Improving 52 Pages: Skills

The skill system in my 52 Pages house rules is based on d6 rolls, owing a debt to the d6 system in Lamentations which itself hearkens back to the original D&D of resolving "skill" determinations as chances out of 6. Recently I've been having thoughts about it and have come up with what I think is a definite improvement. Here is the system as it stands:

After over a year of play, I've found the high levels of skill, failing only on a 1 in d12 or d20, are easily reached by a rogue or a gnome within a few levels, because those classes gain two skill points a level instead of one. I'm not against this in itself - it's good at a certain point to be reliable at such everyday things as sneaking or climbing up a building. The problem comes with trying to scale these super-skills to more difficult tasks. Even if you interpret the -2 for a hard skill as applying to skill ranks and not the die roll, a rogue who started with 3 in a skill and concentrated on it through level 3, getting 7 marks and having a base d20, can meet a hard skill with only a 1/6 chance of failing.

I came up with this system which I think is not just more elegant, but could be the dead-simple engine for a whole game if applied to things like combat (although Paolo camped a stone's throw away a while ago, with something that eventually became 5MORE...).

Instead of using different dice at high ranks of skill, once past 5 marks, you start adding on Reroll marks that let you reroll a failure on that skill every time you use it. Importantly, this anchors the highest level of skill at 5 in 6, with hard tasks, at -2, having a natural maximum of 3 in 6. On the other side, rerolls can be gained by getting bonuses above 5 marks; for example, if you have two marks in Stealth, but you are sneaking around in your native (background) terrain and the thick terrain makes it easy to hide, the +2 for background and +2 for easy task give you six marks: 5/6 success and one reroll in case that fails.

A side bonus is that the same die is used for all skill rolls, eliminating the confusion of switching around to different dice that I've see new players thrown off by.

If you want to set some tasks as near-impossible, they would be at -4: 1 in 6 for a master-level skillsperson, and even someone with two rerolls would be not at all sure of getting it.

The other fix is that rogues get an extra skill box per level but they must split the two, allowing more even advancement.

I'm not even sure this is entirely necessary. The two groups I game with are unusual in that they each have 3 rogue or rogue-like gnome characters, so each one can specialize (and has) and it looks like they have the whole gamut covered even at level 4 or 5. Lone rogues in a party may instead find it more efficient to spread their skills out more.

When Many Adventurers Do One Thing

Sometimes the efforts of many add neatly, as when many arms try to lift a gate.

Other times, they add imperfectly, as when many eyes try to sight or many ears to hear. It's a mix of varying factors: what's being sensed "out there" and the individual's attention. The individual can only contribute so much.

Other times, additional hands are useless, as when picking a lock, or downright counterproductive, as when many people try to hide or sneak.

In a game, very few skills add neatly except for the sheer application of brute force. Those that add uselessly should be obvious. Which leaves the imperfect and the counterproductive situations to deal with.

So when adding skills imperfectly (and why not, there are diminishing returns even when opening a door because only so many people can get good leverage):

One person = one check
2-3 people = 2 checks
4-7 people = 3 checks, made by the 3 best people
8-15 = 4 checks, made by the 4 best, and so on.

Each power of 2 adds another check.

And when skills interfere - as when a large group is trying to sneak:

One person =one check
2 people = 2 checks
Up to 4 people = 3 checks, made by the 3 worst people
Up to 8 = 4 checks, made by the 4 worst, and so on.
Up to 16 = 5 checks and so on.

Failure by any one means noise is made or they can be seen.

God-Theologians of the Cyberweb

Rarely, except when RPG nerds indulge in system arguments, do we see the spectacle of the Gods themselves debating the theology of their secondary creations.

Theologians debate the nature of the afterlife. The self-styled Gods debate the nature of the Aftergame, for the mere mortal players who strut within their glass worlds. Who is saved and who is damned when the game session becomes mere memories? Is it the one who had facile, mindless fun? The one who gained Dark Insights from a touch with the abyss? The one who wrestled with an inconvenient system only to feel the character-building grace of the Rules-As-Written? Is salvation for the elect, or also for the mass-market - the 12 year old, the soccer mom? The philosophers' problem, the ultimate meaning of life, looms large inside the bottle city.

But never mind the immortal player-soul. The nature and construction of the world is also grounds for debate. These being gods, we are treated not to ignorant ideas about how the world is, but omniscient talk about how to make a world. Not "does," but "should," existence precede essence? That is,does my game say "I spend a Wealth Resource making a Power Move to open a Hierarchy Opportunity" and let the image of a sack of faceless coins thudding into the greasy lap of a functionary proceed from that? Or should the game build large concepts from a base of material grit?

