For those of you who don't mind the sympathetic mockery served up by Something Awful's WTF, D&D? feature, they are having a contest for the ultimate awesome old-school-style dungeon room and illustration. Thews, I can fairly say, will bulge.
I'm finding it hard to write my blog while on the road, but hopefully I should get a few more posts out this month, finishing up on the hit points series at least.
Saturday, 9 July 2011
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Tables and the Military
A brief interlude from the hit points posts, spurred on by DaveL's observations in the comments about the clunkiness of armor class tables.
Thinking about some of the things in 1970's roleplaying games that failed to survive in the 80's, one evolutionary dead end was the table. I'm not talking about wacky, 100 random things you roll on tables. Those are alive and kicking. Rather, I'm talking about tables that let you calculate things that, maybe, a simple algorithm could do for you instead. The experience points, hit and saving throw matrices in D&D, not to mention the famed Rolemaster line, are direct descendants of the board wargame table - combat results, weather, attrition, you name it.
And what experience in that generation prepared them for that tablemania? Why did the gaming generation in the 80's and after reject tables in favor of THAC0, roll-and-bonus mechanics, Target Numbers? Yes, it might just have been a development in game evolution; a change for the simpler and better. It certainly wasn't the change from table lookups to computers in education. That happened later. As late as 1996 I was teaching undergrad statistics at a major, wealthy (I mean loaded) US private university using a chalkboard, with a Chinese TA fresh off the boat, and tables in the back of the textbook.
Think about another aspect of 1970's wargaming that also went the way of the dodo - the numbered "case" system in rulebooks, peppered with inscrutable acronyms. Anyone who's read a US military field manual from the period (like this cheery example) will recognize the inspiration for the format of the wargame rulebook, down to the decimal points and sans-serif font. And yes, the thing is loaded with tables. The Advanced Squad Leader system goes so far as to organize all its modular rules into looseleaf binders, field manual style.
This, perhaps, is the real dividing line - between the generation that had a substantial portion of its men go through a military rite of passage thanks to the draft, and the first generation (mine, post-Vietnam) that did not. Tables may be clunky, but they require little thought, can be referred to in adverse conditions without ambiguity. And they're part of the military way of life. Field manuals can be cited chapter and verse, and their typography and illustrations, though lacking in professionally illustrated spiky armor and anorexic monsters, exude a certain authority.
My generation registered, but never got called up under the shadow of World War 3. Knowing people who suffered through military service in Spain and Greece, I'm not going to say that the draft is great for building character - though there's a difference between the mutual respect of populace and military in those countries, and in the USA. It is informative, however, that just as many of the present-day cheerleaders for war distinguished themselves as draft dodgers, the looming threat of being called up made young men in the 60's and 70's more anti-war. At any rate, we live in strange times where the military experience and games once again approximate each other, but from a different direction - war is now taking cues from computer games.
Thinking about some of the things in 1970's roleplaying games that failed to survive in the 80's, one evolutionary dead end was the table. I'm not talking about wacky, 100 random things you roll on tables. Those are alive and kicking. Rather, I'm talking about tables that let you calculate things that, maybe, a simple algorithm could do for you instead. The experience points, hit and saving throw matrices in D&D, not to mention the famed Rolemaster line, are direct descendants of the board wargame table - combat results, weather, attrition, you name it.
And what experience in that generation prepared them for that tablemania? Why did the gaming generation in the 80's and after reject tables in favor of THAC0, roll-and-bonus mechanics, Target Numbers? Yes, it might just have been a development in game evolution; a change for the simpler and better. It certainly wasn't the change from table lookups to computers in education. That happened later. As late as 1996 I was teaching undergrad statistics at a major, wealthy (I mean loaded) US private university using a chalkboard, with a Chinese TA fresh off the boat, and tables in the back of the textbook.
Think about another aspect of 1970's wargaming that also went the way of the dodo - the numbered "case" system in rulebooks, peppered with inscrutable acronyms. Anyone who's read a US military field manual from the period (like this cheery example) will recognize the inspiration for the format of the wargame rulebook, down to the decimal points and sans-serif font. And yes, the thing is loaded with tables. The Advanced Squad Leader system goes so far as to organize all its modular rules into looseleaf binders, field manual style.
