Reddit Playing Games

I've never particularly dungeon delved into reddit nor subscribed to any of its community threads as it just seems like a longer version of twitter to me but to be fair the occasional amusing meme crosses my comms from time to time. Whilst I understand that there are corners for passionate posters as well as numerous community support areas that can be embraced the sheer immensity of prose presents a facade akin to the planetary archives of the Jedi. Its one thing to need a lifetime to read through a library but quite another to need several lifetimes just to tackle the contents section.

Oddly enough as I have been looking at some the old school systems of late I did have a quick reddit dive regarding on the fly dungeon generation. Specifically for GMs there has to be a quick method that spits out something authentic albeit in classic style and there are no shortage of approaches. Whilst I do have prize polyhedrals specifically for use with corridors, junctions and dead ends on, I have never used them as it's somewhat procedural from a single entry point. I presume this is broadly the same as drawing from a deck of dungeon tiles or indeed using a set of ordinary dice to determine layout however there is  risk that a lot of dead ends are generated inappropriately.

There is the narrative approach where the plot goes through the entrance/guardian -> puzzle/rp challenge -> red herring/trap -> boss/twist -> reward phases. The layout becomes somewhat arbitrary in this approach but whilst I like the focus on the player experience it's not really useful on the fly. Oddly and possibly appropriately enough I quite like the chaotic approach of grabbing a few dice and just rolling them onto a piece of A4. From where they land one can quickly draw around them to create rooms and from there its quick and easy to connect them up abstractly with corridors and doors. In addition with D4,6,8,10 and 12 dice available one can use these to correspond to something like the challenge ratings from the 5e monster manual... think I feel a one shot with lots of D12 coming on...

OS Essentials

Simplicity is beauty they say although I have met some fairly simple people in my time so I would't say that this applies across the board but with all the games I have tinkered with over the years I am definitely leaning towards the more streamlined rule set as my preferred experience. What's nice is that the role playing market has definitely come full circle not just with the many re-releases of old classics, Cthulhu being in its seventh incarnation now for example but we are starting to see 'Retro' compilations come to the market.

One that will not to be everyone's taste is Old School Essentials by Necrotic Games but I quite like the look of this one. Touted as a recompiled and faithful reworking of the original 1981 Basic and Deluxe sets the Necrotic release is in modular form with regard to the supplements but for me the no brainier is the black box set with all the releases. Slightly more than slay and hack the approach returns control and much of the interpretation of the rules to the GM. Now the first rule of 5e is that the GM always has the last word under all circumstances but to be honest more that few players end up in some sort of friction with the GM over actions in a game and I find this both jarring and frustrating. I get that a meticulous rule set is supposed to alleviate this but I think it has an opposing gait in that it creates a somewhat meticulous mindset and it can cause bitty exchanges that are not conducive to a healthy game. With a more laid back atmosphere and a more forgiving player base a looser rules based game is much richer in that a GM can focus on narrative despite cutting a few corners with the round to round minutiae. 

Although this is all about reinventing the wheel to a degree it is an opportunity to rethink some of the more neglected dungeon crawling rules such as traps, encumbrance, hunger, rations and the like. There is an excellent set of videos by Questing Beast revisiting some of these mechanics and how to make them fun and exciting - throwing your food to monsters being one way of passifying them or indeed not making them hostile by default but balancing the outcome on the first contact. To be honest I do quite like the presentation of the whole package anyway which is enough of an excuse for me so Amazon will be coming early for Christmas.

Will you parry me ?

 

Stuff is happening. Over the last week or two we have been transitioning to the new games on line and with the call to arms I enrolled to GM Jack's  Warhammer Fantasy with my rogue which saw our first combat. Now it tends to be the case, at least for my part, that the first session or two is more of a calibration experience for new characters as skills are mechanically tested and initial development points and stats are perhaps adjusted in the light of either a character that is too feeble to survive as well as turning down the volume on any superheroes that are accidentally born of a freak statistical accident.

Returning to a somewhat aged RPG serves to remind me how much things have changed and indeed how streamlined more modern systems are. Evolution by player selection seems to have rooted out a lot of the fluff that was of course trailblazing in the early days as the first initiative and combat systems arose. I would say in hindsight that the first systems naturally tried to audit and itemise people's attributes as mechanically accurately as possible as this would be the natural thing to do. It is only in hindsight that actually what you want is a brief and if necessary abstract mechanics system that allows people access to narrative as quickly and easily as possible as at the end of the day mechanics just get in the way and we don't naturally audit what we do for the most part - we just do it.

