Advice in Practice: On the Simulacrum Spell

I've talked before about what I think makes for effective games that keep players wanting more (namely listening to the players and establishing real stakes as described in this blog post), but I recently encountered a Reddit thread wherein the original poster was asking about advice for trying to limit the 5e version of the simulacrum spell. The rule for 5e simulacrum is that a given caster can only cast one instance of simulacrum at any given time, but those simulacra could use their one cast of simulacrum on the caster, creating an infinite army of wizards given enough time and powdered rubies. The redditor in question was worried about this "exploit," and was asking for advice.

While a lot of advice in the comments suggests, "go ahead and limit it, you're the GM," I don't find that satisfying, because I tend to think the inflection points of a thing are usually the most interesting part. So in keeping with establishing real stakes, here was my response. A specific example that is potentially broadly applicable; when your players can do something wild and creative that seems like it will upend your carefully crafted world, let them do it! But also, brainstorm the ripple effects this action will have. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and the world keeps moving while the players wait.

(Also, part of the joy of being a powerful wizard in any role-playing game system is doing wild, impossible things. Don't take that from your players!)

I replicate my response below:

As the DM, you are perfectly within your rights to limit aspects of the rules or setting. That's technically the end of the discussion, although I might canvass the entire player group and see what they think.

But personally? I wouldn't limit simulacrum. I'm usually in favor of whatever nonsense my players want to do.

However, there is always a cost.

Each casting of simulacrum costs 1,500gp and takes twelve hours, which means you can functionally only cast it once per day despite your spell slots. (If your characters have folded time or don't need to sleep, then maybe you get two castings if you have the spell slots. Wish obviously changes the calculus of these assumptions, but it does that anyway.)

That means your magic-user's clone army takes weeks to amass. If anything else is happening at the moment, it continues to happen while they're doing this. If the other players don't want to wait, then they get to go have adventures while the wizard sits in their laboratory and makes simulacra all day.

And what about ruby dust? Your player might have plenty of rubies (a single "typical" 5,000gp ruby as described in the treasure portion of the Dungeon Master's Guide yields enough powder for 3 1/3 castings of simulacrum), but will probably have to get more to amass an army over the course of months. That means they have to go delving, or mining, or trading. How many rubies are in a typical settlement, anyway? A typical mine? Is the queen willing to pry every ruby out of her crown to power your simulacra?

All of this to say: the spell is not instantaneous, and it's not without cost. Casting simulacrum takes time and resources, the sort of large-scale project that someone notices and tends to engender strong opinions. What do the NPCs do when they realize a wizard is casting simulacrum over and over again? What do they do when they realize a wizard has 50 rubies on hand? (Worth at least 250,000gp; the GDP of whole city-states.) What do the other player characters do when they realize the wizard is going to spend the next two months blasting through their wealth to build clones?

Are things so quiet in the world that the characters can afford to wait while the wizard performs their Great Work in their ivory tower? Is there no political or religious organization in your setting that would be very interested in these activities? Is the villain merely sitting idly while the players gather a magical army vulnerable to antimagic?

I don't know the parameters of your campaign. But I do know that player decisions don't happen in a vacuum, and in high-level games, they have consequences. Big consequences. What are the consequences of this choice?

Play to find out.

Advice Against Quantum Ogres

Meanwhile, on a Facebook D&D group, someone shared this meme:

Accompanying the meme was the question, "What do you do if you are the DM?"

As you might expect, The Dreaded Discourse™ reigns, and there is a long conversation nested in the threads below the post. (And the original post was shared to other groups, themselves with long nested threads of The Dreaded Discourse™, so there are a thousand thousand such responses.)

Contrary to my instincts, I engaged. (I fall firmly on Team Anti-Quantum Ogre.) Most of the rebuttals were something to the effect of, "How do I run an epic game without offering the illusion of choice?" But in the midst of that, I think I gave the best advice I've ever given as a Game Master, and will probably ever give as a Game Master, so I repeat it here for you:

The players are already on your side. You don't have to lie to them to get them to like you.

I'm only being a little hyperbolic when I say that 90% of GM problems could probably be solved by keeping this in mind. Even if you're gaming with total strangers, they're there to game. They want to play a game. It's not a job interview* and it's not going on your permanent record, so you don't need to impress anyone. Just make sure it's fun, and it will be memorable without you doing anything special.

(And obviously, "lying" in this case should be assumed to mean things like illusion of choice, or "protecting" certain NPCs, or other bits of behind-the-scenes chicanery. Most GMs keep hidden information, which falls under typical player expectations for traditional sorts of table-top role-playing games. Determining and calibrating how accepting players are about hidden conspiracies, secret NPC agendas, and the like makes a good Session Zero conversation.)