Ontological debates among the gods ask not about the structure of matter but of action - is resolution by a unitary system or multiple ones? Is the monad a d6, a d20, a d10 or is there no monad at all? Should improbable but awesome events be facilitated? What are the relative contributions of fate (GM), chance (dice) and will (player)? Should heroes get a break?

It is the world-building and world-defining nature of these questions that makes geek discourse so impassioned, so theological. Almost by definition, to be a geek is to become immersed in a sub-world, whether by expanding to imagine a totally different universe of reality, or by shrinking the boundaries of obsession to cover a computer operating system. If the dialogue in roleplaying is particularly heated, pompous, intractable or obtuse, that is just the consequence of a theological argument conducted by the gods themselves.

Preamble N: Role-Playing Backwash in Literature

Reading someone's list of the top 13 new and forthcoming fantasy novels -- most of which appear to involve white male antiheroes caught up in what you might call a strategic competitive process for seats embodying rulership -- I was struck by the approving phrase "a well-thought-out magic system." 

Indeed, I appreciate that the author in question, Brian McClellan, has achieved something that Tolkien, Dunsany, Leiber, Wolfe, Howard, Mirrlees and so many others failed to do. But I'll also pounce on this phrase as evidence of a second wave of re-infiltration of role-playing games into genre literature.

The first wave: the back-derivation of content from role-playing. But, whether we're talking about a lite-medieval society with dwarves, elves, and polytheistic clerics, or a shadowy modern underworld of supernatural creatures divided into stylish rival factions, this material eventually became hackneyed. Besides,who can compete with the game company's own hired guns turning out Forgotten Realms novels and the like? 

Thus, the turn in the late 90's to content more directly inspired by history. The model here is George R. R. Martin's reach back to English and Scottish medieval dynastic struggles. McClellan, it seems, taps 19th century Europe for inspiration. Being unique in this choice can get you attention, as happened with Saladin Ahmed's detailed creation of a medieval Arabian milieu in Throne of the Crescent Moon. I read that novel, and while it was enjoyable and flavorful, there was something itching at the back of my mind. I couldn't put a finger on it until that phrase, "a well-thought-out magic system," made something click again. 

When I compare Ahmed  to the authors who inspired D&D, the much-discussed "Appendix N" list, I get the feeling of ...

• not just magic, but a magic system
• not just characters, but character classes, character options
• not just monsters, but a monster manual
• not just adventures, but adventure modules (or better yet, adventure paths)

What is it that gives me this feeling? It might be just a little too much emphasis on the signposts of a roleplaying adventure: combat, healing, investigation. It might be the assembling of a diverse team of adventurers, each with their own talent. 

I had a similar reaction when I read Caitlin R. Kiernan's Daughter of Hounds. I was expecting a warped and transgressive look at a society of Lovecraftian ghouls, and while there was some of that, it was embedded in an all-too-familiar urban monster party -- a world of insufficient light, if you will -- where vampires rub elbows with ghosts and hard-bitten human investigators mourn wrecked relationships.

It's inevitable, perhaps, among generations that grew up with these games as a way to perform fantasy. Appendix N has become preamble, the flow reversed. Literature now draws structure unconsciously from role-playing.  You can read this as a repayment of the turn role-playing took in the 80's and 90's, when it started embedding literary devices, plots, and character development into prepared material, instead of letting them emerge haphazardly from play. 

What would literature that draws on role-playing be, without role-playing that draws on literature? I suspect the derivation would be less obvious; the end product, more postmodern.

A Better System-Neutral

Frank Mentzer & co. at Eldritch Ent have been drawing some flak for the "system-neutral" descriptions in their products. Apparently, to avoid being beholden to the Open Game License, they have decided to express key stats in terms of percentages so a 6 HD monster has 30% "Power" and so on.

Ever wonder why Esperanto never caught on? No matter how illogical its grammar or spelling, a universal language will only work if there are already lots of people who speak it. Now, a plurality and maybe even a strict majority of roleplayers run some kind of D&D. From that, conversion to a system without levels, armor class and hit points is going to be laborious and inexact anyway. So if you want to be free of the OGL, why not just go with D&D standard and make up your own names for the usual stats? As Flavor Flav would say, y'all can't copyright a number ...

Ghoul
Power: 2
(is there really a reason to list hit points in an adventure? Most times I just roll them up in the dicebox with my bucketload of d8's)
Defense: 4 (add to 11/subtract from 10 for AC; you can even break this down into physical, active and magical defense)
Attack: 3/3/6 (die maximums will do, you can figure out whether it's 2d6 or d12)
Speed: 3 (x30' for D&D movement)
SA: Paralyzation (give duration in minutes, maybe just let the DM work out the save or use synonyms for Fort/Ref/Will)
SD: undead blar blar

My previous thoughts on old school statblocks.

