To Do List

This is my current to do list:

To Do:

-Revise the area effect spells.

-Retinue rules.

-Firm up costs for Network, Wealth, and Gear.

-Write up attitudes for orders.

-Write up attitudes for houses.

-Eldritch creation rules.

-Mutation rules.

-Alternate magic systems.

-Starting equipment costs and racial equipment. (Different shields, etc.)

-Finish the advancement rules.

-Faction Influence rules.

-Oaths and oathbound artifacts.

-Time sequences (1 round = 30 seconds?)

-Adventure-making advice/system (Randomly generated dungeons?)

-Reputation Rules?

This is, of course, subject to further changes and additions, but these are the items that have my most immediate attention.

Wrote 2,920 words today, most of which was related to racial attitudes.  Next I'm going to do the same thing for Houses and then for Orders.

Too Many Rolls

I've never been one for short-term campaigns.  Pick-up games that last a single session, for the most part, have never really interested me.  I'll make an exception every now and again, often just to see a new rules system in action, but in order to really grab my attention a game has to be able to have room to grow.  I enjoy watching my characters develop relationships, concoct plans, and grow in both personality and power.  I really love empire building, too.

There's a problem with this, though.  Most games have a breaking point where things just stop working well.  The rules just get so darn heavy that they really get in the way of the game itself.  For some games, this occurs very early on (Palladium, I'm looking at you), but I've yet to play a system that doesn't have this problem, excepting those games that side-step the issue by not having any sort of growth/experience mechanic at all.

3rd Edition D&D in its various incarnations tends to start feeling this problem when characters reach their early teens.  Things get really bogged down and combats start moving at a snail's pace, and if you continue progressing in levels the problems just keep getting worse.  The reasons for this are many, but one of the biggest is the fact that there are simply too many rolls involved in a single round of combat, and this is largely because most of the rolls are useless.

It starts with the initiative roll.  Most systems with combat have some sort of initiative mechanic (though lately I've seen a few that don't have any initiative rules, such as Marvel Heroic Roleplay, which I'm currently running), but when you stop and think about it what is this really for?  You roll initiative so you know when you get to take your action.  In most cases, taking an action is going to involve one or more rolls, so really you're rolling dice to determine when you get permission to roll some more dice.  Broken down like that, it's kind of silly.

Rolling for initiative breaks down the flow of play, too - even if you, like most groups I've played in, only bother rolling for initiative at the start of a combat rather than at the start of every round, it delays the actual meat of the combat while you're getting everyone's roll down and figuring out turn order.

You can sink multiple feats into this initiative roll.  Character concepts can be designed around getting as big a bonus on this as possible, trying to be the fastest gun (or sword, or bow, or whatever) in the West(eros).  But a bad roll makes those feats largely irrelevant, at least for that combat.

But it doesn't end with initiative.  When your turn comes around in the initiative order, you usually end up making some sort of roll to see if your action goes off successfully, an attack being the most basic and most often-used example.  But an attack may or may not strike, and even if it does it doesn't mean you struck well.  Hell, you could roll a critical, which involves another roll to confirm that yes you really did roll a critical, only to roll poorly on damage.  A lot of exciting build up just for a big disappointment.  So really, the important roll is not the one you make to attack, but the one you make to deal damage.

All these rolls are being made to see if you get permission to make the rolls that actually affect things, the ones that you actually care about.  At low levels, this isn't a particularly big deal...  But when you start getting characters who get four or five attacks every time their turn comes around, and who are powerful enough that they need to be challenged by multiple creatures with four or five attacks themselves, then all this rolling starts to become a problem.  This was one of the things that really killed 3rd Edition D&D for me.

Burning Wheel was a hugely influential game on my approach to roleplaying games, whether playing or designing, for a number of reasons.  The reason relevant to this rant is this:  When you make a roll in Burning Wheel, it always matters.  There are no extraneous rolls, and (almost) no rolls-that-you-make-in-order-to-get-permission-to-make-another-roll.  While designing Mistwardens, I've been trying to keep this design strategy in mind.  Every roll should matter, and when you roll well, it should have a significant, measurable effect on gameplay.

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Wrote 1,350 words today.

The Dragon in the Room

Walt Whitman was the American poet.  Note I said "the," not "an."  Walt Whitman's works were so massively influential in the world of American poetry, and had such a wide-ranging influence on the American psyche, that you can see signs of his influence in basically every American poet who has written since then.  If you're an American and you write poetry, whether you realize it or not, you're taking part in a conversation that he effectively started.

Most other poets of our neighbours to the south write their poetry as a response to his poetry, whether to agree with his statements or to contrast against them.  Many do so consciously, but even the ones that don't are still talking to Whitman through their work, because they speak from a space that he had a huge hand in defining.

These probably come across as bold, sweeping statements to those who are unfamiliar with the world of American poetry.  They are, and there are some exceptions to this rule as to any other.  The point is that it's hard to underestimate how huge an impact Whitman's works had on his culture.  In many ways, while he wasn't the first American poet, he was the first to produce distinctly American poetry.

So what does this have to do with RPGs?

Well, much like the vast majority of American poetry is written (consciously or not) as a response to Whitman's works, most RPGs are written as a response to Dungeons and Dragons.  And I'm not just talking about fantasy games - I mean all RPGs, even video games, though they stand outside of the point I want to discuss today.

It's not that these games don't have interesting ideas or have interesting things to say.  It's just that D&D, for better or worse, defines the industry.  It was first, it was the biggest, and the space that these other games inhabit were created by TSR back in the days of Gygax and Arneson.  There's no shame in this, and recognizing that fact - embracing it, even - gives you a great deal of freedom creatively.

