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The Second Person

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Not a lot of stories use the second person singular perspective. Fewer use the second person plural. But this is the primary perspective of dungeon-delving modules, Chtulhian investigations, and space-faring adventures.

Few adventures within Dungeon Magazine’s comes with boxtext, and most of this boxtext comes at the start in a block of a dozen paragraphs, spread across multiple pages. Here’s one such introduction:

As you enter through the large doors, you are suddenly confronted by a massive, 8’-tall humanoid with long yellow fangs protruding from his upper jaw. He stares down at you with great black eyes and empty white pupils. After an empty silence, during which thoughts of or drawing your sword have crossed your mind a dozen times or more, he suddenly breaks into a wide grin and begins to chuckle deeply.

Question & Answer Rules

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

People like basic rules, so BIND should have basic rules (I thought). It didn’t quite work out that way. ‘Basic isn’t easy to define’, and not worth the time arguing about. But the game has developed a better split: necessary, and requested rules.

The little booklets has five sections: actions, combat, travel, weight, and magic. Every game will have those elements, because Fenestra’s magic, and things are heavy, and the players will have to go somewhere because the fantasy genre means travel.

Good Encounter Tables

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Chaotician Writer of Mastodon asked, if zany encounter tables are boring, what makes a good encounter table? ‘Return to White Plume Mountain’ makes a good encounter table, because:

It’s fast,
grounded,
repeatable, and
it develops.

White Plume Wandering Monster Table

The first set is rolled Outside the mountain. The second column shows encounters Inside. The last shows the mountain’s Nucleus.

O	I	N	Result
1	–	–	Rogue Grolls (2d6)
2	–	–	Meenlocks (1d4+1)
3	–	–	Bog Mummies (1d4)
4	1	–	Gnome Guards (1d4+2)
5	2	–	Subsumed Gnomes (3d6)
6	3	–	Big Ogres (1d4)
–	4	1	Elevated Ghoul (1)
–	5	2	Fungus Hulks (1d4)
–	6	3	Bloodwight (1)
–	–	4	Burning Golems (1d42)
–	–	5	Mold Wyrm (1)
–	–	6	Skin Puppets (2d10)

I’m going roll for encounters, just to see what comes up.

Oddly-Shaped Tables

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking about different structures for encounter tables.

Highest & Lowest

Roll 2D6 and check the highest and lowest scores:

Highest	Encounter	Lowest	Reaction	No.
`6`	Military Unit	`6`	Ignore	`1D6 x 20`
`5`	Adventurers	`5`	Neutral	`1D6`
`4`	Giant	`4`	Attack!	`1D6`
`3`	Elves	`3`	Stalk	`2D6`
`2`	Trader	`2`	Friendly	`2D6`
`1`	Deer	`1`	Flees	`2D6`

Deer are encountered when the highest number is 1. This makes them rare, and they only have one reaction: run!
Traders are uncommon out here, but twice as common than deer. They may flee, or be friendly.
Elves may be friendly, skittish, or simply stalk the PCs for a while, observing them.
Military units have en equal chance to do anything.

Each creature can gain any reaction on its own number or lower, so the chart assigns certain reactions to certain creatures.

Stupid Sexy Magic

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If I had to make a spell-system for Oglaf, it would be this:

You can only cast spells with a level equal or higher than the last spell you cast.
Once you cast a spell, you cannot cast it again for a number of rounds equal to its level.

You want to cast Fireball? Let’s warm up with a cantrip first. Yea, Burning Hands works!

Acid Arrow? Yea, that’s some proper magic!

Action Points

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Using action points instead of initiative has been great. It works like this:

Just Go!

We just start, then whoever said they hit the bartender spends an Action Point. Most characters have 3. Once everyone’s spent their Action Points, a new round begins.

The table doesn’t have that feeling of ‘combat!, wait, no, roll initiative, record it, wait for it, who’s first? okay-go-roll-go’.

Every Initiative System Fixed

The table sometime uses ‘round the clock’ initiative (left-of-the-GM starts, then round the table). Once someone runs out of Action Points, they stop taking actions, but you still go round the table until nobody can act.

Trade Deal: Starter Kit for Reviews

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Reviewing RPGs seems unreasonable work. Far too many have tried their hand at the seemingly-easy task of writing one, and even worse: sometimes writing really is that easy. Vampire: The Masquerade’s first ’edition’ looks like a series of short stories, but it had plenty of fresh ideas in there. Gamers, GMs, and writers want reviews, but not many want to review. The few times someone’s sent me something included half-baked nothing scrawls, and a few others with excellent ideas, but horrifying layout. So what’s to be done? I have two offers.

Bored of the Tables

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Random tables of D100 zany-silly things that might happen in your adventure need to cease, because they’ve stepped out of bounds.

I get the motivation:

emergent stories are great, it’s what the game’s all about.
dice are great at ’emerging’ those elements which become the story - the random challenge, the unexpected situation.

The theory’s still sound, the practice remains fun, but so many of the OSR books I see on youtube show-cases and itch.io download step into the wrong arena, and try to pass off underdeveloped ideas by making them into lists and adding a die-roll.

GM Journeys

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The most important things you should do to improve your GMing skills depend on you: they are unique or rare.
Generic ‘how to GM’ articles and books will not help with anything unique to you.
So generic ‘how to GM’ writing do not contain the most important advice.

If I could go back in time and give younger self only one piece of GMing advice, it would be ‘control your stutter’. It takes some effort, but it’s possible for me to remove most of my natural stutter. I won’t read about stutters in any on-line advice; a stutter works differently for lots of people, and many people with a stutter will find it becomes worse when they try to kill the habit.

Folding Rules

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

All rules are bad, but many are necessary. A game about travel without rules for carrying things just forces the GM to come up with rules on the fly. But needing rules to resolve a lot of situations doesn’t mean a lot rules. Designers can cheat by folding rules over each other, so they cover more area, without taking up more space in the toolkit.

Folding Rules in BIND

Unsure if a character knows some obscure fact about the local ruins? This means - unsurprisingly - an Intelligence + Academics roll. But we don’t need a new Skill for everything anyone does. So if characters want to forge a letter, they can use Dexterity + Academics. This begs the question, ‘what do the other Attributes do?’, and a few other tasks fell out naturally.

Reading the Dice

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Nobody struggles to roll a D6 and add +2 in their head, but there’s something nice and immediate to any system that lets you just read the dice as they are. Here’s a random proposal for a system which takes things into account, without any mental arithmetic.

This whole thing will follow the format of my thinking on systems, but that’s not required reading.

The system recognizes Attributes, Skills, and Equipment.
Each one is rated with a die.

So a bare-bones character might look like this:

Playtesting BIND

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I can’t remember most of what playtesting taught me over the last ten years, but I remember these things:

XP on the Sheet

Players didn’t like having to look up the cost to buy Traits with experience points. This seems a bit ridiculous, given that you only look up costs (at most) once per session and there are only a few traits to buy, and every experience ladder has an easy pattern as you increase the levels (e.g. ‘5/ 10/ 15’).

Review: Exploding Kittens

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When your turn comes, play as many cards as you want, then pick up one. If you draw an exploding kitten, you die.

These rules are a rare treat, because they avoid the nasty element of so many games: reading and remembering.

The first pitfall these rules avoid is any special notion of turn-order. By just saying ‘your turn’, players can use their understanding of other games which have turn order. This might not sound like much, but imagine stating the rules in full.

Scheduling Again

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Like a spectre that moans about dead problems, Sci-Show have made a YouTube video on the deep Mathematics of scheduling an RPG night.

Sci-Show on D&D Scheduling

Of course, the Greek-laden formula is just a vector to tell the audience about Maths, but I still can’t approve, because I couldn’t follow any of the Maths. So here’s some easier Maths for people who like RPGs, but don’t like Maths:

Standard RPG Setup

Each player has a 5-in-6 chance of showing up to a game. Before the game, the gods roll 5D6, and if any die lands on a ‘1’, the game is cancelled.

