The pit

You stop suddenly as you realize that there is no longer ground beneath your foot. Looking down, you see an almost
perfectly circular hole in the ground, going straight down. The walls seem hand dug, but you cannot see the bottom. Kneeling closer to it and listening intently, you can almost make out some sort of groaning or moaning. What could be at the bottom of this hole?

The abode

You come across a small valley, barely 400 feet across and maybe 60 feet deep, filled with pines and other northern species of trees. However, among them, you can see the glimmer of polished metal. Coming closer, you can begin to see in the distance a small stone structure, almost perfectly cylindrical and smooth. Above it, at a height of about 10 feet, a dome of polished metal serves as a roof. There are no clear entrance in sight, but someone must have built it. There must be a way to get inside, maybe from underneath?

combat without players

Let's talk about combat, shall we? Combat can be quite easily the most rules-heavy part of the game, no matter the edition involved. Those rules are pretty clear as to what is going on, and work decently well across the board. I am not one to fix what isn't broken, but there are some parts that, to me, are just a glaring omission. LS over at Papers And Pencils touched upon the subject with his fast-playing skirmish. There are no mention of skirmish combat rules. Not quite army against army, but large enough group that rolling dice for each and every combatant is completely out of the question, as it would take 3 hours.

So here's how I do it. This system was designed with GURPS in mind, to be used during a pirate game for boarding action, but it is generic enough that it should be able to be ported over to pretty much any system. It has been divided into two sections, unit vs. unit, and man vs. man. They both use the same basic formula, which is has follows: attackers and defenders both roll a single D6 and add their bonus. The two result and then compared to achieve a result.

Let's start with man vs. man. Obviously this rule would be a bit more rare then the unit vs. unit one, but it is a bit more simple, so i'll start with it. Also, this would only come to play when two NPC fight each other with no intervention from Players.

• First step is determining the toughness of both combatant, or how many hits each of them can take. This is fairly easy in level-based system like D&D, just use the combatant's level.
• Second, determine the modifiers for both combatant. Modifiers are obviously up to the GM, but some  that I found useful are the combat ability (full level for fighter and variant, 3/4 level for cleric and thieves, and 1/2 level for magic-users) and weapon and armor quality. Beside level, each modifiers should only give a +1 bonus or so, as to keep the numbers manageable
• Each side roll a roll a D6 and add their modifier. 
• Substract total from NPC B from the total of NPC A. If the result is positive, NPC A scored a hit and  1 point is deducted from NPC B. If the result is 0, Both NPC strike each other. If the result is negative, NPC B scored a hit. If both NPC roll a 1, neither score a hit.
• Repeat step 4 and 5 until one combatant has been reduced to zero toughness or give up. 

So the whole formula reads like this D6+(mods) - D6+(mods)

Now, unit vs. unit is a bit more complicated, but the basic steps are the same. The modifiers change a bit, such that you could give a +1 if one side is fighting with officers, + 1 if their morale score is over 100 (for AD&D style morale system), -1 if their morale is under 50, +1 if they are outnumbering their opponents, +2 if they outnumber their opponent 2 to 1, etc. Season to taste. The difference is that the final number is multiplied by 3 to achieve the number of casualty suffered by the loser. 

The formula thus read 3((D6+(mods)) - (D6+(mods)) = no. of casualty. 

Some other modifier, if the defenders are unable to strike back or surprised  treat their D6 roll as being equal to zero, but add the modifiers. 

Obviously, only one side will suffer casualty per round. This is okay for me, as the whole thing is abstracted. If this bothers you, you can simply double the rolls, and treat any result of zero or lower as no casualty. 

The iron coast

As the storm finally subside, you find yourself much closer to land then you would have thought. The sand looks odd however, somehow glinting in the sunlight. As you get closer still, you can clearly see that this is no sandy beach. The grains of sands have all be replaced by metal shavings and rusted.flecks of iron. Large block of the same metal pepper the so-called beach. Each of them seem worked, featuring unnatural angles and strange markings. Could this be some sort of ruins, or simply a quirk of nature?

