Badges As Icons

Here's a list of the badges I'm using as icons, with their meanings and the labels/tags used on posts. I suppose it also doubles as a round-up of badges I made that people might want to use for other purposes. It's actually mostly for my benefit. Most of the images on the badges are modified from Lorc's Open RPG Icons.

Topics

Not all the tags I've used have badges/icons.

Skills and Abilities (the ability label)

Class, Race, and Characters (the class and race labels)

Combat-Related (the ac, combat, and d6-weapons labels)

Encumbrance (the encumbrance label)

Wounds and Healing (the hp label)

Magic, Spells, and Artifacts (the magic, sorcery and spell labels)

Monsters (the monster and wandering monster feature labels)

Psionics (the psi label)

Levels and Experience (the xp label)

Rants

Genres

Despite the organization based on time periods, this doesn't mean strictly modern, strictly historical, etc. All that matters is the "breakpoints", listed in parentheses. Most of these don't have a special tag or label yet, and I may rarely write about some of them.

Post-Apocalyptic (anything during or after a global or near-global catastrophe.)

Modern (post-atomic, but mostly within the bounds of what we've experienced... i.e. not future.)

Historic (post-gunpowder but pre-atomic.)

Ancient, Classical, or Medieval periods (anything pre-gunpowder, or on the cusp.)

Pre-Historic (Stone Age or Dinosaurs. Can be modified by other genres to produce anomalous pre-history or time travel to the distant past.)

Mystery, Intrigue, Investigation (originally just a Spy badge, but I doubt I'll write about spies that much.)


I will need to do Future and Space badges, still, especially since these are the genres I plan to write about quite a bit in the future. Planned images: old-school Lithium atom symbol for Future, rocket ship and stars for Space. Really, though, most of what I write about is firmly in the Ancient, Classical, or Medieval genres or their mash-ups, so we may not see much of the other badges.

Badges Detected!

Probably no one noticed, but I started including "subject icons" at the beginning of many posts. For a while now, I've been thinking I ought to use more pictures in my posts, but I didn't really want to go swipe a random picture from somewhere, just for the sake of illustration. Plus, I worry about wasting image space, if I were to upload my own images. So, I've been pretty sparsely illustrated.

Then I thought: "Maybe I should come up with subject icons, so that when I do a post about magic, for example, I can use the Magic icon."

Then I realized: Duh, I *did* come up with a bunch of icons, back when several of us were on a kick about making "merit badges" for RPGs. I specifically focused on "exception badges" that showed which part of the rules you typically change or eliminate, and "genre badges" for campaign type. And those actually make pretty good subject icons, and they're all uploaded already, so... why not use them?

I do keep forgetting to use them, like on the previous two posts about XP for magic items. But I went back and added an XP badge to those two (Bet you didn't think I'd have a badge for XP...) I'll try to be more thorough in the future.

Genre Badge: Settings

I figure genre badges can be divided into two groups: Themes, like the Spy/Crime badge I posted earlier, and Settings, Setting doesn't need to be too specific, but I figure the three broad time categories (Historic, Modern, Future) are a good start. There are a couple broad areas in Historic and Future that could be broken out, though.

My game has a Prehistoric feel or setting. By this, I mean pre-city, pre-metal, probably very little technology as we understand it. This is for realistic Stone Age, Flintstones, or intelligent dinosaurs.

My game has an Ancient feel or setting. This is everything from Copper or Bronze Age through Medieval; the unifying feel is "metal tools, human or animal power."


My game has an Historic feel or setting. This is everything with guns: yes, technically, there were guns in Medieval Europe, but practically, gunpowder is the breakpoint for many players and GMs. I thought about doing a Cowboy badge, but I'm not really sure it's all that different from other age of gunpowder settings, aside from the small details
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My game has a Modern feel or setting. Everything set more or less now, but we can allow leeway and count anything with modern cities and widespread use of the internal combustion engine as "modern", because again this is a breakpoint for some players.

My game has a Post-Apocalyptic feel or setting. The future, but without the conveniences of readily-available technology.

I still need a Space badge and a generic Future badge, if I can find a good concept for one. Note that none of these demand strict adherence to any historical facts; they are all about the feel of the setting. To indicate a strict historical campaign, use the badge with the By The Book badge; on the other hand, you can combine it with the Gonzo badge or the Improv badge to indicate you will be deviating significantly from real-world history.

Exception Badge: Wounds, Monsters, Skills

The next set of "game master exception badges" is a little iffier as to whether they're necessary or not; they could be subsumed into other badges. I decided they were hinted at as being dealbreaker topics often enough that they could stand on their own.

My game uses an alternative approach to Wounds and Injuries. This could have been incorporated into the Combat badge, but I decided highly detailed or freeform wound systems are their own category.


