Changing of the Dice

While tinkering around in the simple system I'm yanking out of West End Games' Ghostbusters game, I pondered changing from using six-sided dice to using four-sided dice.  I find the ubiquitous six-sider boring, though it's far more accessible to non-gamers who might be better able to pick up this rules-light system as opposed to the monstrosities that are latter-day editions of D&D.  Four-siders are my favourite die, followed by twelve-siders, so I thought I'd look into how the game might change based on a different randomiser.

Adjusting the difficulty numbers assigned to tasks is simple: the standard range is 5 (easy) to 30 (difficult), with a new level after every five numbers.  Well, I see that 5 is 6-1.  Six is the maximum you can roll on one d6.  So for every "level" of difficulty you should be rolling one more die if you hope to succeed.  You would have a hard time rolling a 5 on a d6, but most characters don't have scores of 1 (I think 2 is the minimum, though injury or unusual circumstances can cause you to lose points in your traits), so we can safely assume the player will be rolling at least two dice.  If I apply the 'max on die minus one' formula to the d4, I get a scale from 3-18.  Again, it's hard to roll a 3 on a d4, but if you're rolling two of them, not too bad.  So adjusting the scale of difficulty numbers seems to translate okay.

However, with only four possibilities whenever you roll a die, the Ghost or Skull Die becomes a much larger threat.  The probability you will roll the skull and have Something Bad happen leaps from 1 in 6 to 1 in 4.  That's significant.  It could be justified by the setting -- if you run a dark horror or post-apocalyptic game with a deadly and/or scary mood, where the PCs should expect awfulness to be around each and every corner, it might actually benefit you.  I don't know that that's a good idea for my setting idea, which I'm planning to be mostly serious but not grim, with ample opportunity for some comedy/foolishness/slapstick.

So the jury's still  out on this one.  I'm still very much in the brainstorming phase of the setting, and I'm assembling the rules (mostly, as I said, pulled right from the pages of the Ghostbusters book) bit by bit as I go, so there's plenty of time to tweak and experiment.

Rules Light

I'm tinkering about, in my head, mostly, with the idea of adapting using stealing the D6 rules used in West End Games' "Ghostbusters" RPG for a gaming experience. I loved the super-light rules in that game and I think they'll be great for any number of settings. I would probably re-name the "Ghost Die" to a generic "Skull Die" or something, but that's barely worth mentioning.

In the Ghostbusters game, character sheets are slightly larger than a 3x5 card, including room for a portrait. Characters have four Traits: Brains, Muscle, Moves, and Cool, and a Talent for each, which lets a player roll four extra dice when attempting a feat that falls under that Talent. Each character also has a Goal and a set of Brownie Points. The general mechanic is: to complete a task, the GM assigns it a difficulty and decides what Trait it falls under. The player rolls the number of dice their character has in that Trait and tries to equal or beat the difficulty number. The dice are all six-siders, and one must be the Ghost Die, which has the famous 'no-ghost' symbol in place of the six. If you roll the ghost, Something Bad happens, whether or not you succeed, and the ghost counts as a zero. If you succeed or fail without rolling a ghost, you just succeed or fail and nothing particularly special happens outside what you might expect to happen in that situation. But if you roll a ghost, even if you succeed, Something Bad happens, usually, in Ghostbusters, with comic effect.

Players can spend Brownie Points to improve their chances to succeed or to save their character's butt in an emergency. They earn Brownie Points by successfully completing adventures and by explaining what happens to their character when they save his/her butt with Brownie Points. Brownie Points are a little like Fate points, but they're also hit points: if you take damage from something, say, a poltergeist slams you in the face with a phone pole, you lose Brownie Points. I think it's a wonderfully compact and functional system that you can play without the need to look up things on a chart every 2.5x10-2 seconds.

I've made some notes on vague ideas for a sci-fi setting, a 'mutant animals living in our modern world a la Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' setting, and I've even pondered using this in a fantasy setting, and not only to wean some of my players from the idea that D&D 2nd Edition Skills and Powers is the only D&D ruleset worth playing fantasy in. And I'm really getting tired of Forgotten Realms.