As for how to run an epic game without offering the illusion of choice, it's hard to fake the actual work. You basically have two choices in that regard:

• Run a linear adventure path, and be up-front about it. Decide what you do when the players leave the rails before you get to the decision point. (If you don't have a meaningful choice in mind, why give them a choice in the first place?)
• Run a sandbox, but make sure the players have enough information to make meaningful choices. (With the requisite caveat from The Alexandrian that choosing to not do research, or failing to find information, are also choices that should be honored.)

Outside of those options, be prepared to improvise if they make choices you didn't expect, or just be honest with them. You can get a surprising amount of mileage out of, "This is what I have planned tonight," although you have to be prepared to roll with the punches if you want the world to feel immediate and infinite.

And honestly? Speaking from experience, the most interesting game tidbits tend to happen when the players go completely outside of your expectations and into no-man's land.

But remember: no matter what else happens, the players are already on your side. You don't have to lie to them to get them to like you.

* Okay, so if you're a professional GM, it's a bit like a job interview, but "impressing" those players tends to come more from actual work than shortcuts. And as with a home game, you tend to impress players the most when you validate their choices — when the players see that their choices matter and that their decisions have an impact on the world, that's when they pay close attention to your game.

RPGs as Art: A System Matters Metaphor

This tired old debate* rears its ugly head with alarming frequency, and every time, I am left wanting from the answer.

Whenever someone complains about a system being "misused" — which is to say, not used for its intended or supported purpose, like using the Dungeons & Dragons game engine to run an Animal Crossing-style game — a version of the debate that I frequently encounter is that RPGs are tools, and you wouldn't use the wrong tool for a job. You wouldn't, say, use a hammer to try to turn a screw, as you're liable to ruin the thing you're attempting to build or fix.

This metaphor has never sat right with me.

For starters, table-top RPGs are art and are tools to make art. That's a bit different than attempting to use a screwdriver when you need a wrench; some of the most compelling art uses nonstandard components, like that one of the industrial robot trying and failing to clean the blood pooling around it. You know the one:

Beyond being short-sighted from an artistic perspective, it also ignores what a large swath of role-playing games do. Many games aren't tools, but toolboxes; the creators certainly hope that you'll take them, use them, and enjoy them, but once it's in your grasp, it's up to you to figure out how to use it. A lot of hacks, custom systems, and mini-games come from here: add the Objective rules from Unknown Armies; the fishing rules from Rod, Reel, & Fist; and the narrative rules from Let These Mermaids Touch Your Dick Maybe into Call of Cthulhu to get the Frankengame of your mad dreams!

(I don't know why you need rules for organizational agency, fishing, and thirsty-ass mermaids in your hypothetical Gothic cosmic horror game, but I assume you know your group better than I do. Maybe you want the game to be a little more player-directed than your typical Call of Cthulhu game, and you want to add options for SAN refreshes that include fishing and mermaid-mediated sexual healing. But I am here to tell you that if someone on the internet said you're playing wrong by making the eldritch horror fishing and mermaid seduction game of your dreams, they can go pound sand.)

And of course, I will again bang my drum that RPGs are art. Pretending that RPGs are tools ignores why people actually like a particular game, which often has a lot to do with the myriad (and often subconscious) reasons people like art. Is it accessible? Do your friends like it? Does it fulfill some need within you? Is it especially resonant with your background?

All this to say: the tool metaphor always rankles me when I see it, but I only recently realized why.

RPGs aren't tools. They're cars.

If you're not in the United States, allow me to set the scene: everywhere is too far to walk, and public transit is often underfunded, so that means you basically need access to a car to live. So cars are ubiquitous, but I suspect most people buy, rent, or borrow cars for very prosaic reasons: you had access, you could afford it, it suits your needs, whatever. For the vast bulk of people, they just need something that will get them to work and the grocery store.

These are the equivalent of the vast hordes that indie gamers mock when they wonder why someone is hacking Dungeons & Dragons 5e to make an unofficial Uncharted RPG. Such people may neither know nor care about other RPGs that would do what they want more "efficiently," they just want a game that will handle some action, is somewhat familiar, and has lots of online support in case they get stuck.

The bog-standard American car consumer just needs a car to get from point A to point B. If the brakes work, it's good enough.

Then there are the car guys.

These are people with Opinions™ about cars. A car isn't just a convenient way to get from place-to-place, it's a statement. A lifestyle. They study the breeds of car, they know their natural habitats and ecological niches. This one is built for speed and needs premium petrol and hood clips. This one is built for hauling and can add a trailer hitch and a tow reel in the front.

In this extended car metaphor, that's the sort of people who collect RPGs and dissect them. If you're reading this blog entry, chances are good you're the RPG-equivalent of a car guy. We know where the different breeds of RPG live and like to graze, and we will invent new taxonomies to explain why we know them better than anyone else.

The elaborate taxonomy of cars might be interesting to a car guy, but it isn't as helpful to the kid who just started driving to her part-time job. Likewise, the elaborate taxonomy of RPGs is probably overwhelming or boring to someone who isn't obsessed with this stuff.