Only a Company Can Make an RPG

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The RPG scene has repeatedly laughed, cried, or tooted about the various ‘indie RPGs’ made by corporations with with multiple accountants. But wherever you want to draw the line, it can’t be a single author, because nobody makes a standard RPG alone. Even the smallest, the most indie of the indie-RPGs, has a credits page at the start. Any book with only one person to credit wouldn’t have an editor; and any book without an editor desperately needs one.¹

Scot Hexes

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a response to Robgoblin’s post on hex maps. It should have been an email, but Robgoblin has no contact details on the blog.

Our cartographic goblin argues that a six-mile containing one settlement doesn’t map to Middle Ages European fantasy settings, as any six-mile area would contain more than a single settlement.

Even in rural Scotland, relatively sparsely populated even in the mediaeval era, such a hex containing my hometown contains:

The Tale of Toad, Part III

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 21:00:00 +0000

We were en route to find the bones of St. Gravis (as usual).

Part II

The giants aren’t bad once you redirect their bountiful energies. We slept soundly next to this one, who was plagued by little men with stabbing, rusted knives, who woke him with a stab every time he slept.

Once the little lights from their wicker-basked heads appeared, we woke him, Poopy died, and he smashed the lot with his great giant-hands.

The Tale of Toad, Part II

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 18:00:00 +0000

Part I

The next mission was to find and retrieve a pious man called ‘Gregor’. Every time an enemy scarred him, he would draw his blade across the scar to make a cross. The fact that his wounds did not cause infection provides proof that the B_______ has truly blessed him (praise be, unto both heads).

Soon after, more Friends of Giants Society folk came by, and informed us of a tower where someone collects artefacts from the time of giants.

The Tale of Toad, Part I

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a true and honest account of the events leading to my recognition as royalty (pending), and acceptance into the clergy (impending).

We found ourselves, as so many do, brought together by slavers, who have always lived up to their official mission statement - ‘connecting people’. The slavers shunted into some abandoned space under a false pretence, so I crafted an ingenious plan to circumvent the journey, which my new companions misunderstood, and so proceeded into the black depths, to speak with an animated skull who desperately wanted to hold onto his sanity, despite his insane condition.

Review: Pathfinder

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Late to the party, you say? Nevertheless, Pathfinder’s a great example of some awful design features.

I took a little longer than the rest of the table to make a character, as everyone else had a tablet, with a program.

Issue 1: When humans resort to software to make your ‘pen and paper’ RPG characters, something has gone terribly wrong.

I noticed that the Sorcerer and Paladin classes both relied on high Charisma, so I went for a multiclass ‘sorcerer/ paladin’ elf. I thought it’d make for some nice ’elvish flavour’ on top of the paladin class; the pious warrior who also heals, and does elf-magic.

Machine Generated Images vs Photoshop

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I grew up with people questioning whether you can be a real artist and still use Ctrl+z. Before that, people probably wondered if digital photography was ‘real photography’. My generation feels deep suspicion towards any kind of ’not-real-art’ arguments. Now Chatbot9000 has flooded the web with saccharine kittens and uncanny valley boobs, and they’re clearly ’not actually art’, but it’s hard to say why. So here is why I say these images are not real art. They are not designed, nor planned, and cannot represent anything.

Vampires Speak Wallachian

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Blade films portrayed a vampire language, which makes no sense. Why spend another night with some bald twat memorizing cases when you could be in a club getting your teeth wet? Why would vampires develop and sustain a vampire language when they could speak Wallachian?

Vampire: the Masquerade made no direct use of any vampire languages. Without Wallachian, the reader had to assume that elders spoke to each other in modern English, leaving them vulnerable to the nearest eavesdropper with Auspex.

The Turk

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was chatting with a Turkish gent, and he told me about his time playing D&D as a kid.

And to prelude a short anecdote, I have to take my hat off to the bunch of young teenagers reading hundreds of pages of rules in a second language, translating character-sheets on-the-fly, and live-translating the rules for magical items whenever a question comes up.

The Turk played as a shit-stirrer. He wound people up with awful characters, and enjoyed his characters’ various deaths, which were always self-inflicted and entirely deserved. But he had limits, he informed me.

Roll for Charisma

Mon, 19 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

RPGs should have a ‘social stat’ to roll, not because you should always roll for social interactions, but because you sometimes must roll for social interactions.

I acknowledge all counterarguments:

This is a ROLE playing game.
It’s fun.
We need to know how that player bribes the guard - rolling dice does not provide a satisfying answer.

…et c.

Everything ever said on the subject is entirely correct;

HOWEVER

The players have just made a 5-point plan to infiltrate the castle. It’s devious and fun, and they’re on ‘point 3: looking presentable in front of the chef’s mother’.

The Joys of Automation

Sat, 10 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t think any sane individual could write something like BIND without automation tools. Games with a similar scope require a team.

(BIND also requires a team - everyone who’s joined to comment, edit, or draw, has improved the game immensely, but that’s not today’s topic)

Step Five

A lot of people imagine they could make a large game by just ‘doing it’. They don’t spot the trap, hidden in the process.

The Age of Light

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Why all the rules for torches in caverns?

Rules for the darkness, for light and torches, spring up among OSR games like a new cockroach infestation - first you see one, but a thousand more hide in self-made dark recesses. And like cockroaches, the rules are not new. They’re simply out in the light, presenting themselves. Because people used to know the darkness, and now they don’t. So people make rules to show them how the darkness works.

Balancing Mana Points

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One Reddit comment described the problem of using Mana Points in an RPG (as opposed to spell slots):

If it’s a game with more-or-less d20 fantasy or JRPG video game progression, then it’s very difficult to find a cost for an ability early in the game that feels worth the price when you have max 8 mp that doesn’t seem unreasonably efficient when you have 100 mp. Cure for 2 mp seems fine at level 1 when you can do it 4 times. When you can do it 50 times, it’s kind of a design issue.

Music in RPGs

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Music cannot add much to a game, and can easily remove a lot.

If one must add music, it should always avoid being too lively, or attention-grabbing, because players shouldn’t spend their attention on the music - it should be on the game.

Soundtracks often work well (nothing too recognizable). Game sounds should never have identifiable lyrics.

No Class System is a Good System

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Every RPG class system is bad, but before I tell you what you should want, let me tell you about you. Or rather, let me say whom I want to speak with.

I’m not writing for people who enjoy class systems, so much as for people who want to sit above it all, with an ineffable air of enlightenment, saying ’everything is preference, truth is a lie’. I’m here to ’eff’ their air, and bring them back down into the muck. People may prefer a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but since we make reality-based judgements about washing-machines, the health of eyeballs, and quality of food, we can definitely make statements about game mechanics.

Show Me in the Module

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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

BIND's Story Point System

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Airtime over Balance

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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!

System Recommendations

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Making Money with an Open Source RPG

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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?’.

Onepage Dungeon Reviews

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“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 Bluff System

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Theft as Mnemonics

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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?

Tactical Systems are Tacky

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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 have do not use luck.

Why Jaquays?

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 15:00:00 +0000

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.

Initiative Does Nothing

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Standard Initiative rules are the devil.

Your basic combat action is an Attack roll. If you roll Damage at the same time as the attack, then adding another roll for Initiative means every combat takes twice as long. If you just spent 20 minutes on a combat scene that would have been 15 seconds of screen-time in a film, then 10 of those minutes may have been spent on Initiative.

BIND's Magic, Part I

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My third BIND campaign ended in glorious disaster and nonsense which forced me to reforge magic.

Lax Theory

I had a magic system with a bit of metamagic ‘bend’, where people could do basic spells (fwoosh, fire!) then add a little metamagic to boost literally any spell (fwshhHHH FIREBALL!). No more ‘control person’, ‘control people’, ‘control crowd’, and ‘control city’ spells - the system would present some choice spells, and let players put the pieces together themselves.

