Lost in the Ruins

I know, I know. I’ve been gone for a little over two years. I may explain that in a post later this week. But what brought me back now is James Maliszewski’s recent post on Grognardia about all the Ruins of ancient old school gaming blogs, sad remnants of what our community once was.

And Nine and Thirty Kingdoms was name-checked. Damn. Now I feel ashamed.

It’s not that I didn’t miss blogging, or didn’t think about my large to-do list of RPG projects I was working on. I definitely missed the community. As I said above, I’ll probably talk more about this in another post. But one reason for my absence may also be a reason why the community dwindled: keeping in contact became more difficult.

A History of the Ruins

First, they came for Google Reader. I did switch to Feedly to keep up with the blogoverse when that shut down, but I never quite liked that as much. No matter! We could all switch to Google+ and keep up that way!

Yeah, that went away, too.

People tried to do Discord next. I think there were two competing OSR Discord servers, with OSR politics swirling around them as well. Not sure which, if any, is still active. I mainly stopped using Discord because I didn’t really like it as a communication method.

I imagine some people tried to keep the community going via social media like Twitter or Facebook. I don’t think I have any old school contacts on any of those. I stopped using Twitter, although technically I still have an account, and Facebook is completely unusable, especially since their AI moderation will flag longer comments or more than two comments in a short timespan as “bullying”.

Aside: “Bullying” is probably just an excuse. I think the real reason Facebook squashes longer, deeper discussions – the kind we had in the old blogosphere days – is because people who do that tend to focus on only a few interactions and don’t spend as much time on their platform, which means fewer ads. What they want is a lot of shallow exchanges, because people lose track of time and just keep scrolling forever.

Monetizing Your Treasure Trove

Another problem some people have mentioned is the rampant commercialism. People having fewer discussions and only posting ads or updates about their upcoming products. Even I could be considered guilty of that; although I have yet to sell any of the stuff I published and wasn’t planning to do more than “pay what you want”, I got too serious about too many projects and things became less fun.

The thing about turning the creation of supplemental RPG material into a job instead of a hobby is that it makes you focus on generating hype instead of communicating with others. You read less and post more, but your posts aren’t meant to start discussions. They are just marketing.

And even if people do start discussing your product, the endless flood of product gossip tends to turn some people (me) off. Every few months, some new product becomes the darling of the community and gets talked up endlessly, which means no one’s spitballing ideas with their colleagues anymore… and we are all subconsciously aware that K-Rad Game #2376 is going to vanish in a few months, anyways, because have you even seen K-Rad Game #2377? It’s k-rad!

Conclusion

What can we do about this? Not really sure. We can try rebuilding the community, somehow, but how? The problem is that people need to

• ( a ) Go to blogs and read stuff, and
• ( b ) Post links and their reactions to their own blog, but
• ( c ) Their own blogs need other people to be doing (a) and (b) to those reaction posts as well.

We need blogs to be a web again, instead of a forest of trees.

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How Much Should We Worry About Ability Scores?

I know I'm already working on two other multi-post topics here, but I thought I'd take a break and draw attention to What's the Point of Ability Scores? (Part I) over on the Grognardia blog. James Maliszewski is diving into the topic of what ability scores used to mean vs. what they mean at later points in the evolution of D&D and related Class and Level Exploration Fantasy (CLEF) games. The D&D community went through several stages:

1. referee rolls ability scores, player chooses class afterwards
2. player rolls ability scores, then chooses class afterwards
3. player rolls ability scores, chooses class, and adjusts scores bases on class (point swap in Holmes, etc.)
4. player chooses class, creates ability scores targeted to fit that class (AD&D 1e Method V, point buy in later editions)

These stages of development sort of match up with changing views on the importance of ability scores:

1. guidelines only, few iron-clad mechanics tied to scores (3 LBBs OD&D)
2. some modifiers for high/low scores, gatekeeper function for certain classes (post-Greyhawk OD&D, early AD&D 1e)
3. modifier/gatekeeper functions + roll under rolls for non-weapon proficiencies (late AD&D and Classic D&D)
4. modifiers to "universal" game mechanic (D&D 3e and later)

In other words, the more important ability scores become, either for getting the class you want or just plain survival, the more players are going to want more control over their ability scores, either through guarantees that they can get at least one high score or through actual point-buy.

Since I've made no secret that I prefer using ability scores as guidelines and have been removing modifiers from my own gaming as much as possible, the low numbers on both of the above scales are my sweet spot. Although as I mentioned in a comment on Grognardia, I'm pretty committed these days to the idea of "either roll 3d6 in order, or just pick your scores and let's move on". Some of my ideas on that I've covered before here.