That's all right. If they're interested in RPGs, they'll come around to it in their own time.

* As you might surmise, my overall view of the "system matters" debate is, "It depends." Certain systems give you certain tools to do some things more easily than other choices, but my experience teaches me that most GMs tend to run games the same way no matter what system they're using — and that they often bring their assumptions to a new game without familiarizing themselves with it. Once again, the book is less important than the thing that happens at the table, and that is the thing that ought to be judged.

Ours vs. Theirs

This isn't an important update, just something about which I've been ruminating lately. There's functionally no "conclusion" or gameable content to this post; I'm just putting wordcount into the aether so that it is out of me.

Years ago at a local convention, I bought a copy of Tome of Beasts and was busily showing everyone the ridiculous monsters inside when a friend asked the following question:

"Why did you buy that when you can make up any monster you want?"

(An odd question, particularly given that said friend is an author and no doubt realizes that you can write any story you want and yet choose to consume other stories anyway.)

It's a pervasive role-playing game argument that has people firmly entrenched on both sides. On the one hand, why buy material when you can make it up? On the other, why create material when professionals have done the hard work for you?

Surprising no one, I (and I suspect most RPG gamers who aren't Extremely Online™) fall somewhere in the vast middle. I like to use my own content because I create a vast amount of it and because I always make things I enjoy. I like to use others' content because I only have my perspective and using something someone else made gives an air of verisimilitude to any game I run. (I can come up with anything I conceive, but others might create something of which I did not conceive.)

Using others' content comes with two important disclaimers, though:

1) I usually select things I like, and I'm the guy running it, so it's going to sound at least a little like me anyway. (Nicole thought Scarlet Jax was my own creation for years until I offhandedly mentioned that I cribbed her from Dungeon #186.)

2) I do fall in the camp of finding prepping other people's work to be difficult, so the author either needs to make it easy or compelling. (For instance, I understand King for a Day* has a lot of good ideas in it, but the work I would need to do to keep all the details straight means that I am unlikely to use it and would be better served making my own adventure whose details I can keep in my head.)

Those concerns aside, I find the mix of styles to be engaging, and I don't think my players notice the seams terribly often.

What about the rest of you? Do you use published content, homebrew content, or a mix of both?

*A protip for authors: if I have to take more notes to prep your 300+ page adventure containing "nearly 200 NPCs and dozens of unique locations and stories" than I took for a graduate-level course, it's probably too much work.

Rules of Engagement

I've been ruminating on several blog posts for several months, so here's a sliver of one that I should get out of my head sooner or later.

Back around the New Year, a friend of mine was talking about D&D, and how he didn't like the idea of how a fighter with high Armor Class (or low Armor Class, if you're playing with descending AC) is going to use hit points less than everyone else.  It means that our hypothetical fighter is not engaging with every part of the system, and so this GM is inclined to include monsters with better to-hit scores that will strike an inflated AC more frequently.

That almost sounds like a punishment.

If a player makes a character a certain way, that's presumably because they want to play that character with certain expectations as to how things are going to go.  If you play a high-movement, low-AC character, you presumably expect to stay mobile enough that you're never a valid target (or if you become a valid target, you leave).  If you play a wizard, you want to engage with those tasty spells.  And if you make someone with a notable AC, you want to be the immovable object.

Don't punish that choice by devaluing their AC, instead look at everything else on the character sheet.  If you still want to provide a challenge or target hit points or whatever, they probably still have several weaknesses that enemies can exploit.  Your hypothetical walking shield wall is probably still vulnerable to spells, being neither the most mobile nor the most strongly-willed.  And that's without getting into other consequences such as threatening their equipment, allies, family members, fellow party members, and the like.

Besides, there's no need to punish players for their good decisions when they're always likely to cause blowback with their bad decisions.

An Auspicious Time for Megadungeons

I go silent for a week and a half, and a bunch of stuff happens.  The OSR blogosphere (yes, I hate that Web 2.0 Newspeak as much as you do, but sharks die if they stop swimming*) has been blowing up with things regarding megadungeons, largely because of the perceived failure of James Maliszewski's Dwimmermount (truly, you're just best off reading about the whole debacle on The Other Side, because he gathers several of the salient links for your perusal).

For my part, I don't really have an opinion on the matter.  I supported the project, but I have no real issue with the delays ("Do you want the job done right, or do you want it done fast?").  And I don't have an opinion on the "empty space" thing because I haven't read the digital materials Autarch has been releasing, mostly because I've just been that busy.

Ah, well.

Anyway, this is humorous because I received several parcels on Monday.  One was a blotter pad of graph paper so I can start sketching the first few levels of my Carcosan megadungeon.  Another was a miniature of a Kolyarut (here's the D&D 3.x version and the Pathfinder version) whom I plan on using to represent a Planar Trade Consortium agent with business regarding that very same megadungeon.  Finally, my copies of Barrowmaze I and II arrived that very same day.  I haven't had the chance to read through them yet, but still, megadungeons.

