willpower, sins, and flaws

one of the things I liked best about when I was playing the world of darkness games was the way that willpower worked. the basic idea was that your character had a virtue and a vice (based off the seven deadly sins, naturally), and if you wanted to resist your sin you had to spend willpower, usually, and if you acted according to your 'better nature' you'd get some willpower back. you also got willpower back for indulging in your sin, I believe. interestingly, you could also spend willpower to get like, better dice rolls.


ok so, world of darkness games. vampire, werewolf, ghosts, mages, they all have willpower. a character's player can choose to spend willpower to get a boost on dice rolls, or fuel magic, or whatever.

also on a character's sheet are one of the seven deadly sins- sloth, lust, greed, whatever. the character can gain willpower for leaning into their sin, for playing into their darker nature, for showing weakness. the character also has to either spend willpower or take a chance of slipping into bad habits when the target of their weakness comes up. the lustful vampire has a hard time not spending the arms in his or her lover, even when they really should be safe in their stronghold hiding from their hunters... the envious mage has a hard time resisting the opportunity to show off even when they really shouldn't, and etc.

this does a couple of things- it hooks the character and the player together in a really strong way, by making the player care about what the character cares about. if you take care of your in-game avatar, that avatar is more competent, more resilient, and more able to effectively carry out the player's interests in the game. and it also points the GM towards a conflict that the player probably finds interesting, or at least a conflict that the player has already greenlit. a lot of players don't care to have their characters' father or sister as hostages or whatever, but they've definitely given the GM permission to tempt their character with lots of gold, or give them opportunities to showboat and brag, right? and it also lets the player look for these opportunities to let the somewhat more negative side of their character show through if they've had a rough couple of episodes. and that's interesting! there are always lots of opportunities for player characters to be noble and competent, for them to be clean and respectable. [1]

now that I think about it, though, the world of darkness games are necessarily rooted in a very specific sort of western ethos, that subconsciously christian worldview where pleasures are to be enjoyed in moderation, where you are supposed to congratulate yourself for, essentially, being sober and productive at work and whatever else. that doesn't really apply to the sorts of fantasy worlds I want to emulate. I mean, you can do whatever you want in your world- you can just decide that the seven deadly sins are perfectly acceptable to you. but I don't know- a dwarf is not going to understand that she should limit her gold hoard's size, and elves are notoriously indifferent to the human concept of 'vanity,' let alone pride. halflings don't hold with all that running about nonsense and if you call them 'slothful' you're really missing out on a good understanding of their culture and personality.

but here's kind of more of what I was thinking- make it more personal. I'd have my players consider and detail a particular failing of their character, something that they really struggle with. and they can just be the sins, too! something along the lines of 'my barbarian has a weakness for violence, the more indiscriminate the better,' or maybe a more subtle issue, something like 'my cleric looks down upon those without divine powers and has to remind herself not to treat other as beneath her just because they haven't been chosen by the gods.'

personally, I'd take this opportunity to do some world-building too, and give examples of a couple of cultural folk heroes, demigods, and local celebrities, as well as what makes them such exceptional people. maybe a given dwarf king is legendary due to his wisdom, dispensal of justice, and (naturally) his unbeatable wealth, whereas a dwarf wretch is irrational and poverty-stricken and physically weak, unable to defend his stronghold and despised by his family. maybe this particular band of humans idolizes a cleric-beggar-wanderer who used her powers to tend to the sick and downtrodden and gave the ultimate sacrifice and died to save the world from a very particular evil. and then maybe those same humans look down upon a harsh-tongued, impious ruler who frequents the red light district.

and so if I were going to put something on the character sheet for a dwarf character, I'd go to the part where I describe my character's personality I'd write FLAW in big letters and then write a quick sentence about how my dwarf is arbitrary and occasionally downright cruel, and he struggles with his sharp tongue. and then I'd write some ways in which he's pretty alright, actually. and then by codifying it and making it a big part of my character, by getting an actual bonus for when my character acts up, I make it more than an interesting facet I'm going to ignore in favor of doing what I wanted to do anyways. it goes from an interesting quirk of my character to something that I'm going to invoke at the table, something that I want to have come up. something I'll bring up, if the GM doesn't, because I want to restore my willpower and that's that.