Pressure

I have recently come to the conclusion that of have a fulfilling game, there needs to be pressure. It's relates to what EGG wrote in the ADD DMG, that strict time record need to be kept for a campaign to function properly. But I think it goes a bit further then that. There need to be a reason for time record to be kept.

In the first episode of my SCP game, the players had to find a sentient cat that could control people. If they took too much time, the cat would enact his plan, which would extend his control over the entire town, about 3000 people. But the players never pursued any information that would allow them to know what the cat was planning, and therefor didn't know there was a time limit. Later, the agents accidently burned down a missing person/drug dealer's house, and that brought them to the attention of another group interested in the same cat. That other group brought in reinforcement, and promptly blew up one of the agents cars.

I noticed a huge difference in how they played and how they approached challenges after they knew that someone was after them. They were much more careful, and each decision had a cost associatied to it which made them realize that their choice mattered.

Once that happened, the game was much improved I found. So it's not enough to put pressure on the players, they need to know that it's there. The players being hunted by something works quite well, because there is a large unknown to it. You don't know when and how they will catch up to you. Do you spend time trying to find who they are and risk them catching you unaware, do you stick to the plan and get it done as quickly as possible but risk missing important stuff that could have been useful later on?

Pressure is what forces players to make interesting decisions. Idealy, there should be two sources of pressure at least, one that you are hunting, and one that hunts you. Do you deal with threat B and risk threat A getting away? Or do you go straight for threat A and hope threat B doesn't get to you first.

In my upcomming game, the sources of pressure will be much more clear. They will find a timer early on. They won't know exactly what it is counting down to, but they will probably assume it's not something good. So they will be hunting for that. As for what will be hunting them? Giant spiders. Because this is horror damnit and tarantulas the size of minivans are creepy. Also, I fully expect them to piss off the natives, which means more people after them. Fun times ahead.

Forest of Mushrooms.

Emerging from the cave, you come across a strange sight. Everywhere around you are giant mushrooms, spotted blue and red. After a short walk, you see that there seems to be a whole forest of these, and night is falling. Surely camping beneath a towering mushroom is safe, what are the odds of it's spore affecting you?

Doors

I noticed something interesting the other day. Players don't like doors. Not in the "oh my god this doors is obviously trapped" way, it's much more subtle then that I think. Whenever I confronted the player with a closed door or a hallway, they pretty much always choose the hallways. I'm not sure why that is, and I never noticed anything similar in my own actions as a player.

Perhaps it's fear of the unknown. That it's harder to get info on what's on the other side. Or perhaps the doors is unconsciously perceived as a shield, protecting you from what's on the other side. Open the door and that psychological barrier is gone for good.

I don't know why they go through hallways first, but i'm thinking I could use that to nudge the players in the direction I want them to go without damaging their agency. I'm not stopping them from going throught the door, it's their own psychology that makes them think it's a bigger gamble.

Play report

So my players finally completed their first mission of locating and capturing SCPs in the wild. They were much less.covert then I would have supposed, but it actually was better that way. Of the cast of 4 agents at the end, 2 survived relatively uninjured, one barely survived after being shot in the chest, the last one died via shotgun wounds to the chest and hands.

This was my first experience GMing in english, which I found harder then I expected. I am obviously fluent in the language but struggled to build a proper atmosphere with words. I found my own descriptions rather dry and clinical, and hope I'll be able to do a better job next time.

This blog was started after this first adventure commenced, so there is not much information in this, but the next one will have proper play reports. Hopefully it'll remind me of what they did, and help me pick up patterns, concepts and problem area that I can explore and, ultimately, make a.better game.

Undead and level loss

I always disliked level loss. Not because I didn't like bad things happening to my character, or loosing that level I worked so hard to get. No, what I hated was all that math. It's not that it was difficult, it was just long. Especially in later edition with those skills and feats and bonus.ability points, it was a mess to recalculate. And, to compound it, most of the time that someone lost a level, it was in combat against the undead. Having to recalculate your sheet slows down combat considerably. So how do we fix it without removing the fear from the undead? Age.

The editions of D&D that I have played always had some sort of age chart which give you the maximum age for your race, and the bonus and penalty in each age bracket. Why not use that? It's thematic, as encounters with ghosts have been known to leave victims with white hair, etc. Also, it translate directly to something the characters can see, which is always a big plus for me. Since the effect is not disassociated, it does not break immersion the way losing a level can.