Ten Books

Brendan at Untimately asks what ten printed RPG books would you keep if you could only keep ten?

I responded in the comments, but I'll say the same thing here.  Unknown Armies only has ten books in the set:

• Unknown Armies
• One Shots
• Lawyers, Guns, and Money
• Postmodern Magick
• Statosphere
• Hush Hush
• Weep
• The Ascension of the Magdalene
• Break Today
• To Go

Boom.  Done.  If I had to ditch all my pdfs, too, I'd just hack the Fuzzy Logic engine for whatever campaign I wanted to play.

Some Rambling on Morality

So this podcast with Vincent Baker prompted this post on G+ by Zak Smith which prompted this post by Patrick Stuart which prompted this post by noisms.

Go ahead and check those out if you have time; the posts are short, but the podcast is somewhere in the forty-minute neighborhood (although you can probably manage without listening to the whole thing if you're pressed for time).

Anyway, the dialogue boils down to morality in games — namely, is morality a value that should concern us in gaming?  If we do bad things in games, are we bad people?

There's an article by Stephen King that's been floating around for a while, and it's called "Why We Crave Horror Movies."  The central thesis is that we watch horror movies as a form of catharsis (which is hardly surprising), but that the cathartic experience is the release of our darker emotions.  At the beginning of the ninth paragraph, he writes, "The potential lyncher is in almost all of us [...] and every now and then, he has to be let loose to scream and roll around in the grass."  He goes on to say that we are all conditioned to conform to the expectations of society, "But anticivilization emotions don’t go away, and they demand periodic exercise."  He continues, saying, "If we share a brotherhood of man, then we also share an insanity of man. None of which is intended as a defense of either the sick joke or insanity but merely as an explanation of why the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, manage to be reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time."

He ends by summarizing this activit as something we do to "keep the gators fed."

So what does this have to do with role-playing?

I'd be hard-pressed to recall which World of Darkness book mentioned it (probably The Book of Madness, although I cannot precisely recall), but one of them referenced the whole "keeping the gators fed" idea, particularly in regard to playing villains.

I accept this behavior.  To throw more quotes at you, Mr. Rogers tells us, "Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning.  But for children play is serious learning.  Play is really the work of childhood."  Among organisms that play, most do so as a dry-run of adulthood — baby animals play to practice evading predators or catching prey, while humans practice running a household or engaging in basic mercantile behavior.  This is largely conjecture on my part, but I doubt we ever really escape this behavior.  We're always preparing for possibilities and eventualities, and in this vein, we continue to undergo that catharsis.

In my role as GM, I don't set any limits on the PCs' behavior (obviously, every world has a status quo, and my NPCs will gladly impose morality upon you).  In the confines of the game, the players are presumably friends and the environment is presumably "safe."  If you want to be moral paragons, or typically amoral murderhobos, or the most vile rapists and thieves imaginable, I don't really have a preference.  As long as everyone is comfortable, I don't have a problem with it.

That's the rub.  Everyone, as a player, should feel safe gaming in my group.  The world might be deadly, and you might not be able to trust the other characters as some of the must cutthroat bastards imaginable, but as long as everyone's having fun, there is nothing wrong.  If you want to play Black Spiral Dancers or Nephandi or Sith or Carcosan sorcerers, make sure everyone is on board and make the most of the downward slide.

Strangely, though, this is never an issue.  I never really lead the players one way or another with regard to morality, and most groups have an emergent tone that appears as gameplay progresses.  Torturing the bad guys would be relatively out of the question in The Imperial City (with a couple of notable character exceptions — E. M. Lamb's Kasi, who developed into a Tantric Thuggee devotee, might be able to get away with it) and would be totally inappropriate in False in Some Sense or The Truth Shall Set You Free, but has happened in Crux of Eternity and The Darkness of the Womb, and would be totally appropriate for the villagers of Remnant from Nasty, Brutish, and Short.

Basically, if the players want to have a relatively light round of fun, want to explore heavy moral themes, or just want to "keep the gators fed," that's all fine by me.  The moral line that cannot be crossed is a function of the group, not any particular viewpoint.

Note that this is not the same as being devoid of morality, however.  As an individual outside of my GM role, I'll usually comment on the group's morality if the mood strikes me (typically, I'll usually only comment on a shift in tone within the player group).  My world always reacts to it, too — my first Sabbat game ended with most of the characters being hunted down by the police and Camarilla agents because of their murderous rampage.  Charles Odderstol, the big villain of The Imperial City, typically tried to convince the PCs that he had the moral high-ground because they were antagonizing him.  (As an evil, insane cultist, they were perfectly justified, but it was still an interesting pattern I'd noticed.)

