Orcish Genocide and the Reaction Roll

No mechanic can prevent people who are committed to playing orcish genocide, but I do think that one of the reasons it has remained a constant problematic possibility within D&D is the abandonment of the reaction roll

The reaction roll is a useful tool that pushes many potentially violent encounters to at least start off nonviolently. Without it, experience shows that many referees, especially newer ones, will default to encounters that are automatically hostile. 

This automatic hostility then has to be rationalised, and the intellectual prop that is leaned on to explain it is "racial alignment", one of the stupider notions ever to occur in the game. "Racial alignment" as a concept, in turn, is shaped to serve this need and becomes ever more rigid and universal.

Eventually, you end up with nonsense like "all orcs are innately evil" with some shady reasons why, mostly either racist 19th-century biological nonsense or the same thing but with "magic" in place of the actual "race science". In-game, this translate to the orcs show up, automatically attack, and get killed by the PCs without remorse over and over again. 

Throwing out the reheated "race science" is a good start - you can simply have some orcish polities that encourage selfish, cruel and violent behaviour and focus in on these as the source of antagonists without needing every orc everywhere to sign off on this behaviour (even within the polity itself!). This opens up some interesting and fun strategic options beyond orcish genocide. 

But, this change won't make much difference without some mechanical supplement. Saying "Not all orcs are bad" but still having every orc who appears in-game automatically charge in to slay the PCs just means that the PCs will nod their heads at how enlightened they are while still committing orcish genocide. This still represents an imaginative failure, but one the PCs can't really be blamed for.

One mechanical supplement that I think can help people break out of this rut is consistent use of the 2d6 reaction roll, or a similar kind of check of attitudes at the start of the encounter adapted to whatever system. This system should be set up (and is, in most old school versions) so that a simple failure doesn't lead to automatic hostilities (that is, there should be at least one unfriendly-but-not-trying-to-kill-you state). 

One of the functions of rules is to define the incidence of various possibilities. A rule or mechanic where the rest is that the vast majority of the time the enemy will not immediately charge to attack is far more useful for shaping PC behaviour and opening up possibilities beyond mass murder than simply verbally rejecting the bioessentialist fluff is. 

In my old Necrocarcerus campaign, the PCs at one point encountered some Inhumanoids, which are basically vat-grown cannibal soldiers who are brainwashed into serving their evil creators. Necrocarcerus parodies regular D&D tropes, so Inhumanoids basically dial-up all of the bioessentialist / evil magic nonsense about orcs to 11. 

But, in the sessions where the PCs were dealing with them, I just consistently rolled for reaction rolls every time the PCs encountered a group of Inhumanoids. This resulted in far more positive encounters with the Inhumanoids (thanks to some good rolls) than I would have ever planned, and more importantly, the possibility of positive encounters incentivised the PCs to adopt a strategy that didn't require them to kill more than a handful of Inhumanoids at the very start. 

One of the PCs gave a performance to an indifferent group of Inhumanoids, who shifted to being friendly since they'd never heard music before. They kidnapped him, he gave the performance of a lifetime to distract the entire Inhumanoid guard force, and the rest of the PCs used the distraction to steal the nuclear reactor fuel they were there for.

All of this was emergent, rather than planned, of course, but I think that without the reaction roll system working its magic, this adventure would have turned into a fairly typical "orcs in a hole" murder march.

So in brief, while changing fluff to avoid regurgitating inane 19th-century nonsense is good, and worth doing, using mechanics like the reaction roll or similar mechanics that interrupt the automatic leap to hostility are actually just as important for getting to a kind of play that offers more options than just murder simulation.

Abolishing Arguments

I like to play crunchy systems: Mythras, later D&D editions, Shadowrun, etc. I often play in groups where there are widely different levels of familarity and skill at using these systems. I also play in groups where individuals have widely different levels of trust and standards of politeness. Such is life as an adult roleplayer in high demand.

One of the things I try to avoid in games I run are rules arguments. One of the things I try to contain are rules disputes. A dispute is a polite, though perhaps passionate, disagreement over some factual or interpretive matter that strives for consensus or persuasion. "I thought this rule means...?" is the kind of statement you find in disputes. Arguments are the other sort of disagreement, the one where positions rapidly become intractable, where accusations fly between people, where sophistry doesn't so much creep in as kick down the door screaming, and where people are striving to explain why they are right and the other person is wrong and should be ashamed of ever having believed differently.

The lines between the two can be unclear at times, but a clear sign that one is in an argument instead of a dispute is that no one is asking questions that aren't rhetorical or sophistic. Another clear sign is the "gotcha" where the fact that someone is changing their position is treated as an indication of weakness rather than the goal of the interaction in the first place. These aren't exhaustive signs, there are a myriad of ways of indicating that you're acting in bad faith towards someone else (constant repetition of the same points but louder each time is another).

I'm sure we all try to avoid these and conduct ourselves as respectable adults fulfilling our ethical and epistemic obligations to others, but that doesn't actually mean they don't occur from time to time. Rules in particular can provoke these since they exist as an intersubjective reference that defines how things work in the shared narrative of the game, and losing a rules argument can feel like one has lost agency and some level of control over one's (fictional) life. I am certainly not a pedestal here, if anything I am particularly temperamentally prone to disputes and arguments and thus am particularly concerned with how to proactively manage and control them from dominating situations.

In games that I run, I often appoint a "rules coordinator" whose job is to resolve simple rules questions. I usually pick the player who has the most expertise with the rules, rather than simply the loudest opinion on what they should be. In games with individual experience, this person gains bonus XP whenever they resolve a rules question that another PC has. If no rule exists, I make one up, take the time to write it down on a sheet of paper we can all review, and then go forward using that, with any further review or revision taking place in between sessions based on conversations with players. These methods help nip most arguments and disputes in the bud. But not all of them, of course.