When I've looked over the Ghostbusters rules in a little more detail, and decided if this is something I want to do or not, I'll update here.

An Update on The World of the Twelve Faces (12W)

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I have not been running 12W as I planned. I may get back to it, but right now I have other things of importance in my life that are taking precedence. I may go back later and tweak it before offering it on Google Plus. I've been thinking a little lately of eliminating gods (again) and turning the cleric class into a simple monster-hunter/vanHelsing type of thing, in a region where creepy what-the-hell-IS-that former people or something wander about. I was inspired by recent additions to Dwarf Fortress on that front (well, recent meaning a handful of versions ago, anyhow). More detail on that as I ponder it.

But for the moment the World of the Twelve Faces is silent.

The pressure to min-max: struggles with new/old school styles

Zak mentioned this little gem today on his blog:

-Litmus test. How to know a player is lame:
Player discovers Option A (with x flavor) is objectively, mechanically, more powerful than Option B (with y flavor--totally different).
+
Player chooses Option A, doesn't see why you wouldn't.
+
Player is not 12 years old
=
Suck

At my regular game I fall prey to this mindset, that being the one belonging to the ruthless min-maxer. Our group has a couple min-maxers and I feel the pressure to go with the group. We're playing 2nd Edition Skills & Powers, possibly the most convoluted set of rules since 3e. That makes sense somehow. The more I get into the OSR stuff the more the endless lists of options and points and traits and disadvantages and bonuses and abilities oh my annoys the crap out of me. Yet when creating my character for our most recent game, I took the extra rolls the DM offered, squeezed every last drop of ability out of those scores, and min-maxed my character for the ultimate potential in being awesome at table, for fear of having a dumb character who can't do anything interesting in comparison to the min-maxed PCs of my fellows.

I dislike myself for falling prey to this again and again. Each time I make a character I try to make an interesting one, not just one who can do stuff like 'OMG did you *see* that?!' You don't need to be the most awesome to make a memorable and/or enjoyable experience. I do know this. I fall prey to peer pressure, even of the unspoken kind. If everyone at table is wearing a purple hat and you insist on wearing a pink one, you're going to stand out. Now, these people are my friends and no one is going to yell at me for not min-maxing. But I fear I will have a sub-par experience if I don't min-max like the others do.

I once made a kobold priestess who was originally intended to be a kind of comic relief. I was going to play her for her personality, not for her ability to be the damned medic (side note: I hate being the medic. Clerics do not always have to be the medic. Probably why my last cleric was an evil specialty priest of the god of storms. I didn't have to feel obligated to heal the party - my character looked out for herself first!). The first version I rolled up, well before I was ready to switch characters, had a slightly above-average Wisdom. By the time I was ready to run the character, I had re-rolled her and given her an 18 Wisdom. Why? Because I have to be GOOD at stuff! Everybody else at table is GOOD at stuff! If I'm not I'll look lame and suck and I won't have fun. That's what I probably thought at the time.

I suppose I'll just have to take the plunge one day: make a character as if I'm playing in a good old B/X or Advanced game and try my best to have fun with it. I've considered bringing back the kobold priestess, but I still don't want to play the cleric. Maybe a kobold thief... I like the idea of being this scuzzy little reptile who speaks broken Common, eats rats, and doesn't comprehend the strange concept called 'bath'. I could do the same kind of thing with a more standard race, but in S&P there are a heap of race choices, so why not play the critter I like the most? And most importantly, why do I feel this need to munchkinly min-max?

This Might Be Considered a Rant: THAC0

I just started reading Howling Tower.  I opened up a post from January today and the author referenced a post on Critical Hits about the way the game has changed, the influence of the Internet, et cetera.  I was cruising through this post and suddenly came to a screeching halt at this sentence: "We all know that huge weight that was lifted when THAC0 went away."

What?

