards or so without getting killed in a good game). The coolest thing about the Java adaptation is the graphics for the counters. Now if someone would just do a version of the game for Facebook.

At least 20 shots fired and not a scratch on either guy. Notice how it was harder for John Preston to point and pull a trigger than it was for him to wrist-lock the gun from his opponent? That’s because it’s more dramatic that way. Guns are more tricky to pull this off without the dissolution of viewer disbelief (like Mike’s Commando note in the last comments). Wimmer, or whoever choreographed the fights, did a good job throughout the movie.

The two weren’t exchanging blows and deducting hit points. Instead, they were deducting each others’, as I put it in the last post, easily-replenish-able statuses.

On the silver screen, these mainly amount to stamina, balance and awareness. To deliver the killing blow, movie heroes often wear their opponents down in some way, confuse their sense of balance, distract them or catch them off guard. The Equilibrium fight was a matter of the hero wearing down the bad guy’s concentration enough to grapple the gun away from him. Or take a Jackie Chan 40-vs-1 scenario where he’s got a ton of thugs trying to take him down. They could never just come up and axe him in the head, instead they’re trying to wear his heroic levels of stamina, balance and awareness down enough to get him somehow.

Anyway, the shocker is, as far as a cinematic tabletop RPG system, I don’t completely have one. Honestly, I don’t deem it worthy of my time to thoroughly flesh it all out at the moment. Had I gotten further with it, I might have posted all this a year ago. What I have is a rough outline of concepts and then a set of rules on how they might be employed.

Let’s get back to easily-replenish-able statuses. Let’s call them “statuses” because it’s shorter and I don’t know what else to call them. Characters in such a system are likely to have a bunch of regular stats (strength, dexterity, etc.) and then those statuses, which are tied to their regular stats but, as their name implies, they can change over the course of a fight.

So, let’s say characters all have the above stamina, balance and awareness as statuses. These things act like the shields in Infantry, but in multi-dimensional ways. If you try to perform a certain action, depending on the action, it could tax one, two or all of those things. Likewise, if you’re trying to react or counter an opposing action, it might first require a success check based on those actions, and then, depending on the results, one or more of those statuses will be drained. On the other hand, like the Star Wars system mentioned in the last comments, you could take it easy in order to replenish a stat.

Two guys, a thug, who is heavy and strong, and a martial artist, who is light and quick, are duking it out. All of them start out with the same (or similar) stamina, balance and awareness, as they’re both fresh. The thug might try to swing heavily with his fists. As he does that, he’ll make checks and occasionally lose stamina, balance and awareness, perhaps one more than another. I would say heavy swings merit a harsh decay on balance and even a harsher decay on stamina. The martial artist might try to dodge, and if it comes down to that, block these blows. Dodging requires balance. If he fails a balance check, he may be hit. Or, maybe a failed balance check allows of an awareness check, which if that passes, he isn’t hit but gets to block. All of these things require and take away the statuses. Worse yet, if the martial artist receives the full on force of the thug’s fist, that will probably make a huge dent on all of his statuses.

The martial artist, during this fight, will be dodging and striking, not with heavy swings, but with targeted blows. Perhaps he strikes the legs, in an effort to get the thug off balance. Perhaps he targets the eyes, as to decrease the thug’s awareness. The martial artist’s strategy should be to wear something down on his larger opponent that will give an opening to do some real damage.

The Whip

The whip has been touted as one of the most versatile and interesting weapons. I remember hearing about so many possibilities with what a character could do with one, from blinding the eyes to pulling a weapon from an opponent’s grip. The problem is that AD&D’s system simply does not allow for this kind of depth. Instead, all that matters is damage (and, as the above link shows, there are some rules for whips that do more damage than a longsword…great depth there). The problem is that it’s simply easier, at all times, to attack with something that does damage. If you want to grab someone’s leg with a whip, even if that person is 1 hit point away from unconsciousness, it requires a difficult called shot to the leg. Your character points are simply much better spent learning how to wield a kopesh.

Dick’s (non-existent) Cinematic Tabletop RPG Combat system, on the other hand, allows for inventive use of whips and other situational items. This is in the aim to make combat dramatic.

So, below is an outline of how the system might be employed. It’s rough and rather incomplete. I have simply put a lot of thought into the process of thinking this up, so I thought I should make it known here on Protozoic. A major problem that I can think of: it’s probably too complicated. On the other hand, it should be intuitive, unlike Shadowrun’s combat system. In Shadowrun, you’re never quite sure if a particular bullet is absorbed by armor or its target completely. Shadowrun’s system is better than AD&D’s in some ways, but it is hence abstract on top of being more complicated. So, given my system’s complexity, it is better suited for a video game, where the player can intuit everything but only the computer has to deal with calculations.

Character stats: These mainly break down into: Attributes, Statuses and Skills.

Attributes

In my draft, making things as simple as I can, I plotted out Primary Attributes Strength, Mass, and Focus. These attributes are exactly what you think they are. They come in ranges 1 to 10, with 3 being human average and 6 being the normal human maximum (allowing for fantasy/sci-fi elements).

Secondary Attributes are then derived from the 3 above attributes. The Secondary Attributes are Stasis, Quickness and Dexterity. Stasis is how well one finds one’s balance, but also how hard it is to topple one’s balance. Quickness is how long it takes to get any part or parts of one’s body from point A to point B, but not including reaction time. Dexterity is really general hand-eye (foot-eye or anything else-eye) coordination.

These are like the regular attributes in range, but there are fomulas to find each one. Quickness is complicated, but the rest are easy.

Quickness:

Strength+((10-Mass)/2)-Mass = Quickness (note, round all decimals down)

So, Mass and Strength are working against each other. For example, a ham-fisted thug, with 4 Strength and 5 Mass might look like:

4+((10–5)/2)-5 = 1 Quickness

A martial artist, with 4 Strength and 3 Mass, might look like:

4+((10–3)/2)-3 = 4 Quickness

A pretty big disparity, I know, but realize that Mass is going to mean tons when you’re knuckling up.

Dexterity:

(Quickness+Focus)/2 = Dexterity

Dexterity is somewhat physical, somewhat mental.

Stasis:

(Dexterity+Mass)/2 = Stasis

While a small but quick guy is going to be easy to knock over, he also will be able to easily get back on his feet. A large guy is going to be tougher to knock over, but he isn’t going to have such an easy time getting back up.

Statuses

Statuses, which are Stamina, Balance, Awareness and Initiative, can change from round to round, but the first three start at 6 at the start of combat. That is unless the corresponding attribute is higher than 6, in which. The corresponding attributes are:

Stamina: Strength Balance: Stasis Awareness: Focus

Initiative:

A d6 roll + Awareness = Initiative

Initiative is re-calculated at the beginning of each combat round.

Skills

I haven’t fleshed this part out yet. I don’t think it’s important for the example, so we’ll just leave them out.

Weapons

I haven’t completely thought this part through either. What I do have in mind are weapons that rely on certain stats to be used. A big, heavy axe is going to require more power than a a rapier, which would require more speed and aim.

How this all adds up

A big, dumb thug might look like this: Primary Attributes Strength: 4 Mass: 5 Focus: 3 Secondary Attributes Quickness: 1 Dexterity: 2 Stasis: 3 Statuses Stamina: 6 Balance: 6 Awareness: 6 Equipment Weapon: Battle Axe

And the above martial artist could look like this: Primary Attributes Strength: 4 Mass: 3 Focus: 5 Secondary Attributes Quickness: 4 Dexterity: 4 Stasis: 3 Statuses Stamina: 6 Balance: 6 Awareness: 6 Equipment Weapon: Katana

Notice how the both have the same Stasis. That’s because, while the thug isn’t quick on his feet, his Mass makes him hard to knock over. The martial artist, who isn’t nearly as Mass-ive as the thug, is quick on his feet and will usually land like cat if dumped head-first towards the ground.

Combat Mechanics

Hard Actions vs. Easy Actions vs. Automatic Actions

In the Angel fight scene, it was difficult to hit anyone with a blade, but easier to either hit blades with blades or hit someone with a blunt object. Below are how these actions could be divided:

Hard: Heavy Punch (or Heavy Elbow or Heavy Kick, etc.) Any weapon action (slash, stab, chop, shoot, etc.) Tackle (or Grapple or Knockdown or Trip)

Easy: Parry Jab (or Elbow, or Head-butt etc.) Butt (using the non-pointy side of a weapon) Kick (or Knee) Dodge (or Brace for Impact)

Automatic: Parry/Dodge/Brace for Impact

The idea is to think of as many different attack maneuvers and to try to make them fit into the system. Optimally a player will be familiar with a long list of possible actions for his character.

Easy Actions are less strenuous on Statuses and are more defensive, while Hard Actions pay out more if they are successful but stress the character more. Automatic actions are defensive ones that are even less strenuous than East Actions, but don’t require declarations of any sort. They, if not superseded by their corresponding Easy Action, happen any time an attack is made.

Combat Mechanics

Here’s where the article basically ends. Sorry. There are just too many details and I’m just not going to invest the time at this moment to put them in so that things are balanced. Here are just some rough guidelines I’ve thought of:

Initiative works by the slowest characters declaring their actions first down to the fastest characters, but the actions happen in the order of quickest to slowest. That way two things can happen: the winners of initiative get to base their actions off of the slower ones and the slower ones might have to work with reduced Statuses, depending on what the quicker character manage to do.

I’m thinking of using the d6 system of successes, much like Shadowrun and others, because I think they have an averaging effect.

Easy Actions get to use two stats, an Attribute and a Status, while Hard Actions use only one, an Attribute and Automatic Actions only use Statuses. So, dodging uses the total number dice from Quickness and Awareness. A swing of a battle axe, on the other hand, would use only Strength to determine the die. A parry as an Automatic Action might only use Awareness.

Carrying out actions costs Statuses, depending on the difficulty of that action. Failing an action, especially a defensive action, costs a lot. This is made by an Attribute and Status check compared to the character’s current Statuses. Each Status that is more than the check is decreased by one. If the action is a fail, then it is again decreased by one. And, if a the character’s Status is still greater than its corresponding Attribute at, then that Status loss is again greater by one.

If a character loses a Status while being attacked, that Status is set back to 1, and the character then receives physical damage.

So, maybe I’ll finish it one day. Maybe I should have extended this to 4 posts and fleshed it all out. Rather, I think, I’ll tailor it for computer usage.

One way to do this is to account for proximity (think Warhammer 40k or Battletech). While that can make combat interesting, it also can turn your RPG into more of a strategic simulation.

Then, two combat systems converged in my mind as the two most interesting combat systems I have witnessed. Unfortunately, both of them are action systems, not turn-based.

First is the melee combat you often see in movies or TV.

Take this clip from Joss Whedon’s Angel as an example.

Note how it is somehow tons easier for the boy, Connor, to back flip and simultaneously kick two people than it is for him to just punch someone with the fist that has a big blade attached to it. Notice how blades never touch flesh, rather blades seem to attract each other with an audible “clang.” This is until Connor is bludgeoned enough with benign blows that he allows a knife to be held up to his throat.

This is not how real combat works. Martial artists who think combat resembles this in the slightest make me chuckle. However, to the viewer, it is interesting, dynamic and dramatic.

My next featured combat system is the one from the “Eol Crater” zone of Infantry, a sci-if, massively-multiplayer, action, strategy (and sometimes RPG) hybrid online game with an isometric view. I personally hold Infantry as the most fun video game I have ever played, but that isn’t the point. The point is the flow of combat.

For those of you who are not aware of the details of Infantry’s combat system shown here (this will probably be everyone who reads this), I will explain. Each combat suit is equipped with a personal field that dampens the force of incoming projectiles, but every time the field dampens those projectiles it drains some of the suit’s energy. The combat suit has a power supply that recharges the personal field, as well as powering other items; it maintains a maximum energy, usually around 600kj. The percentage of the suit’s total energy determines how much force a projectile has when it makes contact with the suit.

For example, if a suit has 300kj out of 600kj energy left when a projectile finishes entering the personal field, then half of the force or, really, half of the damage transfers to the suit. Final damage is calculated after physical armor is also factored in. A slug from assault rifle, rated at 20 damage, enters a personal field with the above 300kj out of 600kj energy, thus reducing the damage to 10. Body armor on the trooper can further dampen the damage. One common armor does this by 8 to mean that, in this example, the target receives a whole 2 hit points worth of damage. In this particular Infantry setting, such a trooper would have about 100 hit points, meaning that 2 damage is, in fact, just a nick.

The shield system creates some interesting game play. A single slug from a rifle is not going to cause much, if any, damage to a soldier whose suit energy is not low enough. Assuming an assault rifle 40kj on a direct hit, and that a suit recharges at a rate of 30kj per second, then a trooper starting fresh could take 1 slug every 2 seconds without ever even feeling it hit his armor. Therefore, it is only until a suit is drained to around 30%-60% of its total, depending on the armor, that one can start to expect to do damage.

This creates the opportunity for close combat with firearms, since a few long shots won’t even be felt. Troopers close in, using “drainer” weapons which are lower impact but fire faster. An auto pistol, which does not have the damage or shield drain of a rifle, fires fast and is easy to handle. With an opposite nature of an assault rifle, this pistol can take down a combat suit’s energy quickly, but at, 8 damage, it will never significantly bypass the armor of a soldier wearing the above type of body armor. Shotguns work well as drainers too, as they rapidly propel a lot of mass, but not with much power to get through armor.

Therefore, the smart Infantry player will often first drain his opponent, then move to heavier, “finisher” weapons, like an assault rifle or a melee weapon.

In illustration of this, here is a poor quality video that shows a duel between SpearMint., a JumpTrooper, and Andromedea, a Combat Medic.

Both are lightly armored and quick on their feet. Both start firing with their pistols, which are what you see as those initial dots flying around. Watch as their suit energies, shown in purple next to their names, go down (FYI — they can’t see each others energy, only their own, me being able to view both is part of being a spectator). Andomedea, being a lighter class of soldier, has to play keep-away to win, and when his energy is drained to about 150kj, he retreats to give his suit time to recharge. Those white bars you see traveling from SpearMint. are the assault rifle slugs.

It goes back and forth like this without either opponent ever taking significant damage, until around second 30 (and the fight is practically over by second 45).

SpearMint. probably doesn’t realize this, but he’s making a mistake in using an assault rifle at second 30, because Andromedea is dodging too many shots so his suit isn’t drained enough to allow much damage through. With SpearMint.‘s suit energy almost fully drained, Andomedea lets loose his carbine (hard to see, but the sound is that metallic “ping ping ping”) and his revolver (also invisible but is the loud “boom boom boom” sound). Neither of these pack the punch of an assault rifle, but they are the best that a Combat Medic can carry.

SpearMint. gets torn down to about 7 hit points from 80 at that point (I asked him after the fight). Andomedea also starts to take a lot of consecutive slugs at this time, which drains his suit energy to almost nothing. Both back off, seeing that their hit points and suit energies are low. Andomedea actually runs out of ammo at this juncture; SpearMint. is probably even worse off than his opponent, so they both decide to disengage.

If I were the judge, Andomedea won the fight, by doing more with less of a soldier. But, maybe he wouldn’t have lasted half as long were it not for the cover of those pillars. He used his environment to stack the odds, so he is shown as the better player.

Here is another video with clips of random Infantry fire-fights.

The thing to note from this one is that you don’t always have to drain your opponent. An assault rifle is all you need if you manage to drive every bullet home, since it drains too. However, this is tough, sometimes impossible, depending on your skill, the skill of you opponent and various other factors such as a class’s movement speed. It all depends on the situation. Being able to intuit the situation’s needs is half of what makes a good Infantry player.

Infantry’s combat system relates directly to movie combat. Kicks, punches and sword-hilt butts in movies are like Infantry’s drainer weapons, and the sharp ends of weapons in movies are like the finishing weapons in Infantry. Like the above about not actually needing to drain before using your finisher in Infantry, sure, a heavy-handed approach to combat is maybe what would work at points in a movie, but that depends on the situation. Ever notice how a hero in the movies can usually get through a bunch of opponents without ever being wounded, sometimes even fighting multiple opponents at once? This is all up until a final “boss” or even a “miniboss” where the fight takes longer.

Infantry is much the same. A player who is extremely skilled can often take on two newbies at once without ever feeling a scratch. This is because most of the attrition in these combat systems is based on easily-replenish-able statuses, rather than simple hit points.

The point is, there is a lot of dodging, weaving and trying to get your opponent off balance before the final blows, and the tables can turn at any moment, based on choices, rather than just having raw hit points and the odds of doing enough damage to end the fight in your favor.

Next: What the hell are “easily-replenish-able statuses?” And: The unveiling of the combat system.

Compare a level 4 fighter, who has 40 hit points, and a level 1 mage, who has a whopping 4 hit points. The two are fighting side by side versus some castle guards. During the skirmish, the fighter gets hit with long sword which, for this example, does its maximum damage of 10 hit points and then gets nicked a few times at values of 3, 4 and 5; the mage gets stabbed with a dagger and gets completely knocked out with the max damage of 4 (some systems would have just killed him, but we always played that you get knocked out at 0 hit points and start to bleed to death until stabilized at –1 hit points).

The obvious problem with this is the disparity of damage between both characters, who are, after all, 2 humans. How can a small stab mean death to one character but hardly anything to another?

The answer that we, our circle of friends who used to explore mazes and monsters, were able to figure out (or maybe we read in an issue of Dragon Magazine) is a fighter knows how to roll with attacks, and thus a stab from a dagger only ends up being a nick. The mage, who isn’t as experienced in combat, takes the full force of blows and therefore ends up a lot more damaged.

But, let us continue with the story: the fighter manages to slay the rest of the castle guards and tends to his wounded mage friend. The fighter, now at 18 hit points, pulls out and quaffs a big potion of healing that heals 16 hit points, putting him at 34 hit points, still 6 down from full healed. He gives his friend the smaller potion, which heals 8 damage, but is more than enough to cure the almost-dead mage.

How can a potion of greater strength not even heal half of one person’s damage and a potion of lesser strength contain more healing power than another’s health can even contain? Ask this especially when taking the above into account, how the fighter’s wounds are supposedly mostly just nicks and scrapes.

The answer is: they can because the system is simple and it works. But, my problem now isn’t just that it doesn’t make sense, it’s more that it isn’t interesting.

Shadowrun, which to-date contains my favorite tabletop RPG combat system, does a better job with this. It gives all player characters he same amount of “hit points,” and just has each round of combat a contest of trying to get past a character’s defenses. Not to go into too much detail, but for a small example, Character A shoots Character B with a pistol. Character A’s skills and attributes give him a number of dice to combine with the pistol’s values to, when it is all done, a final damage value. Character B’s job is to add up his skills, attributes and equipment to reduce the pistol’s final damage value. This may mean Character B gets hurt or character B could also reduce the damage down to nothing, so that he is either hit and absorbs all trauma or that he dodges enough of the bullets to warrant no damage.

This is superior in that the AD&D notion of hit points is somewhat represented by “health boxes,” which are equal across all living things, and somewhat by a Body attribute, which is part of what reduces the damage in the last example. This way, when someone is healed for one box of damage, it is equivalent to someone else being healed for the same.

The problem is, much like in AD&D, every round is the same. Sure, with Shadowrun’s “dice pools,” you can focus on attack or defense, but each round of combat is a simple game of attrition, where you try to whittle away at your opponents’ hit points while trying to prevent them doing the same to you. One potentially dynamic aspect is that wounded characters are supposed to receive penalties to actions, depending on the severity of the wounds, but that is such a one-dimensional way of looking at combat attrition. Plus, given the fact that it was annoying to use, we simply ignored this rule. At any rate, the end result is each combat round being mostly the same, just like AD&D.

