Every fantasy work has two characters: magic and the landscape.
Landscape
In Earthsea, the water compartmentalizes the locations.
Here, Ged grew up.
There, he learnt about magic.
And every time we want to know more about this land, water provides punctuation to the story and isolates the area.
Middle Earth has a very different personality.
The wide land demands horses, or a lot of walking.
Tolkien goes into depth in every chapter of every book, uncovering new aspects of this or that part of the land;
here we find gnarled trees, there mountains, later will be a rocky landscape.
Post a link to the rules pdf (but assume nobody will read it)
Get snacks (or make dahl if you’re feeling fancy - everyone loves dahl)
Put water and glasses on the table
Dice, rubbers (or ’erasers’ in American), pencils, and coins
Plan smoke-breaks (even if you don’t have smokers)
Intro
Hide the beers until the game’s started.
Beers mid-game works fine.
Pre-game beers do not.
Let people chat a bit, then put a blank character sheet in their hands.
Once someone takes the character sheet in hand, they know the time to start has arrived.
My recent background-watching videos covered the Old School Renaissance (‘OSR’), which looks to revive a lot of old-school D&D-style play.
I started with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, so a renaissance intrigued me.
Strange Premises
While I’ve not heard of some of the more egregious rules returning (thieves tracking 10% chance to ‘walk silently’, level-caps on everyone but humans), the games seem to preserve far more than they should of A,D&D, and the like, including Vancian magic, and classes.
I’ve made an alternative World of Darkness system, where players enter Contests instead of Combat.
Here are the highlights from a campaign.
Setting
In Belgrade (in Hungary), in the year 1130 AD, four people fell to the Cainite embrace in a church, and were forced to survive the political machinations of the existing power structures.
Faster Fights
Fights resolved much faster than standard White Wolf battles.
Almost every roll of the dice resulted in a new development - enemies would never simply dodge or soak a roll, which meant that no roll felt wasted.
Systems should represent genres, and some do this better than others.
System Excellence
Dr Who
One of the Dr Who RPGs (I forget which) contained an absolutely genius initiative system.
The initiative turn-order was:
Speak
Run
Use an item
Attack
This clearly produces unrealistic results.
The system cannot allow anyone to shoot someone before they flee, or flip a switch before someone finishes a monologue.
But it represents Dr Who amazingly well.
Radio dramas often have their characters speak so as to indicate their actions.
Does anyone have an extra blanket? If I get cold I’ll wake up with a bad back.
Hearing this, we know
The group is sleeping outside,
the speaker is old, and
the speaker wants to sleep.
I wonder if the group adopting this habit might enhance games.
Action
Statement
My character goes to go to a tavern
“Is anyone else thirsty?”
I hit it with my axe
“How do goblins like the taste of axe?!”
I search for clues
“Take the west wall, I’ll check this one. You never know what you’ll find if you look hard enough”
I follow the bandit tracks immediately
“Looks like fresh tracks. Let’s go!”
I loot the bodies
“Gimme a hand rolling this guy over, there’s got to be something in their pockets if we look hard enough”
I tried this for one game, and it didn’t take.
Perhaps it would work better with other players.
Perhaps I should have put in some XP reward for a couple of games, just to get into the swing of it.
As established in the previous article, the World of Darkness’ combat system sucks.
But the right system can make everything better.
(If you want to skip the system explanations, you can just download the revised White Wolf pdf)
No Combat Emphasis
First off, I’m not making a combat system.
The World of Darkness deserves something better.
But I am absolutely binning the old combat system.
There it rests, in the bin, with a couple of ashtrays emptied on top, and stale beer-juice festering with it at the bottom of the bag.
White Wolf games always mentioned how small their system was - roll a number of D10’s equal to your Wits + Athletics (or whatever), and count all the dice which land on 6 or more.
The player then reads the dice like so many runes, and the final result would yield detailed information.
0 successes means failure, or at least no progress.
1 success meant you fixed the car enough to get to the next town.
2 successes means the car works, but imperfectly.
3 successes were just ‘success’.
4 successes suggested it was better working than before the fix.
It works eloquently, and the constant demand for interpretation really helped drive stories forward.