RPG Blog Highlights

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recommend these RPG RSS feeds.

If you don’t use RSS, check my setup overview.

Blue Mountain has a post on saving Ravenloft modules (which is brave, and laudable).
Cthnonic Studios has a thoughtful section on RPG design theory, and another on reviews.
DriveThruRPG has a feed so full of new RPGs that nobody can actually read the thing.
Goblin punch: read about dwarven genders.
Idiomdrottning coined the term ‘blorb’.
Playful Void: reviews dungeon zines.
Levi Kornelsen makes RPG theory into an art (specifically, infographics).
Stuffed Crocodile: an eclectic blog, currently chatting about Glimmermark and Traveller.
Supergeek Mike’s YouTube channel does breakdowns of D&D things. I don’t get any of the references, but he has a nice way of thinking about things.
Taskerland: Lovecraft, RPGs, and Photography.
Traverse Fantasy: computer games, trans issues, Maths, and RPG content (sometimes all at once).
VDonnut Valley: sometimes thoughtful, very random.
Vortiwife is making Bloodsuckers (like Vampire: The Masquerade, but NSR) but rarely updates, so the itch.io devlog might be better.

Weaving Stories

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My RPG games follow a format which avoids railroading, without any need for elaborate settings or difficult NPC relations. I call it ‘story weaving’, because it lets me stretch the metaphor.

Railroads are Inevitable

For all the complaints about railroading, computer games suffer from railroads far more than RPG modules. We learn linear plot from films, books, and radio, and our thinking itself has become railroaded into A, B, C.

The Quantum Ogre and the Massive Idiot

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Here is a silver piece, old woman. Now tell me my fortune! What will I see on the road?

An ogre awaits you on the road. Keep your eyes open, and your bow strung!

No need! We planned to take the South road to town, but we can switch to the West instead, and avoid the ogre entirely.

Foolish man! The ogre lies in your path. You will meet it tomorrow.

Terms of Cthethics

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 10:00:00 +0000

A friend was thinking about running a Call of Cthulhu campaign, where demonic hair-extensions burrow into people’s brains to control them. I’ve never run Call of Cthulhu, but I had a few ideas for things which might happen in the background, and some friends added a few ideas. So here are the bullet-points I sent him:

2024 AD

Class action lawsuit on AI-related discrimination reaches final settlement
Skibidi Toilet Company sends DMCA to Garry’s Mod, as Skibidi movie enters pre-production
You go to turn off your phone, but the power-button now turns on AI. Cortana pops up and asks how she can help.
You can turn this feature off by going to Settings > Developer -> Advanced -> Ethics > Ethical Adjustments > Features > Click ‘Fewer features [ ]’ > Agree > Agree > Voice authentication.
Microsoft issues an apology for incorrect instructions on turning off new AI features. ‘That page was written by an AI.’

“We are working tirelessly to fix the hallucination problems, and will be back to you with a better solution as soon as we can.”

Shallow System Excuses

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The RPG scene has suffered for too long under its assumption that every positive feature in a system (realism, choices, fancy-looking hats) must imply more work to understand the system, and more time to resolve every action.

   (easy but nonsensical)                (realistic but Maths)
   <=========================================================>
   [Mąrk Bórg] [World of Darkness]    [Fate]   [D&D]   [GURPS]                                            [World of Darkness Combat]

People imply the idea more than they state it, but when stated, it becomes quite clear that this is a social truth, rather than…true. It serves two functions:

Cavern Mnemonics

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s hard to read a full adventure module - you keep having to go back and check you’ve remembered all the important points. And no matter how much you read, you always need the module open at the table, so that you can check it again. Even when you haven’t forgotten anything, you still repeatedly check the book in case you might have forgotten something.

I want to zap an entire dungeon into the reader’s head. I want it to be so easy to memorize that they just look at a paragraph and know they can interpret the underlying world, and explain to someone what they would see.

Treasure Type P

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A,D&D gave monsters random treasures like this:

Type	Gold	Silver	Copper	Scroll	Potion	Magical Item
S	100-600	1-10	-	-	-	-
P	100-800	100-400	-	20%	15%	-

The system goes like this:

The players randomly encountered an Owlbear. It has ‘Treasure type P’.
The DM then rolls 1D8 x 100, and determined that it has 200 cp in its nest, because all monsters like collecting coins, because all monsters in A,D&D work like hyperactive magpies.
Rolling a D100, the result of ‘58’ shows that the owlbear has no magical scrolls.
A second D100 roll of ‘03’ shows that the owlbear has a magical potion, so the DM selects one from the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Like so many A,D&D systems, it seems more suited to a computer than a DM, and demands far too much time to prepare, even ahead of time. The system begins by embracing randomness, then immediately switches to DM-fiat as the DM must select which magical items the party can gain. It has demanded 4 dice rolls, and still hasn’t determined a result.

LaTeX + Git vs Google Docs

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 12:43:00 +0000

People who want to work with others on an RPG naturally tend towards Google docs. It seems so easy. They send the link out, people make edit suggestions, and you click ‘approve’ or ‘deny’. Everyone’s generating spells, and spelling corrections at 100 kph, and it all looks great.

Git, meanwhile, looks like a technocratic chore, posing a massive barrier to entry for a great many contributors who just wanted to view the file and maybe add in their two cents.

Recipes for Your Table

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A good RPG session works a little like a dinner party, and the best of both have food. So why don’t rule-books come with recipes?

This module pairs well with doritos and twiglets, and a side of Monster energy drink.

Of course, the RPG community, that socially malformed mass of cretins who couldn’t wipe their own snot off their face, will need some basic safety tips.

Remember to ask the players about their diets. Remember to ask if they’re vegan, or have any allergies.

The Beauty of the World of Darkness System

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The classic World of Darkness system has some impressive features.

System Summary

Add the character’s Attribute + Ability,
And roll that number of D10’s.
Each die which meets the difficulty number (default: 6) means one ‘success’.

Bust in the Door!

Strength 3 + Crafts 3 = 6
Roll 6D10 (difficulty 7): 7, 4, 4, 3, 1, 6.
Result: 1 success (bottom of door cracks open, letting you squeeze through).

Outrun the Cops

Onepage Dungeons

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The One Page Dungeon contest asks people for a single-page dungeon with a Creative Commons, share-alike, attribution licence.

“Huzzah”, I thought, “that’s GPL compatible!”, I imagined, wrongly.

The first caveat is ‘GPLv3’, which is still fine for what I do, but a shame.

The next caveat is ‘only CC BY-SA 4.0’, not version 3, just version 4. The competition has been going since 2008, but people only recently started using CC BY-SA 4.0 commonly. Still, some earlier years had some entries using the 4.0 licence.

Group Indecisions

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes the party needs to make a decision as a group. Most of the time, in fact.

The strange man beckons you to follow him
The goblins spot you, and instantly retreat back into a hole in the hillside

You know the drill.

And sometimes, people perfectly capable of deciding what they want to do, will not make decisions for the group. That’s quite understandable, but sometimes the entire group just stalls, unsure of what ’they’ want to do. Discussion does not come easily, perhaps because nobody has a strong intuition one way or another, perhaps because they want someone else to speak first.

LaTeX vs InDesign

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 12:43:00 +0000

I think it’s fair to say that Adobe’s InDesign is the standard publishing tool for RPGs, or at least the most common among the most well-known RPGs. However, it’s clearly inappropriate for BIND.

BIND’s all about working together on an open project, but InDesign is geared to limit that openness.

Cash

In order to use InDesign, one has to:

Have Windows or OSX (both of which cost a fair amount of cash),
sign up for a monthly subscription (more cash!),
agree to never work with countries deemed unfriendly to the USA (or Adobe will flat-out ban you, even if you have a licence).

No Git

Currently, anyone can download all of the BIND books from Gitlab (or Github, or my own git server, et c.) but an Adobe book would require its own site, with its own hosting. The InDesign file-format doesn’t allow for people to make myriad concurrent versions, then make one of them a proposal, and seamlessly send those changes back into every other proposal.