Next Post: Influences for Dick’s Movie-like Tabletop RPG Combat System

But in spite of my disillusionment with the spell-slots/fire and forget style of casting in it’s several iterations, sometimes I still get the urge to design characters more closely fitting the standard spellcaster mould, though generally I’d prefer them a bit more flexible.

Now the usual spellcasters all have some sort of limitation on how many spells they can learn and/or which ones. Also, excluding the Sorcerer, most classes must prepare spells ahead of time and have an additional restriction on how coppies of each spell they can prepare in a given day, a set of rules which rankles my sense of verisimilitude.

Long have I coveted a class which overcame these restrictions. A class with the spontaneous casting. A class without limitations on how many or which spells can be learned.

The generic “Spellcaster” class presented in Unearthed Arcana perhaps comes closest to this goal, although even that class still has a couple issues. For one thing the Spellcaster, like the Sorcerer, is limited in the number of different spells they can know at any given level. Additionally, the Spellcaster is only intended for use in games where the other generic classes (the Expert and Warrior) are being used.

As an alternative I propose the Magus, a sort of omni-mystical sage or man of power, to provide a suitable player character class.

The magus provides greater flexability regarding the type of spells which can be learned, but with limits: Magi are relatively limited in the number of spells they can have prepared at any given time, also the number of spells they can cast in a day is relativley low, and they gain no bonus feats or other special abilities. Further, to learn and cast spells most effectively the magus must diversify her abilities greatly and learn at least two different skills; while, by contrast, wizards need only concentrate on one ability and a corresponding skill.

The profession of magus (plural magi) finds it’s origins at the dawn of history, a time when priest-kings and shamans were common and the line between divine and arcane magic was blurred. In those days the arts of arcane magic were still not identical with those of the more spiritual divine disciplines. Yet in that bygone time sages and lovers of wisdom were as likely to take interest in one set of rituals as the other and those in authority were apt to use any means available to maintain the stability of their small domains.

But throughout the ages some magi specialized in one particular style of spells, eschewing those they had difficulty with. Others simply focused on magics supplimental to their calling in life, or granted them by a particular deity. This gradual process led to the more diverse set of mystical professions (Bards, Clerics, Sorcerers, etc.) which the realms know today.

Consequently few if any magi remain in most lands. In other areas though their remnants yet abide, often having metamorphosized into secretive and esoteric orders. Rarer still are worlds where magus has become the more common mystic profession, potentially at the expense of all others.

Alignment: Any (Though, at the GM’s discression, alignment may influence the magus’ ability to acquire certain divine spells).

Hit Die: d4.

Class Skills: The magus’ class skills (and the key ability for each skill) are: Bluff (Cha), Concentration (Con), Craft (Int), Decipher Script (Int), Diplomacy (Cha), Intimidate (Cha), Perform (Cha), Knowledge (all skills, taken individually) (Int), Profession (Wis), Sense Motive (Wis), Sleight of Hand (Dex), Spellcraft (Int) and Use Magical Device (Cha).

Skill Points at 1st Level: (2 + Int modifier) ×4.

Skill Points at Each Additional Level: 2 + Int modifier.

Spells: A magus casts both arcane spells (which are drawn from the bard and sorcerer/wizard spell list) and divine spells (drawn from the cleric, domain, druid, paladin, and ranger lists).

Like a wizard, the magus may learn any number of spells. Unfortunately, also like a wizard, the limitations a magus’ body and mind, a magus only allow her to have a limited number of spells prepared at any given time. However, unlike a wizard, once the magus has prepared a spell that spell remains prepared even if cast and may be cast again and again at a later time.

Also, given 1 hour to prepare, a magus can “switch out” one spell (making it unprepared) and prepare another in it’s place. This task is the metaphysically equivelant to stretching a different set of muscles before specific types of exercise …or perhaps as a better analogy: like putting away certain tools cluttering up a workbench to make space for a different set of tools.

Divine vs. Arcane Spells: Learning, preparing, or casting arcane and divine spells is fundamentally a different process even for the omni-talented magus.

To learn, prepare, or cast an arcane spell, the magus must have an Intelligence score equal to at least 10 + the spell level. However, the Difficulty Class for a saving throw against a magus’ arcane spells is 10 + the spell level + the magus’ Dexterity modifier.

On the other hand to learn, prepare, or cast a divine spell, the magus must have a Wisdom score equal to at least 10 + the spell level. However, the Difficulty Class for a saving throw against a magus’ arcane spells is 10 + the spell level + the magus’ Charisma modifier.

These differences may seem odd, however they are indicative of the differing natures of the forces the magi must grasp (through reason or intuition) and master (using exacting ritual or shear emotional force).

Like other spellcasters, a magus can cast only a certain number of spells of each spell level per day. Her base daily spell allotment is given on Table: The Magus. In addition, she receives bonus arcane spells per day if she has a high Intelligence score and bonus divine spells par day if she has a high Wisdom score.

Metamagic feats must be applied at the time of spell preparation, and there-after the spell is always cast with the metamagic feat in action until the preparation slot is replaced with a different spell. Alternately the magus may make different preparations of a given spell, some with metamagic feats applied or without; however, each preparation still takes up a separate spell slot of appropriate level.

Bonus Languages: A magus may substitute Draconic, Sylvan, or a planar language for one of the bonus languages available to the character because of her race.

Spellbooks & Learned spells: A magus must study her spellbook any time she wants prepare one of her arcane spells. She cannot prepare any arcane spell not recorded in her spellbook, except for read magic, which all magi can prepare from memory.

A magus begins play with access to twenty 0-level spells plus three 1st-level spells of your choice drawn from either arcane or divine spell lists. For each point of Intelligence bonus the magus has, their spellbook holds one additional 1st-level arcane spell of your choice and for each point of Wisdom bonus they have access to an additional 1st-level divine spell. At each new magus level, she gains two new spells of any spell level or levels that she can cast. These may be taken from either the arcane or divine spell lists.

At any time, a magus can also add spells found in wizards or other magi’s spellbooks to her own making appropriate use of the Spellcraft skill. Similarly the magus can learn divine spells by petitioning an appropriate cleric, druid, ranger, god, fey being, or other divinely empowered being for enlightenment. When attempting to learn divine spells the magus makes a similar set of rolls as when learning arcane spells, however in place of the Spellcraft skill either the Profession (Priestcraft) skill or Profession (Shaman) skill is used instead.

Some divine spells are treated as being of different level depending on their source (ie. Paladin spells vs. Clerical spells). In these cases the magus treats such spells as being of the higher level for all purposes, regardless of the source of instruction.

Magi can make use of the Spell Mastery feat to avoid the need for recourse to a spellbook when preparing spells in the same way wizards can.

Unfortunately, after fleshing out several ideas for this setting via e-mail with a few guys from one of the World of Darkness forums (Bryan Conlon, Gabe Carlson, and “Wolf”), the computer on which I stored all our correspondence had pretty much every one of it’s I/O devices break in some way. As a result the relevant information languished for years on the machine’s inaccessable hard drive.

However, this past Christmas season, while rummaging through Circuit City trying to figure out what to spend a gift certificate on, I stumbled across a kit to convert old hard disks for use as external drives. Now that I have access to this stuff again I’ll probably be sticking at least some of it on the web in the near future.

Dead On Arrival is the only actual story I can remember writing for the setting, and consequently also the only “stand alone” piece of writing that my brief perusal could dig up. So here it is.

Note: This one’s going out to the folks on the Dragonstar mailing list in the hopes that it’ll contribute to the currently ongoing discussion of vampires… in… space…

Keep on keepin’ the faith over there guys.

Three days out from Anhydrous Space Dox, salvage tug Starez IV was finally reaching it’s destination, an unusually shaped metalic object recently spotted drifting into the outer fringes of the Anhydrous star system. During closer approach additional scans showed the object to be an old-time cold-sleep colony freighter with about 4000 passangers/cargo units. At the speed it was going it must have taken near on seven centuries to get to this star system.

Well, unfortunately for those would-be colonists someone in the Terran Concordant had invented the distortion drive a couple hundred years after they set out and the system they hoped to settle was now the property of the Pentonics Conglomerate. Probably the Concordant would eventually settle them on one of the current terraform projects. In the mean time those recovering the ship would get a little money from their rescue/salvage efforts.

Starez maneuvered closer to the unweildy bulk of the cold-sleeper. A quick perusal of historical archives suggested no threat of plague aboard so contact and salvage would not be a problem. The Starez fired a couple careful maneuveres to match velocity and position it’s self close to the sleeper’s center of mass, then with a final gentle pulse of the drives (though “gentle” is somewhat relative when dealing with a fusion drive), nudged up against the sleeper.

Concordant law forbade performing salvage on any vessel until that vessel has been towed to the nearest port, inspection of the ship to be salvaged, proper claims filed, sent back New Concord, digitally verrified, fees processed, etc. In practice this is almost never the actual sequence of events.

It took only a few seconds for the Starez’ computer to patch into the primative number cruncher that ran the cold-sleeper, preliminary results indicated cryo-malfunction resulting in 99.95% of passangers dead. In other words, open locker for looting. Not an hour had passed before three spacers from the Starez plugged into suits and blew a lock see what was what aboard the old body-bag. Reports would still have to be filed, but no one would notice the absence of if a few choice items that weren’t rivoted into place.

…

It had been ages since they had awoken from torpor. There had been five of them to begin with. Rhea, Nick, Vesh, Bill, and Lord Karth.

Lord Karth was their sire of course. A rogue prince of the Bruja, when the Bruja clan still held that name. A genius when it came to the programming and manipulating the primative A.I.s of the time, but violent and unpredictable none the less.

The more floral phrase “Starry Masque” had replaced the old term “Masquerade” in vampiric parlance soon after the first clan-lord finally got the cajones to venture out into the solar system along with the rest of humanity. But the Masque it’s self had remained essentially the same: a code of laws intended to shield the bulk of humanity from true understanding of the fact that blood-drinking undead predators walked among them. Karth had a particularly blatant habit of violating the Masque that would’ve earned him decapitation on pretty much any kindred-inhabited polity inside the orbit of Neptune had he been caught. Passage aboard the sleeper had been an apparently quite successful last-ditch effort to put himself beyond the vengance of several of the more tenacious clan Elders.

Rhea was, in title, his consort. And, though the walking dead have little need of partners in fleshy matters, Karth had had strong attachments to his raven haired mate in life. In death these attachments had merely altered their focus rather than diminishing. Despiter her frail appearance, she had a potency almost to match his own in combat, and in subtrifuge there were a several areas in which she might have gained some advantage over him.

Nick, Vesh, and Bill were only henchmen, Nick the best among them.

The necessity had arrived early on, only 50 years into the journey, for Karth to destroy Bill. Bill had let himself enter blood-lust and in the process had torn apart a ridiculous 631 passangers, thereby dangerously reducing their food supply.

Vesh was also absent from their company. His body now drifted somewhere between the stars apart from the ship. He had been the first to attempt travel between sealed sections of the ship. Lacking a servicable space-suit after the incident with Bill, Vesh had cycled slowly through the airlock to prevent the damage that sudden decompression would bring. Unfortunately, after being outside for only a minute or so half his vitae had boiled through his skin from the drop in pressure and the remaining half had frozen along with the rest of his body. Somewhere out there his immobile, cryogenically preserved flesh still drifted, unless a micro-meteorite had already shattered it as they entered the system.

Soon after Vesh met his fate, Lord Karth broke open the hydraulic fluid feed to a low pressure actuator and mixed it’s contents with the blood of his meal. It may have defiled the taste of the precious liquid irreperably, but the results were satisfactory as his joints stayed limber in the vacuum beyond. In the days that followed Rhea discovered a moderately less offensive substitute in the cryo-lubricant for the sleep-capsules. Ultimately though the taste mattered little since only one dose of any sort of anti-freeze ever proved necessary.

Between the stars they learned several valuable lessons, not the least of which was how tenuously the ties to old Earth were streached at such a distance. When colonies had gone up around Jupiter and on the Martian surface the kindred there had found their loss of strength and urge to feed came in synch with the respective Jovian and Martian day/night cycles, and noticed their injury from daylight grown less severe from the weaker reach of Sol’s wrath. But out here beyond the solar system there were no planets, no great yellow eye of vengance, and the daily loss of blood borne vitality dwindled to only a trickle. In these dark reaches an entire year might pass before there was any noticable loss… unless, of course, one called upon some mystical discipline or other.

Out here the sun faded to become just one among billions of other angry points of light, their strength becomming impotent at such a great distance, as they strove to cleanse from the universe unclean things like the children of Caine. But during their time in the dark sea between, these few of Caine’s children had heard a call of other stars. Stars which through their radiance of orange, yellow, white, and blue shown to the carefully trained inner eye with an inviting red. Oh, yes, over the years they had heard these other stars whispering to them, beckoning them forward.

Unfortunately, all were much farther afield than their 4000 meals would take them, at least if they still desired some leftover kine to graze and pasture at the journey’s end. And as a result they were forced to settle for their programmed destination.

But the call of the distant stars and the eternal searching for the world of their destination made their senses sharp. Keen enough to see the tiny specks of planets across the distnace of lightyears, enough to smell the scant ions burning off the surrounding stars corona, enough to feel the etherial buffet of the stellar winds upon their hydraulic-fluid colored flesh.

Eventually their destination grew close, though still indistinguishable in magnitude from the surrounding stars. Passive sensors picked up radio transmissions from their goal, Earth-style radio transmissions (though, of course they had never heard any other kind). The transmissions were not directed at them, at least not at first. But the information they revealed was the same: Something had happened. Somehow others had arrived before them.

They were still two years distant from their destination when Karth began to prepare.

…

This would be Technician Gomez first opportunity to loot a salvage ship. Wrecks didn’t wander into Anhydrous every day, maybe only a couple times in a lifetime. There’d probably be something on this derelict he could turn over to a collector for some decent cred.

His suit thrust ports glowed from a small box near his lower back. He drifted, seemingly in slow motion, between the other two “salvage” personnell as they approached the ghost ship. Something caught the Gomez eye, some movement near the third colonist pod from the drive.

The optics of his visor automatically zoomed in on the area …to see three figures crouched on the hull below (Below? Perspective can be tricky in space.) staring back at him.

His first shock was to see that there were actually inhabitants still active aboard the airless vessel. Only a moment later as the three strange figures pushed off the hull, still many yards away, did he realize that they were covered only in the barest threads of clothing and, apart from the tools they carried, virtually naked.

Each remained connected to the sleeper-ship via a thin tether attached to an ankle. One of them was a woman with pale bluish skin, her dark hair shifting in sympathetic motion around her head. Another, a male, had the same coloration, though the third had a light orangish cast to him. Gomez found something about the combination of colors oddly familiar, what was it they reminded him of?

It occurred to him that at their rate they were drifting toward him they must be moving at unbelievable speed considering their only acceleration impulse was from pushing the hull. Were they some genetically engineered “branch” people? He’d heard of humans altered for weird atmospheres, but none for a total vacu …

Gomez never finished the thought, he barely had time to react when the female reached him, grabbed his suit by the faceplate and ripped both helment and head off with one taloned hand. Near her Karth had already discovered how to operate the attitude thrusters of the corpse bearing suit in his grasp. Nick gave a wry smile as he scooped a ice-coated globule of red liquid from the vacuum nearby.

Their first victory had come easy, but a greater task was still at hand. This meal had apparently come from somewhere relatively close by. It was some comfort that the pre-existing presence of kine in this star system would make it unnecessary to ration themselves for years while trying to build up a colony. But gaining power in this new arena with it’s unknown technology and political terrain would likely be a challenge in and of it’s self.

Fortunately it was the sort of challenge Karth most enjoyed.

You can find it here in PDF format.

For those really interested there’s more commentary available here on the design philosophy behind it and such.

The survey only contains 10 questions so hopefully it won’t take too long.

You can click here to take it.

This was the adventure designed for the sole purpose of testing out the Injury and Consequences mechanics mentioned earlier. The level of the PCs was 6th and I had them gradually facing protagonists closer and closer to the standard D&D challenge ratings.

The since some of the mechanical elements I eventually try out might clash with any of the pre-planned settings (ie. Forgotten Realms or Ravenloft) I instead cooked up a home-brew setting with characteristics generally similar to the standard ones. There’s not much to it but a few background details thrown together and some antagonists. Since I’d been reading Vance’s Dying Earth recently you may notice some minor thematic aspects of that setting worked in as well. Other elements will be invented later as they become relevant to the story.

My prep-notes for the session follow. As such they contain spoilers, players be warned.

Introduction

It is the 12th Era.

Your company comes recently from Flez where you’d sat idle for some months carousing or meditating as is your want, then mending weapons and preparing as the money ran low, then restless for a job as it finally ran out. You journey now on your way to Yullek Non as record has it the sunken chambers of the 7th Era Iron Wraiths lie buried thereabouts with many potent relics eagerly awaiting to be united the hands of well moneyed antiquarians.

But the journey is long and just after dusk on the third day you arrive at the hamlet of Kuth. The locality sports an inn, the “Landed Mougle”, the door of which hangs ajar with light shining through. There seems to be some activity there but not quiet drinking nor patrons at revel. Rather chairs are broken and bodies are being carried out. The bodies include three elven women clad in silvery armor which catches the starlight, also a large man in some sort of padded leather jerkin, all dead. Two other patrons, a man and a woman appear to have knives and club nearby them but are tending to some nasty looking avulsions.

The bartender Sharvis looks somewhat unnerved. He says that the three women showed up at the same time yesterday babbled gibberish and when no one knew what to make of them they started getting pushy. Sent for Olav the Burly who started to arrest them and they drew blade. For all their fancy gear Olav barely touched them and they keeled over, but they kept fighting as long as an ounce of strength remained.

Today they showed up again and acted exactly the same, but this time they had some fire in ‘em. Sent the boy for Olav and asked him to bring extra help. They cut up Thal and Jibbinik pretty good and you can see what happened to poor old Olav (he gestures to the large deceased man).

“Who’ve I done wrong to deserve a curse like this,” he asks.

Lithan, Lathan, and Latheen

The three elven women, paladins all, are clad entirely in masterwork mithril armor over some sort of false lambskin shift. Their blond hair though long is permanently swept back and has a slightly zig-zag appearance to it as if crimped. If anyone can figure out a way to communicate with them it is discovered that their names are Lithan, Lathan, and Latheen. In fact every duplicate set will have three elven women with the same three names.

The three were created in a hallet, a device forged by the god Grash during the war of the gods in the 3rd Era. They speak only ancient 3rd Era Tagli (the language of Grash) which is nothing like modern Tagli (the language of the local area).

They insist in 3rd Era Tagli that the locals re-build a temple to Grash to their exacting specifications on the site of the inn. Exhaustive inspection of the inn will reveal that it was built on the foundations of an ancient building, although no one locally knows what the ancient building was (except the three women), the town was only founded three generations ago to service the local trade route.

The women start out from the hallet every day at the break of dawn, march all day and arriving at Kuth around dusk. Every night the hallet works to spawn a new batch of three women who are a little stronger than the last (ie. +1 Paladin level per day)

Equipment

The Paladins travel extremely light. Their only equipment includes the following:

• Strange masterwork mithril two bladed sword. The each of the two blades sticking out in opposite directions is bent slightly forming an angular “integral sign” shape. The strange aspect of it is that, while it is not magical ‚the sword always appears as if seen from the side. No ammount of rotating it will allow it to be seen blade-on except by an opponent. This mundane-but-bizarre effect is a result of the weapon’s origin: the work of a god now largely barred from the universe.
• Strange masterwork mithril shirukins. The shirukins are similarly designed. The can only be seen face-on, not edge on. In fact when thrown it appears to the target as if twinkling, glittering disks are floating toward him. *Strange masterwork spikey armor. The dead Lithan, Lathan, and Latheen each wear scale armor. The living ones wear either plate or half-plate. *They also each have a somewhat oddly shaped dagger. It’s odd properties are similar to those of the two-bladed sword.

