Parallel actions speed up resolution in a way nothing else ever could.

5 Players vs 10 Bandits

Look at how the table acts, focussing for a disturbing moment on the players, rather than characters.

Standard One-at-a-Time Initiative

The GM calls for initiative:

1. Alice, Bob, Charlie, Drake, and Emily roll Initiative.
   • The GM either adopts a new initiative system (we now have two!) or rolls ten dice and records every single one.
2. Brief intermission while people sort who goes first
3. Drake attacks a bandit.
4. Drake rolls Damage.
5. Alice attacks a bandit.
6. Alice rolls Damage.
7. Charlie attacks a bandit (miss).
8. A bandit attacks Charlie.
9. GM rolls Damage.
10. A bandit attacks Alice (miss).
11. A bandit attacks Alice.
12. GM rolls Damage.
13. A bandit attacks Drake (miss).
14. GM rolls Damage.
15. A bandit attacks Charlie (miss).
16. Bob attacks a bandits.
17. Bob rolls Damage.
18. A bandit attacks Bob (miss).
19. Emily attacks a bandit (miss).
20. A bandit attacks Bob (miss).
21. A bandit attacks Drake (miss).

In engineering, this is referred to as a ‘complete shitshow’. We’re clearly going to die before reaching the end of this combat.

I have a collection of images without any copyright. I suspect a lot of people who write books which should have pictures do the same thing.

Searching various images for the right types of images is boring. Collecting these images is boring (right click, save, copy author name, paste author name into directory, move image to directory, copy image name…). Sifting through these images is also extremely boring.

It’s time to get organized.

Christer Enfors at Hexed Press created a procedure for generating hex maps.

It uses the basic notion of altitude to make hexes each have a similar altitude to the next hex. The result is that mountains tend to be next to mountains or hills, and hills might generate a forest as the next hex. The entire thing results in a more natural feel than a completely random hex map.

However, it struggles with rivers. The first problem is, there are no rivers. The next problem is that if we add a river, we would either have to modify a lot of existing hexes (as our new river floods through them) or have the river end in a dead-end stump all too often.

Waves of scepticism about the standard fantasy notion of ‘racial languages’ - i.e. languages tied to a particular race - have been building and crashing. Having one language per region, instead of one language for all dwarves, seems much more sensible. And how could all the dwarves in the world speak ‘dwarvish’? Shouldn’t there be many dwarven languages? But I don’t think these objections work.

Different Walks of Life

I have a heavy suspicion that people who think that languages divided across racial lines look ridiculous have fallen afoul of mixing ‘fantasy races’, and ‘human races’. Thinking of human ‘races’ as having in-built languages would, of course, look ridiculous. But a ‘fantasy races’, has about the same relationship to ‘human races’ as ‘gorge’ (the depression in the ground) and ‘gorge’ (meaning to eat too much). They have a clear connection, but they’re not the same thing. A fantasy race is quite real (at least within the fiction of the fantasy world), and this real division entails living separately from the other races.

Chekov’s gun poses a real threat to some games.

If a group playing Vampire: The Masquerade (‘VtM’) encounter a Ravnos, spinning illusions, and confusing mortals, then the next time they hear about unusual events, they will assume that the Ravnos did this. Clearly - the Ravnos is part of the plot! After all, VtM draws heavily from literature; or rather, it draws a lot from the idea-spaces of people who like to analyse literature while telling you that they analyse literature.

They say you have to playtest, but they forget that I’m a lazy man, so when it came to travel rules, I didn’t feel like simulating a bunch of journeys. So it’s time to get the computer to do the work for me.

Setup

An encounter roll occurs every 1D6 intervals in BIND (where an interval = ‘one quarter of the day’ = ‘6 hours’).

Travel rates are around 10 miles per day for a caravan on a road, so to travel 50 miles, the troupe will need 5 days (i.e. 20 intervals). In bash, we can represent these rules as so:

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?)

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.