as far as actual willpower mechanics go, I'd do something like the following:

WILLPOWER

assuming you're playing some sort of dnd adjacent game, you can spend a willpower point at any time to add the results of a rolled d6 to any d20 roll. you can't use willpower to increase your damage or healing or anything else that you'd use any sort of smaller dice for.

willpower is measured from 1-10. characters start with 5 willpower.

if an opportunity to indulge in your flaw comes up and you take it and make things more complicated for yourself and your party, the GM will give you some willpower.

if you decide you do not want to indulge in this opportunity, you'll need to roll for it. roll 1d20. the DC is equal to twice your missing willpower. you don't get a willpower point for this.

you can also decide not to chance it on a roll, and spend a willpower point to automatically succeed at the willpower roll.

if you're using my rest mechanics from earlier [2], any time the characters have a rest worth at least 110% experience bonus, I'd give them a point of willpower as well. a good nights' sleep does wonders for the human (or dwarvish, or elvish, etc) mind.

if a character ever runs out of willpower entirely, then they immediately start acting out their flaw, gaining a willpower point. this can make for some pretty erratic behavior, but that's the point!

an example: a mighty Barbarian has 3 willpower and her flaw is classic for barbarians: lust. so she's in town and she sees a particularly handsome guardsman with really striking eyes- her weakness. she really doesn't have time to introduce herself... the GM decides to force the issue. the Barbarian's player decides that she meant it when she said she didn't have time. since her willpower is sitting at 3, she's missing 7 points, and the DC is 14. not great odds, but she tries it anyways. if she rolls below, then her character's going to go introduce herself to the guardsman, with the intent of a quick liason somewhere discreet. if she rolls higher, then she's on track (ish) and she can maybe keep the man in mind for another time. if the player had chosen to spend willpower, then she would have automatically resisted the temptation.


it's that simple, really. I'm personally looking forwards to hacking my favorite edition of dnd to include this sort of thing, given that it's relatively self-contained and easy to 'borrow.'



[1] I know that some people will choose to 'chew the scenery,' so to speak, even when there's no real benefit to doing so. They just enjoy playing a coward who's making bad choices in-game to be more true to their conception of the character. but honestly, it doesn't really work in your stereotypical dungeon fantasy game. there's no reason to be cowardly when you have a full stack of hit points, no reason at all to seduce bartenders or guardspeople or whatever, you know? it can be fun for its own sake but fun is fleeting and when you're done, you basically have a silly anecdote that stands by itself.

[2] if you're not, I'd give them a point of willpower every other extended rest, or if they pay for good lodgings in a city or something. the whole point of willpower being presented like this is that it is, by design, flexible to the style of play that you and your players are actually participating in. if you have a player who hardly uses the willpower mechanic, that's fine. they're weaker but their experience in the game is going to be a lot smoother. they'll probably get topped up pretty quick and then, since their willpower is high, they won't have a hard time getting

i want to give bonus experience for camping

so how about this: when you earn experience points, you don't get them right away. the DM will write down the experience that you've earned, and you get to wite them down when you get a good rest. how much you get to keep depends on how good of a rest it is. 

because I'm not an asshole, the default is '100% of your experience.' you get to keep what you earned. those goblins are dead and you killed them and you learned how to be better at inflicting violence. keep up the good work. it doesn't matter if you spent your time sleeping in a monsoon under that flimsy tent you wrote on your character sheet when you made the character and that you've apparently been carrying with you while you were being beaten up by ogres and catching arrows with your torso. it still counts. one of the functions of sleep is to help encode your memories and I guarantee you will remember a good chunk of what it is to be scourged by some nightmare acid in two weeks's time.