• Let 'em Pick
• Let 'em Pick random table (PDF)
• Just Pick a Class Already

I'm not sure where that would fall in the development of ability score generation methods, although I like to think of it as Stage 5. Once I realized that all ability score generation methods were basically about getting as close to the scores you want without the GM and other players thinking you are cheating, then really everything other than "I'll take whatever scores I get" is some form of "I'll try to get the scores I want". It's just easier to cut out the dice rolling or point distribution tricks at that point, pick the scores you want, and move on. And if the GM is not interested in being a dick about what players can do, there's not much reason to worry about cheating on rolls, is there?

Blog Post of Note: Character Creation in 5 Sentences

I know I said I was taking this week off, but decided I needed to draw attention to a blog post.

Justin Alexander of The Alexandrian has a post on Character Creation in 5 Sentences, a way to make running an open table easier. It only takes five minutes for someone to join a game if all they need to do is to write down these simple things listed:

1. Roll 3d6, total them, and write them down in these six boxes in order.
2. Are you a human, an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit?
3. Are you a fighting-man, magic-user, or cleric? (If they picked a dwarf or elf you can skip this step. Randomly roll hit points and the magic-user’s spell.)
4. What’s your character’s name?
5. You have a sword, chain armor, a shield, 8 rations, a small silver mirror, 2 torches, flint and steel, a bedroll, and 16 gold pieces. (Customize equipment list appropriately.)

OD&D is uniquely suited for this of the various official versions of D&D because of the simplicity of the rules. I'll add, though, that you could speed up the process even more by skipping Step #1. Just roll and explain each ability score when it's actually needed.

Blog Post of Note: Less Rules To Do More

Justin Hamilton's Aboleth Overlords blog has a few suggestions about hacking D&D effectively: Less Rules To Do More: Combat Maneuvers. It's actually the second post in a series, but it's a practical post, an example of how to consider reusing rules already present or just not using a rule at all and winging it.

Basically, something I write about from time to time, so of course I agree.

Blog Post of Note: D&D Doesn't Understand What Monsters Are

"A monster is a symptom that somewhere, somehow, the world has gotten fucked up."

This sentence is the final summary of a Throne of Salt blog post about monsters, or more specifically about what makes monsters "monsters".

I could disagree with some of the contents of the post, but instead I'll mention this as a point of agreement. Back when I had delusions of being able to afford college, I took classes in humanities (aka myths/folklore) and anthropology, as well as doing a lot of independent reading in those subjects. One thing you learn very quickly when researching mythology, history of the witch trials, folklore past and present, and beliefs about the supernatural as collected by anthropologists is that magical events and monsters aren't just "weird things that happen", but are always linked to a cause. A transgression, a breaking of societal norms or violation of taboos.

Monsters in mythology are either punishments or side effects of sins against the gods. The minotaur results from Minos breaking his word and not sacrificing a bull to Poseidon. Medusa is transformed not because of her own transgression, but because she is raped by Poseidon in Athena's temple. 

In later folklore, ghosts and vampires are the frequently the result of improper burial, but can also be caused by unfulfilled passions (like vengeance) or dying before their time. On the other hand, dying at the wrong time, especially women dying in childbirth or children dying unexpectedly, is often blamed on part-monster, part-witch creatures like the stirge or the penanggalan.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Monsters are basically embodiments of what's wrong in the world, warning signs that something has to be fixed. Where D&D, but also most modern fantasy over the past 75 years, goes wrong is: monsters get stripped from this context and are thus just dangers to fight. This arguably makes sense in fantasy wargaming, such as the fantasy supplement in Chainmail, which offers no explanations for why monsters exist because that's irrelevant in a wargame. It doesn't make much sense for D&D if played as anything more than a skirmish-level wargame.

Blog Post of Note: Element Generator

The Weird & Wonderful Worlds blog has a Javascript-based Element Generator that is worth a look. I would probably tinker with the tables, for my own use, but it's a solid way of generating a random element or three for a distinctive fantasy world, or as the basis for a unique elementalist class.



I may have more to say on the concept later.

Blog Post of Note: The Top Ten Emblematic D&D Monsters

Today, I'd like to point people to this blog post: False Machine: The Top Ten Emblematic D&D Monsters. I would agree with many of the rankings on that list, but more important, I understand them. The list is a mix of monsters every player faces, especially at the beginning, and those that are unique to D&D and well-known.

I don't think I have much reason to comment further on it. Just read the post.