What's wrong with THAC0?  If I know your character's THAC0 I know what Armour Class he's going to hit.  THAC0 20?  Rolled a 12?  AC 8.  It's basic subtraction, folks.  Not rocket science.  Third Edition decided to dumb down the system and now you all can't do math?  Eh?  Sure, it's easier to go, "The monster's AC is 12 so you need a 12 to hit it," but really.  I'm an English  Major.  I don't do math like some people don't do windows, get it?  I  like rules-light systems because I don't want to spend all my time figuring out seventy billion adjustments to my roll just to see if I can successfully walk down the street without falling over.  But THAC0 is not an example of a complex rule.

I started playing D&D (red box Mentzer) around 1984 or so.  I don't recall, as a child, having a great difficulty with descending Armour Class.  I learned it, and THAC0, very quickly.  Could it be that today's players are preoccupied with having the game their way, so their characters can be the special snowflake?  That they love all the new rules that "protect" them from "nasty DMs"?  That's fine for them.  I feel sad for them, but I'm not gonna argue with them, as long as they don't come leaning over here and telling me I'm a moron for using THAC0 and descending AC.  I feel sad that they've had to play with selfish and/or killer DMs who've abused them so much that they see a complicated, bloated ruleset as their only salvation.  And honestly: if you wanna be the badass mofo who kills all the monsters flawlessly and can never ever lose?  Go play an FPS game and turn on god mode.  If you want an experience that you'll remember, a fun time with friends, by all means, play D&D.

Told you this was gonna be ranty.

Secrets and Such - no players allowed!

When I wrote the last post, about the world's inherent weirdness being at least part of the reason for what I called my campaign's "low-magic" quality, I didn't know the half of it.  I've had time to work out (and, in many cases, stumble upon - my Muse works in interesting ways) one of the fundamental truths of the gameworld.

I give this warning to anybody on my current players list: look away now.  I'm going to reveal the number one secret of the world your future characters will be living on.  Loki, SuStel, Arcadian: I mean you folks. :)  I'll be putting "players keep out" as a tag on posts like these.

Spoiler spaaaaccceee....!

The world is tentatively called "The World of the Twelve Faces".  It's not a globe.  It's a dodecahedron.  I've had all kinds of wonderful and bizarre ideas about how it works (inspired in large part by an article on a cubical earth that I believe Zak S. posted some time ago).  I'm taking Zak's 'the underworld connects various surface areas to each other' idea as well.

Each face of the dodecahedron has its own geography, inhabitants, and history.  Yes, they're connected via the underworld caverns and such, and occasional migrants from one face to another may be seen, but basically they're isolated from each other.  I've only built up the face the player characters will start on: Face Five.  I've had a minor brainstorm or two on what and who might inhabit the other faces, and as I've begun scrawling down notes on the faces I've vaguely outlined interesting geographical  bits about each.

The geography of each face is heavily influenced by the numbers that appear on the twelve-sided die I hold up whenever I'm pondering the world.  (I've become painfully aware that different dice are not only of slightly different sizes, but the numbers are frequently in different places and/or orientations, so I've had to decide on a 'canon' twelve-sider so that I don't confuse or contradict myself.  Chessex are my favourite dice, so I'm using my bone coloured one for this purpose, though that pretty light-and-dark blue speckled one on the windowsill is very nice... but different. >.<) Many of the faces sport a deep canyon or crevice of some kind, though in all cases this doesn't look like the number any more.  Well, Face Eight might, since it has a superfast-moving river system that looks suspciously like the infinity symbol standing up instead of a central sea like most of the rest of them, in accordance with what I learned about cubical earth.

There'll  be more on this stuff later.  Hoping to get into a more regular posting schedule around here.

Low-magic sussed: the world is weird

I realised something the other day: the reason the world Illi Pesch is situated on is low-magic is because magic is most of what keeps the world from coming apart at the seams.  There may also be some bizarre stuff that exists to keep it working, or the gods/ancients/builders might have just built that in so there'd be no chance of goofball adventurers wandering about and breaking the thing.

Or maybe not. I haven't decided.