To summarize: in the Google+ post, Zak Smith says, "Is an underlying idea here that morality in the game has something to do with morality in real life?  Like: it doesn't.  Like not at all."  I understand different points of view — in noisms' post, he writes, "I was brought up by Christian parents (a Christian mother, more accurately - my Dad mostly humoured her), and my mother always tried to instil in me the notion that things that we watch, read, or listen to do actually affect our 'souls'; when you watch a violent film it is actually bad for you in some sense.  It is corrupting." — but I agree with Zak.  Fictional morality doesn't really have much (if any) bearing on real-life morality, and one can view any fictional acts that may be considered "immoral" or "transgressive" as simply keeping the gators fed.

Review: Carcosa

You should buy this game.

Okay, so, my history with this game is...well, unfortunately short.

I started hearing about it when delving into OSR blogs.  Typically by encountering reviews discussing the controversy surrounded it.  Like this one.  Or this one (also available on RPG.net).

For those who don't know, Supplement V: Carcosa by Geoffrey McKinney was released a few years back.  It was touted as a supplement to the 1974-edition D&D, and was written with that fact in mind.  It was available at Geoffrey McKinney's blog, but by the time I heard about it and went looking for it, that was a dead link (I now suspect that this occurred because he was in talks with James Raggi to get the thing published).

After looking around for it with no luck for a few months, I saw that Lamentations of the Flame Princess was going to publish it.

With my problem solved, this was one of the few products I actually awaited and ordered on release date (strangely, the other was another LotFP product, Vornheim, which I pre-ordered the day pre-orders went live; I've yet to get my hands on Weird Fantasy Role-Playing, but I plan on picking it up, and I expect damn good things).

Anyway, Carcosa details a fantasy setting taking place, well, on the world of Carcosa (you know, where Hastur lives), a setting combining sword-and-sorcery fantasy, Lovecraftian horror, and the typical weirdness of Erich von Däniken and Giorgio A. Tsoukalos (himself a Delta Green friendly).  Horrible entities stalk the empty wastes, and humanity is a cosmic accident (we were actually bred as a slave race for the Snake-Men).

As for player races, there are only humans.  Humans are weird, though; there are thirteen human races, and these aren't ethnicities, these are actual species, although this does not alter their game statistics in any way.  Each race has dark hair, dark eyes, and skin entirely the color for which they are known (Blue Men are as blue as the sky, Green Men are green as grass, Bone Men have transparent skin and hair, Black Men have skin black as pitch, etc.).  In addition to the typical colors, there are three additional colors on Carcosa, and a race of man for each.

There are rumors and superstitions about the different breeds of men.  They do not trust each other as a rule.

The number of classes is reduced to two: Fighting-Men, and a new class called "Sorcerers."  Sorcerers are basically Fighting-Men who can learn spells.  Unlike typical D&D, they start with no spells, instead learning them in their travels.  Also unlike typical D&D, spells are rather unfortunate beasts.  With the exception of dismissal spells, all spells are horrible and should never be cast by anyone.  They take a long time to cast, require exotic components, and will almost uniformly mark the caster as a bad space person.

So, if magic is primarily evil and everything is trying to kill us, how has humanity survived?  Simple: they scrounge the technological detritus of the Space Aliens (basically Greys, by description), using these items to bring the fight to the Old Ones.  These items essentially replace magic items, leading to a setting where loincloth-clad men with bone weapons also have plasma cannons.  As noted in Carcosa, this reliance has stunted humanity's growth; it is far easier to steal advanced technology than invent some.

Ah, well.

The game has some other little neat things that make it worthwhile: tables for random spawn of Shub-Niggurath, random robots, and random alien artifacts.  One of my particular favorites is the random hit dice/damage mechanic.  It slows combat a fraction, but makes combat completely uncertain.  Characters have set numbers of hit dice and set numbers of damage dice.  However, the die type and value is randomly determined.  Those bandits might just have one hit die, but are you facing down d4 bandits or d12 bandits?  Does each one have 1 hp or 12 hp?  Are they swinging with d4s or d12s when they hit?  What about that monster with 10 HD?  Is that 10d12 HD, or 10d8 HD, or 10d4 HD?

Do you want to risk getting into a fight with him to find out?

All-in-all, Carcosa is a fully-detailed sandbox setting, and probably has neat stuff no matter what you play.  For example, you could totally use some of the monsters, spells, artifacts, and random charts in any game (retroclones require the least translation, of course), with some modification.  If you play oD&D, though, this game is truly an inheritor to the title — it combines gonzo, pulp adventure (Conan steals a fusion rifle from the Grays and kicks ass) with pulp horror (sadly, a fusion rifle doesn't protect you from saying, "Hastur") in proportions to do Gygax and Arneson proud.

After all that, I should probably address the controversy about the book.  This is a game of brutal, violent combat, and morally grey people doing morally grey things to other people likely worse than they.

Carcosa is ultraviolent.

People had problems with the graphic violence of the game.  The article at the beginning of this post notes the most egregious example, that of the spell Summon the Amphibious Ones.  The ritual component for the spell involves coitus with an eleven-year-old virginal girl, followed by her murder.

