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.