For disputes, I think the important thing is to contain the dispute and resolve it fairly and quickly, ideally with as little intervention or attention paid to it as possible. Voting by the players sometimes works, but can actually drag things out more as many people will want to share their opinion and position, or express support for someone else before you can actually tabulate the votes. As well, it can sometimes turn a dispute into an argument if one player believes everyone else is mistaken and picking on them. So a simple incentive I use instead is to hand out bonus XP to to whoever proposes a mutually agreeable solution, and if no one can, to whoever concedes first. Not a lot of bonus XP, but just enough to mollify the conceding side. In fact, I'll often start at a low number and bid it up slightly over time if both sides are being intractable. This method should not be kept secret from the players, and frequent reminders may be necessary during the early phases of implementation.

Arguments are a little trickier. If someone is a vexatious and repeated arguer, the easiest answer may be to boot them, but I find the severity and difficulty of this (as well as the frequent presence of interpersonal complications) actually produce a perverse incentive, where no specific incident can be pointed to as sufficiently severe on its own, and so actually booting the person never happens. I hear lots of people saying that they would do it, but little evidence that people actually do it all that often. So less severe, easier-to-implement, and hopefully more effective? methods seem like a good idea as a first step. I also tend to prefer giving people a chance to correct their behaviour, tho' that's a personal tendency that I don't claim anyone else need to value as much as I do.

Therefore, what I will do in a group which has one or more individuals prone to argument, is to simply offer bonus XP for each session in which no one argues. This starts as a low amount, and if people argue, it increases next session, until it reaches a level where no one argues or I dissolve the group in frustration. If anyone gets into an argument with anyone else, everyone forfeits the bonus XP. People don't have to avoid voicing their opinions or disagreeing with one another respectfully (that makes it a dispute, subject to the above resolution methods), but if the exchange is in bad faith, that XP is gone for everyone. I'll often give someone a reminder or warning if it looks like they're about to veer into an argument in these situations.

This introduces a certain shame factor into their conduct for the arguer, without operating directly through the very points and positions being debated in the argument. It won't stop people all the time, but it does provide a mild incentive that can be invoked, and that doesn't require them to "lose face" (it instead positions them as magnanimously setting aside their righteous blah blah for the good of everyone).

I mention rules arguments here because they're something that specifically comes to mind, but the same techniques are broadly applicable to disputes and arguments over the progression of the shared fiction itself outside of the rules, with perhaps a few others that are unique to the kinds of problems that occur there. Anyhow, if one has a particularly argumentative group for whatever reason, I suggest experimenting with these methods to see if they work for you.

Abolishing Exploding Damage for Guns

One of the things I hate in games is when melee weapon damage is relatively static - you roll a die, add some modifiers and maybe roll a critical hit that doubles that - while under the same system gun damage explodes: You roll a die, and if it's above a certain result, you roll the die again, and if it's above the result again, you roll a third time, etc. then add some static modifiers or double it for a crit or whatever afterwards. I can take this in systems like the Warhammer 40K RPGs, where all damage has a chance of exploding, but I've seen many implementations of guns in D&D and its variants in particular where guns have a surprising deadliness compared to stabbing three feet of steel into someone's guts.

I'm not an expert on the subject, but from what I have read it's totally possible to be shot and hit many times, at least by handguns using modern rounds, without experiencing incapacitation. While guns can and do kill, I'm not convinced that they are deadlier than melee weapons, or that a round hitting a person incapacitates them more quickly than a sword hitting them does. I'm especially not convinced of this with regard to unrifled black powder weapons firing musketballs. 

In Emern, I made a conscious choice not to have exploding damage for guns, or even to give them an extremely high base damage compared to other missile weapons (they are a bit higher, but the end result is about 2.5 average points more damage for an arquebus over a bow, in exchange for a lower rate of fire, once every other round). The one semi-exception to this principle is the +2 assault rifle a PC (Chris Brown, the Berserker) got last session from the Overlord to help him capture some Jaguarmen so the Overlord can sacrifice them to power a spell that will create a submarine so the PCs can go find the Overlord's former partner, "God", who is believed to be living on the bottom of the sea near Sword Isle. The assault rifle only deals 2d6 damage, but can rapid fire on fully automatic, which has the effect of +4 to hit and +4 to damage to represent the extra rounds. Chris Brown used it to kill an invisible giant spider last session, though he also slew a fellow PC (fortunately Nine-Fingered Samuelson was wearing a ring of regeneration the Overlord had given him). The Overlord needs God to help him adjust the microwave communications array on his tower in the lost city of Zancalla so that he can obliterate the Snakemen rocket armada coming from the moon.

Similarly, while I'm not happy with the exact stat profile guns were given in Clockwork and Chivalry, I do think like that the damage is within normal ranges for melee weapons, and that C&C uses a system (Mongoose Runequest 2 / Legend) that doesn't have exploding damage at all. I've been thinking of redoing the damage and load times, and skipping the somewhat complex 2 combat action penalty for shooting a matchlock, since I can't see why any combatant in MRQII would ever use one. Managing the combat action economy is critical to winning, and any weapon that costs you too many CAs to use, especially when the damge is not insane, is not a smart choice.

Abolishing Hit Points

This is a theoretical exercise that I've never tested out, though I think True20 does something similar.

I was reading this paper on handgun wounding effectiveness factors and was struck by the parsimony of the descriptions of injury. Either someone is incapacitated or they are not. Adrenaline and endorphins make pain responses much less likely, to the point where falling down and clutching the wound when getting shot in combat is a learnt behaviour according to the author. Incapacitation results either from blood loss (specifically loss of blood pressure and the capability to efficiently transfer oxygen to muscular tissues) or from damage to the central nervous system.

One of the interesting things the author discusses is how temporary cavities do not generally contribute to incapacitation. That is, when a bullet hits you, the force temporarily pushes your flesh apart, but as it penetrates or stops moving, the flesh flaps back closed behind it, with only a smaller, more permanent cavity being important. Handgun bullets and other projectiles tend to leave only small permanent cavities, which must penetrate into the central nervous system, key blood vessels or other organs where a small loss of mass is sufficient to incapacitate the person. The end result of this is many people, when injured but not incapacitated by a weapon, just keep on doing whatever they're doing (trying to kill you or run away from you, mainly).