This, perhaps, is the real dividing line - between the generation that had a substantial portion of its men go through a military rite of passage thanks to the draft, and the first generation (mine, post-Vietnam) that did not. Tables may be clunky, but they require little thought, can be referred to in adverse conditions without ambiguity. And they're part of the military way of life. Field manuals can be cited chapter and verse, and their typography and illustrations, though lacking in professionally illustrated spiky armor and anorexic monsters, exude a certain authority.
My generation registered, but never got called up under the shadow of World War 3. Knowing people who suffered through military service in Spain and Greece, I'm not going to say that the draft is great for building character - though there's a difference between the mutual respect of populace and military in those countries, and in the USA. It is informative, however, that just as many of the present-day cheerleaders for war distinguished themselves as draft dodgers, the looming threat of being called up made young men in the 60's and 70's more anti-war. At any rate, we live in strange times where the military experience and games once again approximate each other, but from a different direction - war is now taking cues from computer games.
Wednesday, 29 June 2011
The Character's Hit Points
My current game goes with the idea that the hit points of player characters and other beings with character levels represent some intangible essence that keeps them safe from serious harm until they fall to zero. Thereafter, a table of serious injuries applies. I have the severity determined by what fraction of the character's Constitution score they take below zero, though for simplicity's sake boundaries at -3 and -6 might also work, or even a die roll modified by the negative damage for real uncertainty.
Here's the table in one page rules format. In play we had some questions about how zero-level NPCs use this chart, so I created a "monster" result for them and monsters. Yep, monsters are going to be somewhat harder to kill now, though they'll at least have the grace to remain stunned for a while. Monsters without the appropriate body part will still be stunned.
Here's the table in one page rules format. In play we had some questions about how zero-level NPCs use this chart, so I created a "monster" result for them and monsters. Yep, monsters are going to be somewhat harder to kill now, though they'll at least have the grace to remain stunned for a while. Monsters without the appropriate body part will still be stunned.
 |
| click for full size |
The one remaining question is what hit points mean under this system ... which I'll happily defer till next post.
Tuesday, 28 June 2011
The Battleship's Hit Points
Hit points evolved from the game Battleship? Close.
Dave Arneson in this interview traces the concepts of hit points (and armor class, for that matter) back to when he exapted his US Civil War ironclads rules to represent heroic characters in a skirmish game. Both this system and the Milton Bradley system are great to model floating hulls that can take only so much structural damage before sinking.
And by the way, the "hit or no hit" way armor works in D&D also comes from this simulation of a floating hull where the armor is part of the structure. A shell either bounces off or penetrates it. There is no partial damage reduction because there is no meaty interior to the armored shell.
So, all you 8th level fighters are running around absorbing hits like the Graf Spee. Ridiculous, from a simulation point of view. But perfectly adapted to a gamer's need to act heroically - and that, in the end, is why hit points won out in gaming over limb-maiming and eye-gouging wound systems. Arneson even noted that a main reason to adopt the battleship system was to protect heroic characters from the instant, low-probability death possible under the Chainmail rules.
The hit point system means you are a hero at full fighting capacity right to your last gasp. It doesn't wear you down in a death spiral of diminishing returns. And it's easier to choose your battles, withdraw from a hairy situation, know when you've had enough.
More realistic combat systems hold open the possibility of random death or disablement with every blow. With smart players, this can make for an interesting game. It deters players from going into combat with weak creatures just to rack up experience points; makes them afraid to fight and eager to embrace alternative solutions. But sometimes you do want a game where characters fearlessly fight on, and hit points help that along.
My preference is for a game system that hedges its bets, combining these two features in a fair and fun way. Early on in D&D, house rules often adopted critical hit systems to make combat more realistic and deadly - the most influential of these being Iron Crown's Arms/Claw Law which would later evolve into the Rolemaster system. These also seem to be inspired by the critical hits found in some naval warfare systems, simulating lucky shots that blow up a ship's powder magazine or kill its captain. All very well when you have no personal investment in this or that ship. But the problem, as Gygax astutely notes in AD&D, is that spearing monsters through the eye may be fun, but having your own heroic character speared through the eye is not so fun.