I completely understand why that's offensive.  In fact, if you find that offensive, congratulations, you're not a sociopath.

However, I also think that gaming is probably one of the better places to explore these themes, as the environment is "safe."  (We'll ignore all the horror stories about people with bad roleplaying experiences regarding this sort of thing, and briefly assume that we're roleplaying among people we know and trust.)  Granted, a lot of people don't want to explore heavy themes in RPGs because they don't find that fun.  That's fine (and again probably puts a check somewhere in the "not a sociopath" column of your chart).  But I don't necessarily think it's monstrous to include it, particularly if done with an eye toward the subject matter.

Which leads me to the second point: sorcerers are bad people.  This was a deliberate choice by the author; sword-and-sorcery sorcerers are almost always bad, and if they aren't, they're still somehow wrong (even if Solomon Kane accepted him, N'Longa was still creepy as all hell).  Nobody is stopping a character from playing a sorcerer, but the heights of power are only reserved for those who are willing to sacrifice their humanity.  Sure, you can do this awesome thing, but is it worth it?

The question of character responsibility is always appropriate, in gaming or elsewhere.

Basically, this isn't FATAL.  Horrible things aren't included to indulge in a twisted power fantasy, but instead to balance power with consequences.

So that's that.  If you have anything that really bothers you, you probably shouldn't read it (or look around on the internets to see what people are saying about it, and make a choice based on some other reviews).  If you like your gaming to be light-hearted fun, you likely won't like it (though maybe you'll find something you do like, such as the random robot tables).  If you want some gonzo ridiculousness with a little sanity-blasting horrible, you'd probably like it.

Consider it added to one of the many things I'd love to run someday.

A Word on pdf Layout: While waiting with baited breath for the print version (and the map!), I've been looking at the pdf.  It's a gorgeous beast.  The monsters, spells, and map hexes are all keyed together, so that if Summon Atrocious Beast summons the Atrocious Beast from the Well of Generic Pulp Awfulness in Hex 666, links will take you to all these places.  I typically don't like to read pdfs, but this one is pretty friendly.

A Little 4e Note: I'm currently playing 4e, so my awareness is geared toward 4e.  This RPG.net post asks about porting Carcosa 4e.  For the record, I agree with the author's conclusion: limit characters to Martial types (maybe Psionic types, too?) and only allow magic through the Ritual Caster Feat.  Mess with the rituals to match spells in Carcosa, cutting out the generic component types and replacing them with specific components from Carcosa spells.  I'd be inclined to respond to the post if I didn't have to go through the rigamarole of signing up for RPG.net, so chronoplasm, this one's for you.

On the Subject of "Legends & Lore"

I haven't really read much of the Legends & Lore column at Wizards of the Coast, but I heard one of my associates complaining about Monte Cook's new articles, so I had to look at it.

Since taking over for Mike Mearls, Monte Cook has primarily written about the things that made D&D great in previous editions, and how to apply those to 4e.

Now, I don't care about system or edition wars.  I'm adapting a couple of AD&D modules for my 4e game.  I mostly follow OSR blogs on here, and I wrote an oD&D adventure for my 4e campaign. That having been said, I agree with my friend.  Monte Cook's articles are a really weird and clunky fit.  There are ways to simplify 4e, and make it run more swiftly, but it doesn't hybridize well with previous editions (which is one of the core complaints about it).

I thought this post (Monte's first, actually) was particularly egregious.  Monte Cook suggests a system to simplify perception — characters ought to have a set perception rank, allowing them to automatically succeed at perception if they're perceptive enough, or force a roll if there's some uncertainty.

The only problem with this system, is that 4e already does this: there is "passive perception" and "active perception," and it works almost exactly as described.

Unlike a lot of people, I don't think this proves Monte Cook is out of touch (although it certainly doesn't preclude the possibility), but rather that Wizards of the Coast is trying to expand their market base.  It's an apologist strategy aimed at OSR guys and 4e haters, because apparently Wizards of the Coast doesn't realize they already lost that audience.  You can find the core AD&D books for 1e and 2e for about ten dollars apiece, and the 3e books are still readily available (or you can just play Pathfinder).  The internet holds pdfs of out-of-print stuff, or you can grab a retroclone, or you never got rid of your old books.

Basically, sell 4e to 4e fans.  If Wizards of the Coast wants to break into the OSR market, Zak Smith gave a suggestion (I'm mostly referring to his first suggestion to "Publish two big hardcover coffee-table books with all the old TSR adventures in them").

An Aggregation of Stuff

I've amassed some stuff that could generate separate blog posts, so I'm lumping them all together under the idea that if they're all miscellaneous, they can hang out together.

At Dungeons and Digressions, we have a post about pigeon towers.  It's way cooler than it sounds.  Put a pigeon tower in your fantasy/medieval village today!