I've been considering whether this kind of knowledge could be usefully transferred into damage systems in games in such a way that it is not simply a binary system with "alive and fully functional" and "incapacitated" as the two categories. Specifically, I want a way to track when someone is maimed but not incapacitated (for fantasy games where swords can cleave off a hand or arrows can put out an eye) and when someone is not currently incapacitated, but is bleeding out and will be eventually. I think it might also be useful to cover when someone is specifically dead, and not just incapacitated. I'm not sure a track is the most effective way to handle this.

One possibility I've been considering is making damage rolls a sort of reverse saving throw with gradations, where the attacker's roll must exceed certain values in order to inflict each one of the four injury possibilities. I favour these values ascending with level, rather than being based on Constitution or another ability score, so that there is something like, but not quite the same as, ascending HP.

For example, a 1st level fighter might have injury scores of 8/12/14/16, where the first covers bleeding, the second maiming, the third incapacitation and the fourth instant death. An attacker rolls a d20 to attack and gets a 13. The fighter is bleeding and maimed, but not incapacitated or dead. If the attacker rolls a 14, the fighter is bleeding, maimed, incapacitated and dead.

As a possible variation to consider, I might stagger the results so that it goes bleeding, incapacitated, maimed, dead, which would order them in terms of the permanency of the result rather than the severity of the effect on combat capability.

The effects of each status:

Bleeding: Attacking a bleeding opponent adds +2 to your attack roll (thus making further damage more severe). People who are bleeding out may make a saving throw at the end of combat to stop bleeding.

Incapacitated: The person is unable to perform strenuous activity and is either unconscious, in shock or writhing in pain. Attackers get +4

Maimed: The person has a piece of themselves permanently destroyed or detached. Attackers get a +2 to all attack rolls.

1 Right Leg
2 Left Leg
3 Right Arm
4 Left Arm
5 Torso injury (spinal, respiratory system, circulatory system)
6 Facial injury (eye, ear)

Death: The character must immediately make a saving throw or die.

This is all very tentative, so I'd appreciate feedback and / or offers to playtest it.

Abolishing Spell Ranks in Openquest

Tracking the known ranks of spells for divine and battle magic for PCs and NPCs in Openquest is the most tedious and annoying part of character creation and progression. I recommend getting rid of it. Here is the system I will be experimenting with in the next Dawnlands campaign to replace it. The divine magic calculation is taken from Mongoose Runequest 2.

Battle Magic: Characters may cast any battle magic spells they know at a magnitude less than or equal to 1/3 of their POW. They choose the magnitude of the spell at the point of casting. The spell costs a number of Magic Points equal to the magnitude of the spell

Divine Magic: Characters may cast any divine magic spells they know at a magnitude less than or equal to the tens digit of their appropriate Religion (Cult) skill. They choose the magnitude of the spell at the point of casting.

Learning Spells

New battle magic spells cost 5 Improvement Points to learn.
New divine magic spells cost 5 Improvement Points to learn.
New sorcery spells cost 5 Improvement Points to learn.

This has the effect of slowing down the development of magical breadth, while extending depth in its place, so that PCs have an incentive to focus on specialising in a few spells rather than becoming a magical grab bag. It also rationalises sorcery spells with the other two types to keep tracking how many IP you've spent on spells easier, and because I think Sorcery spells are too easy to pick up (2 IP each under the current system). Finally, it prevents having to track individual spell ranks, which reduces book-keeping drastically, especially when you're creating new powerful characters on the fly.

Abolishing Money

I have to admit that I cringe a little whenever I see the substructure of the modern consumer economy replicated in settings where it is totally inappropriate, whether post-scarcity science fiction settings or fantasy settings that should by all rights be cash-poor economies founded on the ownership of real and movable goods. In particular, the abundance of cash, the commodity fetishism in trade systems, and the catalogue-like nature of gear lists all tend to be things that I wish it were easier to do without.

I don't blame game designers for putting these structures in, since they operate on an already-existing understanding of value, particularly cash. Getting cash is so much a part of modern existence that it can be placed into a game world as an obvious motivator for PCs to do things. This is true even in later editions of D&D, where the fungibility of cash is extended to magical items so that there is no discontinuity in the value of things. Unlike a lot of other people, I am not opposed to the purchase and sale of magical items, as I can't see a logical reason they wouldn't be absorbed into the economy, especially if they can be created in any sort of reliable way. I think that it's a natural extension of another problem, the abundance and value of cash, rather than the core of the issue itself. If you want to get rid of magical item shops, get rid of cash.

I think there are two possible ways one can go about this, at least if history and political economy are any guides. The first is a gift-based economy, the second is a debt-based economy. Neither is exclusive, either with one another or with a cash-based economy, so it you can experiment with overlapping them until you find the balance that best suits you. For the rest of the post, I'm going to discuss possible ways of using gift-based economies and debt-based economies in your games and settings.

Gift economies are oriented around the accumulation of social prestige by the production and distribution of goods. This usually takes the form of ritualised gift exchanges like potlatches whereby individuals or collectives (like families or tribes) offer gifts to one another under a principle of escalation, where simply meeting the gift given to one is insufficient for satisfaction - one is obligated to outdo the gift. Homeric and other ancient Greek literature is filled with these kinds of exchanges, though often the gift exchange goes beyond material goods into favours, services and quests. In societies where this kind of economic system is practiced, reciprocity is extremely important - individuals in the historical record have committed suicide over being given gifts that they felt could never repay.

There are a number of possible ways to make this work. The first is to play on the PCs' desire for respect from others. While not everyone has this motivation, many people do, and it's common enough that it forms a workable basis. PCs should understand from the get-go that they will receive items from others as gifts, and in turn will be expected to give items to others. Refusing to give something to someone who asks makes the PC look poor and weak, while giving gifts even when not request makes them look powerful and rich. If NPCs act appropriately based on PC choice here, one can get pretty far. You can tie this in with independence as well - PCs in gift economies who constantly take and never give will be seen as and treated as the dependents of the people giving the gifts to them. If they wish to become mature adults worthy of respect in the eyes of others, they must give far more than they take.