The alternative Gygax proposed was a system of critical injury at zero or negative hit points, where player characters could still survive but were in danger of bleeding out at -10, losing 1 hp/round. Later refinements on this system have tied the negative points to Constitution, applied damage beyond hit points to ability scores more generally (for example Errant RPG), or effectively scored random critical hits with each blow received at zero or less (for example, the many variants on death and dismemberment tables).
In actual play, the last of these gives a nice balance; a zone where characters feel safe, and then a zone where they are at risk of death but still can survive by luck, and get afflicted with really impressive scars, maimings and war wounds. More on the nuts and bolts of that system next post.
And by the way, the "hit or no hit" way armor works in D&D also comes from this simulation of a floating hull where the armor is part of the structure. A shell either bounces off or penetrates it. There is no partial damage reduction because there is no meaty interior to the armored shell.
So, all you 8th level fighters are running around absorbing hits like the Graf Spee. Ridiculous, from a simulation point of view. But perfectly adapted to a gamer's need to act heroically - and that, in the end, is why hit points won out in gaming over limb-maiming and eye-gouging wound systems. Arneson even noted that a main reason to adopt the battleship system was to protect heroic characters from the instant, low-probability death possible under the Chainmail rules.
The hit point system means you are a hero at full fighting capacity right to your last gasp. It doesn't wear you down in a death spiral of diminishing returns. And it's easier to choose your battles, withdraw from a hairy situation, know when you've had enough.
More realistic combat systems hold open the possibility of random death or disablement with every blow. With smart players, this can make for an interesting game. It deters players from going into combat with weak creatures just to rack up experience points; makes them afraid to fight and eager to embrace alternative solutions. But sometimes you do want a game where characters fearlessly fight on, and hit points help that along.
My preference is for a game system that hedges its bets, combining these two features in a fair and fun way. Early on in D&D, house rules often adopted critical hit systems to make combat more realistic and deadly - the most influential of these being Iron Crown's Arms/Claw Law which would later evolve into the Rolemaster system. These also seem to be inspired by the critical hits found in some naval warfare systems, simulating lucky shots that blow up a ship's powder magazine or kill its captain. All very well when you have no personal investment in this or that ship. But the problem, as Gygax astutely notes in AD&D, is that spearing monsters through the eye may be fun, but having your own heroic character speared through the eye is not so fun.
The alternative Gygax proposed was a system of critical injury at zero or negative hit points, where player characters could still survive but were in danger of bleeding out at -10, losing 1 hp/round. Later refinements on this system have tied the negative points to Constitution, applied damage beyond hit points to ability scores more generally (for example Errant RPG), or effectively scored random critical hits with each blow received at zero or less (for example, the many variants on death and dismemberment tables).
In actual play, the last of these gives a nice balance; a zone where characters feel safe, and then a zone where they are at risk of death but still can survive by luck, and get afflicted with really impressive scars, maimings and war wounds. More on the nuts and bolts of that system next post.
Sunday, 26 June 2011
The Panda's Hit Points
I guess everyone who writes about D&D has to tackle the enigma of hit points sometime. Here's the basic paradox:
1. Hit points are a gross abstraction, representing nothing more specific than how long a being can stay in combat without dying. By most accounts, a fighter with 50 hit points taking damage is dodging, ducking, wearing down her favor with the Gods, running out of luck. A dinosaur with 50 hit points taking damage, though, is taking huge slashes to its flesh and hide. This is poison to those who want their game to be a sensible simulation. It's one of the most frequent "problems" that tinkerers try to fix in D&D - by separating body points from luck points (Star Wars d20, etc. etc.), physical damage from defensive skill (Runequest, etc., etc.).By the standards of simulation, hit points are terrible.
2. Hit points are the most successful game element to be exported from D&D. Almost without exception, any computer or board game that simulates a fight at the skirmish level for the past 35 years has used hit points, life points, health bar, or some variation thereof, instead of a more realistic system where individual injuries are tracked. Compare the longevity and sales of Soul Calibur vs. Bushido Blade. By the standards of meeting gamers' needs, hit points are great.