The Hallet

The hallet is a brick made of adamant (diamond) with a seam running down the center of it. It’s roughly as large as a living room. On top is a boss made of thinly layered mithril elements somewhat like flower petals the shape of lightning bolts radiating out from the center. Something about it seems strangely symmetrical and looking at it too long makes your eyes dance. It absorbs the light from Grash’s star when it is above the horizon.

Filaments or tubes of mithril run from the boss into three woman-shaped cavities in the hallet. You can see the insides of women forming in the cavities currently (the sight kind of puts you off human contact for awhile).

A new layer of the boss is extruded each time Grash’s star comes above the horizon. Damaging the boss will hamper the development progress although not stop it unless the boss is entirely removed and it’s anchoring point covered with some opaque substance.

About 20 yards along the trail from the rift lies the emaciated body of Lithan. She looks furiously that you are trying to impede her progress but can barely move and is too parched to talk.

Near the top of the ravine is Latheen who eyes you pleadingly and is more friendly but in a similar state. She knows what Grash’s will would be but feels that something must be wrong about the current state of affairs, maybe an enemy has sabotaged the Hallet? She will help you (point out to you what the Hallet does) if you let her.

Lying in front of the hallet are four bodies: three emaciated corpses of elven women, along with a Lathin curled in the fetal position comatose.

Every 15 minutes of contact with the hallet heals 1 hp of damage from injury but does nothing for hunger or thirst.

Morality note:

Most modern spells for detecting alignment treat “good” as prosocial tendancy and “evil” as selfishness or lack of concern for others as “evil”. But back in the day such was not the case. Of a time “good” meant that a particular thing was in keeping with the will of a particular god and “evil” was anything against that god’s will.

So there were as many “goods” as there were gods, concepts of right which were totally from anything mortals would favor.

Unfortunately for the Paladins it turns out that Grash was among the those entities on the losing end of that war. As a result his conceptual underpinnings were banished from this world. The hallet is one of the few toe-holds he has left. So while the Paladins show up as “good” under alignment detection, their concepts of what constitutes “good” are totally alien to residents of this world. In fact the world they build at Grash’s behest would be quite alien and possibly horrifying to it’s current inhabitants.

Other characters:

Sharvis — The innkeeper. Unnerved that the women have been back twice. Will consider selling the bar if they come back again.

Olav the Burly — The dead sheriff of the locality.

Jibbinik — An honest yeoman with a cudgel, husband to Thall. Recruited impromptu by Olav to deal with the three women.

Thall — Wife of Jibbinik. Good with a butcher or carving knife. Wearing a leather apron.

It’s also to have extra names on handy in case incidental characters show up and require a name. I provided these:

Quanni the Ham

Joez Ril’s Son

Joez from the Medow

Viza Abhal

Ram

Shosh

Portora

That was pretty much it. We just ran with it from there.

So here’s a sheet to keep track of the new character stats:

d20 Alternate Rules — Character Sheet — Combat Section

This sheet is just for combat-relevant stuff. I figure at some point I’ll come up with one for spells and another one for abilities, skills, and other noncombat stuff. But for now the standard sheets can handle those things pretty well.

The results didn’t seem too bad and, as expected, combat was short and deadly. Overall reaction afterward seemed to border on actual enthusiasm though a number of concerns were voiced and a fair bit of discussion and suggestion quickly followed.

A couple of the more persistant issues with the system were:

1) One or more saving throws were made for each attack. Because of this three attacks which each deal 2 points of damage will cause more saving throws (thus more opportunity to have bad things happen) than one attack that deals 9 points of damage.

To some degree this is a problem inherent in the system caused by having to make one saving throw no matter how many points of damage are dealt. A suggestion was made that perhaps rather than having each attack trigger saving throws that all the damage done to a character should be added up over the course of an entire round and the saving throw(s) made immediately before the character’s next turn.

While this solution does solve the problem it was further pointed out that it breaks up the normal flow of play in which the effects of damage are resolved immediately after the damage was dealt and shifts it until later in the round, or even until the next round. This postponement of fate puts the damaged character into a Schrödinger’s-cat-like limbo where-in there character becomes a half-healthy and half-comatose (or half-dead) wave-form. In addition to being unsatisfying for the player of the damaged character this also means that the other players don’t know how to react since they don’t know what state the character is in either.

Also it just creates another temporary damage track (damage taken in a given round vs. total damage) to be remembered and taken into account.

So between the original “saving throw per attack” idea and the new “saving throw per round” idea I’ve come up with something of a compromise:

d20 Alternate Mechanics — Injury & Consequences — Official Revision 1

A save is not made for each attack, but rather each incident of damage. An “incident of damage” could include either damage arising from a specific event (such as falling into a trap) or from a series of closely related events in a brief space of time (such as all the attacks meted out by a particular opponent when casting a spell or during a full attack action).

2) Another issue freqnently mentioned was the “drinking game” aspect (ie. once you start losing your chances of losing again tend to escolate very quickly). This was an aspect that was intentionally included on my part and which the players at once seemed to both like and dis-like.

In part it seemed they liked the idea of the graded decline of character condition due to injury which the system supplied. The main issue with it however seemed to be the fact that the curve from health to death (ie. healthy-staggered-unconscious-dead) is relatively steep. In particular that the “staggered” condition (which causes a –4 to all rolls) doesn’t give the character much leaway to realize they’re losing and withdraw before unconsciousness.

This aspect was in some ways intentional since I wanted the system to be able to simulate both a “quick kill” (ie. someone getting killed from a single highly damaging attack) and a “slow death” (ie. someone struggling along and possibly collapsing at any moment while taking damage over multiple turns).

If you put too many gradations in the scale then the scale becomes so long that it’s nearly impossible for someone to be killed from an attack by certain weapons like a knife, even on a critical hit during a backstab attempt.

Interestingly they liked the way that a potential quick death speeded up combat so I guess there are conflicting impulses on this issue, even within the same player.

Personally I think the whole issue will be resolved when combined with the Armor & Damage Reduction mechanics. However since not everyone may wish to make use of both sets of alternate rules at the same time, and since the Armor & Damage Reduction rules haven’t been play-tested just yet, here is an additional option which might help some resolve the issue to the satisfaction of some:

d20 Alternate Mechanics — Injury & Consequences — Additional Option

Some classes are just trained to be so tough that they can keep going no matter what.

Characters gain ranks in a “Stamina” quality based on the hit dice their class would gain under the standard rules as indicated in the table below:

Hit
Die
Stamina
Ranks
1d4
+1
1d6
+2
1d8
+3
1d10
+4
1d12
+5

As long as a character is not flat-footed they can choose to treat one of their Trauma check Fortitude saves as an automatic success for every 10 ranks of Stamina they posess. These automatic successes are used up over the course of combat as they are applied and can only be regained under one of two conditions:

• If the character has no injuries and has a chance to rest for a few minutes.
• If the character is injured but has been healed of at least half the total damage they’ve sustained.

Over the next couple months it seems likely that other alternate rules ideas mentioned earlier might be brought out and given a playtest. Write-ups of the adventures run may also become available so stay tuned.

This was a magic system unlike any I had ever read in story or myth at the time†† and the fact that it neither inspired me nor modeled any aspect of the worlds I’d imagined or read about annoyed me to no end.

“Well, why not throw the whole game out the window?” you ask, “There are other RPGs out there with more cohesive magic systems… take Mutants and Masterminds for example, you could use that system to model any sort of power you’d ever want and it’s powers seem intuitively balanced and consistent.”

To this I can only say:

True.

But the nostalgia man. The nostalgia!

The d20 system may be stuck in it’s same old mould as far as the casting of magic goes, and maybe I don’t like that mould, but I love the plethora of spells already existing for it. It’s like a huge arcane wish list of random crap. And I could re-create that in some other game, but it’s already available here.

Now there’s another thing about d20 spellcasting that’s bothered me a little over the years as well: Ziggurat-like chart showing the number of spells of different power levels that a given magician could cast in any given day depending on their character’s advancement in a given class. And my hate of this aspect of the system is sort of two pronged:

1. Power creep — The existing system provides few spells (per day) at low level, leaving the caster with nothing much to do after they’re used up. Also, since some of these spell-casters don’t really have many other skills they have nothing to fall back on when the spells are used up. Casters end up hoarding spells and worrying a lot if they’ve memorized the right one.
2. Exotic spells I never get to use. – Some of the higher level spells just seem so cool. But only once in the four or five games of D&D I’ve played have I ever gotten to a level where I had access to them. And at that point the novelty and mystique of those exotic high level spells was minimized by the fact that I was already so powerful they barely mattered. Rather than being something really cool they were just a couple extra tools among my already powerful arsenal.

So what I was looking to make was a system that gave spellcasters at least a chance to cast some of those higher level spells at lower character levels, and one that allowed characters to cast more than a meager allotment of spells in a given day. But it also had to be a system that didn’t make spellcasters so powerful at low levels that there would be no point in playing a non-magic-user.

I got some inspiration in this pursuit from the “Incantations” system in the recent edition of Unearthed Arcana. Unfortunately the scope of the Incantations system is relatively narrow and a bit vague, dealing only with higher level spells and providing very general guidelines for how to employ them in a unique manner. By contrast I was hoping for a bit more unified system covering the whole range of spells in some relatively predictable way.

What I eventually came up with is the “Ritual Spellcasting” system below.

† – The new systems for spell-casting are essentially the same as the old in this regard but substitute the word “prepare” for the word “memorize” when discussing the acquisition of your daily spell quota each morning. This alteration of terminology without a corresponding change in mechanics was apparently meant to appease those who didn’t understand why you forgot the spells you’d learned every time you cast them. Sadly the change didn’t do much for those few of us who now wondered why one could only prepare a given number of spells in a day.

†† — I’ve since read a few non-D&D stories that employ a vaguely similar magic system which I’ll try and get to in a later post.

Nature is the norm, the “ground state” of existence if you will. But the universe can be coaxed into producing more exotic phenomena, arraying forces in unusual ways and juxtaposing substances normally kept separate. This is magic.

The making of magic is no simple thing. Complex processes or “rituals” are often necessary to bring a spell’s effects into being. In some cases a ritual creates a sort of model of an event to act as a kind of focus for the mystical energies involved. In other cases the ritual is used to gain the attention of specific beings inclined to donate their powers to the event. In yet others the ritual sets up a set of minor precursor conditions which will trigger a larger scale phenomena (like using a few carefully placed fire-crackers to trigger an avalanche.

Generally the more outside the norm a magical phenomena is, the more setup it needs. Most spells are cast in one or more stages. The number of stages a spell takes to cast is equal to it’s spell level (excluding 0-level spells which have special rules). Each stage of casting takes a different length of time and some chance of failure.

The difficulty of the roll at each stage when casting a spell is:

Spellcasting DC = 2x Spell level

To successfully make this check the magician must make have an effective caster level that meets or exceeds this DC. However magician’s effective casting ability (ECA) is variable and may not necessarily be the same as actual caster level.

Effective Casting Ability = 1d20 + Caster Level + Class modifier –10

At each stage of the spell the caster rolls to determine how effectively they were at maintaining their magical skills. As long as the effective casting ability equals or exceeds the spellcasting DC then the magician meets with some degree of success. But since the magnitudes of various aspects of the spell (range, area of effect, duration, etc.) are also determined by the lowest successful effective casting ability rolled at any stage of the process, it never hurts to have a higher effective casting ability. The effective caster level at which the spell is cast is equal to the lowest effective casting ability rolled at any stage of the process, though each roll of natural 20 adds a +2 to the effective caster level of the spell overall.

Every time a magician fails to attain a desired a necessary or desired effective casting ability on their roll for a given stage of a spell they may opt to take the same amount of time again and repeat the roll in an attempt to gain greater success. The magician may stop at any time with these rolls and keeps the highest success attained for that stage of the process.

The casting time for each attempted roll at each stage of this process is summarized in the following chart:

Table: Time per stage of ritual

Stage
Time taken
1
1 attempt as a partial action or 2 attempts as a full round action. 
2
1 full round action
3
3 full round actions
4
1 minute
5
5 minutes
6
20 minutes
7
1 hour
8
2 hours
9
5 hours

Generally a caster must start with working on the highest stage of a spell first and work and work their way down to the lowest stage of the spell.

In many cases a magician may wish to leave off stage 1 of a spell, thus leaving the spell “hanging”. They may then complete the last stage of this “hanging” spell at a later time, bring it’s effects into being in the space of an instant rather than in minutes or hours. The magician may in fact “carry” many of these hanging spells about them.

There is however one problem with such hanging spells: Since they are still in the process of being cast they are, in a sense, “fragile”. A caster who is knocked out, takes a blow to the head, or suffers similar impairment may need to make a successful concentration check to regain the facilities necessary to finish their spell. A caster whose pocket has been picked or whose belongings have been extensively damaged may find they make the last roll may be set back a stage because various components for the spell are no longer properly prepared.

Because of these difficulties many magicians still opt to bind their spells into scrolls for later casting rather than leaving them hanging.

Taking 10 — Magicians may “take 10″ when making effective casting ability checks, as long as they are in a non-stressful situation and have time to study their notes or meditate (depending on their form of magic) . This does not increase the casting time.

Taking 20 — Magicians may “take 20″. This actually does increase the casting time by a factor of 20, making a long process indeed to accomplish spell spells in this manner.

Cantrips

Zero-level spells (or “cantrips”) are a special case. These spells are so simple they may generally be brought into effect with a simple gesture and act of will. Normally this is so brief that it doesn’t even count as a “stage” of casting. The first cantrip a magician uses in a round counts as a free action. Any additional cantrips used in the same round require a partial action to work.

Although there are technically no stages to a cantrip an effective casting ability roll must still be made. However when casting a cantrip a magician may “Take 10” even in stressful situations if they so choose.

Class Specifics

In general a magician may attempt to cast any spell of any level in their repitoire while they are any character level. For Clerics, Druids, Paladins, and Rangers this means any spell on their entire class list.

Bards and Sorcerers must narrow down their lists by choosing a number of spells known equal to the maximum number they could know at 20th level. At each level they may switch out one spell on their list of each level for a different one available to them.

Wizards can cast the spells in their spellbook. They start out with all 0-level spells, 3 first level spells (plus one additional 1st-level spell for each point of intelligence bonus. In addition the wizard has access to two spells of each other spell level.

Class Modifiers

Each class has a modifier to their effective casting ability as indicated in the table below:

Table: Spellcasting class modifier


Class
Modifier
Bard
Charisma mod. -1
Cleric
Wisdom mod. +0
(+2 on rolls for domain spells only). 
Sorcerer
Charisma +3
Wizard
Intelligence mod. +0
Druid
Wisdom mod. +0
Paladin
Charisma mod. -5
Ranger
Wisdom mod. -5

Cooperative Magic

When multiple magicians work together to cast a spell they can often speed up the process or produce stronger effects. There are two way to do this:

1. Parallel — The magicians work on each stage of the spell together. Take the best roll of any magician during each stage. With this method each stage of the spell takes the same length but the results are generally better and with the necessity to repeat fewer stages.
2. Series — The magicians work on separate stages of the same spell and combine their efforts to finish the spell. The spell’s effectiveness is equal to the worst roll of any magician during any stage of the spell. This method may speed up the process greatly so long as all the magicians roll well, however the chances of having to repeat stages are dictated by skills the lowest ability magician. Best to stick them on the lower stages.

Ultimately, though many magicians contribute to the spell, there will only be one of them who actually wields the spell when it is complete. This head magician must be chosen before the spell is cast.

It’s also important to note that certain sorts of spellcasting aren’t compatible with other types even when the spell is the same.

Bards — Bards can theoretically cooperate with anyone who is willing and whose power doesn’t exclude them by it’s nature.

Clerics — The beings that clerics serve are rather finicky about sharing their power. A cleric may cooperate on divine spells with other clerics or paladins drawing their power from the same being, or possibly with other clerics who worship allied beings (ie. gods in the same pantheon). Clerics might also be able to cooperate with other spellcasting classes but only if those other classes show a devotion to the cleric’s god or if they are supporting the god’s goals (ie. Druids an Nature-god clerics are tight).

Druids — Druids can cooperate on any of their spells, however they may take a –5 penalty when trying to cooperate with beings who habitually desecrate nature or overturn it’s balance.

Paladins — Paladins are similar to clerics in how they can and can’t cooperate with others when casting spells.

Rangers — Rangers are similar to druids in how they can and can’t cooperate with others when casting spells.

Sorcerers — Sorcerers can basically cooperate with anyone who will let them.

Wizards — Wizards can cooperate with anyone who will let them. However they are better at patching spells cast through other means of magic rather than directing them. As a result wizards can only be the lead caster on spells cast by sorcerers of other wizards.

Metamagic Feats

Metamagic feats must be worked into a spell at every stage of casting in order to be effective. These feats effectively increase the spell level and thus also the spellcasting DC. This should be relatively straightforward although there is one special case:

Quicken Spell — This feat applies only to the last stage of the spell. It also allows the last stage of a spell to be cast automatically without the need for a roll.

New Feats

Expedite Ritual — Pre-requisites: Caster level 5

It is possible with great practice to speed up some of the longer stages of a ritual. By taking this feat the caster can lower the time it takes each stage by one category to a minimum length of 1 partial action. This increases the effective level of the spell by +1.

This feat may be taken multiple times. Each time it applies to the spells of a different class.

Greatly Expedite Ritual — Pre-requisites: Caster level 10 and Expedite Ritual feat.

This feat is similar to the Expedite Ritual feat but may be used to lower the casting time by two categories with a corresponding increase in effective spell level of the spell by +2.

This feat may be taken multiple times. Each time it applies to the spells of a different class.

Most Expedient Ritual — Pre-requisites: Caster level 15 and Greatly Expedite Ritual feat.

This feat is similar to the Expedite Ritual feat but may be used to lower the casting time by three categories with a corresponding increase in effective spell level of the spell by +3.

This feat may be taken multiple times. Each time it applies to the spells of a different class.

The stranger strides forward amid the jubilant throng, a thing apart from these others gathered here. Every line of it bespeaks purpose, effort, determination. It seems not so much to walk forward as to struggle, as if against beating rain and unseen gale or as one heavily burdened.

It’s entrance has not gone unheeded. The keenest ears perked up to sample the notes of it’s knock before they fell and the sharpest eyes glimpsed it’s shape before the first leathern boot crossed the threshold. But those early insights are long passed and even the eyes of the least attentive seek to ken the being’s nature.

“What think thou: Pooka of some barbarous realm? The antlers…”

“Nay, nay. He’s no Pooka surely. Stag be herbivore and I spot a carnassial pair in them gums.”

But it is a he-thing at least. The beard seems to make this much obvious.

Still, though much can be kenned and the court lore keepers have already guessed it’s ilk there remains a sense of distance to the thing. His shape seems solid enough (almost too solid) but the details ripple and waver as if seen through a fast moving stream where currents of hot and cold mix. The effect is strangely disorienting leaving one with the fleeting but uncomfortable impression that this thing is the truly real thing and all else but a moment’s fancy by comparison.