Parallel Actions

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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:

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.
Brief intermission while people sort who goes first
Drake attacks a bandit.
Drake rolls Damage.
Alice attacks a bandit.
Alice rolls Damage.
Charlie attacks a bandit (miss).
A bandit attacks Charlie.
GM rolls Damage.
A bandit attacks Alice (miss).
A bandit attacks Alice.
GM rolls Damage.
A bandit attacks Drake (miss).
GM rolls Damage.
A bandit attacks Charlie (miss).
Bob attacks a bandits.
Bob rolls Damage.
A bandit attacks Bob (miss).
Emily attacks a bandit (miss).
A bandit attacks Bob (miss).
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.

Data Hoarding with Friends

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Generating Hex Maps

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Racial Languages

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Random Encounters Disarm Chekov's Gun

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Having a Bash at Travel in BIND

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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:

The Bluff System

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Problem Player: An Apology

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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:

You are Strange

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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?)

World of Darkness Prompts

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

When Systems Matter

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Musings on the OSR

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Against Collectors

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Extrapolation & Necessity

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Module Decalogue

Fri, 17 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

An Archipelago as a Dungeon

Sun, 12 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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?

The Limited Shapes of Our Bodies

Sat, 04 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When looking at RPG Attributes, one fact returns to me constantly: Olympic Athletes cannot compete in every sport.

Top wrestlers are stocky, and cannot compete in basketball.
Top basketball players move quickly, and cannot compete in weightlifting.
Weight lifters cannot compete in climbing events.

A certain amount of focus in one thing seems to preclude master of another.

This suggests an RPG system where people have some general score (e.g. ‘fitness’), and another on a sliding scale. Perhaps something like the WoD system, but the initial Attribute receives only up to +3, while the others can add up to +2 further.

Designing around Spike-Traps

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When making things, once in a while you spot a pit-trap laden with spikes, and screech to a halt to think about the route ahead carefully. When making chairs, I guess people test by sitting in the chair. Writers and RPG designers can’t get this kind of snappy feedback, so I guess we’re all a bit fumbly when testing solutions. I certainly am.

The Goddess of Abortion

The most recent trap came in the form of old women - ‘doulas’. I like the word ‘witchcraft’, and want to see more ‘witchery’ in the fantasy space. It all seems a little unexplored. My partner suggested leaning into the notion of people who make medicine, assist births, and weave things, and then suggested the word ‘doula’.

Open Source RPGs

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

New RPG creators and tech-startups both enjoy giving themselves the badge of ‘open source’ without having to open up a single source file. In the tech world, they call the company ‘Open AI’, and in the RPG space, they call their licence the ‘open gaming licence’, or simply declare they have an ‘open RPG’, then let people infer their good intentions from the name alone. This shallow illusion has bamboozled just as many RPG enthusiasts as tech optimists.

The A,D&D Nymph Image

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My favourite image from A,D&D’s monstrous manual is the nymph.

The write-up leaves no surprises to anyone who knows A,D&D. Gygax et alia created a genre, which entails a lot of making-shit-up-on-the-fly, which tracks well for a DM. He took a standard mythology creature, and introduced it to a Lord of the Rings world.

The legends stated that nymphs’ amazing beauty could blind a man, which apparently entails a save vs spell (the standard saving throw for anything not covered by dragon’s-breath, death-rays, or poison).

The Cost of Shared Narrative

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

RPGs with a shared narrative mechanic - where players and the GM both come up with interesting people, results, and situations - come with a cost. They pull focus away from the puzzle elements of the RPG, and that’s my favourite element, so I can’t see myself enjoying shared narration mechanics.

Let’s start with an example:

A quiet shuffling sound echoes around the massive cavern. Your stomach groans from hunger. What do you do?

Machines Learn Unlearning to Pole-Dance

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote this piece about Machine-Learning art a year ago, and set it to self-publish. Let’s see how much of an idiot I look like!

First off, ‘AI’ doesn’t exist. Some marketing team took a load of coke, then called their vision ‘Open AI’, because being ‘Open’ is good and being ‘AI’ is impressive. The reality is neither, and the technical meaning of this technical term remains unchanged, no matter what us unqualified plebs on the side-lines of the real research might tweet, toot, or post.

Print it Yourself

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve decided against having online printing available for BIND. This may change, but here’s the thinking so far:

Printing means I need to have the book mailed to me, but posting to Serbia means a whole bunch of faff. Of course, a voice in my head reminds me I could always find a way.

Send the book to a friend, and have them check it.

But setting up a book for printing means an outdated book. I’m always tinkering with BIND.

A Proposal for a Gothic Setting, Based on Ravenloft

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve enjoyed Ravenloft more than any other A,D&D setting, and the 3rd Edition expansion gave it a lot more life. Despite that, a lot of the best themes seem under-used.

Beginnings

Ravenloft began when A,D&D was busy asking ‘what else can we do as an RPG?’, and someone said ‘horror’. Specifically, ‘Hammer Horror’. The monsters were 1D4 bats, the plots assumed foetid stupidity from the players (or at least PCs), and the big-bad-enemies all aped classic horror monsters.

A Real-Time Vampire Chronicle

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Using real-world time in RPGs has worked out great in my last fantasy campaign, so I’m thinking of using it for a Dark Ages: Vampire Campaign.

I want to create a game where every single neonate in the city has a player. I want to see a dozen players, all with a chatroom online, called ‘Elysium’, shooting the shit, making plans, and ‘DMing’ each other with skulduggery.

The campaign would be set in Belgrade, Hungary, in the year of our Lord 1130. Belgrade would have a limited number of feeding grounds, prized according to some difficulty number to hunt.

What RPGs Do That Video Games Cannot

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Domination

In Vampire: the Masquerade, the first level of the Dominate ability lets the vampire issue a one-word command, which the target instantly obeys. It might be ‘sit’, ‘stay’, ‘fight’, ‘run’, or any other one-word command. It’s flexible genius, because it clearly defines what the ability does, but can still allow players to invent all manner of clever things outside of what the spell states.

GMs (or ’the storyteller’ in this case) also have leeway to mess with the vampire.

Realistic Spelunking

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Consumers of BIND

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Generic Fantasy is Great for RPGs

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Móęrk Bąrg Review

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Adventure Styles

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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

Choo Choo!

PCs Get a Quest
Part 1
Go to Part 2
Go to Part 3
Go to Part 4
Go to Part 5
Boss fight

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.

The Problems with D&D

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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?

Running an RPG in Real-Time, All the Time

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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:

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.
As a result, we’ll have to wrap each adventure up on the night, because someone might not make the next session.
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.
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.

Small RPGs

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Windows & Wizards

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

How to Write a Tabletop RPG

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This chronological rundown of how I approach RPG design will go over the most universal principles I’ve learned or copied from others.

Attitude

All rules are bad, but some rules are worth it.

The rest of the ideas here will talk about technical implementation, but the core thought, riding alongside every notion, is that every rule slows down the game, makes demands on people’s time, and creates a barrier to crafting a narrative. Therefore, every rule must justify its existence, and the more difficult the rule, the more it has to improve the game in order to be allowed in.

Nobody Plays by the Rules

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I was once attacked by a horde of kobolds, and it taught me a lesson. These attacks weren’t uncommon, when playing the old Baldur’s Gate computer game. I threw a poison cloud spell at the kobolds, and they started randomly falling over, getting up and walking a few steps, then falling over again. As the dozen little sprites did this falling-over dance, my archers picked them off one by one, which gave me lots of time to think. And this is what I thought:

RPGs Should be Unfair

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A ‘fair’ RPG game immediately cuts the believability from a game. It slays engagement far more than a golden dragon, or a mushroom-man. A ‘fair’ game takes the fear out of the players, which robs RPGs of one of their unique abilities among games - death.