I'm going to take a roundabout trip to explain the discrepancy between the two. I want to argue that hit points are an evolutionary exaptation in game design, adapting to needs gamers have that a more realistic system would not meet.
Exaptation in evolutionary biology means the development, through natural selection, of a new function for a given structure. The concept was popularized by Stephen Jay Gould in an essay on the panda's thumb. This appendage, used to grasp bamboo, actually evolved from one of the panda's wristbones. Another example is feathers, which originally evolved on dinosaurs for temperature regulation but then became important in flying.
Games also have selection pressure. In the game designer's ideal world, the best-selling games will be those that use elegant mechanisms to capture the essential experience of that which the designer is simulating. In the real world, market-dominating games tend to be meatballs like AD&D in its heyday and Monopoly.
Faced with this tragic state of affairs, designers will often resort to a narrative in which, Microsoft-like, industry leaders achieved their position through sheer corporate throw-weight and user conservatism. I am not discounting these factors. But I want to present an alternative view. Although these games are anathema to intelligent design, they often hold within them features exapted from other games that crudely address some of the very real needs of game players. The crudity of these panda thumbs may offend the sensibilities of refined gamers, but they help explain how these games come out ahead in the more rough-and-tumble process of mass market natural selection.
Take Monopoly as a simulation of real estate dealing, for example. In real life, real estate moguls do not randomly move house from street to street, hoping they will not be forced to pay rent in an an expensive location. Their purchases do not depend on their physical residence, either, and precious few of them enter beauty contests. What a lousy simulation, huh?
These features make more sense in accounting for Monopoly's longevity as a family game. They are exaptations from dice-and-track games (Parcheesi, Snakes and Ladders) that let young kids play along and even succeed sometimes by sheer chance. Monopoly also gathers a couple of other game concepts alien to the simulation of real estate dealing - set trading and collecting, chance cards.
So where are hit points exapted from? Some of you may already know, but here's a roundabout clue:
More next time.
1. Hit points are a gross abstraction, representing nothing more specific than how long a being can stay in combat without dying. By most accounts, a fighter with 50 hit points taking damage is dodging, ducking, wearing down her favor with the Gods, running out of luck. A dinosaur with 50 hit points taking damage, though, is taking huge slashes to its flesh and hide. This is poison to those who want their game to be a sensible simulation. It's one of the most frequent "problems" that tinkerers try to fix in D&D - by separating body points from luck points (Star Wars d20, etc. etc.), physical damage from defensive skill (Runequest, etc., etc.).By the standards of simulation, hit points are terrible.
2. Hit points are the most successful game element to be exported from D&D. Almost without exception, any computer or board game that simulates a fight at the skirmish level for the past 35 years has used hit points, life points, health bar, or some variation thereof, instead of a more realistic system where individual injuries are tracked. Compare the longevity and sales of Soul Calibur vs. Bushido Blade. By the standards of meeting gamers' needs, hit points are great.
I'm going to take a roundabout trip to explain the discrepancy between the two. I want to argue that hit points are an evolutionary exaptation in game design, adapting to needs gamers have that a more realistic system would not meet.
Games also have selection pressure. In the game designer's ideal world, the best-selling games will be those that use elegant mechanisms to capture the essential experience of that which the designer is simulating. In the real world, market-dominating games tend to be meatballs like AD&D in its heyday and Monopoly.
Faced with this tragic state of affairs, designers will often resort to a narrative in which, Microsoft-like, industry leaders achieved their position through sheer corporate throw-weight and user conservatism. I am not discounting these factors. But I want to present an alternative view. Although these games are anathema to intelligent design, they often hold within them features exapted from other games that crudely address some of the very real needs of game players. The crudity of these panda thumbs may offend the sensibilities of refined gamers, but they help explain how these games come out ahead in the more rough-and-tumble process of mass market natural selection.
Take Monopoly as a simulation of real estate dealing, for example. In real life, real estate moguls do not randomly move house from street to street, hoping they will not be forced to pay rent in an an expensive location. Their purchases do not depend on their physical residence, either, and precious few of them enter beauty contests. What a lousy simulation, huh?
