Emotion Dice

In Amsterdam this summer I picked up a pair of these dice that are meant to teach kids about emotional expressions. What a great way to mingle gaming with my research into emotions ...

The 6 faces of each die.

Scanning across from top left, let's number them 1 to 6. Four of the expressions are easy to label: 1 is sad, 2 is happy, 4 is indifferent and 6 is angry. But 3 and 5 are interesting because they're expressions that emotion researchers haven't paid much mind to - yet here they are in a set of basic emotion dice for kids, which tells me someone needs to pay closer attention to them.

Number 3 is the wink. A facial expression, yes, but an emotion? The wink to me communicates something more intentionally than an emotion does; amusement, affection, a secret ... I know of no papers on winking.

Number 5 is the "mean smile." At another conference this summer I got into a conversation with a fellow psychologist about this one. He pointed out that the muscle groups for frowning and smiling are rarely activated together. But every child knows the meaning of this expression. It combines the powerful, hostile message of furrowed brows with the pleased expression of the smile, and it means "Ha ha! I gotcha!" Is it just that people often don't show this expression to pictures in a lab? Or that it's more a caricature expression than one found in the wild - combining elements of hostile frown and smile that are understandable when combined, but rarely actually expressed together? These questions require further study.

Anyway, for gaming purposes I also noticed that expressions 1, 2, 5 and 6 vary in two ways: mouth grimacing/smiling and eyebrows frowning/lifted.

Eyebrows are an interesting way of signaling dominance. Some research finds that frowning actually makes you look physically more mature and masculine, because grownups and men have heavier brows. Likewise, the raised eyebrows you see in expressions of fear, surprise and sometimes happiness convey that the person is temporarily feeling less powerful, because children have more space from eye to browline. In gaming, they can represent whether the person is feeling more or less powerful than whoever they're facing - in other words, a morale roll.

As for the mouth, that's used to communicate agreeableness - in other words, a reaction roll.

If you've been following this space for a while, you may see where this is going. Stay tuned - I'm going to adapt that table to use with the emotion dice.

What do you get the geek who has everything?

A character sheet for the fridge! (not to be confused with a mere zero-level shopping list)

Available through TopatoCo from Dr. McNinja creator Christopher Hastings.

Railroad in the Sandbox

Before I leave the ruins of Undermountain there's one more lesson to be had.

Ed Greenwood provides a great variety of hooks and plots that will take the adventurers into his mega-dungeon by one entrance or another. One of the hooks depends on the players seeing a ghostly knight. I mean, this is hardly a spoiler because it's so bleeding obvious what you're supposed to do. But after the apparition is described, we read:

If the players elect to do nothing about the Ghost Knight, they will soon be unable to sleep - whenever they close their eyes, they will see his angry-faced, shining image coming toward them with sword drawn.
This vision continues regardless of spells, magical barriers or cures, planar travels, and so on, until the sleepless, exhausted PCs lay the Ghost Knight to rest by revisiting the alleyway in which he disappeared. (Undermountain Adventures, Greenwood, p. 2)

That last sentence is particularly rich. It conjures up a scene of human defiance and petty authority worthy of Kafka. Or Looney Tunes.

Players: "Okay, well, we're pretty sick of these hauntings, so we're going to burn this plane shift scroll and travel to the Happy Hunting Grounds."
DM: "You spend the day marveling at the abundance of buffalo and opossum. But when you lay down your head to rest in a stand of pawpaw trees ... yes, this low-level knight ghost, this one-shot clue to a secret alley entrance, relentlessly reaches across the gulfs of space, time and probability to wail 'Whyyyy wonnnnt yoooou plaaay with meeee?' all night long!"

Well, OK, this was 20 years ago, in TSR's golden age of plot railroading. It's a sign of how pervasive the one-track adventure mentality was in those days that Greenwood feels compelled to screw over the players' free will even when there is absolutely no need. It's not like the players are following the hook to an adventure that took their DM two months to prepare, or even to a one-track purchased module. No, this is a boxed set that details at least a dozen entrances to the sprawling Undermountain complex. In modern terms, it's a sandbox ... with a railroad running right through it.

And did I mention the Ghost Knight is bleeding obvious? If your players turn down the hook of their own free will, it's like they're telling you, "Nah, we don't really want a dungeon adventure today, do you have something more in the line of a ship's chandlery economic simulation?"