The second element is to give the PCs things that are not directly useful, but are valuable. For example, a PC probably doesn't need 20 blankets, so if they are given them as a gift, there's an obvious incentive to pare it down to a manageable number by giving them to others. Enforcing encumbrance, especially on highly mobile PCs without a home to store all this stuff at, will help them to decide what items are essential, which are useful enough to put up with the hassle of transporting, and which should be given away. Food items and other consumables are particularly common gifts in real gift economies, often combined with a cultural injunction to consume the items once given. Spoilage and rot encourage the PCs to then share the food with anyone they can and get gratitude for it rather than hold onto it.

Another way of dealing with this is specialisation of function. This is extremely common in groups with specialised religious and technical personnel (priests and smiths). One gives gifts to the specialist even when one doesn't require their services, so that when you do need them, you are a high priority (for magical healing, for getting a new sword, etc.) over everyone else making the same request.

The third element is to emphasise the distance between barter and gift-giving. In gift economies, barter is usually reserved only for complete strangers and antagonistic groups. By insisting on a barter-like exchange in societies like this, you are telling the other person "You are a stranger, possibly even an enemy, in any case certainly no one with whom I can have a relationship with". Gift-giving is a fundamentally temporal relationship. It says "We have known one another long enough to trust and care about one another, and will continue to do so in future". To reinforce this, recurring NPCs to exchange goods with are key. PCs in a gift economy should belong to a community, whether a tribe, manor or village, with recurring individuals who they can develop these kinds of relationships with.

The game mechanical tools you need to track this are varied. I encourage the use of something like a dice map to determine what any subgroup within the overall community the PCs belong to has at hand at any given moment. My own nomad starting gear dice map and nomad family generation dice map are intended for just this purpose.

Debt-based economies are somewhat similar to a barter-economy, but often involve a formal tracking system that allows for temporal distance between one side of the exchange and another. In the real world, our modern debt-based economy relies on credit scores, loans asset to liability ratios and other complex financial tools to track how much one is indebted to others, how likely one is to repay the debt, and when one must repay it. In ancient times, this took the form of a centralised tracking authority, often the servants of a king or local warlord, who operated a common market to which various individuals and groups would come to obtain goods like metal tools or weapons, livestock, seedcorn, luxuries, etc. that they couldn't produce themselves. Usually this is combined with taxation in the form of labour, where individuals who use the common market must offer compensation for it to the authority, though sometimes goods may be exchanged instead as well.

Without claiming to be an expert on it, I'm given to understand that Mesoamericans and Mesopotamians both used variations of this system, as did medieval manors for their internal peasant economies. In this kind of system, the PCs bring back the haul from their adventures, hand it over to middlemen, and in exchange have an open line of credit for the goods they want without ever touching money. The reliability of this system requires the trackers to be upright and honest, which may or may not be the case. The debt-based economy still avoids cash, and leaves PCs relying on barter whenever they are dealing with situations outside the market operated by the authority. There may even be multiple such markets in operation by different authorities which they must deal with.

This kind of debt-based economy requires a home base the PCs return to, or at least a site for a market which will recur in the game. It also requires some sort of enforcement mechanism, either guards or magic or something else of similar threat, so that PCs don't simply break its laws constantly by taking what they want and fudging the records. Otherwise, I think this system is similar enough to modern ones that PCs will have an easy time figuring it out.

Abolishing Preprinted Character Sheets

So, on Sunday night for the Thousand Thrones campaign (session 3), a couple of people couldn't come, right at the first session where you really had to be there for (the ship we were on was sinking). So the PCs who were there grabbed the character sheets of those missing, and did our best to get them out alive along with everyone else. Along with my Waldemar, my celestial wizard apprentice, I ran Otto the Pit Fighter because his player was out sick. I wrote Waldemar's character sheet out by hand, as I do with almost all of my character sheets no matter the system, but Otto's player had used a preprinted character sheet. This made finding things unnecessarily complicated, and I encourage all of you to stop using them.

One of the many advantages of doing your own character sheet up with a piece of printer or lined paper is that you can make it as complex as you want, which is usually not very complex at all. As your character grows in power, you can add onto it, or maybe rewrite it out so that the formatting is a bit better when your lists of powers start to run into one another. e.g. My wizard's character sheet only lists the skills I have and the talents I have, and I can tell if I do or don't have these things simply by glancing at it.

But a preprinted character sheet has to accommodate all the complexity and variety of the game from the get go. So usually every skill is written on it, and there's a section set aside for "Spells" even though only one person casts them, or in D&D there's always a box for alignment even if you're playing without alignment, and so on. This makes the sheet overwhelming. I can see the two new folks playing Thousand Thrones with us hunting around their sheets trying to find things, and I know that when I was using Otto's sheet (which is the same format as theirs), I couldn't find anything I wanted to, despite being fairly familiar with the rules to WFRP 2e.

Exacerbating this problem is that it never seems like anyone with the skills at laying out documents knows the rules to the game very well. This is most apparent in the miniscule size of spell sections on D&D character sheets, or in the almost hilariously small areas set aside for talents in Dark Heresy character sheets, but similar kinds of problems occur on almost every premade character sheet I've ever seen.

I also think these sheets encourage poor notation. All you have room to write down under the "Spells" section is the name of a spell, whereas a proper wizard player should actually have the mechanical details of all their spells written down for rapid reference so they don't have to hog the book every time they want to cast something or decide which of two spells is more useful or resolve what happens. As you learn more spells, you also write them down, and when you level up, you modify the spells appropriately as part of the process, so that it's very manageable and piecemeal. It also reinforces your own memory of what the spells do, so that you start to remember that Dimension Door in 3.5 doesn't have somatic components and can therefore be used to teleport out of your bonds or be cast while wearing plate armour without a chance of spell failure, thereby building the kind of system mastery that distinguishes the future-archmage from the bloody smear in robes.