Blog Post of Note: Whither the Dungeon?

Justin Alexander asks on his blog Whither the Dungeon?. The subtitle is "The Decline and Fall of D&D Adventures", although I should mention he specifically means "knowledge of how to run adventures". Although indirectly, I suppose the trend he describes affects the quality of adventures as well, as the people writing adventures now are those who never learned how to run adventures, so they don't know what to include or how to present it.

I wonder, though, if there is some additional reason for the decline of adventure writing. But perhaps that is a topic for another time.

Emergency Spell Casting: Comparing Approaches

The Kernel in Yellow has posted a response to my emergency spellcasting article, so I thought it might be worthwhile to compare the two approaches and discuss tailoring things to your needs.

First: the blogger appears to have come to old school play via 5e, in contrast to my background in OD&D and 1e. Background influences your models when making new material. Consider the way we each used “spell slots”, for example.

• For 5e players, spell slots are a resource to be used. So, The Kernel in Yellow’s approach is to require one spell slot per emergency casting and allow additional slots to be “spent” to improve the spell.
• For me, “spell slot” is an artifact of the way we’re talking about the spell prep process and cannot be “spent” for any reason. So, I treat casting from a book as spell prep and ask "Should there be a difference if the caster were already ‘full’ of prepped spells?’

Another example is the way we handle ingredients. In 5e and even in 1e, spell ingredients are pre-defined and necessary. If you stick to that model, then you would want a way to handle finding ingredients in an emergency, as The Kernel in Yellow does. But in OD&D, almost no spells need ingredients when cast. I, however, assume there are untracked, undefined ingredients used during downtime.

Then we get to casting time. Do you start with regular spell casting as your model and balance emergency casting by making it slightly longer, but still viable as something you could cast in combat? Or do you start with spell prep times, normally undefined, and try to define them?

The tables we each use diverge a lot more. I don’t have a “spell does nothing” effect on my table, and the range of effects aren’t that extreme. 97% of the time, spell casters are going to get more or less the effect they want unless they rush things. Backfires are pretty difficult to get without divine intervention, as is the double-strength maximum result of Fantastic. Kernel in Yellow’s table is aimed more at penalizing emergency casting at least part of the time, to prevent it from being the go-to choice for spell casting. Plus, that Fireworks result is pretty extreme, causing the caster to lose 1 to 4 additional spells.

A side note: since I allow learning new spells via Read Magic, some “emergency” spell casting is really going to be experimenting with a spell the caster has never cast before. Sometimes, the spell will be unique and of little use anywhere but in the dungeon. This is one reason I didn’t want to lean too hard on penalizing spell casters who cast from spell books.

A lot of the differences can be summarized as “My model is spell prep, Kernel in Yellow’s model is spell casting.” With the second model, your design question is going to be “Why don’t casters always cast spells from spell books?” Your answer will probably be “because the results are usually bad,” and you’ll work to balance it against ordinary, “safe” casting. With the first model, my design question was “What happens when you try to prep a spell in a dungeon, instead of taking your time at your home base?” My answer wound up as “It will probably be a little unpredictable, but not much. Mostly, it’s just annoyingly long, so people rarely do that.”

You’ve got to decide which route you want to take: giving players a boost and then balancing that, or giving them something that adds to the rich background details.

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Blog Post of Note: Dungeons & Dragons at a Distance

Jon Peterson's Playing at the World blog has a post called Dragons at a Distance: Early Play-by-Mail D&D, which may seem especially relevant these days. One question I wonder about is whether anyone was running a mix play-by-mail/play by phone campaign back in the day. Regular long-distance phone calls would have been too expensive back then, but you could imagine someone handling exploration and negotiation through the mail, switching to phone when a combat breaks out.

These days, people do Discord/Skype/Hangouts/Zoom, but that generally requires scheduling a session. One could imagine handling a larger number of players via email, with players teaming up as their schedules permit for actual expeditions.

Blog Post of Note: The Minotaur’s Maze

Dyson Logos has a maze map: The Minotaur’s Maze, as well as a discussion on the ways mazes are run. I'm leaning away from treating mazes as skill challenges, myself, but perhaps this is worth thinking about more. Is there a different way to create a feeling of isolation? Can it be done with mapping? Is a feeling of isolation what you, the GM, really want to impart?

Blog Post of Note: My Flavor of Vanilla

Trey at the From the Sorcerer's Skull blog writes about My Flavor of Vanilla, as in "vanilla fantasy", without all the twists and quirks typical of modern fantasy, or the overly-rigid structures built into D&D fantasy. Since I've seen a couple other people referring to Trey's post, I'm expecting more people to be talking about this in the coming weeks. I may even return to this topic myself in a future blog post.