but treating sleep and rest like it literally doesn't matter is kind of... odd, isn't it? in real life, you spend like, a third of your day sleeping. you have a whole room in your house dedicated to the art of the snooze. probably. if you ask a hundred real life American human beings if they wouldn't mind trading their warm bed with air conditioning for a night on the streets with just the clothes on their backs, I bet you wouldn't get a single one without offering them something in return. but in fantasy games, I've had my players weigh whether they want to pay the innkeeper a handful of their hard-earned loot or if they'd rather just sleep outside of the city in their tents because, who cares? what difference does it make anyways? we'll set a watch.

in this world, a soft feather quilt is exactly as good as a threadbare woolen blanket. a king's bed is just as good as a quick snooze on an ooze-slick dungeon floor, or sleeping in a barn. a campfire is where they'll cook food, assuming that they've bothered to bring anything that isn't abstracted to 'rations,' and even then, it's not necessary that they care in the least. rations are rations, you have to eat one because the dungeon master says it's time to mark one off your character sheet, and that's it. let's get back to the parts where it matters, eh?

5e Report, Two Games In

I've been playing in an open-table 5e game for the past month or so. Has it been that long? It feels like we just started. It's mostly the same people as my regular Dungeon-World-Turned-FantasyCraft group, with a couple of friends added from the GM, who is one of my players.

It's been fun, in its own strangely familiar way. I like it. But you know, I'm not sure if I love it.

Part of it might be the way that the system is strangely "flat." There are a small handful of moves you can perform in combat, like Ready and Dash and Dodge, but that's really it. It's back to move and attack in combat, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. You can get a lot of mileage out of just move and attack, as the continued popularity of old-school systems shows. The thing is, the combat wasn't the focus of the show. It's just another simplistic mechanic in a simple system designed to get players interacting with the world through the medium of the rules, and it serves its purpose so well that it's still getting re-purposed decades later.

And here it is again! The thing is, it doesn't feel like the right lessons have been learned here. The designers looked at 4th edition and said "nobody likes being on a modifier treadmill," and they took it out. They looked at 3rd edition and said "every character should be able to contribute at every level," and "every class should have interesting tweaks," and they changed things up to that end. And I appreciate that. But combat is still a drag; it's still half a dozen rounds of "I attack the orc with my sword" and no amount of action surges or infinite-use cantrips really solves the inherent contradiction of the system: they've tried to stretch out the very simple and clear mechanic by adding complications. While intended to create additional depth by providing options, it sometimes feels like padding and a band-aid on the wrong system.

What I'm trying to say is that combat takes up an inordinate amount of space and class features and it doesn't benefit the game. Damage still doesn't matter until you're out of health, and status effects are simple "save or suck for a while" effects that are almost entirely doled out by special abilities. Tripping, stunning, bleeding, tiring, blinding, and knockdowns just aren't effects that you have access to unless your class allows it, and that means that the vast majority of damage is just whittling down the creature's hit points until you reduce that last hit point and they finally fall over.

That said, there are parts of the game I still do like. The classes are distinct and have abilities that are fun in play and create interesting design space in the game. The backgrounds set some cool non-combat abilities and ground your character in the game world (unless you've chosen the Outlander, in which case your choosing not to be part of the game world is your place in the game world, another nice touch). Your skills, attacks, and saving throws all use the exact same proficiency bonus, which is a great step since it makes math much easier. You either have a skill or you do not, and all saves are just tests against your ability score, which is just beautiful design.

I'm very impressed with the way the non-combat systems work together,  and I wish that the combat had been designed with the same elegance as the rest of the system. It's almost certain the that the designers would rather add more classes and feats and continue over-engineering a core mechanic that just plain doesn't need it.

The campaign itself is pretty fun; we've managed to kill some monsters and help people out, and I've been getting almost too much mileage out of Minor Illusion and been enjoying Magic Missile. But the best parts of the game are the parts that aren't in combat, and that's just a shame in a game where the main method of experience gain is killing monsters and the main point of experience is gaining further combat power.