We do run into some problems with the aging instead of level loss mechanic. Longer lived race are less affected by aging. We could increase the amount of years they age compared to humans and others, but I am reluctant to do that since I can't explain why an elf would be proportionally more affected by a ghost's touch then a man. Ultimately however, I don't think this is enough of a problem to scrap the idea though, since the aging is a side-effect. What kills you is usualy something else, like fangs. The aging is long term effect, like a scar that just won't go away. The second problem we encounter is that a missing level is much easier to recover then lost years. There are no ready made spell to rejuvenate people, nor any magical items (to my knowledge). This means that aging can be quite a permenant setback. But on the other hand, it is a great motivator for people to 1. Be afraid of undead, and 2. Search for way to removing aging. That quest for the location of the fountain of youth sounds much better now that the party's fighter is 60 years old. As for how much aging is good aging, I'd guess 1d6 years per monster HD would be a decent guess. Undeads are long-term scary again, and not because of math! it

The Egg

During the last day, you heard a giganticly loud bang, coming from the south-west. After gathering your courage and friends, you go to investigate. After a little more then 4 hours march, you stumble across a massive hole, dug out of the ground in a fashion unlike any you have seen. In the center of this hole, is a rock, about 4 feet wide and as tall. As you get closer, you notice that the rock is smoking slightly and is sitting on a patch of what seems to be glass.

Getting closer still, you can see a large crack in the rock, exposing it's hollow core. All along the edge of the crack is some sort of clear viscous substance, slowly sublimating into wisps of white smoke. Along the ground is a trail of the same substance, the trail leading to the nearby settlement. What could have possibly climbed out of that rock?

The clockwork rocks

The clockwork rocks

In the woods, there is a small clearing of sorts. In it is a large slab of stoned, with a dozen round rocks of spherical form upon it, all slightly different size. You can easily tell that the smaller rocks are moving. Getting closer, you can see groves in the stone slab, no doubt made by or for the moving rocks. If one were to wait long enough, you would notice that the larger rocks are moving too, if at a much slower, almost glacial pace. In the center of the concentric grooves is a small panel, about 3 inches from the ground. Upon it is a multitude of dial, made of transparent crystal, perhaps of some value . Do you dare turn one and see what it does, or simply pry one of the crystal off and sell it to the highest bidder?

Dynamic character sheets

In the increasingly high technology era that we live in, it is surprising that so little has reached the gaming table. Sure, some people use PDF readers and maybe electronic dice rollers, but it seems to me that no one ever attempted to make a dynamic, digital character sheet. I mean, if there is one part of the game that can be easily simplified mathematically, it has to be the character sheet.

I’m not talking only about creation, there are plenty of digital character generator out there for all the game you could imagine and more, I’m talking about at the table instant modification and recalculation of character statistics. You just got hit by a draining ray and are now fatigued? Just add a fatigue template and BAM, your character sheet just got modified in an instant.

With the quite phenomenal increase in G+ gaming, which I sadly have yet to try, it’s a real wonder why no one has ever done this. So how about it OSR-ers, anyone up for the challenge? I’ll take a crack at it, but my coding skills are pretty sub-par, so we’ll see how it goes!

The opposite tree

Sitting atop a small barren hill, is a single tree. This tree, however, is different. It reacts in exactly the opposite manner as it should to the seasons. In the dead of winter, the tree is in full bloom. In the height of summer, the tree is barren and seems dead. A druid would find this tree most peculiar and, most importantly, very worrisome if the condition should  propagate.

Alphabet village name

Telecanter has been coming up with a very good series of post about village names and generation, and has asked the community at large to come up with 26 village names using every letter of the alphabet for different culture that we are familiar with. I figured that since i'm sort of french, I might as well take a crack at it for village names in ye olde France. They were after all a pretty big world power back in the days. When appropriate, the name will be followed by the literal translation in parenthesis, so people can figure out what those funny assortment of letters mean.