One of the many evolutionary dead ends that came back to haunt us last week was the parry mechanic. I remember a lot of painful Rolemaster sessions particularly when parry and stun would serve to either prolong or frustrate combat respectively and in due fashion at the time the solution was to add more skills to counter other skills that were a lag on the game such as '"stunned maneuver" to oppose stun and multiple attacks to oppose too many parrys. Stacking skill counters like this is akin to a tug of war each round which seemed normal then as we had all the time in the world as young gamers but with six players on line the parry mechanic in the WHF only served to drag out the session.

To be fair it's a real tricky situation for a GM as there are a lot of classes and combat styles for which parrying is very relevant but at the end of the day, what do you do ? Tweak a game for more realism or remove the realism for expedience ? Its a classic design issue I think and depends on ones sensitivities to the experience. One thing is sure - evolution does not stop.

Diversity and Dragons

 

Like minded misfits would be a somewhat cliche way of describing us as a club but these days of course the geeky arts have risen to a new vogue and once niche brands have been bought out by progressively bigger fish to become international juggernauts. Warhammer now touts the development of a televised series based on the Eiaenhorn narrative and Dungeons and Dragons films and series have bubbled up more than once and I sense that it won't be long before we will be talking Dungeons and Netflix.

But in the current wave of political correctness diversity has now landed Tienanmen squarely within D&D in an attempt to impose homogeneity within the fantasy environment via the ubiquitous Trust and Safety committees. In the great tradition of all great leap forwards it seems that even mythical narratives will now be rewritten in the professorial light of oppression and grievance studies. With a statement from from D&D (https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/diversity-and-dnd) Orcs and Drow will no longer be regarded as evil to mitigate stereotyping, ability scores will be detached from different backgrounds to avoid racism, and connections between Romanians and vampires will no longer exist. Recently Games Workshop had also been drifting along these policy lines until a missive community backlash stopped them in their tracks via the recent 'Warhammer is for Everyone' initiative (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfH7NJnKoX8).

My point is not that I am worried that RPGs will be patrolled by  the political officers of the social justice regimes- they wont be - imagination will always win in the creative spaces. My concern is that  beloved brands may not survive the backlash from constantly splitting fan bases - the 'get woke go broke mantra' is beginning to claim ever larger organisations with Patreon now on the brink of collapse as the latest example of Trust and Safety overreach. We have never really changed as a bunch of dice rollers at the club as everyone who walks through the door is warmly welcomed whoever they are and those that stay do so as like minded free thinkers. In a strange inversion of the sixties, it could be that we are now the counter culture.

Career Choice

Despite the chaos of several people talking at once we did gain the upper hand in the Warhammer Fantasy character generation last week. I can't say I am warming to the on line world as its a little too much like being possessed but thankfully people are turning on their cameras now so I know that at least some of the voices belong to other people. Whilst I have never rolled a WHF character before it did sort of click when Jon reminded me that many of these mechanics stemmed from the pre spreadsheet mid eighties when imaginations ran just a little to far ahead of the tech and so a number of these systems had a sort of proto Lotus feel.

Nevertheless after the fog of Warhammer cleared I have to say I appreciate the approach to the character narrative. Whilst many  systems include an apprentice or pre career development portion, WHF cleverly links together the professions via entrance and exit options. So for example I rolled an Agitator initially and when all the development options were full I then had to promote the character via one of the exit professions and I chose Rogue which in turn has its own exit options for when the time comes.

This is an implicitly narrative way of creating a character as a career story automatically generates as development points are expended and whilst one can create any desired background in most games the WHF approach is much more gritty and one begins to wonder what a character has been up to as the history is assembled. I don't think I have seen this before and I much prefer it to the usual linear approach. After all our real life stories are often a winding road of dodgy jobs and colourful relationships.

