Ok, so this blog may be like a week old and already I'm thinking of changing my 'mission statement', why? Because of Microlite74.
Every time I pick up Microlite74 my friends have a great time. It's quick, brutal and light and everyone appreciates it. It's easy to adapt to my purposes and there is a wealth of support for it online. The only problem is that it's perhaps a little too spartan.
Step in the more complete solution: Swords & Wizardry.
Whilst Microlite74 is a featherlite retro clone of the 0D&D Swords & Wizardry is the complete package, with Vancian Magic and variable weapon damage and the like. It;s also fundamentally the same game and even has an ascending AC system (tacked in neatly next to the 'regular' 9-down AC system). In short it gives me a game I want to run and that I can build on to for my own nefarious ends.
During the course of musing I've decided that building a campaign world on top of a pre-existing system is (for the time being)m probably the best way to go. Therefore this blog will come to host the things I've written for the campaign in order to keep it in one orderly place.
Thursday 23 July 2009
Sunday 19 July 2009
Setting Thoughts
So I've been thinking about my setting recently and considering the ways that I might make it different than pretty much any other fantasy setting. I knew from the start I'd end up doing fantasy, it's really my 'thang' but it also seems to be everyone else's aswell and the swell of fantasy settings threatens to drown anything that doesn't have an original idea in it.
The problem is of course that you can't go out and just have an original idea and then clumsily attempt to bend a setting around it, it tends towards a one dimensional world entirely obsessed with this single idea. For me this ias the big pitfall I'm trying to avoid.
For my setting I've gone back to my academic roots and plundered them for delicious morsels to flavour my setting with. Recently I read 'The Chrysalids' by John Wyndham, not the best book I've ever read but one that had an idea I found delicious: A patriarchal church, alá Salem Puritanism, that is obsessed with the 'norm', a god wrought image of everything. If something deviates from the norm (ie it is deformed or a mutant) it must be destroyed. There are areas of what is basically 'bad country' where mutation is rife and it was this that gave me inspiration.
Consider the monsters of fantasy, strange creatures often with unnaturalm origins. In my setting I consider them to have been born in the places at the edge of the map where the knowledge of men has no foothold, where strange and unknown things happen and the imagination of humanity is projected into a space where it grows and becomes real. As such dragons and goblins exist but are a by-product of the human mind attempting to fill the empty space.
There are some fairly standard ways of preventing monsters from being created in these wilderness areas:
Kill Them: Send out an order of knights (or cadre of adventurers) periodically to find and slay these creatures and destroy their nesting grounds. This is a favourite of the patriarchal church.
Destroy their Habitat: As opposed to burning down where they live this is the idea of removing the uncertainty of these regions by mapping them completely to remove any doubt of what is there. A favourite of the College of Cartographers.
Breed a Cult of Disbelief: Proving to the populace, or making them believe an arguement, that such creatures are impossible in terms of dimension, dietary requirements and the like and as such do not exist. A favourite of the College of Educators.
I think there's plenty of meat here for adventures, monsters can exist anywhere that there is a 'forgotten' space for them (though this might not be common knowledge) and in my mind there are enough reasons to get the players involved in some good old fashioned adventuring. Now all I need to do is build the rest of the setting around it!
The problem is of course that you can't go out and just have an original idea and then clumsily attempt to bend a setting around it, it tends towards a one dimensional world entirely obsessed with this single idea. For me this ias the big pitfall I'm trying to avoid.
For my setting I've gone back to my academic roots and plundered them for delicious morsels to flavour my setting with. Recently I read 'The Chrysalids' by John Wyndham, not the best book I've ever read but one that had an idea I found delicious: A patriarchal church, alá Salem Puritanism, that is obsessed with the 'norm', a god wrought image of everything. If something deviates from the norm (ie it is deformed or a mutant) it must be destroyed. There are areas of what is basically 'bad country' where mutation is rife and it was this that gave me inspiration.
Consider the monsters of fantasy, strange creatures often with unnaturalm origins. In my setting I consider them to have been born in the places at the edge of the map where the knowledge of men has no foothold, where strange and unknown things happen and the imagination of humanity is projected into a space where it grows and becomes real. As such dragons and goblins exist but are a by-product of the human mind attempting to fill the empty space.
There are some fairly standard ways of preventing monsters from being created in these wilderness areas:
Kill Them: Send out an order of knights (or cadre of adventurers) periodically to find and slay these creatures and destroy their nesting grounds. This is a favourite of the patriarchal church.
Destroy their Habitat: As opposed to burning down where they live this is the idea of removing the uncertainty of these regions by mapping them completely to remove any doubt of what is there. A favourite of the College of Cartographers.
Breed a Cult of Disbelief: Proving to the populace, or making them believe an arguement, that such creatures are impossible in terms of dimension, dietary requirements and the like and as such do not exist. A favourite of the College of Educators.
