Pre-review: The Dark of Hot Springs Island

Yes, there has been a drought of posts from yours truly.  A long dry season for posts on Artifacts and Relics, as it were.  Listen, when it comes to writing about games, my big priority is making headway on Blackrock.  And it's (surprise!) slow going.  I have to say, writing certain bits is a real drag.  But like some kind of mighty-thewed yawper, I heroically trudge forward.

This is like game writing

But life is not all OSR fantasy adventure setting authoring.  No!  I also read OSR fantasy adventure settings.  You see, I have many interests.

And so this post.  I recently picked up The Dark of Hot Springs Island, and have sort-of read it.  I've basically flipped through it a bunch.  I can't say I've read enough to write a review, but I am comfortable saying I've read enough to write a pre-review, or as some might say, "premature half-ass musings."  So please join me, if you will...

The world is my sandbox!

It's been a while since my last post, but that's mostly because I was away on vacation in Europe for two weeks, followed closely by a visit from my mom.  All of that was great, but quite exhausting, and not particularly conducive for writing about my great love for role-playing games.

That doesn't mean that I've been completely idle in the world of elfgames.  Far from it, my friends!  Let's see...so I didn't really do much related to gaming in Europe, although I did plow through Charles Stross' Laundry Files (well, at least the five main books).  I've enjoyed a couple of Stross' other novels (Accelerando and Glasshouse both managed to impress), and even when they have suffered from prioritizing "big ideas" over characters (something I've encountered more in British sci-fi, for some reason), they have been rife with gameable ideas.  

My favorite of the covers

The Laundry Files also has plenty of game-ready ideas (in fact, it's been covered (DriveThru)), and also manages to have some appealing characters and well-paced plotting.  It's certainly not meant to be taken as seriously as some of his other works, but not everything has to be high-art.  And we were talking about elfgames, right?

But that's not all.

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?