The ripples it leaves, the wake of it’s passage as it labors forward, spread outward through the crowd and with them spreads change. And this change is familiar. You know this feeling. You’ve felt it before a thousand times in a dozen lives. It’s the Firchlis, Glamour’s warm breath on the frosted glass of Dreaming. Strange though to feel it in a Freehold. Out of place.

And for a moment it’s suddenly clear why the Fir-Bholg (for that is what he is) struggles forward with such effort. It’s winter. In your revels and joy amidst each others company you nearly forgot this is an outdoor fete. What with the bonfire glowing so, you lost track of how deeply the snow had begun to drift and how gusty the wind had become.

He’s clearer now: clad all in hide and leather (old, brown and worn). At his back a sack of the same. Slung over one shoulder the strap of an old tinker’s pig, and at his hip some verdigrised piece of bronze-work: half sword, half cleaver, half machete, apparently a tool as much as weapon.

His body seemed massive, but another trick of the mind perhaps? It’s clearly a more spare and weathered frame bent there against the snow. The face, mature perhaps but not yet weathered with the burden of later years, looks pensive. There’s a fire in the eyes bespeaking dreams yet to be played out, but the furrowing of the brow suggests concerns, second guessings, the hopes that things might turn out differently than they have.

Though still approaching the Fir-Bholg seems half a field away now, crunching through packed snow with focused tread. The snow remains thick, deep, crisp and truly frozen, but something in the tramp of those worn boots conjures their fall instead amid the rot of leaf mould. A compost from whence growing shoots and creeping things struggle forth.

These changes play out before you. But you look on impervious in your mein and voile, secure in the intensity of your own dream.

“But wait… this is a Freehold,” recalls the Freehold. It’s glamours too are strong and backed up by Balefire, not bonfire. It remembers it’s hearth, it’s sconces, rafters, roof, graceful windows, tapestries and assorted decor. It’s permanence reasserts and the Firchlis’ changes fade leaving only their memories.

The visitor regains a more appropriate (and much less grandiose) proportion in the minds eye as he at last approaches the area traditionally reserved for audiences.

Bowing to one knee he begins:

“Karst, I

“Explorer, tinker, come recent from study at the Great Machine (though little I remember of ‘t anow).

“A’ ye ken Winter is comes, true.

“I ‘en about and seen: Courts a’ Formor are afoot. ‘an misfortune is such my “peeps” (as ye folk say) are divided. Some deny the courts awake. Others (fools) seek alliance wi’ that Dark. But there lies madness and I’ll none of it.

“As of old goes: Enemy mine enemy, mine friend.

“So sought ye out and would ‘ve place among yer ranks an’ alliance in the war to come (perhaps also after if it do ye.)

“I’ve not the Changeling Way about me but what Arts are mine are sufficient to provide mortal flesh if such is a requirement of this court.

“This one’s gifts, meager though, yet yours as asked.”

Thus saying he remains crouched in bow, antlers dipped low. The wait is perhaps brief but from his stillness and the set of his posture it seems he is prepared to remain thus years should it be this court’s will.

Flames flicker at the hearth and the seconds pass.

Fuel for the Fire

Partly due to the interest of a mutual friend and partly to the loathsome yet addictively crack-like nature of the medium, my wife and I have ended up watching several “reality TV” competitions over the last few months, the most recent being “America’s Next Top Chef”. In addition Cartoon Network recently replayed the episode of Futurama where Bender wins the Iron Chef competition by unknowingly using an aqueous solution of LSD as his secret seasoning.

In a totally unrelated vein: Last night I’d been pouring over descriptions of monsters and spells in the old Call of Cthulhu horror RPG to help provide background for an artifact I was thinking of submitting to the Delta Green mailing list.

All of these ingredients mixed together in my fever-addled brain, congealing at around 4:00 a.m. this morning into a viscous stew.

…

Out of the Frying Pan

I recall vague dreams about being in Kitchen Stadium and competing against nameless things. In place of kitchen counters there were dark cyclopian slabs stained with various bodily fluids, mainly blood. Either my opponent or I (identiy was all a but fuzzy here) was busy dicing some dog-sized tentacled thing into fist sized chunks and throwing them into a pot.

At the time I seemed to be some sort of cultist but it was unclear whether my opponent was also, or whether I competed against some less human horror.

As the dream went on I gradually thrashed into wakefulness. My body ached all over and the pint of spicy fried tofu I’d eaten the night before churned in my stomach. It was becoming unclear whether I was actually a competitor, assistant cook, or part of the main course. The teams seemed to be sponsored (or run?) by Haster, Shub, or some other tentacled old ones and outer gods, and at the time it didn’t seem unreasonable that I might be chef and meal all in one.

The more I woke up the more confusing it became. The dull ache and thrashing of my lower appendages convinced me that my legs had multiplied, in the process transforming into thick ropy tentacles. In fact my whole body was feeling vaguely cephalopodic except for my stomach which seemed to have been stuffed, haggis style, with some sort of dubiously bloating filling. I seemed inside a pot, my mass of tentacles churning in the steady boil.

Somehow I could sense that the competing team was cooking something equally lugubrious in the vat next to mine, though even in this delerious state a part of me realized it was just my wife turning over in her sleep on the other side of the bed.

The competition seemed to be culminating in some way but as the physical discomfort of the illness dragged my confused mind into consciousness I couldn’t figure out exactly how. In retrospect I vaguely recall my myriad appendages being arranged in artful profusion on a platter for some sort of dramatic presentation, but what the judges decision was I really can’t tell.

…

Wrap Up

Oddly throughout this whole thing I don’t recall being afraid or emotionally distressed, even at the prospect of being treated as food. My main feelings were general concern for the success of my team, a vague interest in seeing what the outcome of the competition would produce (alway something that hooks me in with these creative TV competitions), and a sense of serenity coupled with the urge to make the best of an inevitable outcome.

Not sure why being cooked up as dinner didn’t seem to phase me much. Maybe it was just the emotional confusion brought on by a fever dream. Or possibly I’ve just read the description of one too many of mythos spells while thinking, “Hmm… This one doesn’t incur too much sanity loss. And the sacrificial victim doesn’t even have to be sentient. Ethically ambiguous. Score!”

Warning: Minor spoilers.

A month or so ago in a review of Star Wars Battlefront I mentioned it’s semi-contemporary Republic Commando. As a wanna-be penny-pincher who would not buy a videogame of his own accord I never guessed that I’d actually be playing Republic Commando. But a friend of mine happened to have a copy. And since he was done with it and willing to loan it out I thought I’d see what all the cool trailers and hoopla were about.

Brief Synopsis: In Republic Commando you play a clone trooper. But not just any Jago Fette body double. You’re a specially bred clone with a little something extra. You play the part of ‘38’ leader of the elite four-man “Delta” commando team tasked to preform special operations on behalf of the Republic.

Your team mates are 07 ‘Sev’ (all round bad-ass), 40 ‘Fixer’ (computer hacking specialist), and 62 ‘Scorch’ (demolitions expert). These guys heal you when you get shot up, help cover your back, preform mundane tasks, and make good natured snarky comments about each other and the local color.

The missions deal with opposing the Seperatist movement and the timeframe covers events between Star Wars II and Star Wars III. Some of the venues included Geonosis, the inside of a starship, and the Wookie homeworld.

Opinion: From the trailers I initially thought Republic Commando would compare directly with Star Wars Battlefront. And while a few comparisons can be made it’s obvious the designers were attempting much different things with the two games.

One difference is that alot of the enemies (especially the droids) are alot harder to kill in Commando than in Battlefront. However, you get alot of new weapons to take ‘em down with including weird bio-weapons taken off enemies and three types of grenades each tailored to a specific task.

Things are alot less random and more mission focused in Commando than they were in Battlefront as well. Enemies in Commando might have a little self direction, but basically always come from about the same place every time you run through a map, and there tend to be specific goals to reach at the end of each map. This contrasts pretty heavily with the free for all slaughterfests that make up Battlefront games. In this respect Commando more resembles games like single player Doom than Battlefront.

Another difference is that Battlefront allowed either 1st or 3rd person display, a feature which I really liked since 3rd person makes for easier coordination and tracking. On the other hand Commando was only designed as a 1st person shooter. At first this seemed like it’d be really annoying, but I quickly got used to it. And I think I understand why they forced you into it. Two reasons:

Republic Commando takes place heavily (but not exclusively) in halls, tunnels and other enclosed spaces. I suspect a 3rd person perspective in some of these locals might have frustrated players as the camera slips into an opaque wall or can’t get a good view around the character.

Secondly, they’re really trying to put you into the part of the clone trooper. When an giant insect splatters nearby it partially obscures your view. EMP grenades that catch your in their blast radius screw with your electronics in notable ways. And when you get shot in the head and killed (at least before one of your comrads can revive you) a spiderweb crack appears through your helmet face shield, the perspective shifts upward and the battle continues on, uncomfortably out of focus like a fever dream. These effects either fade at the appropriate time or are electronically “wiped” off, but provide a regular reminder that you are indeed in the shit.

And your helmet gives you tactical overlays of potential maneuvers (demolitions, slicing, taking up sniper positions, administering first aid, etc.) that you can assign team members to preform. This is kind of cool IMHO since the tactical display keeps with LCD/holographic aesthetic some of the movies had. It also helps stress that you and your men are a team each with particular talents who work together.

The whole feeling of guys with unique personalities and abilities working together in tough situations is pretty well evoked throuhout the game. And for me it really worked. We were the hard headed fools rushing in where Jedi feared to tread. The work was dirty but we were the clones to do it.

I usually like to think of myself as pretty aloof and not too closely bonded with the characters I play in video games. But I’ve got to say: in the level called “belly of the beast” we must’ve gotten TPK’d at least twenty times over the course of a week and by the end I wasn’t just frustrated, it felt like I was personally letting my squad-mates down. And when Yoda wisks us off to other battles leaving Sev behind in that hell hole I almost shed a tear, bitterly resenting that callous little muppet.

Final verdict: Sure the graphics and accouterments were fine, but what videogame can’t boast that these days? On the other hand the ambience, that gritty clone trooper ambiance, she is magnifique.

The stuff below may serve as a general introduction and outsider’s totally biased critique of LARPs, but does suffer slightly from being pulled straight out of my ass. Not that I’m saying anything made from whole cloth, or even in part intentionally fictitious. But while I’ve followed table-top roleplaying games (RPGs) in general alot over the years, as I’ve mentioned at other times, I sort of steer clear of LARPs. I’ve picked up a few tidbits about them here and there, but my knowledge of LARPs is about as informed as my knowledge of football: I might have a vague ideas of the rules and paraphenalia, and maybe remember an amusing anecdote or two someone told me about the game, but when it comes to the background, sub-culture, and details of specific games/teams/conferences/etc. then I’ve been pretty much willfully ignorant of the whole deal.

Still, even though my understanding might not be perfect, I would like to discuss it at the moment. So, for the sake of argument consider the following a primer written by an outsider, or better yet a straw dog to be beaten apart so as to stimulate more elucidating discourse.

With that excessively long disclaimer…

In some iterations LARPing is not unlike when you are a kid and pretend to be a super hero or other character, running around shooting at things with toy guns or weapons, flying invisible ships, etc. As a little kid this usually works ok to some degree but with “contests” or conflicts between players it can quickly degenerate into:

• Dragon: I shot you.
• NottheJFK: No you didn’t.
• Dragon: Yes I did.
• NottheJFK: I was wearing armor. It bounced off.
• Dragon: But I used black-hole bullets, they pull you in even if you’ve got armor so you can’t move.
• NottheJFK: But I was wearing white-hole armor. It counteracts the bullets so I’m still free.
• Dragon: But I shot a really powerful bullet so it overcomes your armor.
• (etc.)

Live action roleplaying games are a more “adult” version of this which seeks to impose some sort of rules to mediate these types of conflicts of vision.

The funny thing is up until a few weeks ago I always sort of thought LARPs were dumb. In fact even before I knew that there was a word for the practice of LARPing I thought they were dumb. As with many gamers who grew up in the 1980s, seeing a young Tom Hanks slowly comming unhinged did practically nothing to frighten me away from roleplaying in general, however running around a sewer pretending to battle crude monster props did seem ridiculously corny.

Over the years I’ve tried to qualify why I’m so put off by live action roleplaying games while still feeling table-top RPGs are a valid form of entertainment. And what I’ve come up with is this:

In table-top RPGs there are elements of problem solving and/or storytelling. And you get to sit down to play them, very relaxed and not “in your face” as it were.

By contrast I always viewed LARPs a bit less like collaborative storytelling, and more like impromptu acting. Thus they provide more opportunity to do strange things rather than just discuss them, and more opportunities to look ridiculous rather than just say something stupid. However, even though LARPs are more like acting, your audience is a bit unclear: in theory you are just acting for yourself and for the other people involved. But in practice you might also be acting for passing pedestrians in the street who’s ridicule you’ll invariably invoke, if not verbally then in their hearts and on their faces.

In this regard LARPing is also more in your face. Also it’s more of a challenge to carry across the image you’re going for. You can imagine the troll or elf that someone is narrating in a table-top RPG, you can picture the fireball or invisibility spell taking effect, but it seems like in a LARP it would be harder to ignore the fact that it’s really a pasty skinned white guy just wearing a cloak and fake pointy ears, or some guy throwing a bean-bag (a common spell-signifier in some LARPs) or folding his arms across his chest (a gesture representing the invisiblity power in a popular LARP).

Also there’s the simulation element of LARPs to consider: For example Society for Creative Anacronism (SCA) folks are all about trying to get your outfit to be as “real” as possible (or so I’ve heard) for the historic time period your re-creating (Though technically I think the SCA is more of a “re-enactment” organization than a rather than LARPing one) (1). For me that’s just too picky. If I’m going to dress up weirdly then give me a tunic and a cloak any day, but for footwear I’d prefer to wear some of my own choosing, and maybe the Ideal Pants (or just cargo shorts) rather than mens hose and/or pumkin pants.

There’s also a difference between “boffer” LARPs and more “rulesy” LARPs (for lack of a better word).

Apparently “boffer” LARPs (like N.E.R.O. apparently) get their distinction from using padded weapons and spell packets (small beanbags thrown to simulate combat spells). With boffers people actually try to hit each other and the best wins, etc. I’d assume that “boff” is the onomatopoetic sound of someone being hit with a padded weapon. Social contests in boffer LARPs are apparently all just acting. This is fine but means that if you personally are bad at physical combat they you probably shouldn’t play a fighting character, or if you are bad at social interaction then there’s really no way you can convincingly portray a social character.

By contrast the “rulesy” (I’m sure there’s another word for these, but I don’t know it) LARPs have specific rules for different interactions. You can carry weapons as props but don’t actually use them. If you get into a conflict you resolve it by comparing some simple traits and possibly undertaking a contest that doesn’t involve dice (usually something like rock-scissors-paper I think). “Rulesy” LARPS include games like White Wolf’s Mind’s Eye Theatre line, and offshoots like Rice Games’ Laws of the Bayou (sadly now only available as a google cache).

The problem I see with these is that they try to exclude the out-of-character expertise element so that how good you are in real life theoretically has nothing to do with what your character knows and can do. But if this issue poses challenges in table-top RPGs where characters are merely mental constructs somewhat seperate from the player, it seems like it’d be more of a problem in a LARPs where players physically portray the character to some degree. How do you keep someone from using out-of-character knowledge and skills when no one’s around to watch them? And even in person-to-person confrontations how do you keep a person from using their real-life social skills to some degree?

Also there’s the matter of conflict between the pretend world and simulated world in the areas of setting, props, staging, and execution. I’ve heard of people wandering around cities acting as vampires in gothy attire (not so bad) and elves in leather fetish gear (gaak!!), and other folks participating in a badly staged mock funeral while being bitten to death by quite-real mosquitoes.

…or worse: the many cases in which a referee (or “rules marshal” or whatever you call the “game master” (GM) in the LARP you’re playing) heavily plays favorites with certain players. Apparently if having an unfair GM for tabletop RPGs is bad, then having an unfair referee in LARPs usually involves a much less subtle trial of hazing, intimidation, maniuplation, and extreme social discomfort.

…

Now, all that said, something made me change my tune a little of late. Brian’s little Ultima exercise actually sounded kind of cool. I haven’t figured out all the reasons why yet, but here’s some conjecture:

Maybe it’s because the people involved in the Ultima outing were (apparently) not competing with each other or trying to one-up each other socially, but instead were working toward a common goal.

Or maybe it was more of a “re-enactment” than a LARP. Although the difference between a LARP and a re-enactment is kind of vague to me, I suspect that a LARP generally involves more freedom of action and choice where-as a re-enactment has stricter allowances for what is possible or can (or will) actually happen. In a sense I think a re-enactment could either be a sort of play staged for an audience (such as some historical dramatizations like the one to commemorate Patriot’s Day in Massachusetts) or an attempt to re-create and simulate the given conditions of a particular part of history (ie. Colonial House, Manor House and similar PBS series).

But the Ultima trek would be a “re-enactment” of an event that never actually physically happened. So then what sort of –enactment would it be? I don’t know. But this stuff bears some more looking into.

Maybe there is a LARP or –enactment exercise that would satisfy me. Possibly more than one sort of exercise. The idea of a model world appeals to me (hence conventional RPGs) but there are some variables I’d want to be able to toggle or adjust somehow to make the LARPs I’ve heard and read about seem less stupid, or possibly even to create the “Ideal LARP” (2).

Issues I’d like to see discussed:

• Degree of Simulation — Simulation is great (that’s what the Ultima exercise was to some degree), but what about the “fantastic elements” you can’t simulate with real-world resources (ie. magic and monsterish abilities)? Do you just choose to simulate only genres (or games/movies/books) that you know you can pull off with real-world resources? Or do you simulate the real-worldish things and just ignore the fantastic elements? Or do you impose some artificial system to quazi-mimic the fantastic elements (like spell packets or calling a band-aid and antibiotic ointment “healing spells”)? All this might vary with the LARP or type of re-enactment you want to preform. Is there some better compromise or combination?
• Costuming — Anachronism and dressing up in odd clothes can be interesting (or so I feel), and I wouldn’t mind doing a bit of it even in certain public venues. But basic cosplay, seems very focused on a specific genre (something the Ultima exercise was) without being really simulational in nature. Cosplay can be fine, but I always feel it’s lacking some sort of immersive element I’d really prefer. Not-so-simulational anachronism in attire wouldn’t be that bad either, but I’d be more interested in something that allowed true mixing of genres, where people made their own costumes rather than trying to duplicate a popular existing show or genre (3). On the other side of the costuming issue, call me a puritan if you will, but I’d like to avoid costuming crossovers with BDSM and other subcultures that make me uncomfortable.
• Fairness vs. Personal Expertise — This is a bit of a dilemma. The table-top roleplayer in me really wants to have some artificial system imposed on the proceedings to make them “fair”, at least as far as things like economics and fantastic elements are concerned (see the Degree of Simulation bullet point above), but the Boy Scout and DIY wannabe/poser in me (not to mention the Harrison Bergeron reader) makes me want to let people excel, at least at things like woodcraft and building contrivances to help them accomplish stuff. Again, this goes back largely to the Degree of Simulation issue.
• Keeping It Down to Earth — This is a big one. One thing that’s driven me away from LARPs possibly more than any other is the perception that people who participate in them try to impress one another or lord their abilities (real or imagined) over each other. In the real world you can often avoid someone if they’re acting like a jerk, or prove someone wrong if they’re claiming something that’s clearly impossible, or call someone out if they seem to be acting in a “fake” manner. But depending on the type of LARP being played some or all of these things will be more difficult to do since the “reality” of the LARP world is, by nature, more consentual than that of the real world. So “Keeping it down to Earth” could mean alot of things. It might simply mean not taking your characters precieved abilities as an excuse/means to seek power over others, or it might mean choosing characters you know you can portray (ie. ones alot like you, or just yourself in an altered context (as I assume was done in the Ultima exercise)). And in general I guess it might mean keeping a good sense of humor and proportion while avoiding farce and melodrama.