Typically, when I run a D&D PC, I use three sheets of paper. One is just stats, one is gear, and one is spells (I almost always play wizards), since those two things eat up the most space, require the most revision, and are often consulted separately from the rest ("Do I still have the chisel?" should not require you to scan past tons of calculations). A separate gear sheet is useful since it lets you organise your gear into sets which your PC can switch between.

For example, Siegfried Hausmann, my limping, atheist doctor with a shotgun in Economy of Force (another campaign the Liber Fanatica guys are playtesting, currently on hiatus until Thousand Thrones is over) has a "town" set of gear, an "adventuring" set of gear, and a total listing of all gear he owns, so that I can say "I put on my good clothes and go to town" without needing to figure out thirty minutes later whether that means that I've brought my medical tools (Answer: Yes). Preprinted character sheets suppress this kind of organisation and present the lowest common denominator in their place.

And finally, the weird spacing issues. Borders, wasted space, tiny spaces between the lines that you would have to have needles to write comfortably between, all come together to make reading and writing on a preprinted sheet completely horrible just as a document. I wish I could slap everyone who ever put the name of the game on the character sheet, since it's usually the largest and most prominent piece of text, just in case you forget you're playing DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS 3.5 or WARHAMMER FANTASY ROLEPLAY or whatever because someone has concussed you with a handful of dice. Tiny writing is writing it's hard to read, and hard to read means hard to find and slow to reference, and since allowing the easy reference and retrieval of information is the point of the sheet, it directly impacts the value of the character sheet, pushing it closer and closer to "active impediment".

Abolishing Sex-Based Attribute Differences

I'm sure you can guess that if I don't think a hulking lizard man and a halfling should have different attribute rolls, I also don't think modeling the difference between sexes is particularly worthwhile. In practice, actual sex-based attribute differences are almost always the result of sexism and privilege, since they very rarely spend time getting sex-based differences right.

There are many reasons why. Here are some in brief:

1) The attributes in D&D and most other Method I games are not precise enough conceptually to be able to accurately model sex differences. Dexterity is a good example of this, since it mashes together a bunch of different abilities including gross motor coordination, fine motor coordination, proprioception and kinesthesia, all of which have different statistical ranges of ability between the sexes. Which one of these concepts should dominate?

2) The attributes in D&D and most other Method I games are not precise enough numerically to be able to accurately model most sex differences. Most sex differences are fairly statistically minor. To actually model the difference, there needs to be at least a 5.5% difference in maximum values (which is about the value of 1 pt. of a stat in D&D). Most sex differences are nowhere near there. There are a small number that are great enough to overcome this threshold, but these do not uniformly favour men in real life, whereas in old school D&D they uniformly do.

3) Sex-based differences tend to ignore obvious areas in which women do better than men. The most obvious are in life expectancy, overall health, and pain tolerance. If one wants to model sex-based differences in D&D using the "stat limit" system, then by the same logic by which women's Strength is limited, men's Constitution should be limited. I am, so far as I know, the only person who has ever proposed this, and I find it has no traction even amongst people who bang on about the virtues of sex-based attribute differences for realism's sake (who are all themselves men). Similar cases can be made for other attributes as well - Wisdom, where men might experience lower caps due to a greater predilection for serious mental illness.

4) Sex-based differences tend to assume that men are the norm and women are exception or alterations to that norm, when of course the opposite is true both statistically and embryologically. It would make more sense to treat women as the norm if we are interested in realism, and modify men's stats, rather than vice versa. 3-18 should represent the range of a women's capabilities, with men mostly overlapping with that range.

I will set aside the "It's sexist" and "It expresses hostility to female players" and "It tells female players that you think they are inferior to men" because they are all so obviously true as to not require further elaboration.

I don't see what sex-based attributes actually contribute positively to the game, since the "realism" argument here is so baseless for the reasons given above that one might as well right "Chicks Blow!" on your forehead in sharpie. It adds an additional level of complication during character creation, it is poor simulation, it causes one to avoid choosing to play a group comprising over half the species, and the differences between individuals is already captured in the individual's instantiation of the 3-18 range already. It's positive contributions to complexity of choice and gameplay are... Nothing.

Abolishing Parties Part 2: Stop Saving the World

Part 1 is here.

Yesterday I said, "The adventuring party with a consistent membership and unified goals is the most pernicious construct to good gaming known," and dealt with consistent membership. Today let's deal with getting rid of unified goals.

A unified goal is one which all, or almost all, of the party treats as the most important thing they should or could be doing, and which they all accept responsibility for dealing with. The stereotypical example of this is saving the world, whether that involves fighting off an alien invasion, dragging the MacGuffin of Power to the Vacation Spot of Power or stopping some schmuck from attaining godhood. I'm sure you've all played in games like this. I know I have, tons and tons of them, until it got to the point where every time Curtis would pitch a new campaign to me, the first thing I'd say would be "I'm cool with anything so long as we don't save the world".

Referees tend to rely on saving the world because it's an immediate, simple way to get everyone to buy in regardless of their personal squabbles. Everyone lives in the world, having it end would be a bad thing, so no matter how much of a prick you are, you probably want to stop whoever's trying to destroy it. The idea is that unifying all the PCs in the pursuit of a common goal will prevent conflict between characters.

Except preventing conflict between characters isn't an inherent good, and part of the point I'm trying to make here is that efforts to prevent it distort games and campaigns. Not only does it prevent the kind of games I like from occurring, it also prevents the kinds of games most other people like, especially if you want tons of drama and exciting narrative twists and so on, because the essence of drama is characters in conflict. So by setting it up so that the party is not a site of conflict, you the DM have declared "I am the font of assholes, all conflict shall be through and with me".

And that puts tons of load on you. You have to develop and remember everyone's rivals and enemies, make sure to have them pop up once in a while, figure out what they're doing when they're not around, plus, all of those rivals and enemies have to have their own teams of dudes helping them out, because as soon as one member of the party is challenged or attacked, the rest will jump on board to help out.