Skill Resolution: Red, Yellow, Green

I believe there is an apocryphal quatrain of Nostradamus that starts out

When the Cook of the Mountain returns to Wizards' lair
To beat the Old School drum, or maybe not

And the Monsters and Manuals swell to the number 78
With the crackling flames of men of straw
Then Tupac shall slay the one whose initials are JFK ... (etc., etc.)

In other words, how should dice rolls, DM rulings, and rules procedures be balanced? This sounds strangely familiar to me. But let me try and tie it all together.

What Monte Cook was proposing is simply a feature that all RPG resolution systems have. Think of three zones. In the red zone, an action fails. In the green zone, an action succeeds. In the yellow zone, more resolution is needed.

The d20 resolution system that Cook co-designed for 3rd edition lays the zones out like this, based on what's known about the action's difficulty class number (DC) and any modifiers that apply:

 1 + mods > DC           
 Any other DC/mods combination (resolution from d20 roll)
20 + mods < DC    

Going to the other extreme, a system based on DM's say-so and interaction with players looks like this:

DM says you can         
DM asks you for more questions and decisions (resolution from information provided)
DM says you can't    

 What exactly was Monte proposing in that recent article? Details are hazy, but it looks something like this:

Rules say you can (character skill > challenge level)        
If character ability = challenge level, roll dice against an ability check (resolution from dice roll) OR player describes action in such a way as to change from "no" to "maybe" or "maybe" to "yes" (resolution from information provided)
Rules say you can't (character skill < challenge level)   

 Which is not too far from the Grand Unified Model of all Refereed Gaming:

Rules as interpreted by the DM say you can (character skill > challenge level)        
If the DM finds no clear "yes" or "no" in the rules or in the DM's head, roll dice against an ability check determined by the rules, or by the DM if the rules do not cover it (resolution from dice roll). Player can describe action in such a way as to change from "no" to "maybe" or "maybe" to "yes" (resolution from information provided)
Rules as interpreted by the DM say you can't (character skill < challenge level)  

From which all else can be derived depending on the exact procedures which are privileged in the yellow box, the amount of stuff in the rules, and the amount of stuff in the DM's head.

But you know, since I started on this post earlier today I think it might have been scooped a little more elegantly.

Resonant Meaning in the Fantastic

Let's get back to the jewelled mosaic of perfect little scenes of wonder and fascination that I last examined as a replacement for the naturalistic churn of monster races and by-the-book magic in D&D.

The problem with that mosaic is that without some underlying sequence  to it, it eventually grows meaningless and dull. The cure for that, then, is to arrange the tiles in some sort of scheme that has resonant meaning.

1. The Initiatory Progression. This is the hidden thread connecting the "levels" of the standard adventure dungeon. The rootless monsters, pointless tricks and riddles, sadistic deceptions, and weird environments have out-of-frame meaning as initiatory challenges to the followers of the Dungeon Mystery Religion. As the players progress, the challenges become harder and more varied, and they acquire level titles and cultic secrets like good Mithraists or Freemasons. It's this lurking text that explains why even the most random gonzo collection of levels exerts a narrative pull. But imagine the flow of meaning that opens up when some of the other techniques are layered onto it ...
2. Mock-Naturalism. A naturalistic initiatory progression behaves like a film noir; with progress comes revelation of the hidden web of corruption, the material ironmongery underneath the noble ideals. Mock-naturalism, though, commodifies the intangible in a whimsical and mysterious way, without reducing it to solid matter. The goblins steal dreams from sleeping children, which they then weave into pixie-nets and sell to the muffled merchants from Mars. Demons traffic in soul coins. What this is not, though, is demystification. If the magic sun gems are really radioactive rocks, we leave the fantastic entirely.
3. Power Struggles. Trade and production can coexist in the fantastic with the other common structure of the naturalistic world: struggle. A war between day and night, between heaven and hell, between mountain and sea has the potential to fix in place all manner of combatants, neutrals, vacillators, turncoats. Each side has its own style and esthetics, and there need not be only two. The discovery of these hidden powers is itself an initiation.

4. System of the Cosmos. An expedition to the southern polar land reveals unthought-of abysses of history that conclusively dethrone man as lord of the earth. The initiatory path reveals the mystic meanings of the ten numerals, tracing the zigzag path of creation back from World to Essence. The sins, the planets, the spectral colors all reveal a comforting and powerful structure to the universe. And the horror genre reveals instead a system that is malevolent or wholly uncaring. The goal of this knowledge can be power, godhood, immortality, the salvation of the earth, or merely to know the truth, which is reason enough for many.

I strongly believe that looking back in a few years' time, the prize for the best mega-dungeon, super-campaign or whatever will go to the experience that weaves the most of these elements of meaning into itself.

Stats: 3d6

Thinking about character stats and methods, using this chart of cumulative probabilities on 3d6 for the high end. The chance of rolling a ...