There's a larger lesson here. It's inconceivable today that one of the top RPG designers could manhandle players with a design choice like this. The reason? Language. Over the course of the last two decades, writing about RPGs has reached a high critical level, spurred on by the emergence of White Wolf as a challenger to the hegemony and outlook of D&D, and by the spread of independent criticism over the Internet. Sure, the language sometimes collapses into jargon. But it also gives us powerful tools to articulate what wasn't obvious twenty years ago, let us spot the railroad in a sandbox, and figure out why it's not just an asshat move by the DM but actually unnecessary.

Out of the Orange Corner

So now we are looking for better solutions for the problem that led Ed Greenwood to break away from his renowned naturalism, with dictatorial bans on most of the high-level travel and intelligence-gathering spells so that parties couldn't use them against the many tricks and traps of Undermountain.

"Sorry guys, can't transport through that mysterious cloud ... again ..."

What do you do if teleport, passwall or ESP just ruins what you have going on in the adventure?

1. Say "Yes." Is it really such a big deal, in D&D, if a wizard has memorized a 5th level teleport spell instead of a cloudkill that could lay low a whole room full of lizardmen- and then uses that spell to deal with a deathtrap? Do you really think brute force solutions are only for combat? Do you realize that blocking these spells, which your player's wizard has memorized with no guarantee that they'll come in useful, forces her into a dumb damage-max mentality? Do you not have enough killer combats and lethal traps set up that the party should be applauded for finding a way around them, instead of booed for avoiding three hours' worth of pointless exercise in your dungeon jungle gym?

2. Say "Yes, but." There are error chances on teleportation, and at the most common levels in AD&D the caster can't take along more than one armored bodyguard. Casting ESP on someone will likely offend them and may not even work if they get a saving throw or think in an unknown language. Be familiar with the difficulties of each supposedly "broken" player approach, even come up with further twists, but don't knee-jerk away from them.

3. Flip the script. If a party can fly up to the window, passwall through the wall, move invisibly and silently while the archwizard is sleeping, and steal the fabled jewelled skull ... best believe someone can fly up to the party's stronghold, passwall through the wall, move invisibly and silently, and steal the skull back plus a whole bunch of other stuff.


4. Be naturalistic about security. So, in a world with such magic, what are the odds that someone has developed countermeasures, and that the stronghold or ruin has got them deployed? Some already exist; for instance, lead sheeting against ESP. Point is, the security measures should be explicable and part of the naturalistic concerns of the opposition, not handwaved in as "super powerful ancient magicks." Security measures are also more fun if they add more difficulty instead of shutting down attempts completely; the wizard's tower protected against flying by a pack of circling griffons, and against teleportation by etheral dimensional hounds that can follow teleport-tracks, Tindalos-style. And soon enough, if you're taking advantage of point number 3, the party will want to know how to protect themselves ....

5. Make spells increase fun, not kill it. This wasn't really available to the designers working within the lines of AD&D, but it's what I and all the rest of the old school players can achieve through house rule tinkering. Teleport is caster-only. ESP lets you detect only the presence of a sentient being, and if they fail a save, a couple of cryptic words from its stream of consciousness. Passwall - nuh uh, no way, though I do allow a high level spell that lets you turn a 10' cube of stone into oatmeal. But then you have to deal with whatever might follow you through, instead of having it neatly close up after you. And also, you have to deal with all that oatmeal.

The Orange-Painted Corner of Naturalism

Is "whale on 2nd Edition AD&D" week over yet? No? All right. I'm here to pay homage to the first Undermountain boxed set, from 1991.


[Spoilers follow]


Let me start with the positive. Ed Greenwood stands tall as a pioneer of fantasy naturalism in role-playing games. I devoured his Dragon magazine articles in the 80's, so rich with invention and detail. They worked up the plain and sometimes weird building blocks of the game into something more like a fantastic museum.

This is about 10% of Level 1.

In re-treading the orange and yellow floors of Undermountain last week I noticed no shortage of this imagination. It's a great resource from which to learn and steal set-pieces: ingenious traps and tricks, disguised monsters, classic fake-outs, detailed combats where the enemy uses every tactic available.