Let me tell you about the ‘unfair’ things my world did to my players. I say ‘my world’, because I don’t consider myself responsible.

One Roll Only

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

RPGs should avoid asking people to roll dice more than once for any result.

Aesthetically, multiple rolls don’t feel right. Rolling dice should feel like casting rune-inscribed bones across a table.

Multiple Rolls Guarantee Success

The door is locked, but can be picked with a roll of 18 or higher.

This sounds like a tough lock to pick! …unless we have 5 people pick it, in which case it will almost definitely open, because with enough players rolling dice, someone’s going to roll 18 or higher. This means all doors open, but only on the condition that people sit around a table, rolling Maths-rocks repeatedly, until someone gets a high number.

Railroading: The Definitive Definition

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Railroading chat devolves into nonsense, as people are working with unclear definitions. Here’s the solution:

‘Railroading’ means that an out-of-game white-list constricts in-game actions.

A ‘white-list’ is a complete list of things one can do. A ‘white-list of websites’ would mean that someone can only connect to those websites, and no others. Conversely, a ‘black-list’ is a list of things which one cannot do, such as a list of websites which one cannot visit.

Subraces Should be Cultures

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Referring to elves as a ‘race’ makes perfect sense. They’re clearly different from the other humanoids, have their own features, and biological properties and oddities.¹

But ‘sylvan elves’? The elves who live in forests, but generally act like any other elf? They’re clearly just elves living in a different climate. Likewise, gnomes who lives deeper underground may well call themselves ‘deep gnomes’ (or be called that by others), but the D&D stats show no reason to consider them physically distinct. Even Tolkien’s different types of elves, who had plenty of physical differences, gained those differences mostly due to different lived experiences.²

Parallel Rules and BIND

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I want contradictory things for BIND, so I’ve been trying to do both. And I have finally made it work…I think.

Rules are Like Onions

Rules for resolving actions now comfortably fit on about three pages at the start of each adventure module. The rest appear where needed:

Adventure modules come with price-sheet handouts for local markets.
The modules also have pre-made character sheets, which removes the need for character creation rules.
Character sheets show the character’s Knacks and spells.
Random encounters are presented as encounter-lists for the Judge.

The core rules have all the details on the Knacks, and longer spell descriptions, with notes on how to stop the spell’s effects.

The Metaphysics of Becoming a Tree

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

All magic systems imply some ontology, and most of the European ontologies come from Aristotle’s view of the world. This is why someone turned into stone might retain their vision, motion, and thoughts.

In Aristotle’s view, everything has:

form (the shape)
substance (what it’s made out of)
telos (what it’s for)
first-cause (where it came from)

For example:

Rain forms drops, is made out of water, it’s for watering plants, and it comes from the sky.
People have people-shapes; flesh, sinew and bone constitute their bodies; people exist to praise the gods and achieve glory; and mothers provide the first cause.
Fireballs have rain-drop shape but fire for substance, they exist to burn, and come from angry wizards.

Anyone transformed to stone would retain their organs with the same telos, meaning that a liver would continue to process toxins, and the eyes continue to see, because that’s what eyes are for (regardless of their ‘substantive cause’ (meaning, the substance they are made from).

Happily Ahistorical

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

RPG worlds need histories, so I had to write some history for BIND’s world, Fenestra. This was a big mistake.

The writing smelt bad, in that peculiar way that most fantasy writing is bad, before half a page went down. The problem came from having to write - every word was vestigial, nothing really mattered; it wasn’t fun.

So when large sections of the rules needed to be rewritten, I took the opportunity to go through every book with a new attitude. Like King Hagard in the Last Unicorn, I destroyed everything that didn’t make me smile, including the whole history of Fenestra. The new vision of Fenestra only has one historical event.

Options in Religions

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

With BIND’s redesign, I’ve been thinking about options for religions. I don’t know if the old gods will survive the redesign.

Polyamorous Polytheism

I’ve always felt a missed note when I read D&D-style fantasy books where a country has many gods, but priests worship only one. Couldn’t a priest love many gods? Wouldn’t they get on better by invoking the god most related to what they want to do?

I call upon Hermes to give me speed, Apollo to give me insight, and Zeus to help me select the perfect gift for the baron!

I Want Fewer RPG Systems

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The cost of learning a new RPG system is…well just the cost of learning a system. Even for those who like the process, it takes time, and it limits those who can play the game. Ask a regular gaming group of four people to try ‘FISHBLADE: The Diceless RPG’, and chances are high that at least one will veto the suggestion.

The benefit is, of course, a bespoke system.

So when is the cost worth it? I can’t put a number on it, but I can plainly see that the number of systems out there are not really worth the cost of learning the lot.

Minimal Verisimilitude in RPGs

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t believe in ‘complex’ or ‘simple’ things - those words point to feelings, not facts, so we may as well debate the nature of beauty. But I can count how many steps a system has, and show anyone the result.

RPG systems have a minimum number of steps to retain that nice feeling of realism, and I think that minimum number is ‘4’.

Step 1: Resolution

RPGs can give all manner of results, but at the very least they must show ‘pass/ fail’.

On the Necessity of the Four Classical Elements

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to make an elemental magic system, and tried to deviate from the four classical elements. It’s a lot more challenging than I thought.

If you go with random stuff, like trees, birds, and rivers as your basic elements, then you end up with a multitude of items.

We could divide the world into larger pieces of course - perhaps ‘small’ vs ‘big’? And have a small-o-mancy wizard?

No - clear nonsense.

Goblin Slayer: The Problem Solver

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just clicked what’s good about Goblin Slayer: it scratches the problem-solving itch.

It looks a little like trash. Standard anime, with modern computing techniques for some nice 3D sequences. A fantasy world where the hero kills goblins, along with his companions: Elf, Dwarf, Lizard-Man, and Underage-Priestess. It opens with an extremely distasteful scene of goblin-rape, which feels like the author hitting you over the head with the central premise: ‘goblins bad’.

How I Made BIND's Monsters

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

BIND began as a D&D-reaction. “Mathematically, these rules stand some serious improvement”. After that, I only wanted some generic fantasy monsters to make an example game.

Unfortunately, art costs money, which I didn’t have. The first RPG I’d made lost me a lot of time wandering through cheap stock-art, with a licence stating the buyer can use the image (but of course, not own an actual image for €3.75). Every one showed a plethora of weird creatures some artist had made for an existing campaign, or some cobble-together creature. One collection had a couple of weird octopus-creatures, another a smooth-skinned giant humanoid with an orb for a head.

Writing for the GM

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t have the reading time for RPGs I once did (or for anything). I’d like to chalk if up to being an adult with a job now, but perhaps the truth is just ‘internet’.

Whatever the reason, I want to write better for GMs. Here are the principles I’ve picked up from reading/ writing (no credits given - I can’t even remember which ideas are mine, and which I found, never mind where I found them).

Why BIND Rules Don't Allow Players to Go for the Eyes

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

(a story about spreadsheet failure)

I’ve considered changing BIND’s ’to-hit’ system to let players ‘go for the eyes’ (or a headshot, or otherwise decide to attempt a vitals shot), and decided against it. My reasons sit below, but expect lots of boring numbers. You have been warned. (or just skip to the conclusions)

Quick Recap

Consider someone with a shortsword with +2 Strength - they deal 1D6 + 2 Damage, or 5.5 on average (this could also be 1D8 +1 or whatever). Let’s also assume that the opponent has the same stats, making the Tie Number (TN) ‘7’.

New Handouts

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

BIND’s maps have their numbers and comments applied by its writing tool, LaTeX. This makes handouts really easy, because the same map can present different layers to different people.

Here’s the plan so far (it’s untested, none of my players have seen this):

The fallen temple to Eldren (god of death and pensions) has an alternative from when it was still standing (both maps made by Dyson Logos).