18   = 0.5%

17+ = 1.9%

16+ = 4.6%

15+ = 9.3%

14+ = 16.2%

13+ = 25.9%

12+ = 37.5%

11+ = 50.0%

For straight 3d6, and 6 stat rolls per character, having a character with at least one score at:

18 = 2.7%; 

17+ = 10.6 %; 

15+ = 44.2%; 

13+ = 83.5%.

These numbers explain why I like the bonus system:

13-15 = +1

16-17 = +2

18 = +3

I feel this makes the best compromise between players' needs to play a distinct character, ease of use, and focus on player rather than character skills.

It justifies using 3d6, giving a special bonus to the truly rare rolls. (With a flat bonus at 13, you may as well roll d4 for the stat, giving the bonus on a 4 and penalty on a 1)

It makes sure a large majority of characters will have some bonus from stats, which goes a long way toward making players feel special. This is true even if +1 is just a token bonus to a d20 roll, overshadowed by the +2 or more that can be handed out based on player-skill choices. (With bonuses starting at 15, most characters will be unexceptional.)

What makes players obsess about stats is stuff like extra spells at low levels for high stats. A high stat should make a character 15-25% more effective at what he or she does best, not 100% more effective...

Practice Break 1.5: Hard Act to Follow

Over the past weekend, this post at Ode to Black Dougal has brought forth a very instructive set of comments to a game ruling problem that itself is traced back through another layer of blogland to a Dragon Magazine article. What's cool for me is how the answers seem to line up with my analysis of solutions to game event resolution from a while back.

A referee is ruling on the party's chances for passive detection of a trailing halfling spy. Success at this will open up new areas of plot space, much the same as detecting a secret door opens up a new area of the dungeon. The question assumes B/X D&D as the starting point. That is, a system without a general character-based mechanic for passive perception. Let's look at the excellent answers, starting with the first advocate of each type of solution.

Stuart and others propose solutions based on player skill. Either the referee works recurrent references to the spy into area descriptions and waits for the players to notice. Or, more harshly on the players (and more easily on the ref), he or she judges that an expert spy would not be seen unless the players specifically look for him. I'll take these as falling within my "improvisational mode".

Clovis Cithog and others propose random solutions based on a comparison of character skill and player strategy with the spy's presumed skill, looking more like my "resolution dice" than "oracular dice," and looking in particular like the seed for a house-ruled detection system.

Jeff Rients cuts the Gordian Knot in "oracular dice" style and puts forward a simple 1/3 chance on d6. This reframes the question as "does it happen?" vs. "does the party do this?"

Alex Schroeder and Lord Gwydion offer up applications of existing rules, for secret door detection and hiding respectively. Various combinations of the above elements are also proposed.

But the most interesting of all to me is JB's answer. Its radical message - information should not be subject to resolution mechanics. If the referee wants the trailing spy to be found, and that plot space to be opened up, the spy should be found, by fiat. This echoes the "prepared" solution, non-random variety.

I confess a liking for the fiat solution because it exposes a general problem with information detection mechanics. If you meant that secret door to be found and the fungus chamber to be discovered then why leave all that preparation up to something as meaningless as a dice roll? JB's point is that the game consists of what the players do with the information at hand. So, the referee can take control over what information gets to the players. Presumably player-initiated information gathering would also be kosher under this system. But  important, game-branching information is not left to chance.

What keeps the fiat method from feeling like a one-way railroad? Player effort and choices, and the referee's responsiveness to them. In particular, to get a diverse party's players involved, the referee can fake a resolution mechanic. The party will always decipher the runes, but it's the cleric who knows the old church script they are written in. The spy will always be found, but it's the elf or ranger who noticed him. And if the party is deficient in anyone with the plausible skill, the referee may - again by fiat - reshape the adventure around this deficiency, and have the spy never be found.

Anyway, I'm really more happy with the diversity of these responses than with any one. Each approach has its good and bad sides, and the taste of the referee and players should be the ultimate arbiter of the halfling spy solution at any given table.

My meta-solution? The main question the referee should think about is, "Does the party need this information to move the game along?" If the answer is a clear "yes," give it to them, but don't make it look too easy. If the answer is a "no," let them surprise you and find it themselves. If "maybe," resolve the outcome through player skill, character-based dice, or oracular dice.

Practice Break 1: Strength-Related Actions

Before seeing what I can dredge up from my theory-dense essays of 14 years ago to supplement my theory-dense essays of today, I though I would take a break to work out some ways these ideas can inform the practice of house ruled 20th Century D&D. 

Last post I mentioned strength-related actions such as bending bars, lifting gates, and breaking down stuck doors as an example of how using the dice roll to decide the environment, rather than the character's effort, can overcome some problems with traditional ability and skill rolls. Strength tests are especially good to illustrate this because they are only applications of force against a resisting object. There is no secret insight or split-second decision for the character to make. Let's see how we can apply this to a strength test system.

