Another kind of magic

I've already mentioned that I think too much about different ways of doing fantasy magic, so it should be no surprise that I'm at it again. Why do I enjoy doing this? Well, the idea of magic is so malleable, and ultimately, it's a literary concept, since it doesn't apply to anything real.  I'd argue that, by definition, magic is unreal.

Thus, the act of defining "magic" and even daring to tie it down with game mechanics is both seductive and frustrating. Seductive, because that which is innately mysterious is bound to attract curiosity, but frustrating because understanding is ultimately elusive.

Anyway, today's take on magic is to replace all those spells and magic items in traditional RPG fantasy with two tools: potions and scrolls.

That's the stuff

A concept of magic

I'm always tinkering with rules and underlying concepts for "magic." Anyone who spends (too) much time working on these kinds of things starts to ask fundamental questions about imaginary concepts, which is obviously a strange undertaking. And this leads us to the perennial question of fantasy literature and gaming: what is magic?

I'm not going to try to answer that here, for a couple reasons. First, it's a subtle and complex concept, and I don't know if I want to go into that much detail in this place and time. But more importantly, it's a very wanky thing to do. So we'll save it for another time.

Instead, I'm going to talk about some ideas I had for a magic system. This was initially conceived for a Delta Green-like modern horror-fantasy campaign, but I think it can be easily adapted to an old-school swords-and-sorcery setting just as well. All we'd need to do is change a little of the window dressing.

I like my magic like I like my coffee—black

Human-as-class

So I took part in an interesting thread on the DCC G+ group today.  It's one of those perennial OSR discussions about "race-as-class," which is all fine and dandy, but Von Ether half-jokingly raised the idea of "human-as-class"...and that gave me a bunch of ideas.

Basically, humans tend to be the individualistic and practical explorers in a lot of sci-fi...you know, Space Americans. Other races are assigned these far more specialized and homogenized cultures that represent only small facets of our lifestyle. I'm talking about lazy Star Trek tropes like the eternally-warlike Klingons and coldly rational Vulcans.

Watch out for Space Americans, man

The same is often true of various demi-human races in fantasy settings, to an extent.  So not only are these mythological entities scrubbed clean of mystery by allowing players to run them, but they are further constrained by unimaginative stereotypes.  Dwarves are grumpy, greedy, industrious and proud.  Elves are elegant and aloof, often advanced but in decline. These lazy cliches have had all the life stamped out of them since Tolkien.

But what if humans were the strange and threatening aliens who belong to a heavily-stereotyped culture?  I proposed two possibilities in the thread: humans-as-orcs and humans-as-elves.

Concepts in game mechanics

Any serious GM is always going to have a few ideas about gaming stewing at once, and inevitably some of the ideas will relate to game mechanics.  So let's talk about a few of those.

Super-simple die systems

I'm always obsessed with the idea of simple mechanics.  When I can identify some mechanics that reduce complexity without sacrificing simulation, I'm happy.  I'm also trying to find ways to make the hobby more accessible.  One way that role-playing games can be a huge turnoff to a lot people is the complexity factor.

Rolling the old D2

Reading Blades in the Dark (see my pre-review) has helped me figure out some of the final details on a super-simple die mechanic. The idea is that it boils down to a single D6 roll.

Pre-review: Blades in the Dark

It's time for another one of my half-cocked opinionspre-reviews, and the subject of this one is that fresh-faced new hepcat, Blades in the Dark.  It was written by a fine fellow named John Harper and published by...a company?  It's hard to tell, because DriveThruRPG swears this was published by One Seven, while you can find the damn thing on the Evil Hat website (and not the One Seven site). The PDF sez it's an "Evil Hat Publication" but it is "In association with One Seven."  Well, it should know who made it.  Guess that clears it up.

Not a very subtle assassin, gotta say

Anyway, I'm supposed to hate this sort of thing, because I've declared myself an OSR nerd and this game is wading far into the storygame side of the pool.  You have players narrating flashbacks!  But as I'm sure my longtime readers know, I cleave to no orthodoxy, so instead I find myself quietly intrigued.  Well, not that quietly...after all, I wrote this.

Oh, what is Blades in the Dark, anyway?  It's a role-playing game where the players are members of a gang of ne'er-do-wells in a Steampunk world with gritty low magic.  You know, Dunwall from Dishonored.  This is Dishonored: The RPG in all but name.  I mean, the name of this city is Duskwall.  That's the opposite of trying to hide your influences.

Empress session report - My Beautiful Sociopaths

I am, of course, referring to my players, the crew that refers to themselves as the "Murderhobros."  But before we catch up with them, I just want to let you know that you're in for a special edition of "What Did I Learn?"  Today I'm going to go big and list my Principles of Gamemastering.  This is eternally a work-in-progress, which is how it should be for us all.  Life lessons, people!

So anyway, where did we last leave our winsome charmers?

All credit to Gus L. - check out his awesome blog, Dungeon of Signs

Ah yes...they had just received a massive text dump of plot hooks, courtesy of the GM with two thumbs (i.e. "This guy!").  And they were very curious about the effects of their sabotage on the Pie Cult.

Gen Con 2017 - Judging for DCC

As I mentioned a-ways back, I signed up for Goodman Games' offer to Judge (GM) four Dungeon Crawl Classics sessions at Gen Con 2017 in return for hotel and convention passes.  I just got back a few days ago, and this post isn't going to cover it all.  To do that, I have to put together a bunch more media resources.  In fact, I really have to first get back to some of the people that I met at the convention.