Inner Space

When asked for spare change from strangers my short answer tends to be no but in the famous words of the overpaid hot dog salesman, change only comes from within. Whilst most of us still inhabit a somewhat claustrophobic social space, the lack of three dimensions are still not enough to keep us constrained as a roleplaying club and GMs are forging ahead with what would be the usual game rotations; change is upon us with no room to spare apparently. The onset and shock of the covid crisis saw us retreat rapidly to our virtual castles and peek at each other through the embrasures. Having said this the zoomers and discordians among us have adapted quickly and just being able to interact with real people in two dimensions does relieve the anxiety of social withdrawal.

And social distancing is not quelling the rush for places in our new upcoming games as we still sport three full tables of players. To summarise GM Krzys is returning to his sentinels comic universe and last time I spoke to him about this there were expansions available that I suspect have found their way onto his shelves by now. Building on a previous one shot the setting takes place in the recently rebuilt city of Megalopolis.

GM Jack is going back to his Warhammer Fantasy tomes and whilst I have very little knowledge of the backdrop I do recall it as an enjoyable D&D like experience albeit somewhat grim. If I remember correctly some of the earliest blog articles were about our WHF at the time regarding  the disposal of a possessed dagger. It was problematic.

GM Jamie is inviting his players into the Tomb of Annihilation outside Balders Gate within the Forgotten Realms. Sounds inviting to me, what could possibly go wrong in a D&D world of low level characters ? Everything I suspect.

With GM Jules's Warhammer Fantasy and GM Jon's Star Trek Adventures running as satellite games, things seem to be very vibrant at the moment with no shortage of adventure.

So there we aren't and there we have it. Tradition is triumphing in the shadow of our plague and we can all just keep calm and carry on although I suspect calmness will quickly be replaced by the bloodshed and usual the haggling over magic items.

Captain's blog

These last few weeks have seen another episode of GM Jon's Star Trek Adventures broadcast back to us and unlike every other Star Trek episode I am very pleased to say that I haven't seen this one before. I'll be the first to say I have a slightly chaotic neutral leaning to my role playing characters no matter their alignment which I think must be an overhang of being very bored  as a child. One of the quickest ways to relieve monotony is to poke something and see what it does. Problem is as you grow up, poke can escalate into provoke but a healthy imagination does temper the soul - better to lose yourself in your thoughts than lose the people around you.

Now this sojourn may explain why I am enjoying the STA so much. Whilst studiously detailed by Jon of course, the quasi military Starfleet culture naturally promotes responsibility and carries a bond with your crew mates by its nature. Basically actions have consequences. As in the last game, something as simple as a risky descent through a volatile atmosphere in a shuttle can really focus the mind when something suddenly goes wrong - in our case a power system failure leaving the entire party not more than a couple of rolls away of being wiped out. It concentrates the mind and although we managed to land, the feeling of risk from then on is palpable - set the scene in the context of threat and it never gets boring. Indeed threat is actually embodied in GM tokens that are played against us - we in turn earn momentum to counter. I like the way this works - we can see threat tokens waiting to be spent and like the tension at a gambling table each token spins the wheels of fate and escalates the tension. 

The narrative of the brand is expansive which is captivating to the trekkie of course but more than that when our shp's decks are being detailed and rolled out to us down to the seating arrangements of our departments somehow it makes the universe just that little bit larger. Our continuing mission engages again on August 8th. I don't know the Stardate.

Byte me

On my role playing radar this week is a new d8 based RPG system called Byte. It's an interesting approach to narrative  and specifically uses a modular construction process for generating the environment. It's what I would describe as a systems approach to game generation which is less common in my experience. In general I would say that narrative captures the imagination and naturally we often get RPGs as part of a larger production line of resources off the back of other media - usually a set of films or a best selling series of books. Our evolution is steeped in culture and narrative is its  scaffold so naturally creators get excited when they imagine new worlds and the dilemmas within them.

Conversely I tend to feel systems approaches are somewhat uninspiring as they just tend to mix archetypal components into a bowl and whisk but this may be missing the point somewhat. In reflection I think a modular approach to game creation is not necessarily an end in itself and perhaps more of a writing tool. Art comes in many forms but perhaps there is nothing wrong with a join the dots system if indeed an interesting portrait emerges.