A: Avelin-sur-mer (Avelin on the sea)
B: Beauvoir
C: Castel-aux-murs (Castle by the walls/on the walls/with walls)
D: Ducey
E: évronville (évron-town)
F: Fortjaloux (jealous fort)
G: Guichaen
H: Havre-le-duc (Haven-the-duke)
I: Idylle-sur-lac (Idyll-on-lake)
J: Joliette (Pretty - suffix for small)
K: N/A *
L: Longue-riviere (Long-river)
M: Montambert (Mount ambert)
N: Notre-dame-de-la-croix (Our Lady of the cross)
O: Onèt-le-chateau (Onèt-the-castle)
P: Puy-sur-roche (well-on-rock)
Q: Quillon-les-sault (Quillon-the-falls)
R: Rouen-les-bains (Rouen-the-baths)
S: Soustonbourg (Souston-town)
T: Thion-aux-saules (Thion-at-the-willows)
U: Ulnay-sous-bois (Ulnay-under-wood)
V: Vix (The x is silent)
W: N/A *
X: Xéphus-des-saints (Xéphus-of-the-saints)
Y: Yssingeaux
Z: Zénith-en-plaines (Zénith-in-plains)

*Unlike english, in french, there are some letters with which words simply do no start. K and W are such of those. I just could not for the life of me find names that started with those letters. So, as an apology, here's a quick and dirty way to come up with french sounding name:

1: Pick a french sounding name. Like Félix, Roland, Louis, Joelle, Marine, etc..
2: Pick a location and drop it in google translate or use the above 26 semi-accurate translation
3: Add saint (for male), sainte (female) or notre-dame (female also) and add it in front of the name
4: Pick the appropriate transition word, en = inside, sur = next to, aux = around, sous=under or beneath,
5: Place the transition word between the name and the location and you are done!

You get names like Sainet-Justine-en-plaines ( Saint-Justine-in the plains), Saint-Michel-aux-sault (Saint-Michel-at-the falls)

Hope you like!

Sources of inspiration

Have you ever been driving, late at night or early in the morning, on a highway. It's foggy outside for one reason or another, when, through the fog, you see the shadows of trees, brought to life by a passing car's headlight. And for a split second, your sleepy self registers that shadow as moving?

This happened to me not long ago, and even thought I knew it couldn't possibly have seen it move, a general sense of unease stayed with me until I reached civilization.

Now, beside wanting to run my investigative horror game even more, it also reminded me of Maupassant's theory. Since music could not exist without humans having ears, perhaps we are cohabiting with a different reality, and we are simply lacking the organ to perceive it. But what if not all of us were missing that organ?

The vinyard

The vinyard of facts.

You come across a large plantation of grape vines, white a large wooden construction. The vines themselves are unremarkable, but the grapes are a strange mix of red, purple, white and deep blue, all of them slowly swirling inside the grape. If one eats a grape, they find the taste quite bitter, but not altogether unpleasant. However, upon consumption, they can ear someone whisper a truth in their ear. Such truth is absolutely true, but is most likely irrelevent and rather useless information to have, such as that the maiden daughter of the town's blacksmith is not such a maiden after all. Or that Old Farmer Flannigan is actually left handed.

The Stone Toad

You come across a small pond, about 50 feet across. On a very small island, is a enormous stone statue of a toad. The statue is uncannily life-like, but otherwise does not seem unusual. Except for one small detail. Every mid-day, the toad animate and lets loose a loud croak. Anyone who hears it must save against spell. Those who fail suffer a slight headache, but acquire the ability to predict the weather for the next 24 hours with perfect accuracy.

The disappearing act of modifiers in GURPs

I have always had a sort of love-hate relationship with bell-curve rolls, like GURPS. For those who don’t know, GURPS uses a 3d6 as a base roll, which is then compared to your skill rank. If you roll lower than your skill rank, then you succeeded in your action. Now, I might talk later about how I tend to dislike roll under skill systems at a later date, but for now, i’ll try to stay on the topic of bell-curve and modifier.

Now, as anyone with some knowledge of statistics can tell you, a bell curve is à graphical representation of a statistic that makes, what else, a curve that spikes in the middle and gets lower at each end.  It is used to figure out probability of achieving a given result. When applied to RPGs, it means that you are much more likely to achieve a result of 10 or 11 when rolling 3d6 than getting an 18. GURPs, among others, work like that.