Maybe the game changes substantially at higher levels; we'll have to see. Wish me luck!

D&D Next: Some mini spoilers

If you haven't heard about 5th edition, go google it right now. I'll wait. We on the same page? Cool.

D&D Next is, basically, some playtesting that the developers of 5e are going through in order to figure out what we, as a playerbase, actually want. Leaving aside the obvious fact that the playerbase both hates and loves everything depending on who you ask, we've managed to get leaked some good information from sources unknown. The one I'll be talking about here is found at this link: http://trollishdelver.blogspot.com/2012/01/what-we-learnt-from-first-d-next.html

It's got a couple of interesting points that I'd like to chew over with you guys. I'll borrow the Trollish Delver's format, because it works as well as any.

• Iconic monsters will remain threats at higher levels
• Levelling won't be all about big bonuses
• Flexibility will be key to gameplay
• More advice will be given to DM's on how to run games
• Old-school randomness will make a comeback
• Characters will feel like individuals
• The art will be harken back to the good old days

1- Iconic Monsters Will Remain A Threat At Higher Levels

This seems good to me, but we'll have to wait and see. One of the benefits of playing a game like Labyrinth Lord or Swords and Wizardry is that the attack bonii, damage, and health were all tied to Hit Dice. It's elegant and easy. If you wanted a new monster, you just changed the Hit Dice and gave it some special abilities. Done and done. I understand that's not even remotely the way it's done now, but it's good to see they're getting back to that by offering a "quintessential orc creature that easily scales." Why they ever moved from that, I'll never know. 

2- Levelling Won't Be All About Big Bonuses

From the sounds of it, levelling will give you more breadth instead of depth. I.E. as you level, you'll learn to do new things more than you learn to do the things you already do better. Sounds good to me, I guess. Maybe this'll help get rid of the fact that characters over, say, 6th level are already superhuman in their abilities by scaling that back some. Would be nice.

3- Flexibility Wil Be Key To Gameplay

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean and I can't even guess. Check the Trollish Delver article for what they had to say. Sounds like marketing bullshit to me, but we'll just have to wait and see. 

4- More DM Advice

I don't know how to feel about this. More DM advice is good, but why bother to mention this? I feel like I'm missing part of the conversation

5- Old School Randomness

Again, I don't know how to take this. Random tables aren't hard to make yourself, but I guess it's nice that they seem to be moving away from the point-buy as a default. At least, from the tone of this. They might just be talking about giving you random monster encounters again. Hard to tell.

6- Characters That Feel Like Individuals

Taking away the copy-and-paste mentality from 4e where everything is ruthlessly balanced can only be a good thing. Looking at 4e powers made my eyes bleed. From what Monte Cook is saying, it sounds like substituting default abilities will be the main way to change up your character, which is cool. It was one of the things that I was sorry to see not be used in 3e prestige classes at all.

7- Old School Art

If there's no more Wayne Reynolds, I'll be a happy camper. It seems like D&D has some of the most uneven art in terms of quality, with a few gems here and there amidst a background of awful art. If this changes, it can only be for the better. 

My verdict: Based on just this fairly insightful article, I'm quietly hopeful for something good to happen. I won't get too excited, because I've seen what WotC can do to dreams, but I'll keep my eyes open and ready for something decent.

The Best Retroclones

Since my other post was extremely (excessively) negative and it didn't let me stretch my writing wings hardly at all, here's another post to tide you over, one with a little more positivity. Yes, it's time to write about the Best Retroclone.

It's a distinction with highly subjective statements that may or may not apply to you, my gentle, well-mannered, and undoubtedly attractive reader. You may howl in rage at my gross miscalculations, and scream in impotent rage at my idiocy. Bear with me, as my opinions are not without reasons.

4th Best Retroclone: Basic Fantasy

Basic Fantasy: Old-School, redesigned

I'm not a big fan of Basic Fantasy. It's an old-school game bolted onto the chassis of 3rd edition gaming, and it shows. It's better than 3rd edition, but it diverges in order to make efforts to "improve" the game and make it more "modern" while still having the spirit of old-school. The spirit is admirable, and it's a good effort, make no mistake. But there's something about it that just isn't for me. I wish I could articulate it. Maybe a greater mind than myself will be able to do so?