Character factors: Should strength action chances go up with level? It doesn't seem they should, unless weightlifting and muscle development are part of a special character class concept.

Of course, the Strength ability should count. I'm not going to presume to know how your system uses 3d6 ability scores, but I'm partial to a general, elegant system of 13-15 = good (+1), 16-17 = exceptional (+2), and 18 = legendary (+3). In any case, I'm going to base any character-side bonuses on the standard bonus your system gives to such things as to-hit and damage from Strength, to make record keeping easier.

As we'll see below, it will be useful to express a character's Strength in terms of "the strength of n men." Figure an average modern man (or average woman tough enough to go adventuring) can deadlift about 200 pounds, and the world record is just shy of 1000. Then for simplicity's sake, erring on the He-Man rather than strictly realistic side, a +1 modifier corresponds to the strength of two men, +2 to three and +3 to four (or two men, who each possess the strength of two men).

Negative modifiers fractionate your strength, so at -1 you have the strength of half a man, a third at -2 and a quarter at -3.

Also, nobody's ever noticed this, but encumbrance really should matter when making some tests of strength. There's a reason why He-Man wears nothing but a Speedo, metal suspenders, and boots. If you're trying to pull iron bars, you're also trying to pull the weight of your iron gauntlets and vambraces; if you're trying to deadlift a stuck gate, you're also struggling under the burden of your backpack full of gold pieces. A reasonable penalty would be to shift the character down one modifier when heavily encumbered, so that +1 becomes average and average becomes 1/2 a man. For door opening, the load becomes part of your mass, so it shouldn't count there.

Depending on your campaign, small size characters like dwarves and halflings may take a general -1 modifier category to all these feats, due to their smaller mass and leverage.

Circumstance factors: This is where you roll to find out just how heavy, or strong, or stuck, the object you're trying to budge actually is. While all kinds of complicated weight and architectural calculations might come in here, really our "n men" system makes it simple. We only need to know two things: how many persons can apply themselves to the task at once, and how many man-strengths does it take to move? Whether for bars, gates, or difficult doors, a simple d6 table can be ginned up. You can roll on it, roll twice taking the highest or lowest according to your sense of the area's difficulty, choose a result on the spot, or work out each test's difficulty as part of adventure design. Just write two numbers next to each door, or zero if the door opens easily.

First roll: How much force is needed? Difficulty in man-strengths.

1: 1 man (ordinary stuck door, soft metal bars, well-oiled light gate)
2-3: 2 men (heavy stuck door, thin bronze bars, obstinate light gate)
4: 4 men (ordinary jammed door, thin iron bars, well-oiled heavy gate)
5: 6 men (heavy jammed door, medium iron bars, obstinate heavy gate)
6: d6+6 men (heavy sealed door, thick iron bars, jammed heavy gate)

The descriptions are only for scale, as it were, and can sometimes be rolled separately from true difficulty. Appearances can be deceiving; strong-looking obstacles can have a hidden weakness, weak-looking ones a hidden strength. Rust and corrosion add +1 to difficulty for doors and gates, -1 to difficulty for bars.

Second roll: How many persons can combine their strength in the effort? (For bending bars, always 1)
1: 1 person (narrow door or gate)
2-4: 2 persons (wide)
5-6: 3 persons (very wide)

Ingenious parties may figure out ways to increase the number of man-strengths applied to the problem through rope, rams, or leverage.

For doors, if the amount of force applied is one man-strength less than the difficulty, it actually will take 1d6 more tries - loud, echoing tries - to open the door, though this will have to be found by trial and error. Also for doors, if the amount of force applied is two men or more greater than the difficulty, the characters overshoot, and are rushed precipitously into whatever situation awaits on the other side of the door. Very strong characters may announce that they are applying a lower effort than maximum, to avoid overshooting.

Say the Dice

The final authority I want to discuss is dice, or random processes in general.

Games succeed when they meet a player's perfect point of challenge - when control and surprise are mixed exactly to his or her liking. Surprise in games can be achieved in three ways:


1.  Complex gameplay - enough to present a problem-solving surprise, even when all moves and pieces are completely visible and non-random. This is the approach of classic strategy games, like Go and chess. They manufacture surprise through the players' own emerging insights into game problems whose solutions weren't entirely obvious from the start.

2. Partial information - some things in the game are known to one player but not the others. Rock-paper-scissors carries this out at a very basic level; against a truly random opponent there is no reason to choose one secret outcome over others, and the game becomes sheer random guesswork. Poker is a better game for meaningful guesswork, as von Neumann realized when formulating game theory. The tension in poker is between making the optimal plays given your cards, and giving away their true value to other players through those plays. The potential for surprise is always there.