Saw the cards, didn't see the Quinns...too bad, since I'm a fan

Summary: A great experience!

Empress - magic rules, revised

Hey gang!  One of the things I've been doing lately has been tweaking the Empress rules for spell casting.  I didn't change that much, but here's a list of what was added:

• There are now only five spell levels.
• Casting spells now have a price, which is equal to four times the spell level minus the caster level, with a minimum value of twice the spell level.
• The price of a spell is proportional to the cost paid by the magician.  As before, the exact nature of the cost depends on the type of magician - time for sorcerers, physical energy for mystics.
• The precise costs of spells has been tightened up.
• Any spell parameters that scale, like duration, damage or range, scale based on the caster's level plus the appropriate ability modifier (Spirit for mystics, Mind for sorcerers).
• There's a spell list!  This is the biggest change; rather than leaning on the SRD or the Lamentations list, I decided to write my own from scratch.  It really wasn't too hard, since I resolved to keep the descriptions short and sweet.

One thing you may notice about my spell list is that few of them have combat applications.  My conception of magicians is that they are not medieval superheroes, firing beams out of their fingers and flying around like a robed Captain Marvel.  Using magic in combat should be quite possible, but it should be indirect and require some creativity.  When it comes to giving and taking damage, fighters should be kings of the battlefield at all levels.

Summon Answer!

Magicians occupy a strange position in many parties.  It's clear that fighters should have a front line combat role.  Thieves are well-suited to all those non-combat adventuring activities.  But magic-users, in the traditional model, are basically able to do pretty much anything, but only a limited number of times. With a traditional magic-user, you can become a combat powerhouse (with your Fireballs and your Cloudkills), or the perfect burglar (with Invisibility and Knock).  It just doesn't seem fair to the other classes to have magic-users occasionally outshining them in their own specialties. 

So I try to find other things for magicians to do.  And I partly succeed.  But you're never going to have a magic system without an Invisibility spell.

Without further ado...

The Curse of Stupidity

I've seen a number of OSR blogs (rightly) complain of the utterly boring nature of D&D magic weapons.  Plenty of posts have been made offering (welcome) replacements for the tired-as-fuck sword +1.  Doot-dee-doo, OSR to the rescue!

So tired of these

But you know what's dumber than a +1 sword?  A fucking -1 sword.

Review: Index Card RPG Core Set

Have you heard of Drunkens & Dragons?  It's a great little channel hosted by "Hankerin Ferinale," who opines at great length about tabletop role-playing, while occasionally getting legitimately hammered.  

Living up to the name

"Hank" records a steady stream of excellent GM advice delivered in a highly entertaining patter.  I recommend his channel without reservation.

Anyway, earlier this year, he started putting out these gaming aids called Index Card RPG Vols. 1 & 2 for his Runehammer Games imprint.  These both consist of nice iconic doodles of fantasy RPG stock gameplay elements - things like treasure chests, animated skeletons, mysterious temples, centipedes, mimics, etc.  

On his channel, Hank explained in greater detail how he intended that these could be used.  The GM could print-and-cut these out and put them on the table to represent elements in play, using card proximity as a simple abstract way of depicting the gamespace.  Not really what you'd call an actual RPG, but this was of course a hint for what was to come.

The other shoe has dropped!  Hank's follow-up arrived in DriveThru the other day, going by the name of Index Card RPG Core Set.

So what do we have here?

Spells without levels

The title of this post reflects a recent design ambition of mine, which is to eliminate spell levels from OSR games without eliminating spells.  I have a few reasons for this.  First, as I've been recently discussing, I have an interest in sandbox play without character progression, and having spell levels starts to feel overly restrictive when characters don't even have levels.

Another thing I've noticed, however, is that the nature of spells and spell levels in OSR makes it difficult for such games to support multi-classing.  At first glance, it may sound like I'm talking about very unrelated things, so I'll explain a little more.  

Don't make me choose, OSR!

Concepts in sandbox play

So, in continuance of some of my earlier thoughts about sandbox play and how it relates to character progression, I've been slowly coming up with ideas for a very simple tabletop FRPG that is based on the idea of little-to-no appreciable improvement from "experience."  Let me discuss some of my initial thoughts.

Strategic advantages

One advantage of having a game like that with very human-scale characters is that you can take advantage of certain assumptions to simplify the game mechanics.  For instance, I don't have to worry about things being highly scalable.  Everything can be muted down to a similar level of power, where special abilities allow you to specialize, but don't end up abusing verisimilitude and game balance in the long term.

This means I don't have to provide really big ranges for power levels.  Things don't have to be super-granular.  This immediately calls a certain mechanic to my mind, one which I have enjoyed greatly in practice: the skill system for Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  What occurs to me is that, lacking character progression, character abilities and character skills can be much the same thing.

Wait, that's not how reflections work...

An idea for the sandbox: no character progression

Sometimes, we are so used to traditions and convention that we forget to question them.  One that I've been re-considering lately, for the first time ever, is the idea of character progression.  I only know of one RPG where improvement of skill over time was not assumed to happen: classic Traveller. 

This was the rulebook I had back in the day

With that one exception in mind, I can't think of any tabletop RPG that doesn't have a system for character progress.  The main question that most rules answer is whether to have a class-and-level system, or track individual skill levels.  Games carefully consider what is the proper rate of character improvement.

But is this all absolutely necessary?