I suppose it might be the way that it takes the trappings of all editions and bundles them together which throws me off a bit. I may be in the minority, but there are distinct flavors of gaming between AD&D, oD&D, BECMI, and the like, and each flavor is delicious in its own right. But some things aren't meant to be mixed together?


3rd Best Retroclone: OSRIC

OSRIC, the AD&D retroclone

OSRIC almost got chosen as my favorite Retroclone. This is from a man who has played almost no AD&D, who is notorious for ignoring vast swaths of rules he doesn't like. But it was the first retroclone I discovered.

I can't remember how or why I discovered it, but I do remember why I liked it so much: It has half orcs, and assassins, and rangers. Half-Orcs are awesome; they have a mixture of sadness and raw power, a sort of sullen majesty. They're men of mixed descent, looked down on in most "civilized" society for faults which are not their own. They didn't ask to be born of the mixture of man and orc any more than other men asked to be born of two men, or of two dwarves. But still they are sneered at, mocked, and unwelcome. This sort of pathos appeals to me, and ensures that half-orcs get a spot at my gaming table where few other demihuman races do.

But as a game, OSRIC suffers from the same faults that AD&D does as a whole. It's a little clunkier, a little more obtuse. It has non-weapon proficiencies, secondary skills, sub-classes, and the like. Much like AD&D proper, it simply feels like it's been cobbled together from bits and peices.

Still, it's a good game. A very solid choice for anyone, though my heart lies elsewhere.

2nd Best Retroclone: Swords and Wizardry

Swords and Wizardry: A 0e D&D retroclone.

Swords and Wizardry is a fantastic game, and always draws me nearer and nearer to its clutch every time I read about it. It's simple, eloquent, and easy to modify, which is the whole point of old-school games.

You'll notice that the image is of the S&W Whitebox, rather than the S&W proper. That's because of the two, I prefer the Whitebox for its open-canvas feel. Both of the editions are spectacular, and are covered in evocative art, excellent writing, and clear statements. It has "optional rules" that have become standard features in other games, such as Strength increasing your damage scores, or Dexterity improving your Armor Class. It also features a single Saving Throw, which is nice and easy to remember, and still allows for plenty of customization (by, for example, allowing Dwarves a bonus against saving throws for poison). Swords and Wizardry is a beautiful, beautiful game, and the Knockspell magazine published by the same company is a great companion.

Best Retroclone: Labyrinth Lord

This writer's favorite retroclone.

If you didn't know I was going to say this, welcome to Lawful Indifferent. This is a blog about retroclones, old-school games, and wargaming.

Bad humor aside, this is my favorite retroclone. Not only does it emulate one of the most popular editions of old-school D&D, it does it well. Beautifully, I might add. It retains the race-as-class feature, multiple saving throws, and easy to digest and understand formatting. The layout is heavenly and the interior art is awesome.

I prefer the purple and black cover of the older edition, but I also supported getting the full-with-art interiors for free, so what do I know? Despite the new free to get edition not having any interior art, this version is still my favorite. It just plain plays well!

In addition, it has the extremely useful and very well received Advanced Edition Characters, or AEC that adds the Ranger, Druid, Assassin, and other classes into the game. It's like taking the best of AD&D and sticking it directly into basic D&D. Not to mention the Original Edition Characters, another "expansion" of the core rules that emulates the "Little Brown Books" of oD&D. I don't have much experience with them myself, but they seem to have gotten fairly high marks from those that have used it.

There's just something about Labyrinth Lord that really gets my creative juices flowing, and the spark in my belly fired. It makes me want to create endless campaigns and design stuff until my fingers wear grooves into my keyboard. You really need to try it if you haven't already.