Next, there's the classic speech from Philip K. Dick, "How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later."  It features several weird events and talks about the basic nature of reality.  It's worth reading for philosophers or world-builders.

Finally, something I was contemplating: with all the vitriol on the internet, you'd think this is a modern phenomenon.  It isn't.  Modern scholars think Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was a subtle attack by the mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) on the increasing abstraction in mathematics.  Wonderland runs on these principles, and that's why it's completely crazy.  This article, this article, and this article all discuss it.

So there you have it.  You, too, can turn your scathing complaint into a beloved work of literature.

More on the Sandbox (and Bonus Random Musings)

So I've previously talked a little about railroading vs. sandbox, and will likely do so again.

For the moment, though, go check out this post at Digital Orc.  It's a very simple thing, but it's a thing worth considering.

Along the lines of the sandbox, I'm currently fiddling with some things, including converting that AD&D 1e module for my 4e players (it's going well, but since I'm reworking one of the dungeon levels from scratch, it's a little slow going because the dungeon layout is rather particular).  I'm also trying to find a halfway decent hex map for my Crux of Eternity map, but it's big.  If I go with 5-mile hexes, this thing is 125 by 100 hexes.

If I manage to make one in a digital format (I'm currently playing with Hexographer, so I very well might), I'll probably post it here for your general perusal.  Note that I have already drawn a map, but I finally decided that a hex map would probably be more workable.

Maybe I should break it down into sections?  I'll play with it and figure it out.

Realism vs. Fantasy

So I saw a blog post recently, but I can't remember what it was.  It was an OSR blog, and I was thinking about the post lately, and...

...that's it.  Maybe someone will recognize the rant and shove me in the right direction?

Anyway, the author put forth the proposition that you shouldn't care about rational world design when it comes to the dungeon.  These monsters don't need to live in a logical ecology that worries about energy distribution; these monsters need to symbolically represent our fears.  I'm paraphrasing my rapidly decaying memory of the article when I say that orcs represent our fear of the prehuman ancestors we killed, while liches represent our fear of our politicians ruling us forever; nobody cares about how an owlbear gets nutrition out of the vermin scurrying around the dungeon, because the symbolism behind him is more important than ecology.

It gets back to noisms talking about non-banal D&D (and collating some stuff on the same topic here), and Zak's rebuttal here.

Basically: do you want to make a logical setting, or do you want to explore a weird, fantastical world of symbolism?

Some games imply an answer — we tend to just expect a certain level of realism from modern-day games — but the answer is highly subjective and pretty complex.

For example, you can bring the fantastical into the modern world — just watch anything made by David Lynch.

Also note some of the advice in the above blog posts.  You can always have a place where the fantastic holds sway.  Maybe civilization is held in place by the psychic residue of its residents, but the wild is wild.

As normal, something to consider.

Another Analogy

Last time I did this, I talked about the Old School vs. New School in terms of religion.  Today: science!

The New School represents the deterministic universe of Newton, the one that we intuitively inhabit.  Theoretically, if you can know all factors influencing an event, you can predict that event.  Planetary orbits are the outcomes of several complex factors, but they're regular enough that we can predict them.  The Game Master might not have already determined what's on the other side of the hill, but if he hasn't, he will do so using the most logical outcome based on the other factors of the campaign.  Frequently, though, the story dictates what's on the other side of the hill, and that's probably been determined.

The Old School represents the probabilistic universe of modern physics (the domain of Schrödinger,
Heisenberg, et al.), the universe we inhabit that seems counterintuitive to a bunch of uplifted hunter-gatherer apes.  There are limits to what we can know, simply because the universe isn't already determined, it's a morass of uncertainty that is only realized when it is observed.  An unobserved area has the possibility of being anything, but there is a sliding scale of probability that it is occupied by any one thing.  The Game Master probably hasn't worried about what's on the other side of the hill, and when you go to explore it, he randomly rolls on a chart that gives a list of things likely to exist there.  This chart doesn't represent everything that could be in the area, only those things most likely to be in the area.

Once again, that's a highly simplified metaphor, but it's one I share with you.

Old Ways vs. New Ways

Keeping with my continuing examination of the Old School Renaissance, here's a bit of philosophy.

The Old School has a lot in common with the priests of old.  In the old days, you didn't pray to the gods to help you, you prayed to the gods so that they would ignore you.  Worship was only noticed when it stopped, and the gods' attention was typically pretty violent.  This is why, in ancient Rome, you could keep your cultural identity, but you had to add the Roman gods to your pantheon — Rome doesn't want the hassle of an apocalypse because you didn't want to pray to the Jupiter.  You are not special because the gods are negligent and petty.

Similarly, the Old School is ruthless.  This dungeon is designed to murder you if you're careless, and it will do so because that's its raison d'être.  If you do not evade the dungeon's notice, it will deal with you.  Messily.