I think there's plenty of meat here for adventures, monsters can exist anywhere that there is a 'forgotten' space for them (though this might not be common knowledge) and in my mind there are enough reasons to get the players involved in some good old fashioned adventuring. Now all I need to do is build the rest of the setting around it!
Saturday 18 July 2009
All Men Are Equal?
There is something to be said for classic gamings penchant for unevan starting characters. Consider the fighter and the wizard, in D&D the fighter traditionally has utility right from the start, he is survivable (if he's clever) and hits hard, whilst the wizard has a knife and probably a single spell. However this evens out later on when the wizard essentially becomes Batman; armed to the teeth with spells and tricks to get themselves out of any situation.
Modern iterations of games, often tending towards standard array or point buy options, have a philosophy that all men are created equal and it is their specializations that make them different.
There are arguements for both choices in terms of character creation and the system I'm tending towards seems to favour a 'level footing' for characters from which their abilities and quirks can be built. However there is the accusation that this method creates cookie-cutter characters a view that certainly has some truth behind it.
So the question becomes how do we differentiate such characters if we are using a 'level playing field'?
We can of course insert any number of systems (defects and personalities for example) to try and breed some differentiation into the system, however all this does is layer more mechanics on top of a system and ultimately just gives more options to a character that will still end up feeling like a stock character.
In older RPGs he random rolling method of character creation prevented this homogenisation of characters and bred a spirit of 'playing with what you have'; the stories of randomly rolled characters who overcame the odds or who failed in humerous ways always seem far more interesting than the uber-slick master swordsman created under a point buy system.
The solution is to enforce random rolling into the system I want to create, however this doesn't sit well as I want my system to be primarily narrative based as opposed to the exploration base of D&D. Perhaps random rolling will be an optional extra stuffed in the appendix, whilst I will include in the other sections a few nudges to get players and GMs thinking in more interesting and expansive ways.
Then again if someone wants to play boring sword master #72 then I guess they will manage it one way or another.
Modern iterations of games, often tending towards standard array or point buy options, have a philosophy that all men are created equal and it is their specializations that make them different.
There are arguements for both choices in terms of character creation and the system I'm tending towards seems to favour a 'level footing' for characters from which their abilities and quirks can be built. However there is the accusation that this method creates cookie-cutter characters a view that certainly has some truth behind it.
So the question becomes how do we differentiate such characters if we are using a 'level playing field'?
We can of course insert any number of systems (defects and personalities for example) to try and breed some differentiation into the system, however all this does is layer more mechanics on top of a system and ultimately just gives more options to a character that will still end up feeling like a stock character.
In older RPGs he random rolling method of character creation prevented this homogenisation of characters and bred a spirit of 'playing with what you have'; the stories of randomly rolled characters who overcame the odds or who failed in humerous ways always seem far more interesting than the uber-slick master swordsman created under a point buy system.
The solution is to enforce random rolling into the system I want to create, however this doesn't sit well as I want my system to be primarily narrative based as opposed to the exploration base of D&D. Perhaps random rolling will be an optional extra stuffed in the appendix, whilst I will include in the other sections a few nudges to get players and GMs thinking in more interesting and expansive ways.
Then again if someone wants to play boring sword master #72 then I guess they will manage it one way or another.
Tuesday 14 July 2009
A Little Direction on Format
One of the big obstacles I've encountered when writing systems in the past has been the layout of the rules. This might seem like a small thing given that I mean only to distribute the game amongst my friends, however a well laid out set of rules can make the difference between them understanding the rules and being completely lost. In short it's one of those things that is worth doing well.
Luckily Rob Lang has got my back and has presented a handy idiots guide to help people like me manage a good layout. A fair amount of this stuff is self explanatory, though there a few tips I've found very useful. Certainly I'm not yet ready to reveal my opus to the world, but when I am you can guess whose layout I will be borrowing.
Luckily Rob Lang has got my back and has presented a handy idiots guide to help people like me manage a good layout. A fair amount of this stuff is self explanatory, though there a few tips I've found very useful. Certainly I'm not yet ready to reveal my opus to the world, but when I am you can guess whose layout I will be borrowing.
Concepts
The first question I have to ask myself is what exactly do we (my group) like to play. Generally we waver between games that involve either the relationship twixt dragon and dungeons or the grim darkness of the far future, a darkness so grim that there is only war.
Other games certainly get a look it but D&D and Dark Heresy rule the roost and this is because they possess both setting and mechanics that draw us in and make us want to play them. So D&D's setting is vanilla, that's fine because we still know it will involve dungeons and the slaying of fabulous creatures (as in elves not camp hairdressers... There is a difference) where as Dark Heresy is heaving on the Warhammer 40,000 setting that we know and love; either way we know instinctively what we're getting into when we choose to play them.
What I have to decide is how to make a game from scratch that is both mechanically sound and thematically interesting. To this end despite having a fair idea of how I want the mechanics to work I need an idea of the setting I want to play in. The trick here is to get a setting that allows me to create a set of rules that sit snugly in the world but that can also be extracted with ease and appropriated for a different use.