Let me suggest that instead of your campaigns having unified goals, especially ones that last the entire campaign, that you should instead establish a strong frame at the beginning, and then mainly rely on temporary, shifting, goals which engage only some of the PCs directly. Once you have this going, it may be interesting from time to time to reunify the PCs in a common, urgent cause once more, but only as a change of pace, and only from time to time, rather than suddenly shifting over to this mode and then running the rest of the campaign like this.

A strong frame is a set-up that establishes how and why the PCs associate without forcing them to do so or containing a goal with it automatically. For example, in Emern, the frame was "You were all part of Don Marengo's expedition to find the lost city of Xapoltecan until a hurricane scattered the entire expedition and left you out here in the jungle with only each other". The very first thing the PCs had to do as they clambered out of the muck and surveyed their ruined camp was decide whether they wanted to find Don Marengo, continue to the lost city of Xapoltecan, or just start heading home. Frankly, if a bunch of them had wanted to do one, and a bunch the other, I wouldn't have stopped them. But I didn't, because the PCs had a discussion about it, which immediately established what kinds of people their characters were. After discussing it, they decided to stick together and find Don Marengo, hopeful that he would help them. And so their long journey to Xapoltecan began.

Q. Why should goals only engage some PCs directly?

A. Engaging only some PCs directly forces those PCs to make the case to their comrades, to enlist their aid, and encourages less committed party members to participate but without eclipsing other opportunities to explore the world. It serves as a test of the relationships between PCs, and that testing generates dramatic conflict without you, the referee having to do anything. It also allows for debate about priorities. If you have two or more things going on, each of which only directly affects a subset of the PCs, they will have to pick and choose. The losers will harbour resentment, the winners will be forced to make concessions (or their arrogance may be such that they do not), all of which stirs the pot.

Q. But how will I keep the party on track?

A. In my experience, parties are excellent at keeping themselves on track, so long as they have reasonable and meaningful feedback on the effects of their actions and clear ideas about what they are capable of doing. The other night, playing the intro to the Thousand Thrones with two totally new roleplayers, the first question during play that one of them asked was "So what's the goal?" I answered this question (as a fellow PC) not by saying "to roleplay your halfling" or whatever, but by saying "Well, we're on board a ship going somewhere, and you're a stowaway, so you might want to use your sneak skills to stay hidden and get food", which seemed to help her without actually directly answering the question (I myself don't know, I'm just a wizard on a boat right now).

If you lay out opportunities, and they are real opportunities that are clearly understood as such by the PCs, then they will follow up on them. One of the most fun things about being a DM is having my PCs say things like "Clearly Rev [my nickname] wants us to follow up on this," or "The Rev must know we'd be interested in this," when in reality I don't have any strong preference or special knowledge at all. I just puff on my cigarette, raise my eyebrows and say "Gentlemen, what's your decision here? Do you want to examine the side corridors or ignore them for now?" and they do their magic.

Q. Why shouldn't my goal be my frame?

A. Frames and goals should not be unified because if they are, the integrity of the frame will collapse when the goal is accomplished. You should especially not do this if you are thinking of the frame being a short, easily accomplished goal that will "bring the PCs together", because that almost never actually works. The PCs accomplish the goal, and then there's a slump where you have to figure out how to weld them together now that there's nothing unifying them.

The frame should present problems or opportunities, not goals. The purpose of a frame is to push the PCs to start defining themselves, their relationships to one another and to the wider world. Frames don't need to be complex, they can be as simple as "You are the four mercenaries who live in this quiet farming town" to "You are the three sons of Errol Dessinger, Warden of the North".

By not linking frames to goals, you allow the frame to persist across goals, which allows you to do what I said earlier, which is confront the PCs with goals that only some of them are directly interested in, but which that subset is inadequate to resolve.

Abolishing Parties Part 1: Play More Characters

The adventuring party with a consistent membership and unified goals is the most pernicious construct to good gaming known. Get rid of them. As a baby step, let's start with consistent membership.

The best gaming group I've ever known was the one with the most character versus character conflict. This CvC was driven by the existence of a large roster of PCs played by the same 3-4 players. The character roster started off small, and then gradually grew as people wanted to play new characters, as characters departed temporarily to pursue their own and then circled back when they needed the other PCs as allies. This created a dynamic, changing cast with no need to rely on player sentiment and niceness to temper dramatic conflict. It also allowed us to do things like kill jerk characters without the player running them feeling like we were "kicking them out of the group" or something, since they would have two or three other PCs hanging around who were woven into the story. Or characters who were or became incompatible would split off to pursue their own goals and accumulate a group of allies more amenable to their tastes. Every so often, something would change, or the different groups would come into contact and they might trade members, as priorities shifted or temporary goals caused different bands to ally.

I cannot convey in mere words how captivating this was. It allowed campaigns to feel truly epic, allowed time to be spent exploring the subtle mysteries of the world or facets that otherwise would have to be left by the wayside due to more pressing concerns, and allowed characters to act on their passions and beliefs with a freedom that an artificial commitment to avoiding trouble would constrain and dampen.

For example, I played in an Iron Heroes game in 2007-2008 that was the single greatest campaign I have ever been part of, at least partly due to the dramatic freedom this kind of play allowed. Our first set of PCs were the three scions of a powerful noble house. I played the youngest of the three brothers.

Each one of us had certain tendencies and inclinations, often conflicting, but we were brought together despite that due to fraternal obligation and fondness. However, our goals would frequently separate us across the kingdom, or one of us would be incapacitated for some reason while the other two were able, etc.

At first, we began by fleshing out and playing what would otherwise be NPCs. For example, the oldest brother once took some of his guards into the slums of the capital where he was ambushed. The other player and I, rather than sit this out, took over, named, and fleshed out two of the more important guards accompanying the oldest brother- Doc, a respected veteran, and Sgt. Fusker, the head of the detachment. These characters remained even after this incident (having acquitted themselves bravely), and whenever one of the brothers wasn't around, we would play them instead.

