I have a beef with chonky source books that say ‘changelings do this’, and ‘always describe the traps, don’t just say 1D6 trap-damage’, and then expecting the reader to create the world in adherence to these principles.

“How about you do your job and write this into the adventure modules?”, I find myself thinking. “How about you stop telling me that every chronicle needs a theme and actually put one into the published chronicles, White Wolf?”¹

The Problem

I just wanted to rock up to the table and start the game, but the DM had other ideas. He wanted all of us to write a character back-story. Having three jobs at the time, I didn’t feel enamoured with my homework. The little story meant a hurdle to jump over to get to the actual game.

But let me back-up and take the hurdles from the start. The first hurdle is reading the campaign notes (otherwise the character’s background would make no sense), the second is writing the thing, and the third comes when the DM finally reads one story per player and attempts to minimally reconfigure the established world to allow for the backstory.

Game designers talk about balancing powers far more than airtime. In fact, I’ve not heard anything about balancing airtime in some years.

Balancing power restricts stories. We’d have to class Buffy the Vampire Slayer as ‘unbalanced’, even if all characters receive equal airtime in an episode, with equal decision-making abilities.

Balancing power demands we cross-compare making a source of light to inflicting a wound on someone. It’s a fool’s errand!

For anyone making an RPG system, I recommend the following systems/ patterns.

One Roll Per Action

If Alice’s PC wants to kick down the door, and Alice rolls a ‘5’, then the roll is ‘5’ for everyone. If Alice’s character has a +2 Bonus then the total would be ‘7’, and if another character has a +4 Bonus, then their total would be ‘9’. But nobody rolls again.

This cuts out a dull minute, while various players try to roll the same action.

Every time I find some interview with an RPG creator, I notice some trickery, or perhaps confusion. The presenter brings up a question about how they make their RPGs, and the answer explains how they make money. There’s nothing wrong with having a job, but how a woodcarver carves wood isn’t the same as how they market their carvings. And the question of ‘will this make money?’, has nothing to do with ‘how do we make a kick-ass RPG?’.

“I’m doing open source”, I said to myself, in a sensible internal-monologue voice. “I should pull from more open source creators”, I concluded with naive hopes, and then I downloaded all of the onepage dungeon entries.

As it turns out, most were not compatible with the GPL, because they did not have an up-to-date open source licence. “Nevertheless”, I sighed, many days later, after finding all the GPL-compatible dungeons, “at least I have these few projects”.

The time has come to extend the Bluff System.

Effects

The exact effects would depend on various Skills and Attributes. Possible pre-written effects would include:

• Knock someone off balance (-3X to their next roll)
• Gut-punch (-2X to all rolls for the rest of the scene)
• Bone-breaker (-X to all rolls, until they can heal)
• Ram (opponent is thrown a few steps in a direction)
• Foot-smash (-4 penalty to movement, -1 to everything else)

…and another list for spells.

The old A,D&D Ravenloft modules were some cheesy shite. Even the most sullen and macabre Goth in Gotham couldn’t extract a nugget of honest fear from the campy Hammer Horror rip-offs. But we loved them. Why?

Ravenloft began with Dracula-but-with-hitpoints, then added wagons of gypsies carrying plot, Frankenstein’s monster off the Sea of Sorrows by Lamordia. Adventure modules featured encounters in a crypt with spooky skeletons and D4 HP bats, followed up by werewolves which were invulnerable to everything except magic. How did anyone enjoy themselves?

A vision came to me of a perfectly tactical RPG system, and then I realized it was worthless, because tactical RPGs are tacky.

This perfectly tactical system could be memorized in minutes, and let you play without any board or counters. Skilled players would do well, unskilled players would do badly. Players would represent stats and equipment with little boons and penalties to the system, letting someone with less skill gain an upper hand, but only a little. Supremely skilled players would still win against someone with better stats, because perfectly tactical systems do not use luck.

Linear dungeons, where players see room 1, then room 2, all in order, can feel constraining.

Dungeon: any location in an RPG scenario with details of opportunity and danger.

Jaquaysing: to make a dungeon non-linear, so players must select which paths their characters take.

The ‘how’ falls directly out of the in-world ‘why?’. Why would anyone live in a series of meandering, looping, hallways? Answering that question shows you where to put loops in a dungeon.