Game-Building 1: Stats

My stat system is probably going to be simple. When it comes down to it, I'd rather have a few stats that do a lot than a lot of stats that simply don't do much. I'd also like for there to be stat bonuses based on classes. For example, a warrior type could get extra strength, whereas a wizardly type could get extra intelligence or some such. There's sort of a chicken-and-egg situation with classes, really.

Warriors are warriors because they were strong, healthy children who learned that the best way to get ahead in life was through physical means. They weren't necessarily aggressive, but they knew that if you weren't at least strong enough to put up a fight, then somebody could kill you or worse. Since they spend so much of their time fighting, training, or practicing, they've become stronger and tougher. Alternately, they could just have natural strength and practice being large and in charge the same way a moose practises having antlers.

Wizards, on the other hand, may have come from more educated families. They could have always been more intellectual, more cerebral than their more brutish counterparts. They had learned from an early age that outsmarting your foes is easier and more useful than bludgeoning them to death. Since they spend their days using, practicing and learning magic, they're a little more intelligent than their sword-swinging cohorts.

But I digress.

My ideal system would be, basically, similar to the GURPS system, in that there would be only a couple of stats and then a couple more "derived" stats related to them. For example, Strength would have Fatigue as a derived stat, and Intelligence would have mana.

And here, I would like to digress again. As much as I love Vancian magic, and as much as I enjoy the writings, settings, and ideas of the man, I dislike the way D&D has dealt with Vancian magic. The magic, as far as I recall, was basically that magic was advanced mathematics and that the spell itself was torn from your head after you cast it. You would have to sit down and re-study the magic formulae after each casting, so alien was magic.

I don't want to get into some sort of wierd debate, so I'll just let it be said that it doesn't fit the flavour of the setting I have in mind. In this world, magic isn't a bizarre mathematical formula, and it isn't available to everybody. I'm thinking more of a Moorcockian magic, where magic is bought from otherworldly beings, with pacts and bargains and bloodlines figuring in more than one's ability to wave carved sticks.

Anyways, I'm thinking maybe a couple of stats.

One for your character's toughness; this one isn't debatable. Although I like systems where your health is more or less the human average, I like the idea of there being Herculean demi-gods alongside pale, sickly, and wretched peons or what-have-you. I'm thinking of just calling it Toughness.

There should be one for your character's strength. Again, this isn't really an option. I'll probably just call it Strength, although I like the poetry of calling it Might. There's something poetic about the stat being an examplar instead of a mere description, if that makes any sense. This is obviously more useful for the brutish warriors.

For an example, Brilliance. It's not called IQ, for Pete's sake. It's not a measured calculation of whatever, exactly, IQ tests are supposed to measure. It's a measure of how Brilliant you are. How much of an incredible genius. This would be useful for wizardly types.

Not really an example, but Dexterity. You should know what this one is.

The last stat would be Cunning. It's a measure of your character's deviousness, his responsiveness, and such. It's also a measure of his perception. It's more useful for wizards than warriors, but like all stats, should have a little something for everybody.

That gives us, in all, five stats: Toughness, Might, Brilliance, Dexterity, and Cunning. One for everybody, two for warriors, and two for wizards.

Introduction

Allow me to introduce myself. My name, or alias, rather, is Nick. I am heavily into geeky things, and have been for years. I started playing D&D with my brother when we stumbled upon my dad's old AD&D guide, a blue book with a man riding a horse, slashing at a dragon on the cover.

I think it was just the right time for me to have found the book- I was bright enough to puzzle out the rules on my own, more or less, and we'd play as best we understood. We didn't have dice or character sheets or anything, but we would play diceless and, basically, rely on our understanding of both fairness and the capability of our characters. Oh, and drama. We would both work on creating the most interesting story we could.

Once bitten, I could never turn my back. I still look fondly back at AD&D, warts and all, as the foundation for my passion for gaming. These days, I play a little bit of MMOs, a little bit of regular old console gaming, some RTSes, some Warhammer Fantasy. A little bit of everything. I'm a hobby gamer by blood, and it's just who I am.