Byte's creators have not held back on thoroughness though with a 400 page rulebook containing 20 thematic modules that can connect in a number of different ways. Basically the GM selects a tech level from 1 to 10 from stone age to space age then ancestries get connected being the racial components and on top of that skill lists are then connected and finally overlaid with one or more thematic modules - from the Kickstarter there is one example construction of "Space Wizards with Swords". Its crazy enough that it just might work...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rgbarros/byte-roleplaying-game-rulebook

Aegis of Hope

Liquid crystal technology has a prestigious and revolutionary history. Invented in 1964 it is now in fact in its 11th generation with the introduction of flexible displays over the last year or so. This is going to be an interesting tech and may well be a milestone on the path to fully blown e-paper - a single portable sheet that can change its surface detail all the way up to fully blown animations. With a sheets of extremely large e-paper there is the possibility of replacing wall paper to give an emergent if not perhaps nauseous experience of something akin to virtual reality. I very much suspect there will be implications for the usual role playing tools - books and modules certainly but also for interactive maps and playing surfaces.

Nevertheless, as interesting as all this is, it transpires that the acronym now has another derivation - namely Liquid Crystal Dice. I always think I have seen it all every time I post a dice review but yet again there is seemingly no end to the mesmerizing craving that role players have for their plastic jewelry. Metallic Dice Games have carved out a niche for themselves in the high end production of rolling polyhedrons and the panache of their website https://metallicdicegames.com/ purveys the air of quality and artisan finery.

Their latest 'Elixir' product range consists of precision cut crystal gem dice, which I have seen before, but they have managed to seamlessly seal the plastic around a liquid core so that as and after they roll the contents continue to swirl causing light to continue dancing off the suspended metal fragments. The kickstarter was funded in under an hour and with an initial goal of about 7k has now surpassed over a third of a million dollars!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/579878362/elixir-dice-handcrafted-sharp-edged-liquid-core-rpg-dice?ref=3rkz44

The different product lines have names befitting their pedigree such as Aethar Abstract, Mana Extract, Vanishing Oil and Aegis of Hope. With an eye popping $20 for a single D20 and close to $100 for a full set we are now far off in the realms of retail Narnia....but they are sooo precious and I wants them.

History and Psychos

I'm going to make a thin excuse to co-opt this week's article but I think I am going to get away with it. These are poignant times in the real world with both high temperatures politically and high stakes constitutionally with the foundations of the free world on the roulette wheel of revolution. However, whether you bet on black or red is not my question but why we didn't see it coming? To be fair our plight has already been shared and is often fated to the casual contemplation of historians or the adjustment of economic theories; civilisations rise and fall after all and whilst Rome wasn't built in a day neither did it fall over a weekend. Revolution or evolution aside the burning question on the square one on which we always seem to find ourselves - are we blind to our future or is there another way ?

From a roleplayers perspective we have perhaps improved tools since the reading of entrails or divining of runes. For our part we play unreserved in our fantastical simulations and experience the cause and effects of our actions on the communities, cities and empires in which we roam. There may well be a light in the future darkness with scale-able simulations but can we imagine a better way? Well, amazingly in recent articles, I have touched upon my nostalgia for the Golden Age of Sci fi and as an Asimov fan I have followed the Foundation epic based on the unlikely wheelchair bound mathematical hero Hari Seldon and the predictive power of his Psycohistory models. Spanning thousands of years his models were not used for avoiding the inevitable fall of the shining Galactic Empire but rather to shorten the darkness for the generations left starving and crawling in its wake.

For such a passionate and nostalgic fan of Asimov imagine my heart missing a beat when I  just discovered the commissioning of a new series based on his Foundation novels. Whilst sci-fi fans will love this, the Asimov fans can savour the detailing of Chris Foss's artwork in the trailer with the thick bands of contrasting colours on the ship decals. here you can compare the 70s book covers with a clip from the trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZd3xUDudy8

As excited as I am to visualise what I could only imagine as a teenager reading these novels born thirty years before me, I am going to literally explode if a role playing system comes out of this and I think it will.

 

Left Hand of Darkness

The voyages of the USS Lyonesse continued this week along with its intrepid and slightly green crew (not literally). The end of the first session saw us needing to call a breakdown service as we stalled out of warp bubble rather embarrassingly on our way to DS3, a tiny presence on the boarder of the Black Cluster Nebula. Thankfully it was a flaw in one of the Dilithium crystals which required a complete dis-assembly rebuild by our very hard working engineering team. In other words not my characters fault, still if you are going to cause a sleepless night to someone it may as well be a Vulcan - they just seem to get slightly more stoic than usual.