Anyway, these are sort of my preferences, or at least things I’d like to think and hear more about regarding LARPs and –enactment exercises.

What do you prefer? Or think you might prefer?

Are there any other concerns or focuses we should be discussing with regard to the LARPing?

(1) — And, sadly, they don’t even re-enact all time-periods, only Earth’s middle-ages and the few hundred years surrounding it. You can imagine my disappointment to find out that, in spite of what the name implies, they aren’t too keen on the combination of elements from earlier time periods, nor futuristic ones. “Anachronism” indeed! *Society for Medieval Recreationism” (SMeR) would be more accurate.

(2) — For additional volumes in Dragon’s “Ideal _____” series please inquire in the space provided below.

(3) — Though I fear the path of total “make it yourself” piecemeal anachronism is the surest route to madness. Or at least annoying farce.

When video game developers set to hash out another first person shooter, real time strategy, racing, role-playing etc. game, they have most of their variables set by the moulds of the industry. A few gimmicks, some new, perhaps upgraded, graphics and a new storyline are added to make the game unique. The end result is the absolute lack of anything unique at all. But, when something breaks the mould, it runs the chance of not playing well. Players might be confused or might not like the new game’s feel.

In other words, the problem with uniqueness is risk. The problem with the video game industry is that it hardly wants to take risks, which is the same for any other large industry. The stakes are too large for 50 million dollar budget American films to go out on a limb on unheard of actors and atypical, confusing plots. The problem with industries not taking risks, not backing unique projects, is stagnation, the lack of creative and novel products. From there, either lightning strikes with the industry taking a well thought-out risk or some low-budget operation outputs some product that gains vast popularity. That becomes “the next big thing,” which in turn becomes target for the industry to rehash for the next decade.

Before the video game industry started grossing more than Hollywood, it was willing to take risks. Game developers did not need to spend large chunks of their budget on convex volumetric fog rendering, bi linear interpolated textures, atmospheric scattering, ambient light effects and other graphical eye-candy that contribute little to any actual fun factor. The age that spawned any of the game genres that anyone plays today allowed more freedom in development. The video game industry at that time had the luxury of being able to risk making a fun and novel game. What an ironic statement.

This is where I come in. I have nothing to risk but my own opportunity costs. I also have precious few resources to accomplish my goals. If I could snap my fingers and have my will of some action-y, graphically-intense game be done, this would be a lot easier. As it is, I will have to struggle with what mediums I can muster. Yet, what limits also liberates. If I took a career in video game design, chances are I would find myself paying the bills by working on the shading for some snowboarding game. At best I could probably design weapon graphics for some mediocre online role-playing game.

But, with my limited means, I still believe I can do the unique. I hope to do some things that have never been done before. I am working on a PHP game (with possible Flash elements) with the current pet name Emporium. Technically, I would have to call it a browser-based, multi-user, role-playing, economic simulation. This does not sound particularly novel since plenty of other games could be considered such, but the approach I am taking is having as much player interactivity as possible. I could go on about the subject of gaming as method of human interaction for days, but here are just some details in bullet form:

• Dynamic World Map – Each hex of map will have its own dynamic attributes. Players could turn a plot into farmland to till, build a house, inn, smithy shop or they could trample the natural growth into trails and roadways. Trees could grow, rivers could be irrigated or players could see deforestation and raging flood waters. Governments could build defense walls to keep out raiding parties or could call armies to pillage and burn neighboring towns. See, while newer games are constantly intensifying their graphics, they are actually doing less by foregoing the opportunity to make limitlessly dynamic worlds.

• No Non-Player Characters – There will be no structures other than player-made structures. There will be no weapons other than player-made weapons. There will be no stores other than player-made stores. There will be no bread, beer, bottles, bags, shovels, candles, scrolls, books, magical wands or potions other than player-made bread, beer, bottles, bags, shovels, candles, scrolls, books, magical wands or potions. Simple enough concept but I have not seen it elsewhere. Most so-called role-playing games start characters out fighting something harmless like rats, which, when defeated, somehow always seem to cough up human currency. Then you develop your character until you are strong enough to defeat huge, bat-winged beasts that, for the same strange reason, seem to cough up human currency when defeated. In Emporium, even currency will be player-made.

• Player-Interactive Economic System – This is going to borrow very heavily from M.U.L.E.. Since there are no NPCs, any goods and services will have to be supplied by players. Players will have to make their own stores and products and thus must have control over production and pricing. Primary and secondary materials will be available on an open market with a M.U.L.E.-like bartering system. Those materials are turned into end-users products by players who will have to base their prices on production costs, added value, rarity and how much other players will want said products (i.e. demand).

• Intuitive Complexity– The above supply/demand stuff looks like it could get pretty complicated. Too complicated. Unintuitive complexity is a large problem with many browser games. Many cannot be played without a calculator present and even then it takes months to come out of the confusion about what you are supposed to be doing. Again, M.U.L.E. is the key. It demonstrates creative ideas on how to develop a complicated 4-player, produce/consume, buy/sell game to be played with nothing but a 1 button, 8-direction controller per player. This thought process is going to apply to everything in Emporium from the materials trading to the combat system. For example, if I can at all avoid it, I will not have any typing in of numbers when I could used buttons and slide-bars instead. As another example, the storefront selling would lay out for the owners suggested base prices. Instead of making those players add up all the costs and then figure a sale number, the game would figure the costs up and then ask the amount of currency players want to make, or lose, on that particular item (of course letting them see the final price as well, but having a money gained/lost meter as a guide).

• Automated Social Capital – Online role-playing games usually have inadequate ways of dealing with player vs. player combat social dynamics. Some restrict players to only player-killing in certain areas others, only allow it between a range of character levels and/or above certain levels, while others just have an optional marker that brands killers as such and plenty just do not allow it at all. I have trouble believing that no other game has attempted some sort of automated friend/foe function, yet it seems most online games let you keep a contacts list, sometimes “friends” and “enemies” lists. My idea of making one will probably be the most difficult to implement out of all the ideas here. Consider this simplified example. Every player character has an invisible chart that includes every other player character and gives them each a rating from 1 to 10. 1 means that character is a mortal enemy of your character and 10 means the character and yours are like brothers. If someone attacks you, steals from you or if you see someone attacking someone else, that player’s score on your chart gets drastically lowered. But, if someone is constantly around you, patronizes your store and/or helps you in certain ways, their score on your chart goes up. Scores on two different characters would adjust mutually, since if you hate someone, they will probably hate you back. Now, if you have a friend (rating 7–10) that gets attacked by someone else, their rating on your friends chart will go to “foe” status (rating 1–3). But it does not stop there, since he is your friend and you are on his side, especially if you witnessed the assault. Thus, your rating of the attacker also moves to the foe range. If you see your friend attack that perpetrator, your rating, your opinion, of your friend will not go down, but the original concept is strengthened. In fact, if the original victim is in good standing with the bulk of society, others will not only frown upon the attacking such perpetrators, but rather encourage it. Upon sight, players would be able to identify friends and foes by some simple system like coloring their names different depending on the relation. From there, you will have self-policing societies, heros and villains, most likely resulting in certain characters being branded as murders and not being allowed participate the economy, essentially banishing them from the society. Those fugitives have the option of building their own inter-character bonds and constructing their own towns, possibly bandit towns built on raiding those who still have wealth. Why bother with creating bandit non-player characters with complex AI and spend time making forts for them on the world map when you can simply let players do it for themselves?

• Physical Properties Rather Than Preset Items – So, if players can make items, then how would they go about constructing them? In other games where you can make items, the player is usually given a list of items to fabricate and a list of materials needed to make them. At their most creative some games let you simply combine a few objects together and watch them become the end product. Consider if a wizard wants to brew a potion. Instead of a potion template, he could be left to experiment with adding certain ingredients together. An eye of newt and ground up mandrake root potion could give a different effect than ground up newt eyes and whole mandrake root potion. But, rather than making some specific map of what combines with what to make what, each material could have properties. Perhaps eye of newt has several properties, one of which gives you magical power when boiled down from a whole eye and consumed, but when ground up targets the eyes. And maybe mandrake root has some properties, one of which grants general healing when ground down, boiled and consumed, but when kept whole in a mixture gives specific cures. So, an eye of newt and ground mandrake root potion might be a general healing potion while ground up newt eyes and whole mandrake root potion cures blindness. In coding terms, do not think of it as “if you ground up X and boil it down for consumption, it will give Y effect.” Think of it as “if said item has X property in Z amount, grounding it up and boiling it down for consumption will give Y effect in the Z degree.” These are hypothetical examples, but the general concept could apply to weapon making, armor making, spell casting and more.

• The Economy Fuels Combat, Combat Fuels The Economy – One of the problems with most real time strategy games is that collecting resources is painfully boring and often bothersome. The latest trend in RTS games is to combine fighting with resource collection. Applying this to a browser-based, multi-user, role-playing, economic simulation means somehow combining material collection with combat. What I have come up with so far is such: there are passive skills, such as mining, lumberjack and farming. Then the active skills are combat skills. A lumberjack has a lumber mill, but chopping down a tree requires both the act of chopping it down and fighting whatever monster pops out of the tree to defend it. The lumberjack, in this case, acts as the closest thing there is to a non-player character. The lumberjack offers X currency for the active duty of fighting the monster. All the player has to do is choose the tree (the type and size of tree that the lumberjack requests), kill the monster and then “ghost” of the lumberjack automatically chops down the tree and takes it back to the lumber mill. The better player characters can fight, the better they can fuel the economy. The better resources available to the economy, the better equipment can be manufactured to enhance player fighting ability.

There are plenty more novel aspects planned, like increasing character attributes and skills through usage rather than the simple choosing of unearned improvements, using nourishment to build character attributes (a throw-back to River City Ransom) and specific experience gained based on what kind of actions taken (another throw-back, this time to games such at Wasteland and Quest for Glory).

The point is to make a game with aspects that I do not see in games produced by the current industry. I would like to think this is because no one yet has dared to think outside of the box in these certain ways as much as myself. Perhaps we do not see these features because they would be too tricky and volatile to implement, or, worse yet, because they would be virtually impossible to implement. I am banking my time and effort in creating Emporium in that my ideas are novel and that I can add meaningful concepts to online gaming.

I know people who are trying to create amateur video games and all but precious few of them are reaching for anything novel. I hear, “I want to make a game just like [some other game], only better,” or, “We’re trying to combine all the best elements of the Final Fantasy games and put them into one game.” I do not desire to create video games simply because I want to make them. I am pulled to do so because I believe I envision things that no one else, at least no one else in power, sees. Through creative thinking, through the proper effort spent and with the help of my friends, I we should be able to see if I am right.

There are many cases to defend the game, like unique gameplay and excellent player control, but my angle is specific: The game has the most interesting swordplay out of any I’ve played.

I formulated this concept while wandering the streets of Reunion Island (I had a lot time to think while walking, sometimes hours at a time), and have been meaning to post this on here for some time. Zelda II has mostly non-humanoid monsters, but at times you find a creature that is about the size of your own player. The humanoid monsters begin basic but, as the game progresses, you fight humanoids with abilities more and more like your own, until, with the final boss, you meet up with a shadow version of yourself.

Your player, Link, is armed with a sword and a shield. The sword attacks and the shield blocks certain kinds of attacks (projectiles and melee weapons). With each you can use them high or low at any one time, meaning you can attacked high or low with the sword and you can block the upper or lower part of your body with the shield.

The most basic humanoid enemy is a simple sprite that runs at you with a knife. Above that are Moblins, pig-faced goblins, that charge at you with a spear that your shield can block, but they only ever attack high, at your upper body. Beyond that are versions of Moblins that can throw spears but only high until you meet a Moblin that can attack both low and high, shown in this short video clip . You can see me play the game of blocking the spear thrusts until I go ahead and finish him off.

Notice how the game developers made the Moblin telegraph which area, high or low, it was going to thrust the spear a split second before it does so. This is the basis of interaction that makes for interesting swordplay. You have to calculate the enemy’s offence while going forward with your own attack. Sometimes the combattants go back and forth with an attack, block, attack, block wave or sometimes the offense and defense of both occur simultaniously.

Here is a clip of another less advanced foe, the Goriya, a rat-man that throws boomerangs. The clip shows the detail of combat that is possible in Zelda 2. Notice that to block all the boomerangs I have to put my shield high and low both ahead and behind me.

Throw in monsters who wield actual swords and shields into the mix and you have something even more interesting. Here is a skeleton who has a sword and shield, but can only use each in a high fashion. Note that I block high when the skeleton attacks. And, finally, is a battle with an Ironknuckle, who can block high and low while attacking high and low. I attack vigorously here, trying to get past its shield while noting when it brings raises its sword before thrusting.

It may not be apparent from this video, but I’ve also noted a bunch of AI triggers present in the Ironknuckle monster. There is a regular ‘guard’ mode for when it is alone. If it comes close enough to your character (it “sees” him) it will ‘charge’ at him. When it is close enough, it will ‘engage’ your character, blocking and attacking. Then there is an ‘angry’ mode which triggers sometimes when your character gets through the shield blocking with a sword strike, and then the Ironknuckle will attack 4–8 times in a row. And, finally, it seems like Ironknuckles usually throw in an attack as soon as you turn your back to him. This might be simply be an illusion, but it could be an AI reaction.

Other versions of Zelda don’t have this kind of swordplay. Not even the most ‘advanced’ versions have anything close. The simple high/low, attack/defend along with appropriate AI give rich combat the likes of which I’ve not seen anywhere else. This is the next step in evolution from the original Legend of Zelda, which allows Link to block projectiles from one direction just so long as he is not attacking. Instead of that, in Zelda II you can block weapons and projectiles from high just so long as your aren’t attacking or blocking low, and you can block low just so long as you are not attacking or blocking high. The complexity and play control is just astounding.

Even the most beloved Zelda III: Link to the Past for the SNES tried to do something along these lines, with swords blocking swords, but ultimately fails. In Link to the Past, shields are only used to block projectiles while swords block melee weapons. This simply means that one side of your character’s front is always immune to swords while the other front side is always immune to projectiles (unless your body is exposed from attacking like in Zelda I). The character maneuverability doesn’t allow you to change or move those sides very well. This is regression from Zelda II.

With all this genius in innovation there is an Achilles heel. You can rather easily bypass all of the swordplay with a jump-slash move. If this could somehow have been fixed, the system would have been flawless. Despite that, it still is genius and deserves more respect than many of my generation gives it. The only improvement that I can thing up is having the humanoid characters not be able to hurt Link unless when using an actual weapon (much like in the arcade Shinobi, which requires actual body contact with a weapon to cause damage; body on body contact only knocks your player back).

We walked and managed well. There’s a problem with many forests on Delmarva; they are mainly made up one tree type, since the forests have all been logged and these are new trees. This tree, the loblolly, is has roots that are poisonous to many other plants and make the ground unfit for many other plants, except briars. This is why it’s so hard to navagate through Delmarvan woods, with such dense thorns. And, for us, we had to be sure not to light any tall or hanging briars on fire.

After walking for a fair amount of time, we came to an open field. The field was flat with frost sparkling on the vegetation. If there were crops on it, they had been long since harvested. We noted that we entered from the north-east corner of the field, and decided to keep with our route and head for the tree line just ahead, keeping with our perceived west/south-west bearing. But, just then, the head to my torch fell off. That was kind of funny because it suddenly just popped off. It turned out, despite my efforts, the wood was burning just underneath the cloth. As we planned, I dug a hole with my axe and fully buried the flames. We tried to light the other torch but found that I had already burned it at my parents’ house before to the point that it was spent. From there, I carried a candle which was even more worthless than the torch.

The party headed through the woods again and noted a shallow creek. It was more like a dry ditch but since we thought we walked far enough, that place would be our temporary camp. Finding a fallen tree to use as a bench, we set up 3 candles on tree stumps around us and broke into the rations. The verdict on hardtack is that it’s not all that bad, but your jaw gets tired quickly. To help it along, we popped the cork for the medieval honey mead and poured some on the crackers to soften them up. Also, putting them over candle flame warms them up and gives them a more cooked taste. The mead was good, but since I was supposedly driving once we got back, I only had a few swigs. Buff doesn’t like fruity drinks so she had even less than me. That meant Joseph had to down the bulk of it, which he quickly did. With the amazing feat of all of our rations being eaten, we gathered the candles, going solely by moonlight then, and headed back.

We made a line straight south for the field, which jutted out there (see the illustrations for a better idea). We turned the corner which opened up to the area where we buried that torch head. On that corner we noted a very hand-crafted deer stand with a metal contruction ladder leading up to it. Heading back to that north-east corner from which we entered the field, we tried to head north-east, which meant turning somewhat left.

We walked and walked and walked to the point that we knew we had messed something up, because we found no road, no anything but more woods. We decided to fan out a little bit, keeping within close earshot of each other, with Buff in the middle and us guys on each end. I spotted some clearing and had Buff hold my cloak, since the cloaks slowed us down through the briars. What I found out was that while the cloaks slowed us down, it also kept us from getting scratches all over our arms, of which after that point I had plenty. I made my way to a field just as Joseph did, with Buff short behind. We looked at each other concerned, and said what was on both of our minds, “This is the same field from before, isn’t it?” The deer stand mentioned above confirmed our fears.

It turned out that in the effort to head north-east at the corner of the field, we kept on turning left. We turned left so much that we constantly changed direction until we re-entered the field from the north-west corner.

With nervous chuckles, helped by Joseph being rather buzzed at that point, we collected ourselves and reviewed how we should go about getting out. The moon that we noted on our backs while heading in, had then risen to a point directly above us. We needed a different approach. From the north-east corner of the field, we saw that the constellation Orion was about 15 degrees to the right of the direction from which we entered. We decided to keep Orion in sight and constantly adjust our direction with that. It seemed to work but more bad news struck: we found another field, but at least it wasn’t the same field we just came from. Without heeding the field, we stuck with the bearing that Orion gave us.

Right down our path we noted some empty hunters’ campers and this lead to a dirt road. This point brought us to analyze some unknowns. We saw some campers in our pretrip days before during the daytime, but we didn’t see them that night while heading north on the dirt road to where we parked the car. That must have meant that we should head right (meaning south) to find the car. But, that’s only if this was the dirt road where the car was. We had made grave navigational errors already that night. For all we knew, we could have been on that ellusive Heather Road, noted by the dotted line to the west. Plus, this dirt road didn’t exactly look like the one we rode on before. It looked too tight with hardly any shoulder room, comparitively. We drew these map scenarios on the dirt road to help us think it all through.

It was 3am at this point and we had to do something to at least figure out which road we were on, if not get back to the car. So we walked to the right on the road. If we didn’t find the car, then at least we could find a street sign at an intersection to help us locate ourselves. We walked and walked and walked. About 20 minutes down the road I noted a chest-high lump of dirt just to the side of the road. I recognized it from the drive up and that the car should be north of here, in the opposite direction that we were walking. Still, if we were going to second guess ourselves before actually finding out for sure where we were, we would never find our way back.

So we walked again for at least another 20 minutes before comming to an intersection. The road showed us that scenario we drafted up before was quite correct except for one thing. We did find the correct dirt road and we were actually heading south. We were wrong on the idea that those hunter campers were north of the car, when they were actually south. It was damn near 4am and we were all tired. Joseph had to be at work in Ocean City at 10am and while we were all tired, time was an issue.