Similarly, the middle brother at one point ran off from his responsibilities to become a mercenary adventurer. He met up with one of our shifty uncles, and a mercenary that uncle had hired, once again played by the other two PCs. Even after the middle brother departed, the uncle and the mercenary (now his trusted bodyguard and assassin) remained and found a third person, a young impressionable nobleman, to accompany them on their own adventures. As people died, others stepped in to take their places, often transferred over from less active clusters who the currently active group encountered. For example, when my noble brother died, the uncle's bodyguard was sent to assist his nephews and keep the remaining two safe. At other times, there would be conflict, as when one group of PCs, a group of revolutionaries, captured said noble brothers and mercenary and were debating whether to execute them (in essence, we held an IC debate about whether we were going to kill our own characters, albeit ones we weren't playing at that moment).

This kind of natural proliferation kept interest high, as you never had time to get bored of a character before you were creating and playing a new one, and you started to long to find out what characters you hadn't seen in a while were up to. This proliferation culminated when the noble brothers provoked a civil war and then left the continent. We played out the civil war through three different parties in three different locations, switching between them each session and seeing the war through its various facets.

I give full credit to the referee for knitting all of this together and making it coherent. It was one of his best realised settings, and the consistent vision of its development and change helped keep everything synchronised. It helped that only a few points was there any sort of direct "quest" which would save the world. For the most part, it was a power struggle driven by personalities for control of the kingdom, something important but not so important that nothing else mattered.

Multiple PCs keeps people from over-investing in a single character, which prevents them from feeling like their goal in playing the game is to have that one character succeed at everything and be the most important person in the world. Preventing over-investment is critical to pulling off dramatic conflict and by extension, character versus character conflict, as it prevents people from getting into mindsets where they confuse in-character disagreement with out-of-character disagreements and feel that someone is picking on them or bullying them or actively conspiring to keep them from being cool or whatever.

Give this a try if you haven't already. It's actually even easier to pull off in settings where the PCs are disconnected murderhobos, as such groups IRL (gangs, essentially) had and have an ever-changing membership motivated by mercenary concerns and prone to violent resolutions of even petty disputes.

Abolishing the Common Magic Skill

Technically in Openquest this skill is called "Battle Magic" and in Mongoose Runequest 2 / Legend it's called "Common Magic", but I don't care either way because I'm abolishing this skill in the Dawnlands. When I need to refer to the type of magic, I'll call it "Common Magic". I'm not abolishing the type of magic, just a special skill that governs it.

In Moragne (a MRQII only setting), there's a ready answer for what this skill is, it's minor prayers to the Hidden God, or to various powerful spirits for some boon (it differs from divine magic in that divine magic can only be cast by ordained priests). But in most other settings, including the Dawnlands, this kind of specificity of domain is lacking. Magic in the Dawnlands is much more diffuse, much more worked into the ordinary world. This distinguishes it from the other kinds of magic you get, all of which have specific domains of knowledge and power represented by skills, which I am fine with.

So I decided to abolish the Common Magic skill and use the following house rules instead.

1) Character still learn Common Magic spells. Learning Common Magic spells is represented by learning sacred and esoteric lore related to some other skill.

2) Characters cast Common Magic spells by declaring they are doing so while making a skill check. They must provide an explanation for how the spell can manifest based on what they are doing. They expend magic points to cast the spell. If the check fails, so does the spell, and the magic points are expended until they are regenerated. You need a skill at 50% or better to be able to cast a spell using it.

3) Skills like Craft (Whatever) can be used to create objects imbued with a spell, Natural Lore can be used to find potent objects like herbs, stones, etc., and Language (Native) can be used to find potent truenames and words. Essentially, these skills can be used to give the "Trigger" condition to any Common Magic spell. In these cases and others like them, the character rolls the skill and expends the magic points during the period of creation / discovery, but the spell does not trigger until they wish. They must choose the magnitude of the spell during creation / discovery. They don't regenerate the expended points until the spell is triggered. The character must handle or manipulate the item containing the spell, and if it lost, the points cannot be regained until the spell is discharged. If someone else takes the item, they may use the magic points the creator imbued into the object to cast the spell. Only a single use of a spell by a single person may be imbued into an item at a time without the use of the Create Charm spell.

Yes, this means the only use of Create Charm is now to create permanent magic items. That still makes it a really good spell. 

Abolishing Attribute Differences Between Species

One idea I've been considering lately for the Dawnlands' mechanical realisation is simply not distinguishing one PC species from another by their attribute averages and ranges, or by attribute minimums required to play them.

Normally in MRQ2 / Legend or Openquest, you have seven attributes, which are generated as follows:

STR: 3d6
CON: 3d6
SIZ: 2d6+6
INT: 2d6+6
POW: 3d6
DEX: 3d6
CHA: 3d6

These are meant to be rolled whenever you create a human character, especially a PC. Other species have different dice counts for each stat, so dwarves in MRQ2 / Legend are:

STR: 4d6
CON: 2d6+12
SIZ: 1d6+6
INT: 2d6+6
POW: 3d6
DEX: 2d6
CHA: 3d6

Dwarves also receive the Earth Sense and Dark Sight traits beyond this.

Trying to figure out a system behind these attribute distributions is an exercise in frustration, as there does not appear to be one. The result of this is that when you're coming up with new species, or changing old ones, there is not a clear set of principles or ideas to follow. You're left eyeballing distributions, checking averages, and then trying to decide what is "fair" and what won't cause everyone to shift over to playing it. Sure, you can talk things over with your players beforehand and make declarations about staying on theme with a human-dominated world, or you can try the pernicious and misleading strategy of insisting that there are "social penalties" a character will face as a non-human, but none of these help me, since neither is true in the Dawnlands. I'd rather design things from the start so that there is at least rough parity between the available choices.