My game uses different Monsters, or a different approach. Perhaps not as necessary a badge by itself, because few players object to GMs who use different monster rules behind the scenes. However, when I create negative exception badges, the "No Monsters" badge indicates that you don't use "monsters" at all, only humans and animals.


My game uses a different Skill system. Yesterday, I considered this part of the Class and Character exception badge, but I decided that skill systems is an enormous hot button and deserves its own badge.

I haven't worked out a good approach to the negative badge that doesn't obscure the image yet, so probably my next batch of badges will be genre badges.

Exception Badge: Combat, Weight, Psionics

A couple more badges. I should probably put these in a Google Doc, since that would be an easier way to distribute them. Maybe I should include Stuart's badges as well, to make everything easy to grab in one go?

For the record, one of my guidelines when deciding what rules category needs an exception, I'm focusing on elements the player interfaces with that are known to be dealbreakers (in other words, I've seen people on forums claim they would or would not play a game with that element.)

I use modified rules for Equipment and Encumbrance. (2eDM mentioned in a comment he's shocked players when they discovered he played encumbrance strictly, but I was still wary of doing a badge for this, until I decided to include equipment in general.)

I use modified rules for Weapons, Armor, and Combat. This badge allows you to warn players that you use extremely detailed replacement rules, or ascending AC in an otherwise straight AD&D 1e game, or d6-only weapon damage (which shocks some people even when you've told them you are playing OD&D.)

I use Psionics, or have modified the psionics rules. Psionics is officially an optional system in most TSR versions of the game, and for some it's a dealbreaker, especially if it replaces magic.

Are there any other rules areas that players are known to have strong opinions about?

Exception Badge: Class and Level

I did some more "gamemaster rules exception badges", for when you want to advertise that your game is significantly different in one particular area. I wanted to focus only on particularly broad rules; although it would be fun to do a "shields shall be splintered" badge, for example, that's really more specific than is necessary. All prospective players want to know is what they will need to ask questions about for rules clarifications. The two obvious rules areas players would want to know about is character creation and advancement.

My game has different Class, Race, or Ability rules. By itself, it may just mean a few extra classes, or tweaks to the standard classes. Followed by the Improvised badge, this may mean a cliché system (like Risus) instead of classes. Followed by the Gonzo badge, this means weird and varied classes or races, like Arduin Grimoire.

My game has different rules for Experience or Leveling Up. This may mean a "level up every X sessions" rule, or random advancement, or a level cap.

Bare Bones Merit Badge

I could only think of one "main" merit badge to add to Stuart's collection: a variant of the Rules Tinker badge.

I use Bare Bones rules. I don't just tinker with the rules, I strip 'em, using only a limited number of classes, simplified combat, and fewer modifiers and subsystems.


The Bare Bones badge will also go well with some of the exception badges I'm going to do later. For example, if you have a Classes badge with the Bare Bones badge, it means your game uses fewer classes, races, or ability scores.

This badge was made using a couple images from Lorc's RPG icons set. Just like Lorc's icons, it's licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Merit Badges

Stuart at Strange Magic has some interesting GM Merit Badges to help identify your GM style on web pages, Google+ notices, or perhaps even in flyers you might put up in your local FLGS. For future reference, I think this pretty much reflects my GMing style:I'm using a slight modification to Stuart's idea and indicating one minor element with a smaller icon. I definitely have a map that I work from, but improv is more important, and the map can expand during play as necessary. So, by adding a smaller icon for the Map merit badge, I'm telling people "expect this, but it's not a major thing."

There's a couple iffy parts. I wasn't sure if I should indicate Tactics with a small icon as well. It depends on whether you mean combat tactics specifically, or just planning in general.

I've proposed topic-specific badges as well, which I call "exceptions". For example, I could add a "Magic" line under my main merit badges and include the Tinker badge on that line. You could even have special icons for broad areas of the rules that would typically have exceptions. Here's my sample, with a different color scheme to distinguish it from the main icons.

I use different rules or a modified style for Magic in my games.

Follow this icon with one of the standard icons to indicate Gonzo Magic, Improvised Magic, Heavily By The Book Magic (material components strictly enforced.)

There could also be "genre" icons, in case you are advertising a game as a particular genre or mix of genres, or as a flavor tweak to otherwise standard pseudo-medieval fantasy. Again, in my sample, I came up with a distinct color scheme, to make it stand out. This sample icon doesn't apply to me, specifically, but it just happens to be the first one I did:

This particular game is (or my games typically are) in the Spy/Crime Genre.

Follow this icon with another genre icon (for a mix) or a smaller genre icon (for a hint,) or with other icons, like the Magic icon to indicate magical spies or criminals.

EDIT: corrected the time-stamp.