Role-playing design notes

Wow! This is a very nice adventure generator! You’ve got to try it to believe it. Generates some very nice maps, with room keys that include both encounters and dressing for you to use or modify. It also generates nice names for the dungeon, such as “The Tenebrous Sanctum” and “The Strange Tower of Madness”.

“Your nostrils are overwhelmed by a sulphurous smell. There is a pile of dung here.”

“I (tragically) don’t have much in the way of secret paths, sub-levels, or non-Euclidian spaces, but even in this simple structure we can see multiple midpoint entries and looping paths. I think if you take a moment to consider the architecture of the world around you, you’ll discover that linear paths are the exception and not the rule.”

Justin Alexander takes a look at dungeon design using Paul Jaquays’s work as an example. You could definitely do a lot worse than looking at Caverns of Thracia and Dark Tower for inspiration.

Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître. Probably not an adventurer, but you never know. This could be the opening scene to an Indiana Jones-like movie.

When I started writing Gods & Monsters and looking at what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to change from D&D, the biggest issue was the cleric. Just looking at the rules, the AD&D cleric is mechanically just a fighter/magic-user with a unique spell list. Later explanations made this clear—they even allowed clerics to use magic-user spells under some circumstances.

I went with sorcerors being the kind of “scientific” wizard who does research and pores over old books; and with prophets being people chosen by divine powers to change the world. In Spotlight on: The Prophet, I described them as:

… based on the active holy man or woman with divine power, such as Moses, David, Jesus, Joan of Arc, and Joseph Turner. Some of them could fight, but their warrior skills were secondary to their religious zeal.

Over on Grognardia, James Maliszewski mentioned that D&D clerics are partly inspired by Peter Cushing’s van Helsing.

That’s cool enough in itself, but the comments section is where it gets interesting. The discussion moved quickly to the notion that clerics should be “men of science and faith”.

Chris Tichenor writes:

I think there’s something to be said for seeing the cleric as a Van Helsing-ish (or Roger Bacon-ish) man of science and faith to distinguish him from the purely supernatural magic-user, though that may be hard for us of modern sensibilities to reconcile.

Specifically, the cleric in this formulation is a “monster-hunter”, like Peter Cushing’s van Helsing, “particularly when monsters are understood to be sin personified” (FrDave).

Brunomac replied sarcastically, “Might as well tell people to run their cleric like Fox Mulder.” But while meant as a putdown, it’s a good example. Mulder is a man on a mission, who believes in a higher order and is on a mission to protect a vulnerable people from the other world. Mulder a cleric? Not a bad idea.

Taking this idea all the way, some of their powers would be knowledge of how to trap and outwit the monsters that haunt the world. Some of that knowledge is divine, such as turning, and some is scientific, such as sewing their mouths with salt. This could definitely be an interesting way of making the cleric class unique.

I think one of the reasons that so many old-school games, even relatively simple ones like Gods & Monsters, have falling rules is that falling is easy. Once you’re in free-fall, special cases drop to nil or near-enough that it doesn’t matter. You can reasonably assume that one table or one calculation gives you the result you want in unknown situations without worrying that the air might be twice as dense as normal or that some air is harder to get a grip on than other air. Once you’re in free-fall, it doesn’t matter. You can even realistically ignore the difference between falling on stone vs. falling on water, and even if you don’t, that’s your one variable: you can easily enough adjust damage according to it.

Very few things that heroes do are like that. When I moved to the much simpler encumbrance rules that Gods & Monsters currently uses¹ I dropped the lift rule entirely. Like the specific miles-per-hour/yards-per-minute movement rules, being able to specifically lift x pounds isn’t useful knowledge. What matters are the bonuses and penalties to strength for lifting variable amounts during strenuous situations.

I had an minor epiphany last night on how to handle this. Gods & Monsters currently has a doubling rule for “obstacle size”. If you can do, say, 10 feet with no penalty, then you can do up to 20 feet with a penalty of 1, and up to 40 feet with a penalty of 2. This doubling rule doesn’t work for lift, however. It gives outrageous numbers that fit more with a superhero game than a standard fantasy game. Either the average hero can’t lift a heavy book, or the strong hero can lift houses.

The epiphany was, why not look at the falling progression, and see if that works for lifting something enough to easily move it around and even give it a toss, in tight situations? Except that it bottoms out at terminal velocity, the falling progression is the same as the level advancement (experience point) progression.²

You may have noticed a bunch of changes to the reference sheet section of the Broadsheet a few days ago. That was in preparation for the new spirit manifestation database.