D&D and others tend to mostly use a  single die roll to resolve tests. Statistically, this makes a line; you are exactly as likely to roll a 1 or a 9, or a 20.

Now, at face value, a bell curve seems better, as you more likely to perform a given task averagely then you are to perform superbly. That makes sense. Your average performance is considered average because it happens significantly more often then the other results.

Now picture this, a thief is picking a lock. It's a darn good lock so it affords a -2 penalty. In a d20 system,  it's a flat 10% penalty it doesn't matter how.good a thief you are, it's 10% and that's it. Now for a roll under, Bell curve system, it gets pretty funky to calculate.  Since it's a roll under system, you succeed if your roll is lower then your modified skill rank. But since it's also a bell curve, that means each +1 has a different % value, depending on the skill of the thief. So a thief with a skill rank of 14 who gets hit with a -2 penalty finds his chances success lowered by roughly 16%. Now, a same thief with a skill 16, picking the same lock, only finds his chance of success lowered by about 10%.

WTF. Bonus and penalty, applied to different people, have different value. That makes no sense to me. If lock B is twice as hard to open as lock A, then it should not be 100% more difficult to open for an average thief, but only 75% harder to open for a skilled thief. Characters with weaker skill and then double boned. They are less chance to actually succeed normally, and are hurt more by the same amount of modifiers.

I understand that a more skilled character can succeed more often than a less skilled one. That is normal, and expected. But a more skilled character has a higher skill score, meaning it automatically compensate for penalty for doing harder stuff. And something that is hard, should not be less hard because someone is skilled. The penalty should be worth the same amount of % chance of failure.

Now as to how to fix that, I haven’t got a clue, but I’m thinking about it!

The hill of bones

Afar, you can see a hill much unlike the others surrounding it. It seems spotted with chalk or some other white stones. As you get closer, you can see that the white spots are in fact bones, hundred and thousands of  bones, broken and scattered throughout the hill. They have been there for quite some time, as the soil has covered some of them and a sickly yellow grass has grown. If you decide to dig, you find that the entire hill is made of bones. If one takes the time, the bones can be recognized at belonging to many species, including humans. What could possibly be at the bottom of that mound?

Why mechanical specialization is dumb

As per the title post, I have always found mechanical specialization to be dumb. I mean, do people really need validation of their character concept that they are craving for every little +1 that they can get? And it even gets worse then that, because it actively makes the origin class worse by comparison.


Let me show you. First, let’s take a simple barbarian and fighter class. The fighter being the base class in this. They receive no bonus for anything. Now enter the barbarian. The barbarian is a big brutish axe-wielder, so he get’s a +1 to hit and damage when using an axe. Seems simple, right? But that +1 also means that the standard fighter is now inferior to the barbarian. But no, you cry, the barbarian is only better when using an axe! But think, when will the barbarian NOT using an axe? The answer is pretty much never. So now, a fighter using any one handed weapon, is always inferior to the barbarian using his axe. How is that good? 

The whole reason for archetypes, is to not need a multitude of options that are ultimately completely impossible to balance. They exist so that they can encompass many single concept. The fighter class is used for pretty much anyone whose main area of expertise is swinging a sharp piece of iron. You want to be a barbarian? Play a fighter, use only axe, and call yourself a barbarian. You do not need a new class because you do NOTHING significantly different the a fighter. 

This is why I like the core 4 classes, fighter, magic-user, cleric and thief. I am hard pressed to find a class that could not fit within those four archetypes. I tolerate AD&D classes (from the core book, not UA or others), because they do not give bonus, they give completely new abilities that the “base class” do not have. 

If you remember anything from this post, is that specialization is useless at best, and downright destructive at worst, as it tends to promote munchkinism (Not playing the game, but rather building the best character sheet possible). If you do feel the irresistible need to make new fancy classes, please, for the love of the game, give them new abilities, don’t simply give them bonuses (Bonii?) to stuff, otherwise, it’s just making playing the non-specialized class an inferior choice.