A random RPG mechanic popped fully-formed into my head, so now it will pop into yours.

The player first states what the character will do:

• I cut the heads off three goblins.

• I stab him in the neck.

…and the opponent makes a counter-proposal.

• I shoulder-barge a bandit, and throw him into the river.
  • Or he could duck, grab your legs, and throw you into the river!

Only one of these things will actually happen. A single roll of the dice decides.

My character was an elvish paladin. Coming from the ancient world of A,D&D, with its racial alignments, I still thought of D&D elves as ‘Chaotic Good’. The unusual image of a law-focussed elf made me wonder how someone would approach a law-abiding philosophy if they came from a society of well-meant maniacs, libertarians, and hippies (at least that’s how I picture an elvish settlement).

The GM gave us the mission:

Fancy a game of football on Saturdays? I mean all Saturdays. Every one, for the next few months. We need you to join a pivotal part of the game.

This is you. This is how you sound when you ask people to play D&D.

You can’t miss one game, or we’ll have to call the whole thing off for that week and no-one will be able to play football. Can you make it? (forever?)

Read More…

It’s hard to remember all those little things mid-game, so I’m thinking of making a LaTeX footnote for stories, which mentions a random very-normal-thing.

• Three young students, complaining about the mosquitoes.
• Retired accountant, walking his dog at 5am because he cannot sleep.
• Traffic jam made by two German tourists - the light is stuck on red.
• A trucker carrying toilet paper struggles to stay awake.
• Polish hotel worker, just off the late shift, reading Lovecraft by streetlight as they walk.
• In the basement-level window, a student studies art history while comedy reruns play on the TV behind.
• Three sober women, back from a club where they deal drugs.

The notes would just lie there, at the bottom of the page, waiting to be used as the tiniest anecdote when narrating a journey from A to B. They exist so the storyteller’s eye can sweep them up at a glance, and discard them just as quickly, or let them fester in the subconscious for when they’re needed to craft an unexpected scene.

Listen, engines and all that don’t matter, as long as it works. It’s the person driving the car you have to worry about. If the driver’s a drunken lunatic, then driving the best care in the world won’t help.

This nonsense wouldn’t usually fly, but somehow it’s become a trained response to anyone discussing problems or fixes in RPG systems.

You don’t care about how the washing machine works until it breaks down. You don’t care how, but everyone cares that it works.

I love the notion of OSR books - the bare minimalism, the daring reinvention and questioning of schemas and tropes. So here are my musings on some OSR-style mechanics.¹

Goals

• like old D&D
• don’t fill the character sheet with 1,000 special skills
• short rules
• lethal game-play, forcing players to be clever

Why HP?

If we’re going to go full-on minimalist, recycling is the way! Instead of tracking HP, we could just as well re-use Attributes as a resource which could be depleted.

I sometimes feel that collections can imply something shameful, and it’s especially potent in RPGs. It has something to do with wanting to horde, rather than use; to own rather than do. I can’t fully articulate the feeling, but it has something to do with one thing coming from on high as the ‘definitive’ idea, the ‘canonical’ item, idea, or procedure, which then makes everything else wrong in comparison.

I’ve decided BIND will never be a collector’s item, and I’ve made sure of it.

When designing Fenestra, I noticed it had no magical universities. I really mean ’noticed’, rather than ‘stipulated’, or ‘invented’.

People think that if anything’s possible at the start, then it’ll all be possible later. Options ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ are each possible, so perhaps we might select option ‘A’, and later ‘B’. But the fact that ‘A’ is possible, and ‘B’ is possible, does not mean that ‘A & B’ is a possibility.

Ronald Knox wrote ten rules on how to avoid ruining a murder mystery with an unsatisfying solution. They apply very well to writing and running RPG modules, with a little alteration.

And just like any module or murder mystery, I’m going to start with a problem, then undress it slowly.

How to Ruin a Story

Suppose your last three sessions have felt like a mini-campaign, bursting with mystery and possibilities.

RPG dungeons often presume a lot of separation between rooms. Anyone starting a fight in this dungeon would immediately tip off all creatures. We can excuse our way around it with oozes, deaf goblins, et c., but it’s a heavy restriction that seems to receive less attention than it should.

It also seems odd to find enemies separated. Why does Keraptis, in White Plume Mountain, have all of his minions waiting in different rooms with one magical item each? Why not have them together?