So the question is what do my players like. Thinking back over previous sessions I can see that whilst we've done alot of combat in all our games we've found that the social side of things tends to bring out the more crafty and interesting roleplaying. Combat is quite stale by comparison , with limited maneuvers and a detached string of numbers as players wither hit or miss.
Partially this is to do with grind, 4e D&D is particularly guilty of this, whilst the fast, deadly combat of Dark Heresy has done more to put us all on edge in a single combat than any of the best bits of 4e. This is not to disparage 4e, with which we've had great fun, but combat seems to have more 'zing' when the players every move could invite mortal peril. Any game I make would have to include this peril, combat in my mind should be fast and brutal and not central to events.
So what do we have so far: A game of indeterminate genre with fast, brutal combat mechanics and interesting social elements. Perhaps not the most definitive list of components ever.
I'm still finding it difficult to distill what is best about our social encounters in terms of game mechanics. These things have a tendency to be more about player aptitude and cunning than the actual mechanics; but I'm not sure my players are ready for a skill-less system alá 0e D&D, or perhaps it is I who am not ready to adjudicate it, so for now I think there will be a skills system in the mix there.
Other games certainly get a look it but D&D and Dark Heresy rule the roost and this is because they possess both setting and mechanics that draw us in and make us want to play them. So D&D's setting is vanilla, that's fine because we still know it will involve dungeons and the slaying of fabulous creatures (as in elves not camp hairdressers... There is a difference) where as Dark Heresy is heaving on the Warhammer 40,000 setting that we know and love; either way we know instinctively what we're getting into when we choose to play them.
What I have to decide is how to make a game from scratch that is both mechanically sound and thematically interesting. To this end despite having a fair idea of how I want the mechanics to work I need an idea of the setting I want to play in. The trick here is to get a setting that allows me to create a set of rules that sit snugly in the world but that can also be extracted with ease and appropriated for a different use.
So the question is what do my players like. Thinking back over previous sessions I can see that whilst we've done alot of combat in all our games we've found that the social side of things tends to bring out the more crafty and interesting roleplaying. Combat is quite stale by comparison , with limited maneuvers and a detached string of numbers as players wither hit or miss.
Partially this is to do with grind, 4e D&D is particularly guilty of this, whilst the fast, deadly combat of Dark Heresy has done more to put us all on edge in a single combat than any of the best bits of 4e. This is not to disparage 4e, with which we've had great fun, but combat seems to have more 'zing' when the players every move could invite mortal peril. Any game I make would have to include this peril, combat in my mind should be fast and brutal and not central to events.
So what do we have so far: A game of indeterminate genre with fast, brutal combat mechanics and interesting social elements. Perhaps not the most definitive list of components ever.
I'm still finding it difficult to distill what is best about our social encounters in terms of game mechanics. These things have a tendency to be more about player aptitude and cunning than the actual mechanics; but I'm not sure my players are ready for a skill-less system alá 0e D&D, or perhaps it is I who am not ready to adjudicate it, so for now I think there will be a skills system in the mix there.
An Introduction
Welcome.
I suppose I should probably say something about what I intend to do with this blog. Back when I set my other blog adrift on the stormy waters of the interwebs I had the goal of trying to create a simple roleplying game for use with my friends, partly because I had been doing it for years anyway and partly because we were really cheap at the time and I wasn't prepared to fork out £60 for the D&D corebooks.
Nowadays I have a little more DMing experience under my belt and have played in more varied games and it has helped clarify what I want to do with my game: To create a simple game that can be condensed (in the manner of microlite) allows for varied styles of play and that will appeal to my friends.
The last bit is the most important; this is not an endevour with some notion of a commercial end, this is simply something that I'd like to do with my regular gaming group, and by extension this blog is to keep a record of some of those fevered musings that creep through my mind so that my group can get a grasp on things and perhaps offer suggestions or ideas on what would make the game better in their minds.
Anyhow, enough with the mision statement. Fevered Musings Commence!
I suppose I should probably say something about what I intend to do with this blog. Back when I set my other blog adrift on the stormy waters of the interwebs I had the goal of trying to create a simple roleplying game for use with my friends, partly because I had been doing it for years anyway and partly because we were really cheap at the time and I wasn't prepared to fork out £60 for the D&D corebooks.
Nowadays I have a little more DMing experience under my belt and have played in more varied games and it has helped clarify what I want to do with my game: To create a simple game that can be condensed (in the manner of microlite) allows for varied styles of play and that will appeal to my friends.
The last bit is the most important; this is not an endevour with some notion of a commercial end, this is simply something that I'd like to do with my regular gaming group, and by extension this blog is to keep a record of some of those fevered musings that creep through my mind so that my group can get a grasp on things and perhaps offer suggestions or ideas on what would make the game better in their minds.
Anyhow, enough with the mision statement. Fevered Musings Commence!
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