It would take forever for all of us to walk to the car, since it took us at least 45 minutes to get down from the campers, so I volunteered, for the sake of time, to run back alone. I slipped off my jeans but kept on my sweat pants, took off my boots, threw off my cloak and borrowed one of Joseph’s long sleeve shirts. Those two insisted on bring each their cell phone, and we weren’t playing around anymore, so I took Buff’s phone for communication. I ran, wearing only socks on the dirt road, breathing into my sleeve to keep my face warm.

The time went by pretty quickly for me, but those two had a small scare. Some animal made a sound, the closest animal contact we had all night, which freaked Buff out a little. Joseph knew that if she started freaking out, he would freak out at well, so he calmed her down and tried calling me. I got a ring but not enough reception to answer at first, which didn’t help the freaking out situation at all. We eventually connected and I said I didn’t hear anything in the woods. Crisis averted.

When I got to the entrance of the campers, I stopped for a moment and looked around. I noted the drawn maps in the dirt on the ground and then looked up the road some, towards north. At the end of my vision I could barely see a clearing opening on the right of the dirt road. I investigated and lo-and-behold it was where the car was. We had missed the car by no more than 50 meters. And, amazingly, considering how bad we got turned around during the first attempt at leaving, we hit the dirt road no more than 20 meters away from where we left it. I got Joseph and Buff, dropped Buff off in Pocomoke city and got back to Salisbury nearing 5am.

It turns out that our starting point was a far ways more north than where we thought it was. I adjusted the map below to show a more northern starting point. I added guesses to where the fields were and where we traveled. Each color represents a different leg of the journey. The black X at the end of the yellow path is the resting site.

The plan was to park my car in front of one of these state forest entrances, just off of a dirt road, and then walk west/south-west until we hit this one creek (labeled as a “river” on the map), where we would rest for a little while and consume our comestables before crossing back. Below is that same map with better markings. The black shows the roads, the east road being the one dirt road, the red being where I parked the car, the blue being the creek and the yellow being the general direction of intended travel. The dotted line also shows a road, Heather Rd., marked on a state map, but of which we couldn’t find any sign during a couple laps in my car in the daytime a few days before.

As we three stepped out of my car, we suited up with all the equipment. Here’s a rundown:

Dick:

• sack, a pillowcase looped and tied around the belt
• 3 bundles of 3 pieces of homemade hardtack, each bundle wrapped up in paper
• hand axe, for weapon variety, hung on the belt
• cloak and dagger
• 3 candles
• 2 torches, the head of each wrapped in a grocery bag
• boots Note: While I layered myself in sweatpants and jeans, I kept my torso layers to 2 t-shirts.

Joe:

• pillowcase sack
• machette, with scabbard
• cloak and dagger, the cloak being one of Bear and Loki’s
• matches
• map contained in a metal scroll case, makeshifted from a cigar case
• bottle of mead, 750 ml, made in Maryland
• gloves

Buff:

• cloak and knife
• staff
• boots
• gloves

I threw this together to represent the party:

All suited up, we noted the moon on our backs, crossed the street and entered the woods.

A friend of mine, Joseph Galetti, and I frequently drive through wooded areas, often up in Delaware while helping Doc Grogan with herp research and sometimes to see friends who live near the Pocomoke forest. For lack of the memory of how exactly it came up, I’ll just say that I mentioned to Joseph how I used to walk the woods and how these woods would work really well for that, being so far away from any civilization. The laughter about the absurdity of the idea slowly became, “Dude.….we should do that some night.”

So we started planning. Maps consulted, inventory lists drawn up. Joseph was charged with the task of finding the best place to do this. Pocomoke forest it would be, being so far from anywhere but Furnace Town and we picked a weekend (about a month ago now), both Friday and Saturday nights of which would be perfect: clear, no wind, with temperature lows of 32, just cold enough to be sure tick season is over and just cold enough for us to need cloaks. I planned much of the little ends. I made parchment for a crude map that we could carry, furnished the rations and researched torch-making.

The online resources for making parchment all suggest dousing paper in tea or coffee. My house has neither of these so I clumpled up some printer paper into a ball and then dipped that into a cup of my dad’s Diet Dr. Thunder, then transfering it to a cup of Worcestershire Sauce (appropriate considering Pocomoke forest is in Worcester County, Maryland). The result was a very nummy-smelling bit of map. Joseph then penciled in approximate details.

Making a torch took more time. I first bought some lamp oil, then I tied a small rag to a short stick, dumping some lamp oil on the rag end. When lit, it flared up very nicely. So nice that it flared up too big for the short stick so I had to drop the torch, behind my parent’s house, on a yard full of dry leaves. After a panic to find some water and a container, I tried again, making sure I wouldn’t leave the fireproof stairwell. It seemed to work OK. I found a much longer stick and then cut up a large rectangle of fabric out of a cotton t-shirt. Laying that out in the back yard, I layed it out flat and drenched it with the lamp oil. I thought letting it soak in but dry out would prevent problems. The next day, I took the fabric, picking off a dead house fly who seems to have gotten high on the fumes, folded it longways and wrapped it around the top of the stick, hammering 3 nails in to secure it.

Part 2 comming up next.

Character classes range from the simple (ie. Fighters) to the extravagantly abilitied (ie. Bards, Druids, Rangers), covering a wide range of occupational and lifestyle choices. However, one potential drawback of this sytem is that each sort of class is very much focused in a particular area of magical and/or mundane expertise. And this can be fine if you simply want warriors who kill things and magicians who sling spells about…

But what if you’re interested in playing a different sort of warrior: a cavalry man with who has studied history a bit and has better strategic, diplomatic, and leadership skills? Or a wizard who’s not just a walking toolbox of magical effects, rather a wise man who has studied up on arcane lore of all sorts, strange creatures, alchemy, poisons, spirits, and the planes beyond?

To accomplish either of these ends using the standard classes the characters would need a pretty darn high intelligence since neither of the classes in question get many points to spend in buying skills. The only standard classes with a significant numbers of skill points are the barbarian (6 + Intelligence modifier), ranger (6 + Intelligence modifier), and rogue (8 + Intelligence modifier). And given their specialties it seems out of place in many cases to foist one of these classes on a character just to expand their skill base.

Also, what about all the NPCs (non-player characters) who work in cities and countrysides doing things like baking bread, collecting taxes, and plowing fields? Need they all become rangers and rogues in order to learn the appropriate job skills?

Wizards of the Coast has applied a couple of official and optional patches to this derth of occupations for mundane experts and ordinary guys since the 3rd Edition came out. The first attempt at a fix to provide NPC classes in the Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG) for various non-adventuring occupations. These NPC classes included: the Noble (a modestly skilled fighting type), Expert (generally similar to a rogue but with a couple fewer skills and no roguish abilities), Warrior (basically a feat-less fighter), Laborer (a sad, sad little class a bit like a wizard without the magic or mystique), and Adept (an underpowered cross between sorcerers and clerics). Of all the NPC classes the Expert came the closest to being useful as a PC (player character) class, but still was much less talented than the a rogue in both skill and special abilities.

Later, after Edition 3.5 arrived, the new Unearthed Arcana book of optional rules updated the expert as a “generic class” playable as a PC. The update gave experts access to additional feats, though still not as many as a fighter; and skills, though similarly: not as many as the rogue. So again a class was created which shortchanged characters in comparison to other similar classes.

Also the newly updated expert’s attack bonuses and proficiencies, while appropriate for a person of action, were somewhat out of place for studious or otherwise sedintary sorts of characters.

To remedy these deficiencies among the mundanely skilled I’ve come up with a couple new classes. Outlined below are the tradesman (an average citizen and competent practitioner of their given occupation) and the sage (a broader expert on many subjects, though less experienced in combat and similar worldly concerns).

Alignment: Any.

Hit Die: d6.

Class Skills

• The tradesperson may choose any 10 skills as class skills.
• Skill Points at 1st Level: (8 + Int modifier) x 4.
• Skill Points at Each Additional Level: 8 + Int modifier.

Table: The Tradesman


Level
Base Attack
 Bonus
Fort. 
Save
Ref. 
Save
Will. 
Save
Special
1
+0
+0*
+2*
+0*
Bonus Feat
2
+1
+0
+3
+0
 
3
+2
+1
+3
+1
 
4
+3
+1
+4
+1
 
5
+3
+1
+4
+1
Bonus Feat
6
+4
+2
+5
+2
 
7
+5
+2
+5
+2
 
8
+6/+1
+2
+6
+2
 
9
+6/+1
+3
+6
+3
 
10
+7/+2
+3
+7
+3
Bonus Feat
11
+8/+3
+3
+7
+3
 
12
+9/+4
+4
+8
+4
 
13
+9/+4
+4
+8
+4
 
14
+10/+5
+4
+9
+4
 
15
+11/+6/+1
+5
+9
+5
Bonus Feat
16
+12/+7/+2
+5
+10
+5
 
17
+12/+7/+2
+5
+10
+5
 
18
+13/+8/+3
+6
+11
+6
 
19
+14/+9/+4
+6
+11
+6
 
20
+15/+10/+5
+6
+12
+6
 
Bonus Feat

Class Features

All of the following are class features of the tradesman.

Weapon and Armor Proficiency: Tradesmen are proficient with all simple weapons, plus the hand crossbow, all light martial melee weapons as well as light armor. Note: If the tradesman is a hunter or some other occupation which would require the use of weapons (such as long bows) they should take the appropriate weapons proficiency feat (ie. Martial Weapons Proficiency) at first level to allow for their use.

Bonus Feats: Only feats which relate to the tradesman’s current profession may be taken as bonus feats. If the player can make an argument for the feat’s appropriateness, even if the justification is tenuous, the feat can be allowed. (ie. a bartender who takes the Dodge feat because he’s always having to duck thrown objects in bar fights)

Saving Throws: Although above the Reflex saving throw is indicated as “good” and the Fortitude and Will saves are “bad”, in reality the player may choose any one saving throw to be “good” at first character level and the other two to be “bad”.

Multiclassing: A character may start out as one sort of tradesman and later on become another sort. When a tradesperson switches from one profession or area of training to another she may choose different skills as class skills for the new occupation and a new “good” saving throw, if she so desires. In all other regards she treats the two different tradesperson occupations as if they were different classes and follows the standard rules with regard to multiclassing.

…

Alignment: Any.

Hit Die: d4.

Class Skills

• The tradesperson may choose any 15 skills as class skills.
• Skill Points at 1st Level: (10 + Int. modifier) x 4.
• Skill Points at Each Additional Level: 10 + Int. modifier.

Table: The Sage


Level
Base Attack
 Bonus
Fort. 
Save
Ref. 
Save
Will. 
Save
Special
1
+0
+0*
+2*
+0*
Bonus Feat
2
+1
+0
+3
+0
Bonus Feat
3
+1
+1
+3
+1
 
4
+2
+1
+4
+1
Bonus Feat
5
+2
+1
+4
+1
 
6
+3
+2
+5
+2
Bonus Feat
7
+3
+2
+5
+2
 
8
+4
+2
+6
+2
Bonus Feat
9
+4
+3
+6
+3
 
10
+5
+3
+7
+3
Bonus Feat
11
+5
+3
+7
+3
 
12
+6/+1
+4
+8
+4
Bonus Feat
13
+6/+1
+4
+8
+4
 
14
+7/+1
+4
+9
+4
Bonus Feat
15
+7/+1
+5
+9
+5
 
16
+8/+1
+5
+10
+5
Bonus Feat
17
+8/+1
+5
+10
+5
 
18
+9/+1
+6
+11
+6
Bonus Feat
19
+9/+1
+6
+11
+6
 
20
+10/+1
+6
+12
+6
Bonus Feat

Class Features

All of the following are class features of the sage.

Weapon and Armor Proficiency: Sages are proficient with the club, dagger, hand crossbow, light crossbow, and quarterstaff, but not with any type of armor or shield.

Bonus Feats: Sages may choose any feats as bonus feats as long as they have the appropriate prerequisites.

Saving Throws: Although above the Reflex saving throw is indicated as “good” and the Fortitude and Will saves are “bad”, in reality the player may choose any one saving throw to be “good” at first character level and the other two to be “bad”.

Multiclassing: A character may start out as one sort of sage and later on become another sort. When a sage switches from one course of study to another she may choose different skills as class skills for the new area of expertise and a new “good” saving throw, if she so desires. In all other regards she treats the two different sage occupations as if they were different classes and follows the standard rules with regard to multiclassing.

The back story is this: Our characters have progressed through many levels seeking to remedy the many troubles of the world through the unravelling of cryptic and seemingly conflicting prophecies. My character ends up growing through many sessions to be a multi-classed Goblin Fighter/Rogue/Disciple (Disciple is a special magic-thiefy “Prestige Class” the DM whipped up) who specializes in stealth, archery, and arcane stuff.

We end up questing after this artifact, “The Harp of Beyjayu” (or something like that), which in theory can somehow be used to keep the world (which is apparently not totally unlike The Force in that it has a light side and a dark side) from flipping so that the day side gets dark for 5000 years or so (not a good thing). However this harp, being an artifact, is so strong that anyone who hears the person playing it will instantly go along with that person. It also overwhelms the person playing it (in this case some bardic chick) and makes them sweep the countryside going overboard, essentially raising loyal armies practically by accident and destroying local government.

To avoid ourselves becomming automatic servants of the harp player our group did a little quest to earn some magic (artifact grade) salve. This salve when applied liberally like a milk mustache to the upper lip prevents the harp from overcomming the salve-wearer. But being artifact level salve it also has a side-effect: it deadens all emotions (and hurts Charisma) making any Good wearer essentially a walking exponent of utilitarianism. The effect can only wear off if something breaks your heart (and how can that happen if you have no emotions?).

Since it looked like at least one of us would have to wear the salve I decided my goblin was the one who could be sacrificed. He’s always one to try weird arcane stuff anyway (occasionally to his detriment (ie. the psychosomatic One Ring to Rule Them All incident)). So he puts it on.

So, being all utilitarian now (and since his greatest abilities are sneeking related), for the next three sessions he tails the party from a distance hiding in the hope that when the party encounters the harp player he’ll be able to catch her off guard. Then someone in the group points out his hiding spot in front of a hoard of enemies, nixing that plan.

And it turns out that the harper went alone to fight a red dragon of all things and we end up following her trail into the dragon’s cave. The dragon apparently likes to polymorph into the form of a killer elf-woman who makes the local kobold tribes fight for her amusement. Since we defeated one of the dragon’s champions she said we could go into her cave, but we could never leave (she’s a collector and wanted to get the whole set apparently).

The dragon had alot of cool stuff in there including wands, swords, coins, staves, clothes, and a caged female bard with a harp. We pretty much had our run of the place, but trying to leave summoned a living wall into the entrance and would rouse the dragon’s anger.

We free the harper from her cage and are all wandering around looting the place and trying to figure out a means of escape. Except for my character. My mission, as I see it, as my goblin sees it, is to get the harp at all costs and leave as expediently as possible. We did something threatening to the harpist so she’s wandering around the cavern invisible avoiding us, so it looks like we may never get the harp. Which leads to:

Good idea #1: As a “disciple” my character has the power (once every 6 days) to switch places instantly with another person in the area who hasn’t attacked him yet. So my goblin gives the other fighter in the party his bow (some sort of magical bow which does massive amounts of non-lethal stunning damage) and has the fighter shoot an arrow directly at my goblin. My goblin instantly switches places with the invisible harpist and she gets TKO’d.

The goblin then rushes over to retrieve the harp and the party goes about figuring out how to escape. We decide to sleep on it since some folks want to get spells back.

Bad idea #1: The harp doesn’t like my goblin (maybe because it can’t control him) and breaks it’s own strings in protest. He figures it’s broken, but to see if it’s really an artifact or not he dips it in the lava (it was a red-dragon’s cave, apparently there was a lava flow through the back). The harp burns entirely up after a few minutes.

As it turns out some artifacts are in fact destructable through normal means, they just re-form at a dramatically suitable time in another part of the world. So basically I’ve destroyed the harp we came to find. Out of character I yell, “Crap!” a couple times. And after a bit of stupified confusion on everyone else’s part and amusement on the DM’s part it’s ruled that this severe disappointment and set-back at least has the benefit of giving my goblin his emotions back, so at least something good comes of it. He uses the newly regained emotion of averice to loot the 25 magic wands hermetically sealed in glass cases (gotta love Use Magic Device skill) around the lair.

So everyone wakes up and we decide to blow this popsicle stand. This is a strange and complicated undertaking by our disorganized methods and involves one of our party members partly burning the living wall with acid and the party monk annoying the dragon by melting sizable portions of it’s hoard in the lava. Finally I get:

Good idea #2: Using a wand of Levitation (max lifting capacity 1200 lbs. in this case) I levitate a 1200lb. glob of molten lava, sear a hole through the wall, and par-broil the remains. Yah me!

We rush through the opening into the dragon’s firey breath weapon. Monk (who also has a neat prestige class) heals me and we retreat back into the cave. Dragon walks in, polymorphed back into an elf-chick and fighting ensues.

Now the last campaign of D&D I played with this DM ended up with us fighting a red dragon and all dying, so I was hoping we would not all die in this game. Dragons are fearsome foes which calls for desperate measures, but my goblin’s a pretty self-sacraficing guy (Align. CG) so nothing’s out of the question. Then a thought came to me: there’s tons of magical stuff hanging around here, I alone have 25 wands in my posession, but dragons are pretty magic resistant, and anyway they have so much damage resistance you need to pump alot of damage into them fast to take ‘em down. Which brought things to a head with:

Good idea #3: (also bad-ish idea #2) I cast about with my arcane lore for a stave, any stave, capable of making a Retributive Strike. Now for those not in the know, “Retributive Strike” is little used a rule held-over from D&D’s older incarnations. Basically it’s a one-shot trick that can be done with a couple types of really powerful magic staves whereby the weilder breaks the staff and all it’s power instantly pours out. It does massive amounts of damage to those right nearby and the weilder himself either takes the full brunt of the damage as well or is shunted into another dimension (50% chance of either outcome).

There are alot of staves in this cave, but is there a variety I could use for this? The DM is apparently feeling really agreeable in these matters tonight and decides that yes, there is a suitable staff of some kind (though my sad Arcane Lore roll doesn’t clearly distinguish which sort of staff it is…doesn’t matter though) in the cave.

So my goblin snatches the staff to himself, sneeks up behind the dragon, and breaks the staff over his own shoulders thus Retributive Striking the entire area. Then I promptly fail, by the thinnest margin, the 50% chance to be shunted to another dimension. All in the immediate area (me, the dragon, and one other character) instantly take 400 points of damage and die as a wave of golden energy sweeps over us. Everyone else in the party is far enough away to avoid the strike and survives totally unscathed.

As further good fortune would have it, although the dragon and I were both dead for good, the other character who was killed had an amulet which would keep his consciousness safe until his body could be revived.

Certainly my goblin was dead. But what better way to go out than while taking down the eponymous monster of the game in a literal blaze of glory made possible by semi-obscure rules?

…

And that’s how I killed a red dragon in D&D using a Retributive Strike.

Urbandead

In the game you start in a quarantined 10 x 10 suburb (each with 10 x 10 blocks) section of the city of Malton. You are a survivor from the city, a scientist from a lab somehow linked to the viral outbreak that caused the zombism or a military evacuation personel dropped in to round up survivors for extraction. Or, you are already a zombie with an appetite for those oh-so delectable human brains.

What I’ve griped for in a zombie game is one theme in every zombie movie: Every friend is also a potential enemy. Either through becoming one with the zombie hoard or finally snapping and going psycho, other humans are often, in the movies, the biggest threat to those still living. This game has all of that. Whenever a human character dies, he becomes a zombie. Not only that, but there are no restrictions for killing other humans as a human (other than the victims friends banding together to lynch you).