These features make more sense in accounting for Monopoly's longevity as a family game. They are exaptations from dice-and-track games (Parcheesi, Snakes and Ladders) that let young kids play along and even succeed sometimes by sheer chance. Monopoly also gathers a couple of other game concepts alien to the simulation of real estate dealing - set trading and collecting, chance cards.
So where are hit points exapted from? Some of you may already know, but here's a roundabout clue:
 |
| T-shirt available at Threadless.com |
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
Unsexy Matriarchies
I’ve been vacillating about whether to include feminist/intersectional gaming blogs like The Border House and Go Make Me A Sandwich in my blog roll.
On the one hand, it’s important to keep up awareness of these issues.
On the other hands, a) most of their articles are about computer gaming, which is not my focus here; b) a lot of the content boils down to outrage at the latest example of dumb and obvious sexploitation in the industry, which is a bit like writing about Hooters and saying “Boy howdy does this place objectify women.”
I really appreciated, then, this recent post on Border House that breaks away from both molds. It’s a breakdown of how a lot of fantasy matriarchal societies are unrealistic reflections of patriarchal male fantasies, centering on that ever-popular Gygaxian invention, the Drow.
 |
| The Underdark, as cast by Rick James. |
Zaewen's line of argument: a real society in which women hold the power wouldn’t have them dressing up all sexy in thongs and 1980’s pirate boots. Flaunting sexuality is soft power, on those occasions when it even constitutes power.
Which then raises the question, what would a more realistic society dominated by women look like? I think the answer to that question falls one of two ways depending on how much you want to incorporate la difference ... the biological differences between men and women ... as a part of this hypothetical female power.
Star Trek: The Next Generation ... well, tried, and failed famously, to flip la difference in the episode Angel One. It presented a society where women were big matronly amazons, men were little twinks, and everyone had feathered hair. Of course the whole setup ended up collapsing like a house of cards when some real men showed up, so the episode ended up being more regressive than progressive. But the squicky feeling at seeing those little guys with bare chests and earcuffs was a pretty good sign you weren’t just being treated to another Sexy Matriarchy.
Canadian writer and artist Dave Sim took another obvious tack when he created a feminist dystopia in the latter half of his decades-long Cerebus comic book. Instead of reversing the gradient of physical strength, he based supremacy in Cirinist society on women’s ability to bear children. We get a pretty credible, if caricatured, matriarchal society from this convert to Islam and admirer of Oscar Wilde who explicitly hates women with every shred of his being (except for those who in Sim’s estimation carry, instead of extinguish, the creative spark that he associates with men ... like, uh, Coco Chanel ... I can’t make this stuff up). Men who don’t submit to female authority and take part in family life are confined to the company of other such men and encouraged to drink their life away in bars. This of course has nothing, I mean everything, to do with Sim’s own personal history.
What these random examples show, perhaps, is that even the most imaginative writers prefer to see female reign as just as morally bad as male domination. And that stereotypes run deep. The Star Trek episode plays with the discomfort of reversed sex roles but eventually upholds the Federation perspective which turns out to be only as semi-enlightened as 1980’s America. Sim’s world only feels plausible because it’s built on such solid stereotypical bedrock, where women entrap men sexually into becoming dads while men oscillate between creative genius and drunken dissipation.
I hear Joanna Russ did a better job of this, so I really need to pick up The Female Man.
Saturday, 18 June 2011
Another Simpler DCC Idea: Wild & Critical Spells
So it seems the Mighty Deeds (why did I think Feats?) commentary and replacement rule was well received. Here's another idea for taking a complex rule from Goodman's Dungeon Crawl Classics game, and making it more modular and compatible with the standard run of D&D clones and variants.
Instead of having a separate table for wacky results for each spell, why not have the wacky results be ... other spells?
You can get more extreme with this, in terms of abandoning the spell slot system, but I want to work this out sticking as closely to the classic fire-and-forget casting system as possible. Another insight: "no result" is boring and frustrating for spellcasters. So I'm just excluding it as a possibility.
Whenever a magic-user is going to cast a spell, before the player has stated the targeting and area of the spell, roll d20.