Blog Post of Note: In Which Gygax Gets Disenchanted with Wandering Monsters

Delta's blog has a post today titled In Which Gygax Gets Disenchanted with Wandering Monsters. I'm not entirely certain Gygax was complaining about the rule, here, but clearly, he was changing it.

I may have some things to say about wandering monsters, because who knows? I might change things, too. But I think I'll save that for a future post.

Blog Post of Note: The Khopesh Curve (plus a sidenote)

Delta's D&D Hotspot: The Khopesh Curve is a short and to the point post about the XP awards for killing monsters. What's the difference between flat XP for hit dice and the Greyhawk XP system? Read Delta's post to find out!

A sidenote on blogging, though: I've seen many posts since the collapse of G+ about how going back to blogging will help keep the conversations going. OK, but why does everyone have to make this harder? To those of you on the Blogger/Blogspot platform: there's a little widget that adds sharing buttons to your blog posts. Believe it or not, this lets people share your posts, which means people can be invited to join those conversations you crave. I'm sure other platforms like Wordpress have something similar. But I'm not seeing anyone use these.

It's like people prefer screaming into the void.

On a related note: people should be reading the Old School RPG Planet aggregator. Not just adding their blogs to the bloglist and ignoring everyone. Sure, there are some improvements I'd like to see, but it's a great resource even as-is.

Blog Post of Note: Making monsters different - an example of invisibility

Chicagowiz has a post about Making monsters different, specifically talking about invisibility. His opening point is something I agree with totally: too much stuff in D&D is just about hit modifiers, making the game rather bland. It's one reason I've been moving away from using numeric bonuses.

Switching to the specific example given (invisible creatures,) I'm wondering whether two ACs would even be necessary. Instead, give an AC for when an attacker knows the target's position and assume that otherwise, the target can't be hit. In other words, replace "-4 to hit" with "can only be hit if not using vision to target".

I do have an interesting follow-up idea, but in the meantime, check out Chicagowiz's post.

Blog Post of Note: Rethinking clerics and religion, part 1

I have a couple posts in the works, but thought I should direct people to this post instead on the Sword of Mass Destruction blog.



Sword of Mass Destruction: Rethinking clerics and religion, part 1



There are some points where I might disagree, but that's mostly because I think of religion in terms of structural anthropology and Indo-European studies (Georges Dumézil and the like.) It's not relevant to the topic, which is how to design religions for your D&D game. Of course, rather than going through a checklist like this, my approach would be more like "take two or three actual historical cults and merge them, change the names, and add a little spice to make it feel unique." But you still need to keep things like this in mind when looking for cults to borrow.

Blog Post of Note: How Much Mapping Is Actually Required?

Alex Schroeder raises the question: How much mapping is actually required? He’s not talking about mazes, where the architects include features meant to confuse invaders or lead them into traps or ambush spots. The example he gives is of a fairly linear map with a few branches.

He suggests that this map doesn’t really need to exist at all. The details of the dungeon can be handled entirely with text. I’d agree that a truly linear map with no branches or even one with just one or two side passages could be handled this way.

But some areas should always be mapped, for example one with more than one exit in most of the walls. Even if the area can be described in words, it’s actually easier to understand it with a map. Another example is a room with large furniture, statues, pillars, or anything else that breaks up the floor space. It’s not complicated to describe, but figuring that stuff out with a map is practically instantaneous.

This does lead to some ideas about mapping, but I’ll save those for other posts.

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Blog Post of Yesteryear: Fantasy Religion?

I've been getting some traffic from an older post on Andy Bartlett's blog Known World, Old World: Fantasy Religion? I think it's just coincidence and people are just going to that post, then clicking blog links in Andy's sidebar. But it's a worthwhile read: How do you keep the excitement of real-world religion, with its schisms, heresies, corrupt priests (or false priests,) and religious conflicts? Andy's partial solution is... well, I'll let you read it on your own.



This is certainly a topic I've talked about before, but may like to return to.

Blog Post of Note: Original, Simple, Ready to Hack

I may not completely agree with what Dan says in Throne of Salt: Original, Simple, Ready to Hack, but there's a grain or two of truth, and some entertaining commentary along the way.



Me, I still say that it's not an OSR game unless it's Class and Level Exploration Fantasy, but the "Simple" and "Ready to Hack" points, as well as "Organic", "Skill-based" (needs a better name...) and "Reactive", are all applicable. But YMMV.