My World, Your World

I have recently been looking over some of the online material about the World of Greyhawk setting, inspired by Grendelwulf's compilation of the army lists for most of the eastern map, and contemplating bringing back to life the campaign system I used in high school to game out the Herzog's invasion of the Iron League.

But what struck me about the history of Greyhawk is how similar some of the issues are to the Legend of the Five Rings setting.

There is a tension in every setting between "My World" (the company's) and "Your World" (the customer's). Setting-neutral games like D&D, of course, avoid this to a large degree by letting gamemasters play god to the full extent and shape the continents, religions and kings of their own little realm. But for others, there's the attraction of letting someone else do all the grunt work of fleshing out a setting. What's more, if the setting becomes popular enough or derives from an already popular fictional world, you have the coolness factor of gaming in THE Middle-Earth, THE Star Wars Galaxy, THE Forgotten Realms.

Or is it really cool? I never really got the appeal of big franchise settings. There's nothing less interesting to me than gaming where the jobs of world savers and earth shakers have already been filled. OK, Frodo is taking the Ring to Mount Doom, but we're fighting wolves and investigating a haunted tower over here in west Eriador. Whoopee.

Setting the game in the past or the future of the fantasy world doesn't quite work, either. In the past, you're still conscious of continuity. You really need a setting where history is cheerfully rewritten and stability is the norm, so a campaign set in the past won't cause too many time-ripples. John Wick used this to good advantage in setting his L5R role playing game in a peaceful era before the events of the Big Storyline. Many gamemasters took this opportunity to present their own alternative versions of those great events, to keep the players guessing and maybe even able to alter history.

In a future campaign set after the big story events, the temptation is to replay the Apocalypse over and over again or risk anticlimax. Then even the Apocalypse becomes an anticlimax no matter how many times the stakes are raised, former enemies become allies, and so on. Legend of the Five Rings fans and Star Wars novel readers know this all too well.

See, what roleplayers need is a setting sufficiently fleshed out to spare the GM hard labor, but sufficiently skeletal to develop with a free hand. The original World of Greyhawk and even the 1983 reissue were perfect for this. Big blank expanses of minty green hexes, generic medieval backdrop with a wide range of realms and terrains, enough quirkiness to be memorable.

But inevitably sclerosis sets in. Game companies, like academics, must publish or perish. So in come the sourcebooks, splatbooks and supplements, filling in the blank expanses. Novels have to be sold, too. Someone decides that what this world needs is more drama, and an Apocalypse shows up. The iron weight of Canon is lowered, and your games are no longer free; they have to bend to the megaplot.

There are rumors that TSR unleashed the Greyhawk Wars to ruin Gygax's creation after he had left the company. While there may have been some spite to the proceedings, there was no such rupture with Ed Greenwood, and yet the Realms fell to much the same temptation.

It's a natural process brought on by the business model of the industry. L5R roleplayers continually grouse about the apocalyptic canon being forced on them, story arc after story arc of a collectible card game that advances its story through tournament results and, like the shark, will die without constant movement. They may complain, but the card game funds the role playing game, not the other way around. In fact, the latest edition of the roleplaying game has wisely gone back to being timeline-neutral, so that sourcebooks can still be sold without forcing the action to happen in the current era.

When all is said and done, in any given living room you, the GM, are sovereign. It's your responsibility to bring surprise to whatever the players do. If they want to play in Middle Earth, OK, but all bets are off. Build an alternate story where the Ring is a red herring, the shards of Anduril are the real McGuffin, and if the players screw up all of Middle-Earth goes to hell.

There are reasons why published material has to stick to canon. It's the long fingers of copyright lawyers and estate guardians, and the rabid hordes of Internet fan-sticklers. But they can't see into your living room. Use that freedom.

Spears are Special

Spears win the "most common weapon with the most special rules in gaming" prize. They can impale you and get stuck (Runequest); have some kind of an initiative or reach advantage due to their length (just about everyone); can be set against a charge for an insane amount of damage, which is only fair because a charge itself does an insane amount of damage (AD&D); can be used from the second rank (OD&D). I'm probably missing a couple more.

Starting with the spear, there's definitely a difference between the long and short spear. The short spear doesn't have reach but can be thrown. The long spear does have reach but needs two hands; balance that and the lesser damage of the spear, against the possibility of a tight formation (3' frontage) and whatever reach gives you. Simple enough.