Screenshot of the game

This is just a lame browser MMORPG like the rest, where you grind your way to the next exp level, but it has some very commendable aspects. First, the pace is slow. Slow like a chess match where you move once a day. You get an Action Point every half hour, for a maximum of 50 Action Points after 25 hours. That’s 50 clicks, which goes by fast. The main reason for this is so not too much happens before you log in the next day, or half a day (like your character being killed as soon as you log off). It also allows for alot of strategy, planning and discussion in between players in the mean time. For that reason most people play 2 or 3 characters (which is allowed as long as they don’t interact). Not only are there human classes, like Fireman (with his trusty Fire Axe!), Cop, Military, Consumer and NecroTech Scientist, but zombie skills, like improved combat through “Vigor Mortis” and the ability to smell which human is hurt more, have their own skill tree.

Also, there is a good balance between humans and zombies. Zombies aren’t that hard to kill, but they can also just keep on getting back up (note: no MMORPG has perma-death). This, at first, seemed counter-intuitive but, since there are no NPC zombies, the sense of there being too many zombies to take out with available resources comes through this. Zombies can be reverted back to human (again, this is a MMORPG, no one is going to play if their characters are always getting permanently fuct), but it takes alot of out of game chatting and searching, a fair amount of effort. I think that’s alot more fair than other MMORPGs where you just lose your stuff and some exp.

And, non-combat classes can gain exp fairly easily through other tasks (healing, tagging buildings with spray paint, extracting zombie DNA and more). That’s refreshing.

The game is generally a round of gathering resources, going out, getting exp and then finding a safe place to recharge your turns, perhaps helping secure the building by barricading the doors, with desks and such, from the zombies outside. The problem is, if zombies know where you are, then you will eventually lose your safe house to them, as they overpower with sheer resilience. Humans are constantly on the run, as they should be.

Take the example of the Sandlerville suburb. Southeast you’ll see the Dowdney Mall, an excellent place to stock up on resources. When my crew started, that’s where we decided to huddle up, along with the masses of other players. This lasted through the weekend but zombies eventually broke in and players are still trying to recover from that one. Now we’re all separated in different safe houses, trying to hook back up, bring our fallen comrades back to the land of the living and take the mall back. There’s an armoury two suburbs south and things look even more grim down there, or so say the reports.

So that’s it, a glimpse into a fairly decent browser game. The problem is, it’s too decent. It’s been getting swamped with traffic and the servers are suffering as a result. Until that’s cleared up, I don’t suggest trying the game out, or at least don’t try to play during the evening (the daytime isn’t too bad). The game was receiving near-daily gameplay updates up until the traffic problems, which means a hiatus until the server can be upgraded and such. This gives me ideas for my own planned project and some reality checks about browser games in general.

Here are the links for the Minibosses and Infantryzone communities where we’re communicating about the game. The latter has extensive gameplay guides.

There’s plenty of validity to this view. But D&D actually tries to cram alot of detail into the system with spells, combat maneuvers (at least in the 3.0 and 3.5 editions), and class abilities. My feeling is that the standard D&D/d20 system has come a long way but is stuck at a crossroads. On one hand it’s straddling a fence between the old amalgam of “sub-systems” (one set of rules for damage, one for spellcasting, one for skills, many for other abilities) and a unified system (saving throws, skills, and attacks all work similarly). On the other hand it’s straddling a fence between a sort of simulationist attention to detail and a quicker, simpler system.

While there’s alot of room for debate I feel there exist game systems which are better at speed and simplicity than D&D/d20. So d20 may as well try to succeed at the more detailed, simulationist approach. It also seems that a few of the existing sub-systems could be unified or more elegantly implimented.

To this end I’d favor a combat system (complicated though it might be) with the following steps:

1. Hit/Miss: Roll one die to determine if the attack hits (also determines if attack hits flesh or armor).
2. Dealing Damage: Roll one or more dice to determine damage (determined by weapon and maybe strength).
3. Modifying Damage: If the attack hit armor damage is reduced. If creature is large damage is reduced (if creature is small damage is increased).
4. Consequences: If any damage gets through the character records this and rolls to see if they pay a consequence.

The existing d20 system covers Dealing Damage adequately, and I covered the Consequences angle in my last entry here. So this time round both Hit/Miss and Modify Damage will be covered.

Since it’s early inception (that I know of) the various incarnations of D&D have treated the damage resistance of armor as a hit-probability modifier under the heading of Armor Class (AC). Under this system the character’s armor either turns away an attack completely or allows the full damage of the blow to harm the character. This kind of “binary result armor” may produce a sort of virtual damage resistance as a certain percentage of attacks on average don’t strike the character.

The problem though is that this is only on average. Averages produce a better approximation when there’s a large pool of data (in this chase attack results) to average together. Large totals of character hit points (as standard D&D typically has at higher levels) mean that it takes more attacks to kill a character, thus producing a better average for attacks and supporting the existing AC system.

But what about characters with few hit points at low levels? Or games which use a non-hitpoint based system (as under Injury & Consequences)?

For example: A character with only a few hit points dons a full suit of plate armor and gets attacked by another character with a dagger. Rolling extremely well on their attack the character with the dagger does full damage against the armored character, killing them quickly… this in spite of the fact that they could not physically have bypassed the armor and the dagger wouldn’t do enough damage to overcome the armor’s hardness rating (amount of damage needed to break it).

The following alternate system is intended to avoid or minimize such quirks:

Dodge

Instead of having Armor Class (AC) characters have a Dodge score. A character’s Dodge is equal to 10+ their Reflex Save. Attack rolls which meet or exceed the defender’s Dodge hit something, although what they hit may be armor.

…

Parry

Instead of Dodging a defending character may make a Parry roll. A Parry roll is basically an attack which does no damage but attempts to deflect an incomming blow. The Parry roll uses the defender’s:

   1d20 + Defender’s Dexterity Bonus + Base Attack Bonus

   (+ additonal modifiers if applicable(1))

If the defender’s roll exceeds that of the attacker then the attack has been successfully turned aside by the defender’s weapon. Otherwise the attack hits some part of the defender’s person, although again it may hit armor.

A Parry roll is usually treated as an attack of opportunity(2) brought on when the defender knows they are being attacked. Thus characters may attempt to Parry as many times in a round as they have attacks of opportunity. A character may choose to forgoe their normal combat action in a round and Parry as many blows as they would normally be able to deal.

Normally Parrying does not work against ranged weapons or when using ranged weapons (alghough if you want to swing your bow to block a sword stroke that might work, not good for the bow though). However, certain Feats(3) may be devised to overcome this deficiency.

(1) — Shields provide a bonus to Parrying.

(2) — “Attacks of Opportunity” are extra chances to attack that characters may recieve if a defender does something to open themselves to attack (such as turning around to flee). Normally characters get one attack of opportunity per round if the opportunity presents it’s self although some Feats allow for additional attacks if multiple opportunities occur. In the case of Parrying the only situation considered an “opportunity” is when the defender is attacked.

(3) — Feats are individually purchased special abilities in the d20 system (rather than skills which increase incrimentally or abilities gained by advancing each level in a character class).

…

Shield Bonuses

Shields provide benefits to parry attempts in two ways. First of all they increase the chance that a Parry attempt will be successful due to a Parry Bonus (added to each Parry roll made). Secondly, some shields increase the number of Parrys that may be made in a round. The benefits in this regard for each type of shield are noted below:

Shield Type
Parry Bonus
Extra Parriesper round
Buckler
+2
+1
Light Wooden
+4
+2
Light Metal
+5
+2
Heavy Wooden
+7
+3
Heavy Metal
+8
+3
Tower
+15
All (and only) frontal attacks

A Tower shield is very effective but only works against frontal attacks. It is also bulky and requires a move-equivelant action to reposition to face a different direction.

Damage Reduction

If attacks hit a character’s armor then the armor stops some portion of the damage from getting through (sometimes all the damage). This is referred to as Damage Reduction (DR).

Although only Armor is covered here there are other phenomena which also provide Damage Reduction, such as thick hide, physical makeup (piercing weapons don’t do much damage to creatures which lack bodily fluids), or sheer size. Damage Reduction from these phenomena “stacks” (ie. “is cumulative”) with DR from armor.

The amound of DR an armor provides is determined by the armor’s style of construction and material. A few kinds of armor may be particularly effective against particular sorts of attacks (such as dragon hide armor).

…

Armor Coverage

A full suit of plate armor protects the entire body against most physical attacks and a hazmat suit protects against most biological or ones. This is simply because, due to their whole-body coverage, nothing can bypass the suit and any attacks must violate the suit’s integrity to get through.

Unfortunately not all armor is so whole-body encompassing. Most suits only cover the vital organs, groin, and maybe the head or arms.

Each type of armor has a Coverage Factor (CF). The following chart relates percentage of the body covered, Coverage Factor, and body parts.

Armor Coverage Factor Chart

Coverage
Factor
% Body
Coverage
Body Parts covered
+1
5%
Hands or face
+2
10%
Entire head, each arm, each leg
+5
25%
Upper torso or lower torso
Total (+20)
100%
Whole Body
/2
n/a
Front or rear surface only (ie. shin guards, chest plate only)

Note: Any combination of armor with a Coverage Factor of +20 or more is considered “full coverage” and automatically applies Damage Reduction without a roll.

…

Combining It All

In combination this is how Dodge/Parry, Coverage Factor, Damage Reduction work:

• If an attack is less than the defender’s Parry roll or Dodge score it misses entirely.
• If an attack is less than the defender’s Parry roll or Dodge score + Coverage Factor then it hits but damage is reduced by the armor’s DR.
• If an attack equals or exceeds the defender’s Parry roll or Dodge Score + Coverage Factor then the attack hits and bypasses the armor’s DR, thus doing full damage to the character beneath.

The following chart sums up the types of armor common in D&D provides DR and CF for each. Assume that monitary costs, arcan spell failure chance, and other factors stay the same as presented in standard d20 documents.

…

Common Armors

Armor Type
Coverage
Factor
Damage
Reduction
Padded
+10
+1
Leather
+10
+2
Studded Leather
+10
+3
Chain Shirt
+15
+4
Breastplate
+12
+6
Splint Mail
+18
+5
Banded Mail
+18
+5
Half Plate
+16
+6
Full Plate
Full (+20)
+6

Padded, leather, and studded leather armors covers the torso only.

A shirt of chain mail covers the whole body except the legs and face.

A breastplate covers the torso, but also has a helmet protecting the head (but not the face) and shin guards protecting the front of the legs.

Splint mail and banded mail cover the whole body except the face and hands.

Half plate covers the whole body except the legs.

Full plate covers the whole body.

There are other things about the D&D/d20 combat system I’m not especially happy with, such as the actions per round allocation. But changes along these lines begin to make some core elements of the system (such as standard class abilities) more difficult to reconcile with each other. So I probably won’t be poking at these for the time being.

But D&D magic system watch out: you could be next.

The idea for today involves changing the system by which damage affects character abilities.

Those familiar with any of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG’s incarnations are also aquainted with the concept of “inflating” hit points. This is the mechanic whereby characters gaining more experience they not only become more skilled but also gain the ability to shrug off more and more injury and damage before becomming incapacitated. Eventually this gets to the point that certain types of high level characters can, unarmored, get hit with a high explosive armor piercing missle and likely walk away.

The official line of reasoning on this is that “hit points” don’t simply represent damage absorption per se, but also sort of skill, luck, and hustle involved in minimizing damage. Unfortunately this rarely seems to be how the concept is used in play and doesn’t explain why it takes so long to naturally “heal” the hit points lost.

Other rules like the “massive damage threshold” mitigate this strangeness in some ways, but often these rules seem more like a patch job than an intuitively obvious and easily remembered part of the game mechanic. And in my experience they’re often forgotten unless convenient.

Within the past few years Wizards of the Coast, the company currently publishing the official D&D line (as opposed to other d20 compatible, non-D&D specific game-lines), put out a book called Unearthed Arcana. Those familiar with the old AD&D game may remember another book by that title. The new (and quite different) version of Unearthed Arcana contains many alternate rules for the D&D classes and systems. It even includes a couple alternatives to regular hit points.

In one alternative, apparently first seen in the Star Wars d20 game, they separate hit points into Wound Points (which don’t increase with level) and Vitality Points (which follow the standard inflation). The idea here being that Vitality Points represent the luck and quick reflexes used to avoid being badly damaged and Wound Points represent actual physical injury. Also Vitality Points recover much more quickly.

I thought this was an ok system as far as it went. Good for “cinematic” combat and high adventure, where the heroes have a good chance of dispatching minor thugs and comming out unscathed. But I was hoping for something with a little more chance of danger.

I’ve never been in serious combat before (unless you count wrestling with siblings at the age of 12 or so), only really seen it in movies, etc. But in my mind it’s rarely a situation where the people involved can simply walk in and know for sure that they’ll easily walk away with a specific level of injury. You could get stabbed in the nads by an expert with a knife, knocked unconscious (but still alive) by a kid taking a lucky swing of the bat, or even (by sheer bizarre luck) survive a moderately close strike by a high explosive armor piercing missile.

Now Unearthed Arcana does also provide another set of rules that does sort of accomplishes this. In UA’s “Injury” system characters who take damage don’t just ignore it or fall comatose (depending on whether or not they’re at 0 hit points), but instead roll a die (singular of dice) with modifiers determined by the amount of damge taken. Bad rolls indicate they die (cease living) or become partially incapacitated. Good rolls indicate they keep going no matter how much damage they’ve taken en total.

This seems to me like a fine solution to the issue except for a couple things. Mainly it’s just that this is a bit more complicated, involves more things to look up and remember and has it’s own fair share of special cases.

There are other alternate systems out there too (the Grim-n-Gritty combat rules by Ken Hood for one), but I’ve decided to make a variant of the “Injury” system mentioned above. Hopefully this will be, if not simpler exactly, at least more straightforward and elegant.

A Trauma Check is a basically a Fortitude Saving Throw made to resist the negative effects of injuries sustained.

The system works like this:

The character makes one Trauma check each time an attack or accident causes them any Damage. Additionally they must make another Trauma check for every full 10 points of Damage recieved in the same attack or accident. The difficulty (DC) of the Trauma check is equal to the total unhealed Damage they’ve ever taken.

For example if a character takes 6 points of Damage from one attack they make one Trauma check. But if they take 10 or 11 points of Damage from one attack they would make two Trauma checks.

If the character passes the Trauma checks there is no change in their condition. However, for each failed Trauma check the character takes (even if the checks are in subsequent rounds) the character’s status descends one step on the following ladder:

Failed Check
Condition
No
Normal
Once
Staggered - Character can only take actions half as often and takes a -4 penalty to all actions.
Twice
Unconscious. - Unaware, no action possible.
Thrice
Dead - Soul departed from body.  Unhealable through the same means as the living.

Rolling 1 on a Trauma check counts as a Failed check, even if the character has enough ranks in their Fortitude Save that they couldn’t normally fail the check.

…

Blood Loss

Characters who are bleeding heavily (usually those who have taken 20 points of damage or more) will continue to take damage automatically at the rate of 1 point every 10 minutes. These characters have the same consequences for failure on a Trauma check as any other character taking injury, but if they succeed on their check their condition stabilizes and they cease taking more Damage due to blood loss.

…

Healing

Healing works the opposite of taking damage. Each day the character heals a little naturally removing 1 point of Damage. Some other forms of healing can remove many points of Damage suddenly.

Each time healing takes place (ie. each incident where a specific amount of Damage has been removed) the character makes a new Trauma check against the total Damage remaining. For every 10 points of Damage healed the character makes another Trauma Check.

If the Trauma checks fail while healing then nothing bad happens. For each Trauma check that succeeds the character improves by one condition (ie. Unconscious to Staggered, or Staggered to Normal).

…

Poison, Disease and Immunity Checks

Poisons and Diseases are much like weapons in that they do Damage and cause progressively worse negative conditions. However, poisons don’t always cause the same negative effects as physical injuries. Some poisons might paralyze the character or render them unconscious or susceptible to suggestion.

Immunity checks are normally used when trying to cope with poison and disease in the same way that they are used against physical injury.

Like weapons some poisons and diseases will cause more damage than others, indicated by damage dice per dose. And while neither poison nor disease normally causes blood loss they do often bring about metabolic deterioration with the same effect. Poison damage is tracked separately from that of physical injury and the two types of damage don’t normally “stack” (get added together) for the purpose of Trauma checks.

…

Taking Damage

Damage dealt by melee attacks or thrown weapons is normally determined by:

   Weapon dice + Attacker’s Strength modifier (if applicable).

   (Most other ranged weapons are similar but lack the Strength modifier.)

The defender may modify this number through Damage Reduction (DR). DR is the number of points subtracted from each attack taken. For most humans starting off the DR is 0. Larger creatures and creatures with naturally tough flesh may have a DR greater than 0.

Small creatures and those with a brittle or weak flesh may actually have a negative DR. Since subtracting a negative number is actually the same as adding it, a negative DR effectively increases the amount of damage a creature takes from an attack.

DR due to size normally affects poisons as well since a small dose of poison is diluted by a larger volume of blood. However diseases normally aren’t affected by DR since the micro-organisms involved multiply within the body.

The following chart indicates the damage reduction a creature recieves based on size:

Size Modifiers Chart

Size
Height/Length
Size DR Modifier
Fine
≤1 In.
-8
Diminuitive
≤1 ft.
-6
Tiny
≤3 ft.
-4
Small
≤5 ft.
-2
Medium
≤7 ft.
0
Large
≤15 ft.
+2
Huge
≤30 ft.
+4
Gargantuan
≤60 ft.
+6
Colossal
>60 ft.
+8

Armor and DR

This idea of “damage reduction” brings up the issue of how armor mitigates the damage dealt by opponents and my discontents with that aspect of the d20 system. Whether there’s any interest or not the next post will probably tackle that whole deal.

• First and foremost is Chinese. Graduating with a degree in Chinese from the University of Maryland qualifies one to do jack shit. None of us are comfortable speaking the language and none of us could read a Chinese newspaper to save our lives. Some of my fellow graduates are getting somewhat international jobs that have some dealings with China, because they’ve got their eye on the cash dollar bill. I need to learn the language. My plan is to go over to Shanghai, China’s largest and fastest going city, the New York of East Asia, and spend 20 hours a week teaching English. This will be enough to keep me living over there and I’ll use the rest of the time learning Chinese, outside of a classroom, the way I did French in Africa.

• Martial Arts. I’m putting Haidong Gumdo on hold until I return from China. By “on hold” I mean that I plan to continue keeping up my conditioning for it, but I don’t plan to progress very much at all. My physical focus for at least the next year will be knife combat. Be it training for knife duels ala. Dune or putting a shiv in someone’s back ala. Riddick, I’ll now be concentrating on training with under a foot’s worth of blade. I have a perhaps marketable invention for knife dueling, which exposure and justification I keep delaying to put here. Now that I’ve mentioned it, I hope that holds me to blogging more soon.

• Video games. Some people play video games as a hobby, others make video games as a career or hobby. Until now I’ve been simply thinking about games as a hobby. This stems from my involvement with a lesser known great of a game called Infantry and my playing a classic great game M.U.L.E.. Multiplayer dynamics intrigue me. I believe I see alot of things that haven’t been done but could also be great. But I’m no programmer and I don’t own a development company. With that I’ve scaled my dreams down to fit to size. Success with the smaller would lead to eventual attempts of the greater. I couldn’t even produce the crap titles with which Grue spends plenty of time. I think I could, however, make a browser game. Again, more on that later.