I’ve had it in the back of my mind for a long time now that I should have a database of things like spells and spirit manifestations. The main reason I haven’t done it yet is that the most obvious candidate is spirit manifestations: prophets get a clearly-defined list of manifestations they can use. But I put it off for two reasons. One is that I’ve been using Word, and Word is a bear to automate. As I’ve been moving the books to Nisus, however, that’s no longer an excuse. The other reason is that I don’t like that prophets have a specific list of things that they can do. In D&D, clerics used spells; clerical spells and magic-user spells were literally interchangeable. Gods & Monsters prophets do not use spells. The goal of spirit types is that a prophet can do healing, can do war, can do chaos. What I’d love to have is a mechanism where the prophet doesn’t have a list of “spells”, but rather where the player says “I heal this person” and the game mechanics are obvious.

My requirements for this mythical mechanism, however, include that the prophet player must not have to build the manifestation from effects. That kind of engineering is for the psychic. I don’t want a list of manifestations, I do want game mechanics, and I don’t want any building. This is probably impossible.

At our last game, we spent about five minutes trying to figure out what “protection from animals” does, before finally realizing that I’d renamed that manifestation to “wildlife sanctuary”. I decided it was time to create a database. A bit of private time with BeautifulSoup and a quick model in Django, and here you go.

I’ve designed it for easy use for players of prophets. If you are playing a third level prophet with the spirits of Prophet, Protection, War, Charm, and Trickster, there are your manifestations. Go up a level and switch out Protection for Chaos? Here you go.

And I’d like to take this moment to say how much CSS media rocks. Rather than make a separate page for printing, just print it. A couple of lines in the style sheet remove all of the information that’s not useful in the printed version, so you can print out a summary sheet, a spirit list, and a book of manifestations as easily as print.

Over on Grognardia, James Maliszewski talks about why he uses level drain, and why he is considering not using it. His reasons for moving away from them are (1) that they don’t get saving throws, and (2) that they are almost all game and no world. That is, of all the things that can be affected on the character sheet, levels are the most removed from the character’s reality.

Still, there’s also a part of me that rebels against the notion of changing level drain. It’s one of the few attacks in D&D that genuinely puts the fear of God into even the most foolhardy players and encourages cleverness to avoid it.

This is the classic defense of level drain; I’ve used it myself. But the reason it puts “the fear of God” into players is that, unlike other resources that the character has on their character sheets, levels are a direct reward to the players. When a DM sends level-draining creatures into the adventure, they are punishing the players. As both a player and game master, I’ve seen far less “cleverness” used to avoid level-drains, and far more flat-out refusals to accept it as part of the game¹. Level drain is an affront to the player, not the character. Threat of a good spanking would instill just as much fear in them.

If the desire is to make undead feared (and that’s a good desire), there are better ways of doing that. It ought to be something that both the player and the character fear. Immobility, loss of control, and serious injury are all things that characters aren’t going to like, but that aren’t punishments.

In Gods & Monsters, I went with the latter. Undead can cause injuries (what D&D would call negative hit points) without having to go through survival points first. Undead are still feared, because injuries are dangerous things: an injured character has penalties to doing stuff (just as people who have had the life sucked out of them by an undead often seem to in our source materials), and any character that gains injuries runs the risk of unconsciousness (which, again, seems to be a chronic problem for those getting the life sucked out of them).

Players are definitely afraid of having their characters go unconscious during a fight. I’ll bet the characters don’t like it much, either.

I only understand about half of what Rob Conley writes here about making rivers in Inkscape maps, so it’s not surprising that his sample maps look a hell of a lot better than the maps I make for Gods & Monsters.

I’ll add that the blur feature makes lakes and rivers look a lot nicer. Just a slight, barely-perceptible blur around the edges makes a big difference. I’m adding blur to just about everything nowadays.

The Greyhawk Grognard is looking at how to organize the various sections of D&D-style rulebooks. OD&D had Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, AD&D reorganized to the Players Handbook, the Dungeon Masters Guide, and the Monster Manual. Why separate the game master book from the player book? Why keep monsters separate as well?

The way I look at it is this: if it’s a rule, it goes in the Rulebook for all players to read. If it’s specialized, it gets its own book. And I like to keep each book that gets used at the table at 120 pages or below and in a format that flattens more easily.

So, I have the Gods & Monsters Rules in their own book; the Arcane Lore magic book, and the Divine Lore prophet book. I separate out spells and spirits because only some of the players need them, and they take up a lot of space. I’m trying to avoid the necessity of looking things up in an index (one of the reasons I’ve avoided even making an index) by keeping each book focused.

I used to make a “big” book available on Lulu¹ that combined the Rulebook, Arcane Lore, and Divine Lore. But nobody bought it—including me. At the table I found it more useful to be able to hand the Divine book to the prophet player, the Magic book to the sorceror, and not have them distracted by the rules that they don’t currently need.

There are a couple of oddities, currently. I have skills in the Arcane Lore book because they aren’t big enough to go on their own; I may end up moving them into the main rulebook since they are far more integrated into the rules than they used to be in previous incarnations. Specialties and psychic powers will stay in the Arcane Lorebook because they’re too small to go on their own. It’s all a tradeoff between playability and just plain having too many books lying around.