Too Many Systems, Too Many Settings

I'm back today to re-read my New Year's resolutions. It seems I've strayed from the path.

The big two projects of the past couple months (aside from working on my dissertation implementation more than in the past) has been zilch and Caligo.

zilch (which deserves a better name, but stands for "Zach's Implementation Lies Cold & Hoary") is what the domino die mechanic idea turned into. It's a sort of board-game-style dungeon crawling RPG. It's actually pretty sweet. You represent characters with 4 playing cards (one of each suit), roll d6s for skills, use dominoes for an exchange/stance-based combat, track details with poker chips, and use Scrabble tiles to track and cast magic spells.

Yes, I finally have a decent Scrabble-based magic system! This time I started with the ~600 D&D spells and distilled them down to 26 schools/tiles, rather than starting with the noun/verb approach of most rune-based system. Tiles are often still combined to produce the more powerful spells, though.

Anyway, the intention of zilch is to have a lite, "paperless" play style for one-off dungeon crawls or short campaigns.

Caligo (the Latin word for misty darkness) started a week or so ago when I got a free PDF version of World of Darkness from a DriveThruRPG sale. While overall I found WoD to be yet another standard, solid, reliable table-top RPG system, there were a few little rule nuggets that intrigued me. I started putting together ideas from DRYH, QAGS, etc, pulling together a very lite, narrative-focused system for descents into darkness.

As you can see, I've drifted from my goal of "no new threads."


In other news, today I bought a Warhammer Fantasy Grotek and Felix omnibus. These stories are good fun! As I've mentioned before, I often get overwhelmed in the bookstore: so many great stories, so many worlds! How do I play them all? How do I build something better myself?

Upon waking from my nap, I realized I don't have to. As GM, we often rely on pre-packaged adventure scenarios. Why don't I allow myself to expand the use of such aids to include other creative works? There's all these great adventure short stories out there--recently Conan, Elric, and Grotek & Felix for me. What's wrong with "borrowing" those? Or maybe blending a couple together? Roleplaying is not a public presentation; it's a private, intimate sharing of tales. If my player's haven't read the stories themselves, the ideas are new to them.

I know this is certainly not a new insight. In fact, I'm sure I've read it a number of times in DM advice chapters: take ideas from your favorite shows or books! But I guess today I was ready for it, open to the idea that I am really only obligated to provide a fun afternoon for myself and my player(s), not produce a whole new creative vision for the world.

And this insight spills over into the rule design too. I'm getting overwhelmed here too. There are so many systems out there when you look past the handful of large publishers. And each one has some novel, intriguing aspect to offer. Yet there is no way to combine all these little gems, because each works because of it's home system. Lately I've been coming to appreciate even the advantages of different die mechanics. So many cool things are possible with only certain die mechanics; yet, each also has its drawbacks. But, in the end, you have to pick only one of them and play it.

It seems we all want, to some varying extent, to produce our own system: to tweak, to touch, to make the rules we play by our own. But, taken to excess (as I am always wont to do), this becomes divisive, producing a babel of systems so that players cannot move from game to game because each requires its own system. Obviously, there is a balance here. There must always be a bazaar of ideas and system options available; but it can be hard to decide to work towards system harmony and synthesis, rather than just throwing out one more discordant voice.

So, once more, I come here to put in writing: I need to focus my efforts on what I already have going!

Fallen Clerics in a Morally-Objective World

Waiting for the bus today, I began to puzzle over the idea of the corrupted D&D cleric and, by extension, the fallen paladin and the innocent church-goer deceived into cult worship. These things make good story hooks, but how could they ever happen? In D&D, deities grant spells directly, so how could a cleric ever unknowingly stray from the path of light? Surely the sudden lack of spells would be a wake-up call! Here's my take on it.

First of all, clerics can be one degree of alignment different than their deity. So a LG cleric of Heironeous could drift to LN without losing his spells. And a cleric doesn't have to be evil to disagree with the PCs and get in their way. Indeed, this can be an even thornier issue when the cleric is not evil and so cannot simply be dispatched.