PC Species in the Dawnlands:

The Burnt
Dogmen (Gnolls)
Dragonmen
Dwarves
Elves
Half-elves
Half-dogmen (half-gnoll, half-elf, technically)
Half-orcs
Halflings
Hobgoblins
Humans
Voidmen

For a total of twelve races or species, counting the mixes. Then, there are perhaps another 4-6 types of humanoids who are not suitable as PCs, but would be common enough that stats for them would be extremely useful (Lizardmen, kobolds, goblins, and murder gnomes come immediately to mind).

I originally drew up a document statting out all the various differences based on the physical, intellectual, etc. qualities these races and species should have, but it was an incoherent mess and I've since disowned. it. The main problem was the SIZ stat.

My initial plan was to divide all three groups into "tiers" by SIZ, with small, medium and large species and races. However, the tiering broke down because there's an uneven distribution, and some unclear edge cases. Do dwarves count as a small race? Do half-dogmen count as a large race? As well, categorisation of some individuals, particularly individuals in the main group the PCs come from - the Kadiz nomads - is unclear. Most have at least some elvish descent if human, or some human ancestors if elvish, and I was trying to figure out what the blood quantum should be to qualify as a "half elf". In the end, I abandoned the entire project as fruitless and overly complex - almost unplayably so, as it would be difficult for people trying to figure out what species to play to make that choice in a straightforward way.

The idea I'm coming around to is that everyone, everyone rolls the human stat line. You rolled SIZ 18 for your halfling? Well, he's a fat, muscly bastard. SIZ is technically a measure of mass, not height, which allows this sort of thing. Your gnoll has SIZ 8? Then he's a scrawny, underfed mutt of a gnoll, maybe the runt of his litter. This has the advantage that PCs don't have to memorise how attributes are rolled for multiple species.

Originally, I was concerned about giving dwarves infravision, and gnolls smell powers and all that stuff, but I've finally decided that I don't really care enough to, and will simply roll it all into already existing skill checks. When the dwarf uses his infravision, he is just making a Perception test in the dark.

I like this solution because it reinforces a couple of core themes of the Dawnlands setting. The first is the idea that almost everyone is "people", regardless of how horrific and weird they look. Common stat generation reinforces that idea by suppressing arbitrary special difference. The second is hybridisation and recombination. Most people in the Dawnlands are some mishmash of human, elf, dogman, orc, etc. to varying degrees, and sorting that out into arbitrary categorisations based on blood quantum with a certain threshold determining when you get the magic powers leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma Should Not Be Attributes

I've been growing increasingly critical of attributes that measure properties that are so dependent on a player's abilities that their separate measurement for characters does nothing but add conceptual confusion about the site of agency. Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma of the six classic attributes are the particular ones I am moving closer and closer to simply replacing.

Intelligence: The problem is two-fold: Simply that a dumb person cannot roleplay a smart one without constant fudging, assistance, and interference by others; and the concept of g which underpins a unitary intelligence attribute is psychometrically dubious and conceptually overladen. When I meet smart people in ordinary life, I find that their minds produce thoughts with distinct, often recognisable characteristics that are unique to them. By contrast, when a character is "smart by committee" in a game, the presentation of their ideas is vague, and imprecise, and the chain of reasoning that led them there cannot be reproduced.

Wisdom: This attribute is a muddle of different qualities, even within its two larger categories of "Perceptiveness" and "Insightfulness". I have never managed to find two people who agree on what exactly a "high Wisdom" character is like once you get beyond vacuous and banal generalities. The character with the highest Wisdom I have ever played (18) was a psychopath who had driven himself to prodigal levels of skill from an early age, and whose basic attitude towards others was that they were mildly dangerous pets.

Charisma: Another conceptual muddle, and another one where players skills overwhelm character ones, unless one takes seriously the advice to let dice-rolling overwhelm excellent roleplaying and the formulation of reasonable, compelling arguments or plots. Basically, either you make this attribute irrelevant, or you make roleplaying irrelevant, or else one becomes the back-up for when the other fails.

I think that by choosing more constrained and reasonable elements from each of these conceptual muddles, we can relegate the rest to the realm of roleplaying and player ability, which are far easier to talk meaningfully about and to resolve problems with than continuously trying to resolve the unsolvable puzzle of how a player's charisma should interact with a character's charisma.

In place of these three attributes, I propose:

Intelligence could be replaced with an attribute called either "Attentiveness", "Acuity" or "Reactivity". Acuity would measure a character's conscientiousness, attention to detail, visual acuity and ability to integrate and adapt to changes in the environment. Specifically, it would influence initiative rolls and saving throws, cover what is now lumped together under "perception" tests of various sorts, and assist in finding traps and clues and such.

Wisdom could be replaced with "Calmness", "Focus" or "Repose". Focus would measure a character's ability to remain calm in stressful or confusing situations, to concentrate on a problem or object of reflection, and to avoid being distracted from their goals. It would be the spellcasting attribute used by wizards. It would help with certain kinds of saving throws, as well as resisting temptation, and overcoming certain types of fatigue.

Charisma could be replaced with "Grace", "Luck" or "Holiness". Grace represents a person's connection to the greater magical forces in the universe, especially but not limited to the gods (if any), demons, extra-dimensional tulpas, whatever. It serves as a luck attribute, as well as being the key casting attribute for clerics and other divine casters. It should aid saving throws to resist magic effects, and general misfortune.

Each one of these is conceptually narrower than the attribute it replaces, but I think the added coherence is a benefit here. As well, these are all areas in which the character's abilities can be clearly distinguished from the player's. Since players primarily deal with verbal descriptions of what their characters are seeing, acuity represents a characteristic that the player cannot truly exercise. Focus pushes roleplaying by preventing characters from asserting that their characters are psychopathically and implausibly calm in situations that there is no reason to believe the characters would be as blase about as the players are. Grace represents the luck of the character, something player ability has no real effect on unless that ability is cheating on dice rolls.

I have not tested these out, but I think I shall in my next Swords and Wizardry Complete campaign, whenever that will be. Anyhow, I'm curious for people's comments and opinions on these changes.