This means that if the PCs research at the local library, they can find a map of the original:

Sleeping in a Dungeon

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The A,D&D core book stated that wizards could only memorize spells in the morning, and also only after eight hours of complete rest. The bigger dungeons occasionally demanded that people sleep in the dungeon in some safe corner.

These two aspects never sat well with me. I kept picturing the party’s fighter lecturing some poor mage:

Rest well! Don’t worry about the monsters, or worry about nightmares. We’re gonna need your spells in the morning, so have sweet dreams, or we’re going to be down a party member, and we need everyone we can get. We’re off soon, so don’t spend too long getting to sleep. If you don’t fall sleep now, no spells, and you’ll end up being eaten by some monster without that wizard-shield, and likely the rest of us will too without your fireball spell.

Dungeons Need More Space

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The dungeon ecosystem doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I think Tolkien has a fix.

Wandering Monsters Don’t Make Sense

I love the formula. In the cold depths, something approaches, and it wants to eat you.

Deep underground, you tread carefully, then stop as you hear heavy footsteps. Or perhaps those aren’t feet?

Add this to an existing dungeon, and elements quickly tie together. Perhaps player lure the monster into that death-gaze statue. Or perhaps they flee from a giant umberhulk, and stop just before a pit-trap and have to think quickly!

No Introduction Necessary

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been commented that BIND has no introduction, saying ‘what is a roleplaying game?’, and I don’t think it needs one.

Of course, nobody’s picking this thing up in a 90’s game store, et c., but I feel we have a deeper problem. I think that no RPG - including D&D - really needs an explanation of ‘how to do roleplaying’ or whatever.

I started out with a confused kid, who mixed in actions with a computer game (most likely the original Baldur’s Gate). It was a mess, but I could see how the game should have played, and immediately wanted the books. My father bought me a basic set, and some more splat-books every time I visited him. Soon after I had quite a pile.

Minified vs Minimalist Rules

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Tiny rulebooks are all the rage, and it’s great. The game of go has (arguably) 3 rules. Chess has a dozen rules. Monopoly has that little booklet-thing which nobody reads. RPGs often have 400 pages of rules without counting an adventure module, and often lack proper indexing. This hobby is mad, and the backlash against that madness feels refreshing.

But some of those refreshments cut out so much that they can’t satisfy a game’s requirements. Time for the terminology…¹

What the RPG Community Should Steal from FOSS

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Software engineers regularly jump into others’ open source, and help out, but the RPG community do not do the same, because they do not have the right tools.

Look throughout the history of any number of software projects and you’ll find a slew of apparently random people, unknown to the software’s creator, jumping in to lend a hand. Look at calcure (the open source calendar) and you’ll see healthy discussion on the board, about fixes and features people want to see.

Deathless RPGs

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

RPGs where nobody dies really irk me, because they have rules for dying. If you want an RPG where nobody ever dies (or runs out of food, or whatever), then I won’t complain…until the rulebook states ’these are the conditions for death'.

We have two problems.

Problem 1: Fudging GMs

Everyone writes up some dramatic backstory, in a loopy font in MS word, and about the 0.5 Megabytes mark hands it to them GM. The GM then feels that killing the character wouldn’t fair, and I can understand that, given the investment.

Drinking Game Design

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Standard drinking games are badly designed; if someone does badly, they get drunk, then do worse on the next game, which prompts more drinking. The only people who play drinking games want to drink, but when you lose, you drink, so the incentives don’t track anyone’s goals.

A better drinking game would have a drink as the prize, meaning that skilful players become lose their skill, and the skill-level evens out until everyone at the evening has reached similar levels of coordination, puzzle-solving, or just whatever the game involved.

Spreadsheets are Great

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Whenever I’m unsure about a rule, I pull out a basic spreadsheet, and start populating numbers.

The image I had for the ghoul spell began with a mage who could raise small things from the dead, like a cat, or dog. Slowly, the dark sorcerer would learn to raise gnomes, then humans, and finally raise undead ogres or basilisks.

The system should clearly set some maximum HP for the target. Standard spells in BIND always use the caster’s Intelligence Bonus, and sometimes use the spell’s level, so the final formula would have to be some combination of one of those.

Community Assumptions on Source Files

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve found myself aghast at the multiple (not loads, but still) conversations I’ve had online where I’ve proposed an open-source RPG, and I’m told that this really isn’t adding much, because people can already copy systems.

I have personally copied a system. I have rewritten White Wolf’s rules so that I could modify them, and it took over a month of nearly all of my free time. I really doubt everyone is willing to spend the time they require to recreate a book, just to add a few rules, and I doubt most people could do it in the same time.

I Warned Ye!

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I warned ye!

but did you listen to me?

Oh no…

you knew didn’t ye?

It’s just a harmless little licence, isn’t it?

…sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

The Game Plan for an Open Source RPG

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve implied all this heavily in other writing, but just to be clear, here is the game plan for BIND.

Firstly, BIND doesn’t matter. I want to see an open-source RPG that’s actually open source.

I want to see the community able to break away from a corporation telling them what they can do, and just make their own games. While people can technically do this already, when people believe they can’t, they can’t. I’ve heard Wizards of the Costs described as the ‘patrons’ of the RPG community, and find it sickening. A patron gives money, corporations try to find ways to take money - if some game is brilliant but cannot make money, a corporation won’t make it, except by accident.

Always Say the Target Number

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A player rolls the dice, and the table watches the result, like a roulette ball bouncing about. Rothgar has a +4 to make the jump, but the chasm demands a Target Number (TN) of 12.

The player rolls 2D6…

               (( _______
     _______     /\O    O\
    /O     /\   /  \      \
   /   O  /O \ / O  \O____O\ ))
((/_____O/    \\    /O     /
  \O    O\    / \  /   O  /
   \O    O\ O/   \/_____O/
    \O____O\/ ))          ))
  ((

and they land on ‘8’.

Ordinal Fallbacks

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Game designers often lecture (or bemoan) that nobody can possibly make a realistic game. But in the words of Queen Victoria, I am not interested in the possibility of failure.

Instead of looking at ‘is this showing what would happen if you really mounted a dragon while wearing armour’, I prefer to look simply at the ordinal Mathematics (i.e. relative values).

If someone’s a shit-hot martial artist then I really don’t know how many people they might kill in a minute, but I know that more training should up the expected kill-count.
Better ‘Persuasion’ should mean a better chance at persuading people.
Wearing armour should increase a character’s chance of surviving a battle.

Players won’t notice much about the chances of doing something, and probably don’t care if a torch illuminates 10’ or 5 metres. What they all care about however, is that holding a torch lets them see better in the dark. As long as ordinal relations hold, the system has done its job of responding to a change in the plot.

Word Game: Ghost

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My favourite word-game is Ghost.

You go round in a circle, each person stating a letter, which builds to a word.
If someone completes a word of four or more letters, they lose.
If someone receives a set of letters which cannot complete a word, they can challenge the person before them.
- If the person before states a legal word, they lose.
- But if they state a word, then the challenger loses.

Example

Round we go:

White Wolf Devlog 6: Changeling

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My favourite WoD RPG will always be Changeling. I’ve run one campaign, and I wish I had time to run more.

I don’t know if I’ll ever have time to re-write it, like I did with Vampire, but I have plenty of concrete plans for changes.

Seelie vs Unseelie

The book began by saying ‘Seelie’ does not mean ‘good’, and ‘Unseelie’ does not mean evil, then instantly forgot its own advice. Every paragraph associated the Unseelie fae with bedlam and banality, with slavery and death. The Unseelie clearly received the role of the ‘bad guys’ at every turn.

RPG Faff Metric

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Some RPG systems are obviously more of a faff than they need to be, and some take more time than others. This feels obvious, but I want a better way to measure it than using my gut. I want to give a little flesh, with a Maths-flavoured guesstimate, similar to ‘Big-O notation’ (a method for guessing how fast a sorting algorithm works).

faff noun: An unnecessary or over-complicated task, especially one perceived as a waste of time. verb: To waste time on an unproductive activity.