Those are the main projects for the summer and beyond. Here are the others.

• Music. Attending The Fucking Champs concert inspired me to pick up the guitar again. I have no ambitions but to have fun. So, I bought a new pack of rust resistant strings, given my rust monster complex. I’ve even found a way to extend the life past when the coating wears off. I use a metal cleaner called Mr. Metal, which is a no rub cleaner that I used for blades before trying on guitar strings. Anyway, I’ve started learning stuff fromThe Fucking Am album, but I’m more than open to suggestions as to fun stuff to play, as I’m going to reach a definite ceiling to my ability to play Champs works. Now if only I could find my pedals…

• Fluorecent rocks. New Jersey might suck, but apparently Bear, Loki and Grue are sitting on a gold mine as far as fluorescent rocks are concerned. I think you guys should really “dig in” and start hunting rocks. Are you guys up? As soon as I can contact Chuck Grogan, I’ll have him give us a starter run-down.

So that’s that, an exposé, mainly as a way to hold myself to the projects. You should hear about these in more detail very soon. If not, you guys have official rights to bug me.

For a long time the working title of this game has been FaLoR (Fast & Loose Roleplaying). That’s one of the things I’d like to change at some point in the future. At the time I came up with it I thought it was short and had visual balance. But the more I read it the more it sounds like a cross between Valor and Fallacy, plus it’s got this weird EvErY OtHeR LeTtEr CaPs thing going on that is bugging me a bit.

There’s this concept of why people play RPGs that’s referred to as the GNS model. This stands for Gamist, Narrativist, Simulationist. At The Forge game design forum they have some very picayune definitions for what constitutes each of these categories. Also apparently at The Forge they’re pretty picayune about alot of the details of RPGs, too picayune for an amature like me to desire parsing on any kind of regular basis.

Anyway a bastardized version of what these terms stands for follows:

Gamist — This sort of person is interested in solving problems and puzzles or otherwise “winning” the game and comming out on top in some way.

Narrativist — This person is interested in telling a good story, getting some interesting details in, depth of setting, fleshing out and developing characters, etc.

Simulationist — This person wants the game to accurately model reality. Even if “reality” is a made up universe they will probably be satisfied as long as the game replicates both the harsh and pleasant aspects of that universe with mechanically imposed consistancy.

Of course most players really want a combination of these elements (one reason RPGs are different from wargames or short story writing). And most games include each of the categories to some degree. Still some games satisfy one category more than others.

With regard to this model FaLoR sits pretty firmly in the Narrativist camp. It doesn’t even have a damage resolution system for Bob’s sake, anyone could die at any minute if it seemed appropriate and agreeable to all involved.

Most games I design draw heavily from others that’ve impressed me in the past. Usually during the course of writing about any game material I’ve come up with there’s this little war that goes on in my head. The two combatants are:

A) The feeling that by mentioning all the designers who inspired this work I’m dropping names like a little kid trying to carry 200 lbs. of phone books,

and

B) The desire to avoid the ingratitude and intellectual dishonesty incurred by not citing my sources.

Fortunately I suspect readers here may be unfamiliar with these gods of indepentant game design. So it’s really no immodesty (only inaccuracy) for me to claim that over the course of the last three years or so I’ve born love children to each of them in turn.

octaNe — I mentioned this one in an earlier thread. Although the default setting and alot of the mechanics of FaLoR are completely different from those in octaNe, many of FaLoR’s task resolution ideas and other brass tacks are drawn directly from it. This is to the point that I sometimes fear Jared A. Sorensen will break down my door one day and demand comeuppance or something. But from what I can tell he isn’t exactly the sort of guy to demand comeuppance unless maybe it involves a steel cage match with masked luchadores. And probably FaLoR is different enough that my fears of copyright infringement are unfounded in this case anyway.

Donjon — Another little narrativist masterpiece, this one by Clinton R. Nixon. The main idea I scooped from Donjon was how he handled the use of character’s expendable resources. In all a Donjon’s a pretty cool idea for a game. Only drawbacks being a mechanic that involves a butt-load of d20s and (apparently) a somewhat intense and competative form of narration between the GM and player. This second aspect isn’t necessarily so bad, but not exactly what I was looking for.

Risus — A really simple little RPG by S. John Ross. Although I’m not the greatest fan of ‘dice pool’ mechanics like this game uses, John’s brevity (it’s only 6 pages long) and the intuitive “Cliches” system of character definition have been things I sought to emulate in my recent attempts at designing universally adaptable games.

:::

So, where to next with this thing?

For one thing I’d like to throw in a little art-work here and there to make it more attractive. This is something I was hoping Loki could help me out with, but other submissions are also welcome. Since I’m not planning on charging for this thing in the forseeable future it’s just pro bono I’m afraid, though artists will get credited in there somewhere.

Also the name of this game could definitely use an update. Originally I picked FaLoR to suggest something simple and easy to use, but at this point I’m not so concerned about that. A name that suggests narration or telling stories might be nice, but “Storyteller” and “Saga” are already taken and “Talespinner” just brings to my mind pictures of Baloo in an airplane.

So suggestions for a new name are welcome. But please steer clear of stupid junk like “Dookie Fart Pants, the RPG”. Try for something short (maybe one to three words or sylables) and evocative sounding that rolls off the tongue.

Any suggestions about the mechanics welcome. General criticism is fine too, prefferably constructive though.

Also alternate rules, specific settings, or other add-ons are encouraged. I’ve got a couple of my own in mind, but in the tradition of Risus I’m not above linking to other folks adaptations of the game.

But first, of course, the digression:

As mentioned briefly in Roleplayer Blues and the music review I had some interest in the X-Box rpg Fable. Really I think I just liked the commercials, the idea of a character getting lighter or darker, customizing and growing and becomming part of some epic story. And, let’s face it, I really just like the word “Fable” (It’s got this short, simple, homespun and evocative sound to it like “milk” and “hearth”… and “home” and “spun” for that matter).

Apparently I mentioned this once in passing to She Dragon, probably circa June 2004. Sometime around the time that She started getting a whole bunch of babysitting gigs to suppliment her income as a women’s gym daycare worker. Only at Christmas would I find out that this extra work was done on my behalf to obtain not only the game mentioned earlier, but also to fund the purchase of an X-box to play it on. To make this more of a labor of love it turns out that 3D movement games give She Dragon headaches so it’s not like She’s about to enjoy the gift herself any time soon.

At least She has the compensation of my own meager holiday gift, and the fact that She actually does enjoy the company of small children anyway.

…

As part of the deal with buying an X-box at that location you actually got three games for a lower price so we also have Mortal Kombat n ( :: n = some integer, probably between 0 and 5, that I’m too lazy to get up and look at) and Star Wars Battlefront.

Star Wars is a game I imagine would probably be pretty neat played on a network with some other folks. Unfortunately my ass is too cheap to pay for such a hookup so I can only tell you about solo and split screen gameplay, and even here my view is pretty unenlightened by lack of experience with other similar games.

I mean, what can I say? It’s better than Duke Nukem? Better than all the Dooms I’ve played? Of course it is, but there are a ton of run-around-and-kill-things-in-3D games now, so those kind of comparisons don’t really mean too much.

I’ll say these things though:

For my untrained hands the controls were a little complicated at first. Those X-box controllers have alot of buttons and triggers and the games generally take for granted that you will quickly master the ability to press each and every one of them with excellent coordination.

Fortunately, now the student has just about become the master. I can strafe rebel scum with fire from my standard issue Imperial blaster while nimbly dodging many of the incomming shots from his anarchist “light side” buddies.

Basically there are two different time periods you can play in: Historical (circa the Clone Wars) and Empire/Rebellion era.

Within each context you can play one of two sides: Rebels or Empire, Droids or Clones.

And within each context there are also several different planetary scenarios you can fight in. These you can look up yourself if curious. There are more than ten, I’m pretty sure.

You also end up fighting (or tripping over) variuos other factions in a couple scenarious: Tuscan raiders, Amadala’s house-guard, frickin’ Jar-Jar Binks’s people, ewoks, and jawas.

A friend and I played it a few times around here and have pretty much figured out that, with a couple exceptions (ie. the Droidica) and some slight variations in weaponry, all the sides in the conflict are actually about the same, they just look different. This is probably to be expected so that one side doesn’t have a gawdawful advantage from the start.

At the same time though the scenario really sort of limits who you get to pick as your troops. For one thing you can’t pick any of the other factions, so you can’t cheer on your Tuscan raiders and jawas as they drive out the offworld menace and restore a free Tattoine for all swadled peoples. Similarly you can’t have people from different eras fight, so no droids facing off against the rebel alliance or any of that shenanigans.

But there are a couple bright spots. With split screen you and another player can either play on the same side or against.

And, you can either choose to have your guy be either a 1st person or 3rd person shooter. Early on I switched to 3rd person and have never looked back (Figuratively that is. Literally my guy looks behind himself constantly every time he starts trying to take over a command post.).

Which brings to mind another aspect of the game: The point of it.

Theoretically on some planets there are goals you need to accomplish: Sheild generators to be taken out or defended, etc. However, from what I can tell actually accomplishing these goals gains you nothing. The game normally ends up being a war of attrition seeing which side can eliminate all of the other’s soldiers or overtake all of the command posts first (usually the former). Additionally it’s really tough to accomplish the stated goals in most cases since the target facilities are usually re-spawning points and by the time you’ve destroyed the target you’ve had to totally annilate the opposing army anyway.

Ultimately I don’t think Battlefront was a bad game, but just seemed it could somehow have been made slightly cooler and more flexible somehow.

Battlefront includes a little trailer for the Star Wars Republic Commandos game that looks pretty cool though. From the little previews I’ve seen Commandos seems to stress actual individual and small group tactical effort rather than the “put 400 opposed troops in a giant terrarium and shake it to make ‘em fight” approach that Battlefront appears to.

Get spelunker.mid here

Some of these people do actually seem to be decent, well balanced folks. But when I say “good people” here I am of course using this phrase ironically or at least as flattery. I mean “good people” in the same sense that western Europeans of centuries past referred to the fairies as “the good people”. Basically in that many are wise or impressive, but also strange or unkenable and likely as not alien to the narrator’s cosmology and morality. The sort of creatures that should be referred to as “good” out of politeness lest they take a malign interest in the you and curdle your milk or worse.

These good people keep me engaged with their threads on roleplaying matters. But after awhile the really compelling threads stop coming so I’m forced to turn to my own devices and get back to the actual RPG design that I claim to be some kind of minor expert in.

Everyone in the RPG community is doing something with RPGs. The real trend-setters actually invent their own games with innovative mechanics, settings, and/or themes from scratch. Other people memorize everything they can about a given bunch of settings or systems and become major authorities on these matters. Still others become good Game Masters (GMs… or Dungeon Masters, DMs) able to share the gift of collective storytelling (or whatever) and make it enjoyable for others.

But not me. If the great RPGrs are like the Ancient Greeks then I’m more like the Romans (except without the expansive empire): Rather than mastering the classics or inventing something new I generally just take existing things and modify them to suit my needs. Mostly I find game mechanics and such that have always bugged me and try to tinker them into a shape that makes me happier. My other great time-consumer in RPGs is finding a game system that I sort of like and trying to convert my favorite settings to that system.

This is a time consuming process that is sort of rewarding in the short run, but not much in the long run. The problem being I find myself alternately a pawn of zeitgeist (among other fancy words) and apathy. If something is cool at the moment I start working on it, but it’s soon forgotten when the new shine wears off and I realize that no one cares about it anyway.

This guy named Jared A. Sorensen came up with a game awhile back called octaNe. The default setting for octaNe is a sort of crazy post-apocalyptic western world, something like a mixture of Gamma World and the movie Repo Man (It would also probably be pretty close to Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone if Spacehunter had more capuchin monkeys and heavy metal guitarists.). I always pictured the octaNe setting as something Loki might get into if he was still playing RPGs heavily these days. But in any case I’m non-plussed by the default octaNe setting, I only like the mechanics really. So there you have it.

My current project is trying to convert all my favorite settings to the octaNe system. In this case “all my favorite settings” seems to include all settings which are past their prime and whose game lines are now out of print if they were ever popular in the first place. I’d like to apply the octaNe’s mechanic to:

Mage: The Ascension — The Mage setting is one in which reality-altering magicians live in a darkly modern world trying to get their personal projects done while contending with a variety of dangerous and annoying oppositions.

What kind of opposition? Well, since their world-views contrast with the predominant one the magic they work causes dangerous backlashes which could easily maim or kill them if they’re not careful. Also, the active agents of the modern world-view (ominously called “the Technocracy”) would rather not have necromancers, hermetic wizards, and mad scientists wandering the streets and so pose a constant threat. And to top it all off there’s personal vendettas, demonic forces, and Things Man Was Never Meant To See™ kicking around as well. All honest fun really.

This game was one of the more popular ones in White Wolf’s “World of Darkness” (WoD) line. Not quite as popular as Vampire: The Masquerade, probably because it didn’t have quite the degree of gothy angst.

Changeling: The Dreaming — Characters in this game are sentient dream entities who possess human hosts and try to deal with living in two worlds simultaneously. They have to deal with court politics (blah), a force of dreariness called “Banality” (blah), and a myriad of awful creatures and forces summoned up from humanity’s collective subconsciousness (yah!). In it’s day this game was not very popular and was derided for many reasons, not least among them:

• The book had color pictures. Seriously. For people weaned on White Wolf’s other angsty black and white games the color pictures made the tone seem too light-hearted and cheery. It didn’t help that about half the pictures were “cute” by anyone’s standard. Heck, the dancing bear early on just about put me off my feed.

• The setting was kind of complicated. It involves a world where reality has two layers which are perceived simultaneously. For me this was a cool feature, but for quite a few it was just another confusing aspect of things. The complications were somewhat increased by the inclusion of many nit-picky details and mechanics of how these setting elements worked.

• The theme was unappealing. For one thing the protagonists of the game are “fairies”, a word which only has negative connotations in modern slang, and even when used correctly conjures images of cuteness or at least hazy flower childy-ness. To make matters worse the protagonists are more or less constantly threatened by a force of “uncreativity” which will ultimately tear them apart. Since most people get into RPGs as an escapist activity this does not endear it in their eyes. Ironically this aspect of the game makes it among the most tragic in the WoD line, but people already scared off by the color pictures are unlikely to notice that.

But anyway I still like it to this day, so in for system conversion it goes.

Dragonstar — This was a setting for the new d20 D&D system. Over all I like it. There are some little quibbles I have with D&D and it’s associated mechanics which I might get into at a different time, but for the most part I’m satisfied with it.

The premise of Dragonstar is “what would happen if D&D took place in space, in an otherwise scientifically plausible universe”. Old gamers may remember Spelljammer, an earlier attempt at AD&D in space (which by my reckoning sucked a mean ass). The main difference is that Spelljammer came up with a crazy fantasy-magic space through which magical sailing ships traveled, whereas Dragonstar assumes a relatively normal space-opera universe where D&D magic and races just happen to exist.

This one I’m just converting for “everything and the kitchen sink” thoroughness.

And there are other settings I’d like to do also. Maybe a superheros setting along the lines of Mystery Men or The Tick. And after reading this old out of print book GURPS Ice Age I’ve always wanted to do something neolithic or paleolithic. Other times I think it’d be neat to play Fable as a pen and paper RPG.

But all of these run into the same problem: once they’re completed, if they ever are, who will play them? GMing is not something with which I have much experience and few people I know seem interested in any of the settings mentioned above. Heck, all of them are out of print and thus waning toward obscurity.

Today I press onward into the gloom with my conversion of Mage: the Ascension into octaNe mechanics: Rage! Rage, against the dying of the light!

We all loved it when Wolfenstein 3D came out, followed by Doom 2, finally allowing us to shoot people in 3 dimentions. Such a revolution in gaming has been followed by, well, it hasn’t been followed by anything but the same. The recent “revolutionary” releases of Doom 3, Half Life 2 and Halo 2 have shown us that not a goddam thing has changed in recent gaming except for graphics.

To illustrate my point, here’s an anecdote: Bear and I borrowed Hordak’s Xbox for a couple days just to play the original Halo. I thought to myself, “Oh, cool, with 2 players cooperating, sitting right next to each other, this could lead to really good teamplay.” This image was quickly shattered as the height of teamplay became Bear yelling “GRENADE!”, me fumbling with tunnel vision to find where on the ground he threw it and, a couple seconds later, taking the full blast from under my feet.

This is the frustrating thing about first person shooters, yet it brings up a more fundamental issue about video games and games in general. All games are designed to simulate something and make it “easier” than before. Now, the sense of “easier” here means alot of things, including less expensive, less dangerous, less tiring, quicker or just possible in the first place.

Consider sports for a second. These are physical games that simulate combat to some degree. Boxing, wrestling, rugby and football are more direct in that effect but even badminton and swimming involve physical competition with a declared loser, and losing symbolizes death. Sports as competition invoke physical aspects of parties and declares winners, usually without any necissary harm to anyone involved. This, less dangerous, is one sense of “easier” stated above.

Back to video games, they simulate taking on challenges that no one is ever up to. Shooting guns, flying planes or slaying dragons are all less expensive, easier and, in the case of the dragons, only possible in the first place through video games. Mario and Luigi can jump forward and land a few steps behind. The dude from Grand Theft Auto can steal cars with the press of a button and the player at home really doesn’t get arrested. That’s not to say that everything in a video game is easier than anything in life. It’s that the parallels should be easier. Here’s a checklist for first person shooters and how they compare to real life.

• Shooting a gun = easier, less expensive, less dangerous
• Movement = quicker, easier, less tiring
• Being on a space station, fighting aliens = only possible through games
• The ability to glance down at your feet, taking in 180 degree peripheral vision = COMPLETELY NON-EXISTANT

This is exactly what’s wrong with first person shooters. Until this is seriously addressed, there will be no more “revolutionizing” of first person shooters, unless you’re the kind that counts graphical facelifts.

What I’ve been waiting for since soon after I got a computer is finally here: We can now play M.U.L.E. on the internet. M.U.L.E. is renown with gamers and game developers alike for its non-zero sum game strategy and simple interface. M.U.L.E. pits 4 players in a Monopoly-like experience that simulates planet colonization, dealing with economic principles such as supply and demand, price theory, economies of scale, learning curve theory of production, diminishing returns and more. Now keep in mind that M.U.L.E.‘s interface only includes Atari joystick controls, 1 control stick and 1 button, meaning no keyboard to actually input numbers, but it still manages to handle a complex economic production and trade system. Also keep in mind that multiplayer games with multiple levels of interaction came decades ahead of its time with M.U.L.E. in 1983. Expect more on the game itself later.

An online friend from a M.U.L.E. forum put some time and effort in and figured out how to work an Atari emulator, Atari800Win, using Kaillera, a net connection system, to play M.U.L.E. over the nets. The end result is a zip of all the needed files that’s under a meg large and a budding online community that we are trying to expand. Notable is also that it’s possible to play with all 4 human players, which is exicting since the less AI in the game, the more unpredictable the games get.
Of course this is only for Windows machines, so we’ll have to see if we can get this working with any other OS.

Level 5
Level 6
Final Fight with Lucifer

Apparently it sends you to a second quest cause the whole thing was an illusion. Not much changes except the red devils get 2 shots instead of one, which is very important to level 3.

1st level with commentary

How to kill those red devils

2nd level with commentary

3rd level with commentary

The bitch is that he makes it look so easy. Try it yourself if you haven’t lately.

More to come.

kareshi is mostly known for his piano renditions of vintage Nintendo tunes.