The core area of these Saturday Night Special encounters, justified by "hey, mad 29th level sado-wizard," is fringed by more naturalistic environments: the tavern where adventurers' descents make up a kind of medieval reality show, the slaver town of Skullport, or Waterdeep's monster-infested garbage dump. And even the smallest treasures drip with detail. Why loot "some jugs of wine" when you can have "14 wicker-jacketed, 5-gallon green glass carboys of dry white wine (1 gp)"?

At his best, Greenwood doesn't just create naturalism with physical and economic details. He takes the official monsters, spells and magic items to the limit. Ropers and mimics take on a dizzying variety of guises. Wands are disguised, put into the hands of enemies, worked into traps. Why make a trap rely on magical tentacles when you can use an imprisoned mutant carrion crawler instead? Sure, there are occasional "inexplicable" magical effects, but you get the sense he had more fun working with the standard toolbox.

But here's the catch - players can use their resources to be naturalists too. Faced with a script that says "Endure your heroic, character-defining quest up through seven chromatic levels of the Rainbow Tower to reach the solid gold pineapple on the platform at the top," the prosaically-minded player rebels and says "Er ... what does this fly spell do, exactly?" This is why medieval knights were afraid of crossbows. History is written by innovators who at one point said, "Screw the rules of engagement. This works." Player naturalism finds short cuts around fantasy railroads using the rules and resources built into the game itself.

Ah-ah-ah, but ol' Halaster is not letting you off so easily in Undermountain. Inexplicable, massive "magical fields" stop all teleporting, ESP and other game-breaking spells. We see not just a naturalistic designer, but one who expects players to use naturalism too - and prepares for it! Just about every dead body you find in the maze has a name and a history in case the players try Speak With Dead. That's cool, but at the same time there are places where the player runs up against "because I say so."

• What you can do in Undermountain: Fry a whole room of orcs with a level 3 fireball spell.
• What you can't do in Undermountain: Use your 5th level rock to mud spell to deal with that trick where the stone hands take one magic item and give you another. The hands are just impervious to any magic short of  a limited wish.

• What is detailed in Undermountain: Exact procedures for lifting, smashing, and being crushed by the doors in the Bonecrusher trap.
• What isn't detailed in Undermountain: How exactly those necrophidii, the ones that jump out of the pillar you have been prying gems from, steal your magic items. They just do! It's part of the trick! What do you mean, you want a DEX check?

"Look sharp, the floor here is orange."

So, it's not the designer's naturalism, but a particular response to anticipating the players' naturalism, that paints the encounter into a corner. I'm not picking on Ed Greenwood. This is a common problem in 2nd Edition-era adventure design,  lampooned pitch-perfectly over many issues of the Knights of the Dinner Table comic.

1. The designer wants the characters and setting to read from the mythic script. Characters should succeed through force of arms where appropriate, and through clever wits in designated clever wits areas. The setting must be allowed to enforce the moral lessons of its tricks and surprises.

2. The players want themselves, not necessarily the characters, to be heroes. Their funniest and most awesome stories are of outwitting the DM, not the dungeon. The more the rules describe a prosaic, lawful system of cause and effect, the more they can leverage this against the mythic story to gain advantage.

3. This is where things go awry. The designer refuses to allow player creativity to work and imposes more rules, by decree. When the players burn down the Hollywood saloon facade they find, not a way out, but walls behind made of solid steel and three feet thick.

Now, how can a designer do naturalism and not end up like this? I have a few tentative solutions, coming up next.

49 Pages

These are no 49 ordinary pages.

This is a plan for 18 point text, graphic modular house-rules pages for the first three character levels of a classic d20 medieval fantasy adventure game. They are in four sections corresponding to what players and GM will be doing in a typical campaign: Characters (white); The Village (yellow); The Adventure (orange); The Town (brown). The format forces conciseness, as regular readers here will have already seen. I usually end up liking what this does to the final products.

Let's be real. Nobody's going to use it who doesn't know what a roleplaying game is. The kids have played enough computer games, and anyone our age who is getting into this stuff has at least one person in the group who knows what it's all about.

So #1 will not be the usual thing. And #49 is downright heretical, but, I think, necessary as a starting point. Especially for the people approaching from computer gaming.