More interestingly we subsequently set off on mission to investigate the whereabouts and or otherwise fate of the Vulcan Exploration Ship (VES) Sunak and whilst narrowly missing a space whale whilst negotiating an entrance corridor into the area we finally detected a beacon, although the crew have been experiencing some cognitive dysfunction possibly due to a wider telepathic field. It's an interesting situation and there is a nice balance between caution, discipline and risk. Curiously enough as a pilot myself the game triggers all the same sort of feelings - pilot training is rigorous, repetitive and highly disciplined so when things go off plan, the brain already has a scaffold of checklists that go to work immediately - it not only quells panic but narrows the decisions one has to take. The added advantage of a Starship is that we can regularly call meetings and re-assess anomalies which is a valuable safety net.

However as a pilot I wouldn't deliberately fly into a large black telepathic cloud which is where the intrepid Starfleet training would superseded my own I would presume. Navigating in unexplored Nebulae brings its own challenges as to the traditional left hand rule of dungeon crawling so I think it really would take a Vulcan to optimise a search pattern when flying blind - perhaps that's where the ears help.

Inhuman

Not being human can be a slippery slope for a roleplayer. I have never really reflected on all of the non human characters I have played as generally speaking there always tends to be appropriate background material,  or indeed they retain a large proportion of their humanity genetically speaking. Half Orcs are basically part feral and exhibit neanderthal characteristics I feel as they tend to be low intelligence, uncooperative, strong and short tempered but what is interesting is that their general temperament still exhibits human traits skewed to different sensitivities. Vampires, like Cyborgs begin as humans but generally speaking have their empathy removed - Vampires prey on humans so empathy cant really be a trait, certainly when they are hungry and otherwise it is lost over time as their human memories fade. Cyborgs perhaps like werewolves still have a human element that is either trapped or subservient to an overriding force, being either a compromised brain or curse respectively.

As in media an audience needs a handle on a character in order to engage a story so it's necessarily a case to offer recognizable dilemmas - same for reolpleyers as a metaphorical human bone has to be tossed to a player in some form. In playing the recent Star Trek Adventures we have a range of non human characters in play including a fluorine breathing Zaranite which will be interesting. Whilst there are some great episodes such as The Devil in the Dark and Darmok where our finest human characteristics are pitched against our darker impulses the outcome is, as always with Star Trek, optimism in the finest humanistic tradition.

I think the role playing border controls stop at the truly alien characters. Cyberpunk notwithstanding, I wonder if a truly alien character is viable at all ? The handle would have to be its behavioral context respective of the other party members as there wouldn't be any recognisable psychology involved although it would have it own motivations of course.  Perhaps the outcomes become irrelevant in such a game and it becomes more about painting a portrait than changing people. It could be the case that all characters can be derived back to through evolution as anything alive must start with a drive for survival either mechanically or intellectually. I am drawn to Alex Garlands films, Annihilation in particular although playing an amorphous glowing blob might keep people up at night.

Some Re-Assembly required

This coming Monday will bring the country back to something like normal working hours as non essential shops are allowed to re-open. Actually I am not sure if that includes pubs and clubs but even if it does there will still be social distancing rules of some kind in place. The quandary for us is how we can resurrect our meetings and to be honest, I don't think there are really many options; the whole point of a role playing game is to sit around a table together and build a world in which to argue. The Belmont Railway Club always seems to be running on fumes, financially speaking, but I don't know the whole story as its a member of NARC and I would guess there is a supporting freehold covenant somewhere in the background as the building itself is Victorian and wholly owned by some entity that clearly isn't profit orientated. Perhaps it will always be there like the cave paintings of Lascaux.

More pressing are the finances of the Dice Saloon that is completely dependent on a social space. Whilst it was in transit to the Emporium on London road I can only hope that the respective landlords and contracts are flexible as its clearly a long term sustainable business despite a hopefully short term pandemic. I think its all going to come down to a vaccine ultimately as who is going to linger in any enclosed space until then.

I'm not sure what plans if any we can make and I suppose it will depend on our individual circumstances - on line play will just have to keep us all sane as well as possible for now and whilst I am beginning to get used to it, it's not a substitute although as a role player it should be theoretically possible both to run a scenario and roleplay all the characters oneself. Is this mad ? I can't tell anymore.