3. Random procedures - dice, cards, knuckle bones, yarrow sticks, what have you. The cheap and easy way to achieve surprise from time immemorial.

These three paths to surprise actually correspond to three game refereeing modes, if you make the insight of counting the referee as a player.

Following the path of complex gameplay, the referee lets him- or herself become surprised by the interaction of material made up on the fly with the creativity and initiative of the players. These kinds of interactions are deterministic but don't feel that way, because they come out of an unpredictable dialogue about what is possible. There is nothing truly random; what happens is whatever players make happen, vetoed by what the referee will allow, constrained by the limits of plausibility for everyone. This is the improvisational mode.

Following the path of partial information, the referee writes down contingencies beforehand for the consequences of player decisions, works out solutions to deterministic puzzles, and plans detailed encounters with opponents. This is the prepared mode. Player success here is a matter of figuring out, in a way, whether the referee has put the troll behind door 1 and the treasure behind door 2, or the other way around. Whether this game resembles the faux-random game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, or the more subtle guessing game of poker, depends on how adept the referee is at planting subtle clues, and how adept the other players are at finding them.

Following the path of randomness, the referee uses dice, but for two subtly different purposes. One use of dice I'll call the resolution dice mode. This happens when a referee knows the chances of something happening are between "no way" and "sure shot," but lacks something crucial to be able to judge it in a deterministic way. That missing element can be lack of knowledge. Let's take combat. Unless you are one of these guys, I don't think any sane referee would want to judge the blow-by-blow of combat in improvisational or prepared mode. Even if you came up with an answer based on years of sword combat experience, the players wouldn't buy it, and it wouldn't feel fair when they got hurt. There are just too many unpredictable factors in combat for your decisions to sound like anything more reasonable than kids playing "Bang! You're dead."

The missing element that propels referees into dice resolution can also be lack of patience with preparation, or lack of confidence with improvisation in other areas. Instead of going through the whole song and dance with moose heads, statue arms, and hinged busts of Shakespeare, sometimes you just want to roll a 1 and find a secret door.

Even more interesting from my point of view is the oracular dice mode. The twist here is that the referee is not using dice rolls to see how well the players succeed in their actions, but to determine the very makeup of the world around them as they discover it. Monster hit points ... rolled-up player ability scores ... wandering monsters ... and any other random tables for generating content on the fly ... all of these represent the oracular mode.

The oracular use of dice solves a nagging problem with both the improvisational and prepared approaches to setting up challenges for player characters. Often, a deterministic solution will depend on a match between a resource a character has, and a problem he or she encounters. Even if resolved randomly, game flavor demands that there are bonuses to resolution rolls from favorable match-ups, and penalties from unfavorable ones. At this point, the all-important sense of fairness can start to waver. Either the player complains they never meet a two-headed troll to slay with their sword +1, +5 vs. two-headed trolls; or the referee feels obliged to send a conga line of two-headed trolls to be carved into kebab; or there is some middle ground which feels awfully like a carefully plotted out, artifically fair middle ground, and not at all like real life.

The oracular solution, though, feels like real life: it's completely unknown to everyone just how often the character will run into a two-headed troll. And for that the absolute best thing is a random encounter table with a slot for two-headed trolls. (The other satisfactory solution is for the player to take part in improvising the  adventure and actively seek out favorable matches, asking in every tavern for the nearest two-headed troll lair; but even this should only increase the chances for a troll roll, not guarantee it every time.)

The reason oracular dice are so interesting is the possibility of using them to settle a number of situations usually sorted out with resolution dice rolls. For an example that got me thinking along this track, take a look at the language rules in version 0.5 of James Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess ruleset. Every time you encounter a new language, you roll to see if you know it, the chances being determined by your Intelligence.

At first glance, this seems crazy; what do you mean I don't know whether or not I speak Finnish until I run into an actual Finn? But when you consider the alternative, it starts to sound crazy like a fox. The alternative is the two-headed troll problem. As the preparing referee I have to decide what language the all-powerful army speaks; you know, that army that can only be dealt with by parleying. I know what languages all the player characters speak. So do I screw them or give them a break? Why not just roll for it? That way, any outcome seems fair; blame it on the dice, you had your chances.

(As an aside, though, my preferred solution would have the roll be for what language the army speaks, and see if it matches the characters' known languages. Not knowing which languages you speak, for instance, deprives you of the ability to choose to travel to those areas or seek out those people. And then there's the munchkin factor, where players try to speak to as many people and read as many old manuscripts as they can to max out their language skills ...)