The New School has more in common with the newer religions.  You pray for mercy from loving deities who are interested in your well-being.  They actively want you to succeed out of some undefined interest — perhaps the gods see you a child to their parental role, or perhaps there is some spiritual fulfillment involved.  You are special because God made you.

Similarly, the New School is merciful.  The story is more important than navigating some deathtrap, and the Game Master wants you to succeed so that you can finish the story.  Death is a risk, certainly, but it's not as pervasive — and it might be an empty risk or wholly symbolic.

Curiously, though, there's the structure of Yin and Yang here, to just throw everything into a mishmash of world cultures.  Free will is a decidedly new idea — the old gods determined your fate utterly, while the new gods gave you free will so you can succeed or fail on your own merit — but it is one which the Old School prizes.  That dungeon might be a death trap, but you decided that you wanted to explore it, you decided that you wanted to go down the left hallway, you decided that you didn't need to buy a ten-foot-pole, and you decided to walk at a normal pace so that you fell right into that pit of acid.  If something attacked, you decided not to run when it ate your dogs and hirelings.

Contrary to what you read, the New School similarly dislikes railroading, but it tends to be a little more abstract.  You are free to do anything, but you're probably going to find yourself in this story again.  That's a decidedly ancient idea — yeah, sure, maybe you had free will in deciding what breakfast cereal you ate this morning (probably not), but your major decisions are certainly scripted.

That's simplified, of course, but I like the metaphor, so I share it with you.

The Great Retrogaming Debate

Though retrogaming typically refers to computer consoles, I also use the term to refer to roleplaying games (though I saw the Chatty DM refer to it as the "Old School Renaissance" on this post).  Bear with me for a second while explain some meta-nerdosity.

As noted previously, I came to gaming in the late nineties, and started on the Storyteller system by White Wolf.  I came to Call of Cthulhu and the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and now my collection is so bloated that I'd be hard-pressed to unravel that tangled skein.  Regardless, by the time I assembled a group that wanted to play fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons, I had read a lot about gaming.  I was well-acquainted with the flak Wizards of the Coast received for D&D 4e, and even some of the arguments about it (namely that it attempts to emulate the styles of MMOs and computer RPGs in an ironic bout of recursion).  However, it wasn't until I started looking around for D&D stuff that I became better versed in the debate.

In planning the aforementioned 4e game, I had several players who were new to the hobby, and all but one are new to D&D.  They showed interest in dungeon crawls, and I decided that I wanted to include some classic references and classic dungeons to help the new players score a little geek cred.  Of course, this led me in search of the aforementioned classic dungeons (and I'm now amassing a weird little library of first and second edition AD&D books, and even a few basic/expert D&D books), which brings me to the present.

I came across this post about the Hickman revolution on the blog Grognardia (which I would be inclined to recommend, particularly if you want to know about the history and early traditions of D&D, as well as RPG retrogaming in general).  Go ahead and take a little time to read it.  I'll wait.

If you didn't read it, it's basically about how Tracy and Laura Hickman saved D&D by introducing heavy, story-laden modules (they're probably best known for the Ravenloft module and the Dragonlance setting).  Before this time, modules were comparatively simple, generally just being wargaming scenarios with little pretense as to why the characters are doing what they do, only that they are facing the dangers of what might possibly be a dungeon that possibly contains a dragon.  This in the hope that they become richer and more capable.

However, he then says that the Hickmans' meddling is what splintered the hobby into the various factions today, and that the hobby lost something through the introduction of this imposed story (it is now pretty much assumed that story elements will be included in any published adventure).

It's a valid argument, but I'm not certain I agree.  Admittedly, I'm biased; I went through the trouble of giving you a synopsis of my gaming background to so that you would know that I started gaming in the post-Hickman era.  However, I'm still not sure I can even objectively agree with the argument.  The hobby has people who want to play a game vs. the people who want to tell a story (I daresay this has been true since the beginning), and they still have that option.  Though the inclusion of story as an innate function of RPGs has occurred since AD&D second edition, and most games have a section on running the game that focuses more on storytelling techniques than charts and tables, it's still out there, and it's still talked about.  Most games suggest against it, but ultimately concede that there's nothing wrong with pure hack-and-slash gameplay if that's what your group wants to play.  D&D still has a section (albeit a small one anymore) about running the game as a pure game; you spend an evening running the monsters in the dungeon against the adventurers in a dungeon, and that's it.

Ultimately, I'm not certain the Hickmans depleted the roleplaying hobby by emphasizing story elements, as that's still largely the purview of individual Game Masters.  Though there's some debate about it, I hold to the GNS Theory, and suggest that there's a game for every type of player.  The game is still whatever you make of it.

P.S. If you want to make your brain bleed, feel free to follow up your visit to Grognardia to this post on Wax Banks, just to get a feel for the debate.  Like Grognardia, it makes some good points, but also features arguing on the internet (although, unlike Grognardia, a lot of the venom comes from the author).