However, the idea of a cleric actually turning to dark magic while still believing he serves the light is pretty thrilling. I think it could happen in D&D as follows: Most deities have many appellations beyond their normal (true) name. For example, Moradin of the dwarves is also called Soul Forger, Dwarffather, All-Father, and Creator. A cleric would likely develop their own personal appellation for their deity--even something as simple as "my Lord" or "my Light". Driven to distraction by sorrow, hate, greed, or a quest for revenge, they may rely on this personal appellation more and more as they slip from their true faith. Eventually, when they finally cross the alignment line and their deity refuses them spells, they would likely have a conflict of faith. Perhaps this would lead them to a period of fasting, flagellation, and praying, calling to their deity by their personal appellation. Eventually, their call is answered again. In their relief and rush to return to their work, they don't fully investigate the presence now granting their spells. (Indeed, there's probably a lot of self-deception going on by this point.) Unbeknownst to them, a new deceptive deity is now granting them spells and receiving their worship and appellation.

Now, when the PCs catch up with this cleric, they can still point out certain objective facts: the evil cleric channels negative energy, has an evil aura, and receives no reply if he calls upon his old deity by its true name. Faced with such facts, the cleric may be redeemable: he may atone and eventually return to the light. Or he may embrace, knowingly and whole-heartedly, his new patron deity and be forever corrupted to evil.

Adventurers: Embracing the Cliche

I started working on mini20 again this weekend. I also went to my local gaming store to browse around for a bit, as I've been feeling a bit dry when it comes to good story ideas. I looked through the bargain bins of old 3.0 and 3.5 OGL adventures and the like, but didn't find anything very exciting. For most of them, I thought: "Hmm... same old, same old--adventures come to town, find trouble, and so need to clear out a dungeon."

But I realized later that I'm being snobbish: adventurers clearing out dungeons for wealth and glory is the very essence of D&D! I've realized the same thing when reading pulp stories by the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft: yeah, this stuff may not seem particularly original today (especially after it's been rehashed and imitated in fiction and film for decades), but the stories are still damn exciting! And a sort of lite, fast, almost beer-and-pretzels dungeon-crawling campaign is exactly what mini20 is supposed to be good for. That's what's so great about using genre and cliche: you know what you're getting into, you know what the background assumptions are, and you can just jump straight into the action.

During this morning's shower, I considered this further and realized that the concept of the "adventurer" is key. Indeed, the adventurer concept is at least as important to the fantasy roleplay genre as magic and exotic beasts.

What I mean by the adventurer concept is that the fantasy world has areas of darkness and danger. These could be great tracts of wildness or simply the creepy-crawliness of the city sewers. These places are dangerous because of the foul beasts that dwell there, but are frequently well-stocked with gold and treasure accumulated by said beasts. The common citizen fears these dark places, but is willing to hire independent contractors to deal with them when the irregular need arises. Thus, in the fantasy setting, there is actually a well-established career of "adventurer". That is, the citizen of a fantasy setting should think "I need to hire an adventurer for this" as readily as they might consider hiring a plumber or a blacksmith. Sure, adventurers might not be thick on the ground--particularly since the fresh, eager, inexperienced novices are the most likely to be picked off--but their rag-tag bands are easily recognized in the fantasy world when they do show up. In such settings, there's nothing strange at all about a local striding up to such a band in the inn, tossing a pouch of gold coins on their table, and offering to hire them for an odd job.

Thus, the adventurer is an independent problem-solver for hire: mercenary, detective, explorer, spelunker, and exterminator all in one. Starting out, of course, they serve as simple caravan guards, mercenaries, and message-carriers. Some may fall from the path, becoming little more than highwaymen, brigands, freebooters, and grave-robbers (and thus giving other adventurers a bit of a bad name, though also employment to deal with their fallen colleagues). But those that do make it, and that strive for noble altruistic ideals as much as for buried wealth, become heroes, revered throughout the land: part war-hero and part rockstar.

Idea: Zombie Sim Game

I guess this is a good a place as anywhere to jot this idea down:

This summer, B. and I were chatting that it'd be fun to roll ourselves up as ordinary level characters in a high-simulation system like GURPS and then run an end-of-the-world zombie game/simulation. It would be cool to set this up in a specific city location, so the DM could have a real map of the area, thereby determining how long it'd take to get places, where certain supplies would likely be, zombie concentrations, etc. It'd be fun to see how long we'd last with all our now-useless skills, like computer programming and psychoanalysis. :)