Impaling is part of critical hits, which my system isn't doing.

Charging is one of those things really more relevant to mounted combat. You would only get a substantial bonus on the attack when moving very fast and seated with the lance couched. As for setting spears against a charge - again, only really deadly against mounted charges, and with more a deterrent effect than anything else. In a skirmish, a horseman or other charging creature who could see you holding the spear could usually veer off in time. Still a useful rule to have.

Three rules for the two-handed long spear, 7' or longer:

Long: You strike first against one opponent with a shorter weapon on the first round he moves into melee with you, if you're facing him.
Deep: You can attack from behind a friendly character, without the first strike bonus.
Set: If you are wielding a long spear, and you are involved in a charge at greater than 12" movement rate, you strike first and the spear has +2 to hit and 1d6 extra damage. This is true whether you are charging or being charged. If two spears clash in a charge, both strike simultaneously; this is one place where the "back and forth of combat" model doesn't apply.

One other thing to keep in mind for any pole weapon. Although it can be used in a narrow frontage, to turn and still use it will require room equal to its length, either to the side or overhead. This makes it a risky choice in a dungeon setting.

Where's Uikku?

For all of you wondering what John Wick is up to these days ...

He's been making rules-light game systems. Sweet!

They're for a couple of familiar story-heavy settings with the serial numbers filed off.

Still taps "Enter" a lot when writing, too.

We now return you to your scheduled icosahedron-based programming.

Weapon Control Means Using Two Hands

Swords, axes, and maces all come in two-handed versions that mean more power, longer weapon, longer swing and ultimately more damage. More damage can come as bigger dice, damage bonuses, roll twice keep high, or my current favorite, multipliers for strength damage bonuses (as in 3rd ed.).

If you allow +2 and +3 bonuses at very high ability scores, even a 1 1/2 x multiplier can double the damage a weapon puts out. That's a real advantage for high strength characters, and having lucky 18 STR high rollers running around doing twice the damage of a mere mortal on every hit might get in the way of the character-lightness of the game.

A tamer alternative might be to allow a flat higher rate of damage and say the +2 and +3 bonuses can only be fully obtained using a fully swung two-handed weapon. But by the same token so are the -2 and -3 penalties. (It makes sense, too, to say that small weapons, dagger for sure, and maybe others, have no strength bonus or penalty whatsoever.)

Two-handed weapons need some love because they are going to suffer from a no-shield drawback, plus the other drawback my formation-conscious house rules require: they need a wide swing frontage to use, 7 feet of space at least.

Combine with the basic sword, axe and mace principles and we get this:

All two-handed weapons:

• cannot be used with a shield; 
• apply the full +/-2 and +/-3 strength modifiers to damage , while normal sized weapons have a maximum damage modifier of +/-1 (to hit modifiers are the same); 
• take up 7' of swing frontage, so only fit in a 10' corridor with someone else who is using a 3' weapon (spear, dagger, shortsword, longsword used as a shortsword).

Two-handed swords do 1d10 damage, and are versatile; so strike two-handed as a longsword with 5' frontage and as a shortsword with 3' (but not as a dagger in close combat). Thrusting with a two-handed sword was a legitimate technique. Extra damage bonuses only apply to the full 7' frontage though.

Two-handed axes do 1d10 damage, and punch through armor in the same manner as one-handed; +1 to hit for every 3 points of physical armor on the target.

Two handed maces and hammers do a base 1d8+1 damage, and have the same armor-class to hit bonuses as the one-handed variety; if a flanged mace or a hammer, the same as an axe; if a spiked mace, +1 damage vs. opponents with 2 points of armor or fewer.

Mace for your Face

The rest of the weapons posts will be less involved.

It's tempting to treat a one-handed mace or hammer as just an axe that doesn't chop. Its reason for existing, in historical warfare, is the same as the axe: to damage through armor, in this case more by concussion than by actual penetration.

The mace head is about the same weight as the axe head, but without a cutting edge. So, well, it doesn't chop. But it doesn't take that much skill to wield either. As long as you get a good swing you don't even have to worry about which way it's turned in your hand. The mace head can also come with attachments. You have your flanges, which are armor-piercing. You also have spikes, but come on, those skinny little things are going to break, blunt or bend if they hit anything hard, weakening the blow; or at least, they'll be stopped by the armor. This is true even if you are some renaissance fair dudes fooling around with a metal-shop mace. Spikes are more in the line of grapeshot; really nasty against unarmored flesh.
 