Here's another infamous example familiar to most of us. A certain game gives a character with a Super Duper strength a 50% to bend bars and a character with an Average strength only a 2% chance. Furthermore, this game allows only one try per character to bend bars, for fairly obvious reasons. So Super Duper Man blows his roll and Average Guy makes it. That doesn't make sense. Why not have the roll be oracular: determining the strength of the bars? That way both characters can bend weak bars (roll of 02) but only the muscleman can bend strong ones (roll of 47). Strength of bars, hiddenness of secret doors, complexity of trap mechanisms, and other "skill roll" problems could all benefit from taking a closer look at the oracular dice possibility.

Now, although this is a good wrapping up point, I'll just point out that all the above comments about referee decisions also hold true for rules. Because, as I explained last time, game rules are just referee decisions written down and standardized. This is true whether the rule tells you it always happens, it can't happen, or you have to roll for it.

Next up: I think I'll tie in some old essays I wrote to the discussion.

Says The Rules

Rules accumulate in a system where the player-referee conversation cannot by itself supply a sense of fairness. 

And by extension, in systems where the player-player conversation also falls down. The Legend of the Five Rings CCG, like Magic and so many collectible card games of the Class of 1994, started out with rules and card wordings that in many places had to be interpreted by good faith and good will. Issuing rulings was entirely a fan-supported effort, and by fan I mean Jeff Alexander. The atmosphere was more relaxed. Players at competitive levels were open to improvised stunts that a more serious game would have frowned upon. Like the two Dragon Clan players at the Day of Thunder championships who "settled their differences in the mountains" by playing their game on the tournament stand instead of their seats. Or the Scorpion Clan players who bribed the judges in-character with koku (L5R product points).

But the competitive environment evolved, with the game persisting far beyond the three-year ending point originally envisioned for its story arc. The gonzo atmosphere got separated from the game play, and spot rulings eventually weren't enough. Competitive players want to know that their questions will get the same answer no matter where they play.  The interpretations of rules lawyers get taken more seriously, no matter how strong the temptation to take them aside, casino-style, and tell them not to be such a wanker. So what previously was left to player agreement, then tournament judge decisions, moved to an official list of case-by-case rulings that got longer and longer.

When I moved from design team to rules editor for 2007's Samurai Edition, taking over from Jeff's 12 year reign as rules guru, one of my priorities was to clean up the morass of often inconsistent rulings that had accumulated over time, codifying them into a background rules document. From case law to principles, in other words. This move also created a more consistent environment, because it laid down rulings based on general rules rather than specific precedents. Fair? Very. But the door had finally closed on the carefree early days, when players had to figure out for themselves the implications of phrases like "The Samurai must not do whatever it is he was about to do."

So it goes with role-playing games. I use "game" here both in the small-scale sense of a particular referee's campaign, and in the large-scale sense of an evolving game system. RPGs, too, start to grow more rules wherever and whenever the sense of fairness starts to falter.

House rules. Let's assume that a game can start from a Golden Age of improvisation and negotiation over rule gaps in a spirit of mutual trust. As more and more spot rulings are made in this game, a sense of consistency and fairness dictates that repeated rulings be noted down. If the Dungeon Master rules that an unarmored character moves silently on a 1 in 6 chance one day, it's unfair if the next day's ruling is that he moves silently on a 25% chance modified by Dexterity. Fairness thus eventually demands the expansion of house rules - the equivalent of a local scene judge's consistent way of making rulings in a CCG or other complex game. This evolution is an ideal, but the truth is that even before house rules, all but the most freeform of games start out from a core of basic rules. These rules are simply the designer's idea of the basic stuff that should be consistent in the game in order to be fair. Everything added on serves the player's and GM's sense of what should be fair - opening some avenues in a consistent way, closing others that prove abusive.

Standardization. The next step of evolution, then, is when house rules are not enough to serve an expanding scene. This is the step that Gary Gygax explicitly took in the AD&D books, which filled in many of the gaps previously addressed by house rules, in the interest of greater portability of players between different campaigns. For some, fairness suffers if the house rules are arbitrary. (In my experience though, the profusion of rules in AD&D in fact led to a sort of house-ruling by subtraction. First off the plank in our campaigns: things like psionics, weapon vs. AC modifiers, and the grappling system.) In CCGs, this step is represented by the precedent-based rulings document.

As with CCGs, and as also noted by Gygax in AD&D, the growth of serious competitive play at conventions also created a push for standardizing house rules into game rules. Fairness has to depend more on rules if the players don't know each other socially and if groups are competing for some award.

Market-driven reasons also count. One way to sell books is to fill them full of new official rules you just can't do without.  Then there's demographics. It is hard to escape the involvement of new gamers, younger people, or the kind of difficult folks that nerdish hobbies seem to attract. Rules create a superficially easier way to create that sense of fairness without requiring much in the way of trust, life experience, or social skills.

