RPGs have dungeons…well more often those dungeons are caves…no, actually RPG plots often feature caves, which we call ‘dungeons’. Anyway, these caves look rather strange, because people began drawing them on graph paper, and later they made sure to fit the entire map onto a single square at the top of a page.

RPG caves look very strange, yet disappointingly bland. But I’ve been thinking…

Depths and Turns

Caverns could present the same kinds of challenges as wilderness survival, but very different in the details.

I’ve rather gone off the notion of ‘collectibles’. Collectible RPG books are special because they can’t meet the demand. We can’t all have a copy of those original D&D books, or whatever swanky thing White Wolf brought out with the expensive full-page art.

In this vein, I’ve been making the campaign book - ‘Missions in Maitavale’ - less collectable while I rework it.

• All copies are available forever, so anyone can have any version at any time.
• It is not a pdf, the pdf file you download simply lets you get the book by printing it.
• All monster statblocks have boxes next to them. If a room has ‘4 Goblins’ with ‘5 HP’, then there will be a goblin stat-block with 4 rows of 5 boxes, so the Judge can easily score through the HP as the goblins die, and I encourage them to use a pen.
• I’m going to leave space at the bottom of every page for the Judge to take notes.¹
• And every handout now sits inside the book.

That last one took more hours than it should have. I had to tell LaTeX to remove the page numbers, then to clear everything to the next right-hand page (meaning ’the next page with an odd number). But I’d just removed the page numbers, so LaTeX fell over and shat the bed, while screaming something about \hboxes.

Why is it always the same old elves, and hobbits, and +1 swords? Can’t people come up with anything different?

…I hear this every so often, and I wonder if any of these people actually pick up the myriad gonzo-RPGs with novel races (or at least ’novelty races’). Of course, many have the extra barrier of 40 pages of history of random races - bird-people, lizard-knights, and other first attempts at casting the illusion of a full culture, fit for a gaming world.

System

Everyone who says Mąrk Bórg is plug-and-play is partly right. It still has a lot of steps, though I don’t recall all of them.

Successes

1. Roll name? (is it optional?)
2. Select class (or not)
3. Roll your 3 stats (they go from -2 to +2)
4. Do something with omens (what exactly are they?)
5. Weapons table
6. Armour table

So we have about 6 page-flips, with a brief index hidden at the back. Everything about this game is brief.

What’s great about dice-pools is meaningful results, all the time. You’ll struggle to get that with a D20.

Listen…

Example 1: Good Chances

The party ranger wants to navigate through the forest. Forests are dangerous, and he might fail, but his bonuses mean he succeeds on the roll of 3 or more.

A 90% chance of success makes the roll a little less interesting, unless the party stand a lot to lose. Even then, this roll will produce the result of ‘business as usual’ 90% of the time.

There are a limited number of ways one can write an adventure. Let’s start with the famous railroad model:

Choo Choo!

The tell-tale signs you’ll find here are sentences like ‘when the PCs reach the village’, or ‘when the PCs find the item’. Basically, anything beginning with ‘when the PCs…’, because that’s making an assumption about the players’ decisions, and that assumption will push the GM into making sure the PCs follow through with the suggestion.

A lot of the motivation for writing this book was because A,D&D never seemed to live up to its promises. The newer editions were a clear improvement, but never seemed to release the original game’s shackles.

An image of burly men, bursting through a door, ready to destroy anything in their path covers the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. This was a clear example of antagonistic NPCs, out for blood; but couldn’t it just have easily been a barbaric adventuring party?

Last year, I got excited about the idea of tracking realworld time over downtime. Shortly after I implemented it in my campaign, and it served the entire table, very well.

The Perspective Flip

Real-time RPGs look strange if you look at them from the wrong end. Let me turn it around for you:

1. The players are just anyone who turns up on the day. This could be 3 or 6 players - we don’t know who’s free.
2. As a result, we’ll have to wrap each adventure up on the night, because someone might not make the next session.
3. Time can become inconsistent over the course of sessions - different PCs arriving in different areas at different times threatens to make some deeply inconsistent and warped narratives.
4. We can fix this by making time pass at a rate which keeps everything consistent.

Using ‘real-world time’ comes as a result of an open table. And the open table has some great benefits.

Minimalism rocks.

Looking at these minimalist systems like Cairne and Mörk Borg, I felt they were onto something. 3-pages of rules, and ‘on with the game!’.

I’ve yet to play one, but the more I read these systems, the more I feel something’s simply missing. Specifically, ’everything except combat'.

In the old D&D games, everything outside combat was dealt with GM-fiat. Trying to sell magical items? Trying to disarm a trap? Want to blow out a candle and duck before someone hits you? Need to fix a bow? Without any rules, everything goes to GM fiat.

It cannot be long before anyone familiar with abusive software models, and RPGs, notices undeniable parallels.

The free and openly available systems function well in a technocratic sense, but lack advertising. On-boarding new people feels easy when dealing with an enthusiast, but your standard user struggles with the new system’s inattention to graphics.

The new D&D system comes littered with references to their own products. Users may not be forced to buy them, but the ecosystem has been arranged with other Wizards of the Coasts products in mind, so getting a book for the Pathfinder setting, or buying books with the history of Drizz’t, now form a natural, frictionless path.