This is an argument for making it a strictly inferior weapon to an axe, but also available to less skilled warriors. Such as clerics. Oh wait, maces-for-clerics is a completely made up thing based on one image taken out of context.

To add insult to injury the mace is actually better than the sword in the common situation of fighting half-hit-die or less monsters. As a teenage AD&D player I noticed that the mace, at its classic 1d6+1 damage, was guaranteed to kill a 2 hit point critter while a longsword would fail to kill 1 time in 8! A morning star was even better for whomping rats, and actually even better than a longsword, with 2d4 doing on average half a point more than 1d8, and a 2 only being rolled every 1 in 16. For a while my fighter would tote sword and morningstar around, like a true min-maxer.

Stepping back and looking through the lens of rules philosophy, this is wack. An emergent property of the dice used for simulation, the "mace advantage" exists entirely on the game layer, and isn't even signalled for the player - you have to be a low-grade math nerd to figure it out. I think this is one of the rules abominations John over at the 9&30 Kingdoms is warning about with the evocative phrase "incestuous complexity." And you know what? It's not even that much of a deal. Using my experience as a high-grade math nerd to figure out how much advantage the mace gives you over the sword, on average it only gives a 6% greater chance of one-hit killing a 1d4 hit point creature.

On the other hand ... that flattened spread of damage is nice to simulate something that either hits you or it doesn't. If you get grazed by an axe, that bleeds; by a mace, that tickles.

So, have the flat damage, but tip players off. And add the quiddity.

Maces have a "flat" damage roll based on d6, plus a bonus. Because they do a minimum of 2 points of damage, they are slightly better than other weapons at reliably killing monsters with low hit points.

Crude mace: Iron ball or stone disc on a stick. Plain d6+1.

Flanged mace: d6+1, same bonus against armor as an axe (+1 to hit per 3 points). The difference is that maces are good against skeletons; axes are good against wood.

Spiked mace: d6+1, with 1 extra damage vs. an opponent with only 1 or 2 points of armor (AC 9/10 through 7/12). This will really bring it to those giant rats ...

Clubs based on only d6, spikes give +1 as above. It's not easy being cheap.

It's all in the game

Just remember: evolution does not imply progress...

Pretty cool - if necessarily incomplete and arguable in details - pedigree of social games through the ages, from Jon Radoff.

Sword and Axe: The Mythic

The mythic aspects of the sword and axe flow in part from their function. The rest is history and religion.

The sword is the weapon of killing, dedicated to nothing else. It is purity, oaths, knighthood, kingship. It is the blade of fine cutting, interpreted in the Tarot pack and Buddhism as intellect and discernment. Blind Justice wields it. It is an angelic weapon, by association with the flaming sword placed east of Eden to guard the Tree of Life.

It is magic to Iron Age cultures - because sword technology seemed magic in the Iron Age. Perhaps this is why magic swords are cooler, more prevalent, more interesting in D&D than any other kind of weapon. It is a ritual weapon of the magician and the priest. (Ritual, I emphasize.)

It is male, direct, patriarchal. It is shaped like the Cross. It is holy - at least until Michael Moorcock turned the idea on its head. Its use in execution is reserved for the nobility, in Europe and Japan alike.

A priest of the sword gains the right to carry this edged weapon but at a terrible price. He cannot heal; his curative spells become open, bleeding wounds, cast through the metal of the sword and deepening its strikes.

The axe is the weapon of the people, the earth, the Minoan mother-religion, the labyrinth, the bull-cult. It is moon, blood, wildness. The double-bitted axe is seldom seen on the battlefield, ceremonial, double-facing, double-speaking. It is female power.It is the armament of the Minotaur.

Single-bitted, the axe is a barbarian armament; it is thunder, force narrowly concentrated.

It is the tool used by the state to decapitate commoners. Bound in reeds, it is the Roman fasces - the power of the state bound by the will of the many. It is the tool used by the priest to sacrifice cattle. Dominion over the impure.

A priestess of the axe seeks out the deep places of the earth, but reserves her holy weapon for the object of her quest, the dark sacrifice. Healing and wounding are all the same to her. She may not summon light, but knows a charm for seeing in the dark.