I expect some pages will split, and others merge, and I'll keep it to 49. Bold pages are already completed, with links to the posts if they've been posted (but expect some revisions).

Hey, if I even complete a third of these, starting from the most interesting first, it will be worth it. So, anything obviously missing?

1. What Is This Game?
2. Vital Statistics (definition of stats and basic mechanics for characters and beings)
3. Who Are You? (rolling a character and choosing a character class)
4. The Adventuring Character (charts of character stats and skills for the first 5 levels)
5. Adventuring Fighter Powers: Force, Finesse and Followthrough
6. Adventuring Priest Powers: Restore HP, Faith Healing, and Abjure Evil
7. Adventuring Rogue Powers: Ambush, Distraction and Skill Mastery
8. Adventuring Wizard Powers: Spell Casting
9. Spells for level 1
10. Spells for levels 3-5
11. Powers of the Adventuring Dwarf and Elf
12. The Adventuring Gnome: Dabbler's Magic and Loser's Luck
13. Going Shopping 1: Weapons
14. Going Shopping 2: Armor
15. Going Shopping 3: Equipment
16. Going Shopping 4: Domestic Animals
17. Who Else is Out There? (interactions with NPCs explained)
18. First Meetings (morale and reaction tables)
19. Companions (hirelings and henchmen) 
20. Everyday Life (living costs, travel, etc.) 
21. Adventure Environments
22. Light and the Senses
23. Moving Around
24. Breaking Things
25. Hazards: Fire, Falling, Water, Poison
26. Traps
27. Enemies: Animals
28. Enemies: Humanoids
29. Enemies: Monsters
    
30. Enemies: The Weird
31. Enemies: The Unholy
32. Combat: The Encounter
33. Combat: Time and Space
34. Combat: Initiative and Actions
35. Combat: Missiles and Powers
36. Combat: Melee
37. Death and Damage
38. Critical Hits and Fumbles
39. Recovery and Healing
40. Treasure
41. Magic Items I
42. Magic Items II
43. Experience and Advancement
44. Travel through Civilized Lands
45. Town Services
46. Town Goods
47. Carousing
48. Town Encounters
49. Winning The Basic Game

Old School Dungeon Encounters In Action

I updated yesterday's dungeon encounters table (thanking Google Docs for making it easy) to take into account some feedback and fix a few other glitches, adding also a favored old school Barsoomian critter.

One of the innovations is a rule that if an increase in numbers would take the number of monsters above 30 or so, that increase is replaced by a tactical advantage. "What, you can't have more than 30 monsters in a dungeon army?" Practically, no. It's a pain in the ass to track that many monsters. What that combat will usually boil down to, as it did when we fought Ye Olde Room of Umpty-ump Kobolds in 10th grade, is a defended doorway and lots and lots of boring roll-roll-roll. Allied groups of monsters in adjacent rooms, now, that's another story.

Because I want this table to be usable in a pinch, I also replaced the illustration of doubtful value with a table of random handicaps that can be applied to benefit either the party or the enemies.

Now, below are the results of 6 encounters generated for a party of rank II, that is, 2nd and 3rd level characters.

This is a disorganized cave complex and ruin. Leaders and Troops/Surface are replaced respectively with Predators/Loners and Vermin.

Room 1: 12 giant leeches.

Room 2: Giant poisonous frog, confined to a pool of water (inspired by the leeches)

Room 3: 28 large centipedes (food for the frog)

Room 4: 16 saucer fungi, advantage is that they are in a zone of otherworldly darkness around a fungus altar.

Room 5:  A formerly 7 headed hydra, with two handicaps: only 3 heads remain, and it has to attack the party up a slope from its swampy lair.

Room 6: Five ghouls.

What I like about random generation is the way it sometimes throws out a theme. Does anyone else do the encounters first and then map the dungeon around them? Because I'm seeing an area for each of these ... a shallow entrance pool for the leeches, trickling stream in the frog room, the centipedes are in a maze-like area of limestone tunnels, the fungi are a dead end off there, and the ghouls are in an abandoned evil temple past the hydra, which is at the bottom of a huge slanted cave.

One last favor to ask - could someone just download my Varlets & Vermin pdf from the link to the right, and confirm that it is accessible? I just want to make sure the "link only" privacy option works for one of my existing  files before I set them all up to be that way.