The spell goes wild on a 1 if the caster can use spells of a higher level than the one being cast, or a 1-2 if the spell is of the caster's highest level. Add 1 to this wild range for every 2 points the caster's Wisdom is below 9, and subtract 1 if the caster's Wisdom is 13 or above.
The spell goes critical on a 20, a 19-20 if the caster's Wisdom is below 9, and 18-20 if it is below 5. There is no chance to go critical if Wisdom is 13 or above. Yes, magic-users may want to lose Wisdom to become more powerful and random, which is why some spend so much time delving into secrets of forbidden knowledge (insert sanity loss=wisdom loss system here).
Wild Spell: Roll at random on the list of magic-user spells for that level. The magic-user casts that spell instead, whether or not he or she knows it, but may target it at will. If you rolled by chance the spell the magic-user was trying to cast in the first place, the spell escalates; go to the next highest level, the magic-user picks a spell that will not be cast, and roll on that spell level table to find out the spell that is cast. If the spell picked is rolled, escalate to the next highest level, and so on.
A creative DM may have some of the spell's effect or style influenced by the spell originally cast. For example, a magic-user trying to cast Web who casts ESP instead may find that cobwebs appear on the walls, that shout out and echo the thoughts of the closest sentient being.
Critical Spell: Roll 2d6 and take the lower:
1: The spell is cast with double range, double duration, + 1 to each damage die, and -2 to saving throw.
2: The spell, once cast, is replaced in memory by a random spell of the same level.
3: The spell is cast with double effect (area or damage, for example) or with -4 to saving throw.
4: The spell is cast without using it up in memory.
5: The spell has its usual effect plus the effect of a spell the caster chooses of the same level or 1 level higher.
6: Roll twice, and 6 has no effect.
I think this system has a good chance to walk the line between player boredom and total player screwage. Instead of "you fail" it's more like "hey, make the most of Rope Trick right now."
 |
| Via LevinLight Wiki |
You can get more extreme with this, in terms of abandoning the spell slot system, but I want to work this out sticking as closely to the classic fire-and-forget casting system as possible. Another insight: "no result" is boring and frustrating for spellcasters. So I'm just excluding it as a possibility.
Whenever a magic-user is going to cast a spell, before the player has stated the targeting and area of the spell, roll d20.
The spell goes wild on a 1 if the caster can use spells of a higher level than the one being cast, or a 1-2 if the spell is of the caster's highest level. Add 1 to this wild range for every 2 points the caster's Wisdom is below 9, and subtract 1 if the caster's Wisdom is 13 or above.
The spell goes critical on a 20, a 19-20 if the caster's Wisdom is below 9, and 18-20 if it is below 5. There is no chance to go critical if Wisdom is 13 or above. Yes, magic-users may want to lose Wisdom to become more powerful and random, which is why some spend so much time delving into secrets of forbidden knowledge (insert sanity loss=wisdom loss system here).
Wild Spell: Roll at random on the list of magic-user spells for that level. The magic-user casts that spell instead, whether or not he or she knows it, but may target it at will. If you rolled by chance the spell the magic-user was trying to cast in the first place, the spell escalates; go to the next highest level, the magic-user picks a spell that will not be cast, and roll on that spell level table to find out the spell that is cast. If the spell picked is rolled, escalate to the next highest level, and so on.
A creative DM may have some of the spell's effect or style influenced by the spell originally cast. For example, a magic-user trying to cast Web who casts ESP instead may find that cobwebs appear on the walls, that shout out and echo the thoughts of the closest sentient being.
Critical Spell: Roll 2d6 and take the lower:
1: The spell is cast with double range, double duration, + 1 to each damage die, and -2 to saving throw.
2: The spell, once cast, is replaced in memory by a random spell of the same level.
3: The spell is cast with double effect (area or damage, for example) or with -4 to saving throw.
4: The spell is cast without using it up in memory.
5: The spell has its usual effect plus the effect of a spell the caster chooses of the same level or 1 level higher.
6: Roll twice, and 6 has no effect.
I think this system has a good chance to walk the line between player boredom and total player screwage. Instead of "you fail" it's more like "hey, make the most of Rope Trick right now."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
