A recently acquired Peter Mullen original,
Caravansary (yippie!)
What Kids’ RPGs are Missing by Ben Milton
What are TTRPGs but make-believe with dice? Slipping into the role of a character as a kid (as I recall) was pretty easy, be it Batman or Ash Ketchum or whoever. I mean, this is really dumb, but during our school aftercare program, a bunch of us would recreate episodes of Total Drama Island (bascially a cartoon Survivor parody) by deciding on a competitive game to play as teams, and then we'd vote someone off of the island (they became the next game host).
Kids are imitative; they don't want to pretend to be kids pretending to do something, they want to pretend to do something. They might not have the emotional tools or experience to fully inhabit the mindset of character, but they can remember what they have seen that character doing or saying, and when in doubt, they'll just do that. It usually works, actually.
As Ben puts it, "kids... can smell condescension a mile away," so why sugarcoat games for them? I mean, don't be weird and include stuff they don't need to be thinking about, but don't make it a walk in the park either.
Wandering Monsters should have a purpose in wandering around by Bryce Lynch
This piece was originally posted on RPG Geek in 2014 under a different title on my birthday of all days. Spooky. Anyway, I'm going to break this down paragraph by paragraph since each one contains a worthy nugget worth exploring.
Firstly, Bryce starts with the thesis that a wandering monster table should inspire or be cut. He's right in that one as simple as the included example can be pulled from basically anywhere if the monsters are simply a mechanism to tax the party. It's no different than a trap with a timer, really. I think this taxing element is important for impressing a sense of time passing upon players, but considering that players need to be able to make decisions based on what information is presented to them, it's a missed opportunity that they are to be assailed by an enemy that seems to have no other purpose than being a nonce.
Secondly, Bryce asserts that monsters should be doing something rather than waiting to attack. Correct. The ecology of a dungeon doesn't need to be realistic, but it needs to be logical. Monsters aren't in a dungeon because they don't want players to get the loot... that's too meta to admit. They have a goal or purpose outside of the PCs on a spectrum of complexity. Being hungry is fine as a baseline.
Thirdly, as hinted at earlier, these encounters are a chance to reveal information about the adventure that players can act upon. Even if they are docked some hit points for their trouble, players have an opportunity to make a better decision on how to risk their remaining ones if they learn something new from the encounter.
Finally, don't mistake detail for purpose. If what they are doing and why they might be doing it are not immediately apparent or able to be pieced together, there's not a lot of point in describing it. If we establish that monsters have goals, we don't need to write a book about what they are, just seat them so that they are in a position to accomplish them in whatever area they are rolled up in.
A scratchy unnamed random encounter table by Nobboc serves as an apparent expansion to this piece, demonstrating an application of activities that monsters might be engaged in with short, punchy descriptions. Now, if I were a gelatinous cube, I might be (1) attempting to mate with spilled jelly rations (2) trying to squeeze through a grate to shed undigestible treasure (3) slowly pulling in another dungeon denizen (roll another encounter) or (4) internally puppeteering a partly digested skeleton.
Hit Dice ARE MEANT TO BE ROLLED by Eric Nieudan
Unfortunately, Eric's original blogpost has been lost in the waters of Oblivion, but he did make a take two which is still available. I'll stick to evaluating the contents of this piece since, well, it's in KNOCK!, and the other one decidedly isn't.
Eric basically postulates that if PCs used a number of hit dice equal to their level (with the size of the dice corresponding to their class) instead of hit points, there's a number of ways that we could incorporate rolling into the mechanics of the game other than for HP maximums.
Hit Dice as a Soak Mechanic - Roll a hit die to try beating incoming damage with the result to negate it. Failure results in losing the die, and no remaining dice means death/dying. This changes up the math of PC survivability significantly. For instance, all level one characters can take one hit that goes through before biffing it, which isn't too far off-base, but martial classes have a much higher chance of simply not going down when taking a hit because of their higher die. If a character uses a d4, rule as written, 4 damage will automatically down you. You have no higher chance of potentially beating the damage at higher levels either, you can just take more hits. That said, this mechanic can basically be read as "you can take a number of hits equal to your level with a chance of ignoring smaller hits according to your hit die size." At that point there isn't even really a need to roll for monster damage, just players rolling a die to see if they ignore damage. I'd phrase it like "if you roll higher than a 3 on your hit die, you do not lose a hit die" if that's what we're doing. It's not a bad system, but I think it dramatically shifts high-volume monster attacks to being more dangerous than high-damage single attacks which might unintentionally nerf some beasties.
Hit Dice as a Free Pool - This is a refinement of the above system by allowing players to contribute additional dice to prevent damage. However, these dice are discarded anyway, and if you run out, any damage taken at zero hit dice is lethal. Additionally, if a roll is failed, subtract the hit dice roll result from the damage total and cross-reference with a table to indicate the type of injury sustained. This fixes my previous critique on high-volume vs high-damage attacks by factoring in the damage taken, but the system overall just kind of sucks for players to track overall, I think. Sacrificing hit dice is a real catch 22, and does nothing to streamline something they already know: don't take damage, it's bad for you. The fixed damage rate is also just kind of lame, in my opinion. I thought the whole point of this exercise was to roll more dice.
Hit Dice as Stamina - Now we're drifting into heroic fantasy by allowing players to alter checks/saves with hit dice, with a smart caveat that only the highest result of one of any rolled counts. Additionally, "fighty" classes can expend hit dice to increase damage. This latter point makes more sense than the rest of the rule to me if it applies to melee or non-bow missile attacks (javelins, throwing daggers, slings, etc.). I would be tempted to tinker with this one, perhaps refining it so that they take disadvantage on d20 rolls if they run out of hit dice since this isn't specified in the rule here. I don't mind meta currency if it doesn't break immersion, so this one isn't too bad.
Hit Dice as Risk Dice - This is just modded usage dice from The Black Hack. It's a good option. I'd rather have characters use this die as a tweaked doom die from The Black Sword Hack instead of damage, similar to the previous stamina mechanic.
Death, Dying and Healing: a Sliding Scale - A logical extension of the above systems and how to recover hit dice. Works well enough if incorporated.
I think I'm most impressed by the stamina mechanic as a class-agnostic way of reincorporating the act of rolling hit die as physical labor, giving a little extra firepower to our poor, unfortunate non-spellcaster/non-stealy characters without necessarily depriving the sneaky, smarty wimps of the backline. I think I'll try using this with 1 hit die recovered per rest next time I'm running a B/X-esque game.
20 Gunpowders by Eric Nieudan, et al.
It doesn't seem like there's a formal (or at least accessible) origin for the term "Gygaxian democracy," and searches keep pointing me towards an unrelated yet interesting piece by Prismatic Wasteland on incorporating democracy into fantasy settings. If I had to define it in a way more substantial than KNOCK!'s footnote, it'd be:
A collaborative design effort to produce gameable material for TTRPGs.
I think the keyword here is "gameable" since that is what makes it Gygaxian as opposed to generically collaborative. To this end, the gunpowders included here have unique usages and consequences if it happens to suit your table to both (a) use gunpowder at all and (b) make it slightly more complicated to use. Throwing my hat in the ring, I'd suggest "Glowpowder" which causes muzzles and anything struck to glow with the intensity of a candle for 1d4 turns after firing due to the residue. Firing again during this period has a cumulative 2-in-6 chance of causing the glow to intensify to the level of a torch for the remaining time.
I started fishing for responses to my own d20 table of Pixie Tribes in the KNOCK! discord to keep the tradition alive. I hope the contributors would agree to submitting the final table to a future issue.
No comments:
Post a Comment