Why You Might Open-Source Your RPG

Sat, 03 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A few RPG creators might make bank, but for the most part, we don’t. For the most part, people don’t even want to make it their entire career - they have a particular vision of a game they want to make. I think if indie designers want to see their ideas succeed, they should release them and start working with others, because nobody has all the skills needed to create an RPG.

Dualism in a World of Darkness

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

So there you are, storytelling a twisted tale of modern horror about a coterie of vampires, when an odd ability crops up. One of your players has focused on controlling people so much with the Dominate Discipline that she can now enter other people’s bodies, taking them over as if they were her own.

So we know that the ‘soul’ - that is, the mobile part of the mind, the non-brain part of the mind, has just shifted over into a new body. One might expect the experience to be quite harrowing, for the vampire to collapse like a newly born deer or a stroke victim, and later slowly learn how to walk and speak. But apparently it’s quite easy; the vampire’s mind (or soul) steps into the new body like a comfortable suit. We can only conclude that all the muscle memory is part of the body - and where else could it reside except the brain? So the brain allows a translation of the soul and the soul just does the general work. So while dyspraxia is about clumsiness in thought and clumsiness in the body, a dyspraxic vampire should, in theory, be able to wander into the body of a dextrous athlete and become dextrous.

Representing Star Trek Babble in an RPG

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A response to Antolius’ post, Star Trek Adventures TTRPG has a fatal flaw.

3D Chess

When Star Trek fans wanted to make a Star Trek (ST) chess-board, there were two schools of thought - one reconstructed the rules from actors who were moving pieces randomly, and another created a game from the same board, but with their own rules. All-in-all, I think the second method produces more interesting results, and in fact is more authentic, because onlookers seeing someone play ST chess will think ’that looks like some real nerd shit’, which is what it’s meant to look like, and probably what the actors at the time were thinking.

Real Time Passing Between Games

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

RPG Vloggers chatting about Gygax note on real-world time-synchronization have got me thinking about really using this rule. In case you haven’t heard the idea - Gygax demanded that every day which passes in the real-world, one day passes in the game. The troupe starts and ends their games somewhere safe, like a tavern in town.

It sounds like a bizarre concept at first, but when you view it from another angle, it makes perfect sense.

TikTok Killed the Vampires

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Vampires could never feel really plausible, but Vampire: The Masquerade created a lot of fantastic reasons to buy into the World of Darkness. Enough that once the reader allows the vampires and their magical powers, the masquerade they all keep - the mass conspiracy that they don’t exist - feels easy to swallow.

Pull yourself, dear reader, back to the 90’s, where the only way to get on television was to apply to prove you could read pre-approved lines, and the only way to publish a letter to the country was to have a newspaper accept your message.

White Wolf Devlog 5: The Umbra

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I feel the World of Darkness could have done better by having the various spirit worlds accessible only through some trance, where someone enters that world in spirit-alone, and leaves their body behind.

Unintended Teleportation

Garou traversing the umbral planes, Giovanni vampires wandering into the land of the dead, and Changelings, wandering the dreaming lands of happy Boggan villages, all imply the same thing: anyone traversing through the spirit-realm can essentially teleport, i.e. they can move from one place to another without going through the spaces between. If a group of changelings establish a trod which goes to the Summer Lands, and then establish another in a second city, then the results are inescapable: they can travel from their local trod to the Summer Lands, then from the Summer Lands to the second city. They can now teleport to that second city.

White Wolf Devlog 4: The Arena

Sun, 16 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In the new Contest System for the Storyteller system books, both players roll the same Attribute + Ability combination for ‘Extended and Resisted’, so Subterfuge is used to lie and spot lies, and Investigation allows someone to uncover crime as well as hide it. This has made a number of people online strangely irate, so this seems like a great time to speak about non-obvious system benefits, and why just going with your gut doesn’t always produce great results.

White Wolf Devlog 3: Attributes

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

White Wolf’s Attributes were surprisingly revolutionary, as D&D had set such a strong precedent with ‘S,D,C,I,W,Cha’. The deviation’s great, but they retained some bizarre ideas from D&D.

Dexterity

‘Dexterity’ should really refer to coordination, but it was soon used as a ‘speed’ stat, showing how fast someone can run. It seems to pull in bodily-awareness (to dodge attacks), sprinting, the coordination one needs for a gun, for bows, and for swords.

White Wolf Devlog 2: Specializations and Expertise

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Specializations in White Wolf rules are a nuisance, in need of an overhaul.

How They Work

Specializations in White Wolf allow someone with a rating of 4 or more in a Trait to re-roll any ‘10’s for a chance at an extra success.

Expertise (not used in all books, but present in the Dark Ages), allows a character +1 success.

Problems

Both rules are crap, for many reasons.

Mechanical Problems

White Wolf’s basic rules have a wonderful purity - you grab the dice, cast them like so many runes across the table, and then read the result. This ruins the experience, forcing other players to wait as someone nit-picks through the right dice, and roll again.

White Wolf Devlog 1: Merits & Flaws

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

So I was making a better combat system for World of Darkness games, and eventually started remaking the whole thing.

Overview

Merits are stupid. Merits are gone.

Let’s look at the merits, and keep in mind the golden rule when designing a game

It’s not complete when nothing can be added. It’s complete when nothing can be taken away.

Let’s look at what we can take away:

List Analysis

Acute Sense

This adds a -2 difficulty to rolls which rely on a particular sense.

An Automatic Dungeon Generator

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Automatic dungeon generators are rubbish. Some are pretty, but all of them are completely unusable.

You enter a room, it has a goblin, or treasure, or nothing. Next room.

It makes no sense. Why was the goblin sitting there? Why was there treasure in the next room, and why didn’t the goblin take it? Everything looks like 8am after an underground rave - pointless, meaningless, and with random items and stragglers lying about.

I Don't Run Session Zero

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

‘Session 0’ is the pre-game evening to talk about the game, without having the game. I don’t see any reason for five people to lose an evening, planning future evenings.

The notion of a session 0 has become so ubiquitous that blogs and vlogs seem to assume it. They say ‘during your session zero’, not ‘if you have a session zero’.

Why Bother?

I can’t find a single good reason in favour of spending this non-event.

Balancing White Wolf

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Character Creation

While I’m remaking the World of Darkness Combat system, I’m starting to feel that Character Creation could stand to be a lot more balanced.

But it’s more of a Storytelling system. This isn’t about killing trolls for gold pieces - it’s adult story-crafting.

…that’s what I hear the books echo back to me.

And okay, “story crafting” sounds great, but why do players receive Experience Points for certain behaviours?

System Realism Matters

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A hundred paces down the dark tunnel, you see dozens of goblins dancing round a fire and singing about eating anything that moves.

At this point the crew begin to plot.

Could we just stay here and shoot at the goblins? We should be able to get a load of arrows off in three rounds.
If we run back to where we avoided that pit trap, maybe the goblins would trigger it, if we can get their attention.
We have three people with shields and spears. If two at the back take the spears, could we make a shield wall in this small corridor?

These plans form the in-breath of the game, and it executes on the out-breath.

Two Ubiquitous Fantasy Characters

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

My Session One

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Pre-Game

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.

Finding the OSR

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Highlights from the WoD Contest Game

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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 and Genre Representation

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Show, Don't Tell

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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, he’s heavy but there’s got to be something in one of 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.

Fixing White Wolf's Combat

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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 Combat Sucks

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

I Want Realistic Dragons

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Weighing into an ancient (or at least senile) fantasy debate, I’d like to go back a step. The debate usually goes like this:

An elf punching a dragon to death because of monk-training isn’t realistic.

    You think dragons are "realistic"?

No, but a certain semblance, in certain regards, to reality, which we might call ‘verisimilitude’, meaning ’the quality of seeming like-reality’, helps suspend disbelief, and enriches the tail.

That last bit’s bunkum, and here’s why.