Once you've accepted the mindset of "Yes, this game is a response to Dungeons and Dragons in many ways," you don't need to worry about trying to create something wholecloth, ex nihilo.  Which would be impossible, anyway.

My game is influenced by D&D.  Of course.  How could it not be?  When I design a rule about initiative or spellcasting, I'm making that rule in contrast to their counterparts in D&D.  When I approach rules design with a particular philosophy in mind, I'm doing that because I think the approach that was taken in designing this or that edition of D&D didn't work and I need to do things differently.  Or perhaps I think it did work, and I want to build upon those lessons and successes.

It's all part of the ongoing meta conversation of game design.  There's no point in being anxious about these influences, because they are literally unavoidable.

* * * *

Wrote 520 words today (so far).

Alpha Tests (parts 3 and 4)

Last weekend I had two alpha tests (one more than expected, but I caved to peer pressure).  Both were fairly successful, in that the game did pretty much what it set out to do and everyone had fun.  Spells were still kind of wonky during the first session, but I think they're pretty balanced at this point.  Still a lot of fine-tuning to do on various perks, techs, and spells, of course, but that's going to be the case for pretty much always.

I badly need a phonetic pronunciation guide for basically everything.  With a strong Greek/Roman/Persian influence, there's lots of confusion over how you say stuff.  I don't think I heard "House Achenea" pronounced the same way twice in a row during either session.

I've got a to-do list done up.  It keeps getting bigger rather than smaller because for every thing I finish I find three more things that need attention, but I expect that will be how it goes until the rules system gets pretty deep into beta.

I'm not sure how many more alpha tests I'm going to need before I can say I've gathered the information I need to gather, but off the top of my head I want to:

-Run an all-Fenrir game, just to see how broken a Fenrir pack is by the rules as written.
-Run a game of higher levels, say 4-5, to get a better idea of how the rules scale up.
-Run a short 3-session campaign to get a feel for the domain management rules.

So, that's at least five more before Beta proper.

Mistwardens

I've decided to resurrect this as my development blog for my current RPG project, tentatively titled Mistwardens. It's a pretty massive undertaking compared to anything I've done before.

As a starting point, it uses Clinton R. Nixon's Donjon for the basic rules mechanics. Specifically, it takes the following concepts from Mr. Nixon's game:
-1 success = 1 fact or 1 die.
-Wealth and Gear stats and the mechanics therein.
-Monster looting mechanics.
-Dungeon level mechanics.
-Monster skill creation.

From there, Mistwardens sort of goes in its own direction. To be honest, it's a bit of a Frankenstein's Monster of a game, blending player-narrative control with turn-based tactical combat on a gridded map. So far in playtesting, the blend of the two has worked out better than I'd hoped.

More importantly, though, is the inspiration that Donjon provided for me... Clinton R. Nixon designed that game not to emulate physics or any particular genre of fiction, but as a game that he'd want to run. That's how I'm approaching this game; as something I personally would like to run. When it's finished, I hope the rules to automate all the things about GMing RPG games that I find tedious, while leaving me to play with the things I enjoy. That's my primary goal.

A close second in terms of design goals is to have a game whose setting and rules mesh both logically and organically. A lot of the time, the in-world rules of a game aren't really compatible with the game mechanics, and while it works out okay in play the Fridge Logic creates problems. (e.g., If flight is a common ability for monsters to have, why would a medieval society rely on castles? If every chapel has a spellcasting cleric, wouldn't disease be a thing of the past? Etc., etc.)

Some other random questions that I hope to address with this game:


Why don't monsters wipe out civilization?

In a typical dungeon, there may be dozens – or even hundreds – of battle-hardened warrior humanoids, along with magical beasts and arcane resources. Sometimes these can be extremely powerful. Such a force would be a threat even to a city, but when it comes to a frontier town? The forces of civilization would stand no chance against an initial attack. So why don't dungeon denizens attack? Why do they just hide in their dungeon waiting for adventurers to wipe them out?

Mistwardens attempts to answer this in a couple ways. One, they do attack. It's a fact of life on the frontier that your town needs to be able to repel attacks. More importantly, though, dungeons are places of power – the farther away monsters get the weaker they become.

Why do PCs learn so fast?

In most XP systems, PCs learn really fast compared to the setting NPCs. From a gameplay perspective, this is a good thing, but it can strain believability. Sometimes the explanation given suggests that PCs learn so fast because they go through so much in such a short time. Yet the same argument could be made for NPC adventurers or soldiers, who still gain levels much slower than PCs.

This becomes even more pronounced when dealing with long-lived races; it may take an elf 400 years to reach 20th level in D&D, where it takes just a few years of gameplay for a human PC to reach that level. Sometimes the explanation offered is that short-lived races tend to learn faster, yet an elf PC will learn just as quickly.

Mistwardens writes it into the setting that PCs are special. Moreover, they're taking a learning shortcut – empowering their souls by collecting and refining Mistweave, which allows them to grow and develop over a short period of time whereas an NPC would have to learn the old-fashioned way. Mistweave (also known as experience points) is a physical thing that Wardens (PCs) have to go out and collect for the glory and protection of the Empire.


Anyway, I think that's enough for now. Right at the moment, all my notes added together gives a word count of 25,344 words, about 1200 of which was from today. It's hard to speculate how many words it's going to take before it's finished, but I know I've barely scratched the surface. The game is still very much in alpha stage.

Doing an alpha test tomorrow - my third. Mostly looking at character creation. Hoping it goes well!