All this has been noted before in various places in blog-land, but no matter how strong the rules, there still has to be some level of agreement on how far the rules can be bent, exploited, and munchkinized. I'll never forget the day one of our long-time players brought a female friend back from MIT to play in our campaign. We pretty much had an agreement to play straightforward heroic-style AD&D, but this young woman threw every cheesy trick imaginable, from the Command spell using "masturbate!" to creating hand grenades by having Magic Mouth + Fire Trap cast on clay balls. She was playing by the rules, and would have torn up a convention game. But she wasn't playing by our unwritten rules. That's also a matter of trust and fairness - even if our way of playing to the spirit of the game was one that competitive gamers would sneer at.

Consolidation. In CCGs and other complex games, the case law of competitive game rulings can accumulate and make it hard to learn and see the underlying principles, requiring a housecleaning and simplification. Likewise, the ever-mounting number of rules and options across the supplements of a long-lived roleplaying system can reach a point where they would most obviously be improved by consolidating the mechanics involved. This was most famously the promise of d20 D&D - to compact the mass of charts, tables, ascending and descending numbers, different dice rolls, and subsystems over 25 years into one core mechanic; to make monsters work like PCs; to get combat down to a science. Ironically, this simplification was quickly overwhelmed by the profusion of character-based features and cruft, and it turned out that giving monsters the same stats as PCs wasn't really a step toward simplification of play. But these faults were bolted onto a rock-solid mechanical chassis, one that Castles and Crusades in particular has taken advantage of while adopting a more stripped-down set of options.

Next in the series: Dice and fairness.

Says Who?

Welcome all. In this blog I'm going to keep a jotting of my thoughts about game design, in whatever game I'm having design thoughts about at the moment.

Right now my thoughts are all about D&D systems in various "old school" incarnations. In fact, my blogroll pretty much consists of writers I've found have interesting thoughts about roleplaying in that system. That may change as I move my thoughts on to other topics like board/card game design, wargames, and CCG.

I'll also use this space to post my own amateur productions for the public domain. Right now I am close to finishing a booklet of low-level monsters for Swords & Wizardry. Another longer-term project is a complete reworking of the D&D character classes and spell lists - an attempt to combine New School variety with Old School elegance. We'll see how that pans out.

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So, old D&D. It's not about nostalgia for me. It's about the new insights into an old game, summed up most eloquently in Matt Finch's Primer. And with that, the possibility of players old and new knowing more, and playing better, than most of us ever did in 1982.

Key to understanding the different forms and flavors of D&D, or really any refereed game, is knowing who or what the system gives authority to. How do you determine what things happen, and whether plans translate to success in the game?

Referee and Players
One of Finch's key points about the old school ethos is that authority comes from "rulings, not rules." The examples of tactical play in the Primer in fact show an even more complex principle. It's not just ruling by referee fiat, or player say-so, but by an active conversation between referee and player.

While the referee's authority is final, the player moves things along, proposing and trying actions that generate new rulings from the referee. If the authority tips over too much in favor of the referee, the players don't feel like they are playing. You get bad DMing like the play example in the 1983 Mentzer edition of D&D, where the DM starts to tell the players what they do, think, and feel. But too much in favor of the player, and you get a walkover campaign with no real challenge - an infantile world of primary-process wish-fulfillment.

That's on the tactical level. But it also works on the strategic level. The old school love of open-ended "sandbox" settings and many-forking megadungeons - the distrust of pre-ordained plots - speaks to the same reliance on improvised communication between players and referee.

Even more relevant is the return to underwritten rather than overwritten adventure locations. Yes, crass practical reasons might underlie the appeal of one-page dungeons and one-sentence room descriptions. Grown-up gamers have less prep time on their hands. But the minimal approach to campaigning also gives room for the same kind of conversation between players and referee. Players say where they want to go. Players, not referees, get themselves into trouble, come up with plot material and adventures. Referees improvise dungeon features, creature tactics, villagers and taverns. There is no boxed text to read.

That's great! That's golden! Indeed. But underlying this is the assumption of trust - of fairness. Because the ultimate authority rests with the referee, players have to trust that their referee keeps both tactical and strategic play balanced between possibility and challenge. It's not just a trust in the referee's good will, but trust in ability to generate fair and believable content on the fly.

The referee in turn expects the players to respect his or her authority - to push the implicit limits of play, certainly, but not tiresomely, and never to challenge the referee's final "No."

That describes the improvisational system where referees, and secondarily players, have tactical and strategic authority over the game. Take this idea to the utmost, and you end up with a refereed Engle matrix game, or something like the wonderful Baron Munchausen, where all actions are resolved by proposal and counterproposal. But D&D is not so free-form. There are rules - for characters, combat, saving throws, magic, and (controversially) non-combat skills. Why are there rules?

Rules accumulate in a system where the player-referee conversation cannot by itself supply a sense of fairness. 

And - because I'm trying to keep these posts at a reasonable length - I'll explain what I mean by that in my next post.