I Wish Neo-Pronouns had been Adopted

Tue, 17 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tabletop RPGs have struggled with pronouns more than most places, because they speak through constant examples.

The fighter rolls a ‘10’ on Initiative, and the goblins roll and ‘8’. He goes first.

A,D&D used the default ‘he’, throughout all examples, and in the second edition, printed a small box explaining that they chose this pronoun to be unambiguous, but that the reader should understand that ‘he’ would also include female fighters.

Fate Points in BIND

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Remember that book or film where the protagonist received a nasty wound, then persevered, and won the day? Well that can’t happen in RPGs, and that’s a shame. So my solution is Fate Points (FP).

Reasons People Created Hit Points

Hit Points make sense as a standard game abstraction, until they apply to PCs. If PCs routinely die from a bump on the nogin from a kobold’s rock, then the game’s not an RPG, it’s just a very slow war-game, played one miniature at a time. Arneson (I believe) arrived at the solution of HP, but it wasn’t much of a solution until PCs gained enough HP to stop being killed in one hit.

Ideas People

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Oh young one! So you think you have an idea. Well let.me.tell.you: EVERYONE has ideas. Nobody cares if you have ideas. The real results are in work, in the execution. It’s about labour, not inspiration.

I’ve seen this kind of patronising lecture a few times on various RPG boards, and speaking as someone without any ideas, I fundamentally disagree.

Most of my RPG work has involved taking other people’s ideas and polishing them. I have the stamina to write, review, test, and repeat for months. Sometimes years, if the ideas still feel fun.

The OGL is not Open

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Open Gaming Licence (OGL) does not in fact produce terribly open games, so I wish people would stop referring to such RPGs as ‘open source’.

No Real Books

The OGL specifically excludes Product Identity.

“Product Identity” means product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations, environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects, logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark clearly identified as Product identity by the owner of the Product Identity, and which specifically excludes the Open Game Content;

What Systems Do

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Systems can be boiled down to input, process, and output.

┌────────────────────┐     ┌───────────────────┐     ┌────────────────────┐
│   Monster: AC 17   │ ──> │                   │ <── │ Player: Attack +3  │
└────────────────────┘     │      process      │     └────────────────────┘
┌────────────────────┐     │                   │     ┌─────────────────────┐
│ Player: Long sword │ ──> │                   │ <── │ Player: Strength 14 │
└────────────────────┘     └───────────────────┘     └─────────────────────┘
                             │
                             │
                             ∨
                           ┌───────────────────┐
                           │ Monster: Lose 3 HP│
                           └───────────────────┘

Input and Output

System inputs and outputs are different from an actual game’s inputs and outputs. A GM might say ‘you split the basilisk’s leg-tendons open as it belches a final noxious cloud’, but the system just says basilisk = dead. A player might describe elaborate lies their character weaves, but the system just has them roll a die and the results are yes or no.

If You Want to Understand an RPG System, Remove the Dice

Sat, 05 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Reading over systems with all of those ‘Add this, roll that’ can give someone the appearance of a massive RPG engine, churning out all sorts of details and replicating various interesting minutiae of the gaming world. But sometimes what’s really happening is pointless plastic tapping noises, and once the plastic’s taken away, you get to see what’s underneath. You get to see what really matters in the system - the options and the results. Meaningful options, ones which allow you to push the result one way or the other, are the totality of the game’s engagement - the whole of what makes the game a game.

Random Character Generation

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 12:43:00 +0000

Random character generation is great, especially random Attributes.

Why you hate random Attributes

People think Random attributes will ruin your game because D&D has taught them that Attributes cannot be raised quickly. If one rolls a bad character, they’ll have to play ‘Jake, the pointless’, forever after. This problem vanishes once people can raise their Attributes after play.

Problems with Point-Buying

Bewildered Noobs

There are 7 races to choose from, and 9 classes. We also have some campaign-specific races from these splat-books.

The Open Source RPG Dream

Sun, 30 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The cynics say that we keep reinventing the wheel. They say we have too many RPGs, mostly doing the same thing, and why bother to write yet another RPG about elves and magic swords? And they have one thing right - we should stop re-writing RPGs from scratch. Instead, we should change them.

Knave started as a modification of Cairne, as the writer wanted to add a few rules. And then someone copied Knave to create Vaults of Vaarn, and so on. Without the ability to copy these texts, the authors may never have made the books.

BIND

Thu, 20 Jan 2022 12:43:00 +0000

BIND is a grunge-fantasy tabletop RPG designed to solve a number of problems:

Problem: Character backstories are a pain.
- Solution: Story Points
Problem: Players never engage in the adventure in the right way; when they should go left, they always go right, but railroading them never gives good results.
- Solution: Threads
Problem: Standard fantasy stories contain long-term wounds in their narratives, while fantasy RPG mechanics effectively prohibit them.
- Solution: Fate Points
Problem: Everyone makes house rules, which results in a bunch of D&D clones.
- Solution: Open Source

Download

Source Code:

Return to White Plume Mountain

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This was one of the greatest adventure modules out there. I played it so many times that I once used it as a Mind Palace in university, because I can remember every single room.

White Plume Mountain

The original adventure took the adventurers around a ‘house of fun’ style dungeon, with a ham-fisted hook, and no kind of plot. They enter a room, and beat up baddies. Sometimes those baddies have a magical weapon. One room has a big zoo of monsters in glass boxes, and the PCs must fight through them. They can’t defeat the evil wizard who sits at the base, because the plot says so. The evil monsters with magical swords will fight one at a time.

Rune Quest is Awful

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

RuneQuest’s Glorantha setting is 500 pages long, so it’s about half the length of Lord of the Rings.

In order to help with character creation, players can get a ‘Player pack’ pdf, which tells you that the book as written was too confusing for normal players to build a character.

The character creation begins with your grandma, determining her occupation, skills, and what that means for you, before we move onto the next grandparent, and so on. I’m not fucking kidding.

Trouble at Grogg's

Sat, 20 Nov 2021 12:43:00 +0000

Trouble at Grogs is one of the best adventures I ever ran, and I’ve run it many times, in multiple systems.

It looks like any other adventure at first.

The players find a roaring tavern owned by a half-ogre named ‘Grog’.
Grog asks them to find out who’s been stealing things in town.
Reading more, you (the GM) find out that Yuri (another tavern owner) has hired two half-ogres and two elves to start the trouble.
The bad-guys (Yuri and his crew) have found underground tunnels, and use them to steal and make mischief.
On day 2, Yuri’s two half-ogre cut-throats come to rough the players up.
The town is brimming with various people and places, such as an ex-ranger sheriff, a banker, and a maid at Grogg’s who secretly works for Yuri.

The first time I read it, I was surprised to find it didn’t have an ending. I leafed back a page, and read more thoroughly as if I’d missed it. But no - there was no ending. I played it anyway.

Don't Have a Fun Game

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 12:43:00 +0000

I so often hear people giving the golden rule of RPG’s as ‘remember it’s a game, and to just have fun’. I can see that if nobody likes the game then it’s not a good game, but the ‘have fun’ advice, while common enough, doesn’t help anyone to do anything.

John Mill discussed the paradox of happiness. If you want to build a boat, you try to build a boat. If you want to go to the shop then the best thing to attempt to do is to go to the bloody shop. But if you want to have fun? Well, try it now. It really doesn’t work. So what can you do to ‘have fun’? Well, there’s sports, catching up with friends, learning new maths and a whole host of other things. Notice a common element - none of them have ‘fun’ as an objective. Sports may be fun, but don’t ‘play just for fun’. Play to win. You play to score points and stop the enemy scoring points. If you’re catching up with friends and you want to have fun, where exactly does that lead you? Probably nowhere. You might be better off seeing where the conversation takes you. If you’re learning maths, don’t go with what’s fun. Who knows what maths is fun before learning it? Better to work at examples quickly and look at why things work as they do. By the end of the night, you might find you’ve had fun whether you get all the right answers or not.