Masterwork Weapons

I've been playing around with an idea in my head- what if, instead of having a "plus" level and (maybe) a unique power to magical items, what if you did away with the plus altogether?

What if the big draw was the fact that it was magical, instead?

I haven't playtested it, but I can't imagine that there'd be any real problems simply porting it into a game. You could shift the bonuses to attack and damage on to the fighters' base values (so that a fighter who's "supposed" to have a +1 sword and armor could have an innate bonus to attack, damage, and armor class instead), and then have the occasional monster reduce damage if it was struck by a non-magical weapon. Something like how (as I understand it) certain monsters in OD&D simply couldn't be hurt by anything but magical weapons.

So there'd be value in a "boring" magical sword, for example- it'd still have the properties of a "magical" item (being constantly razor-sharp, resistant to breakage, resistant to magical destruction)... but you could have a normal smith create it. Hello, masterwork weapons. Nice to see you again. Why don't you take a seat.

You'd have to modify store-bought adventures and settings a little, sure, but it wouldn't be hard. Just take the boring swords and axes that don't get any cool powers and make them masterwork weapons. Now they're well-forged weapons with a certain value, but it makes sense that there's stacks of them lying around instead of being kept in a box while the enemy warriors are running around with mundane weapons.

In this scheme, there would be two categories of magical weapons and armor: the "regular" masterwork type that's a cut above regular weapons without contributing to power creep, and then "unique" items that are sentient, or return when  thrown, or whatever it is they do. And here's the real benefit: The items are important for what they do, instead of what stats they boost.

It's something to think about, anyways.

"What is an RPG" introduction: Necessary?

From KORPG's blog:

From a historical analysis, I can recall that virtually every RPG rulebook I’ve ever opened had a section explaining what RPGs are, how they’re played, how they (usually) use dice, how player take on the roles of characters in a world of the GMs devising, etc.

All those over-arching things about a RPG that we already know are sometimes condensed at the beginning of a rulebook. Almost as if reading that specific rulebook might be the very first introduction a reader would have into the world of RPGs.

But why is such a section even in the rules any more?

If you ask me (which nobody did, but hey, bite me), I don't think that section is necessary anymore. Let's be realistic. Any product that we, as hobbyists, make is for hobbyists. That's the simple truth, and has a couple of important consequences, the most important of which is that you're writing to people who already know the subject matter. The guy who's wondering what an RPG is, is not opening up your self-published book and reading what you wrote there.

That guy has either already picked up an RPG (probably Dungeons and Dragons, but possibly a White Wolf game or  some other mass-produced game you can pick up at your Large Bookstore of choice) and read what they had to say, or he's been taught by somebody who already knows what's up. Our hobby is fairly unique in that it rarely spreads by the raw materials. Usually, it spreads, memetically, through people. You get taught by some guy, who got taught by some other guy, and so on and so forth, until you get to people who either taught themselves with a mass-marketed game's introductory product, or you get to Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson or whoever.

These people don't need introductions. The purpose of an introduction to "shared make believe time" has already been served. You don't need to do it.

I mean, really. Is there anything more of a waste of space than including how to roll dice and which way to round numbers? If somebody's reading, say, my Aremorican Addendum, they already know how to roll dice and what character sheets they're using and which edition of D&D they're grafting it onto. They know what hit points do, and what spell levels are, and the difference between divine and arcane magic is. You don't have to explain that any more than a magazine aimed at aviation buffs needs to explain what in the world a "bushtail lightwheel" is. You already know, or you wouldn't be here.

Computer games don't come with instructions on how to right click and drag things anymore. You don't have to explain the basics of a 30 year old hobby to people. You're writing to an advanced audience. You don't have to pretend otherwise.

What I Really Feel Like Doing

Is writing a drop-dead simple game that lets you make characters that "plug in" to high-level D&D so you can rock out with your block out without generating up a 17th level character from the ground up, complete with "level-appropriate" (whatever that means) gear so you can stomp on some demons and rip apart Llolth's brains.

Something that gives you the right numbers, but maybe gives you a little extra, too. After all, half of what made D&D balanced (to the extent that it ever was) was that fighters were stronger on the way up, and wizards were strongest when you got to the top, but that can't be much fun to be a fighter when you never got to experience your prime and you don't have a castle (or it doesn't make a difference because you're in the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Bone or wherever).

So maybe we could make some sort of "prestige class" sort of thing, except you wouldn't have to bother with the  whole boring pre-requisite thing, you could just be like "Yeah, I'm rolling up a Bone-Shard Thaumaturge. Anybody gonna be a warrior? If you are, I'll pick up a couple spells of Mighty Striking or whatever for you," and then the guy next to you would be all, "Nah, I'm planning on being a Red Fist Invoker, I'm not allowed to have magic cast on me or it'll break my sacred vows," or whatever.

It'd be sort of bringing it back to tournament play, where it'd be all about how much loot you got and whether or not you passed the challenge, sort of an old-school meets new school mentality. Plus, if you die, it'd take you about ten minutes to make a new character.

The really hard part would be making it so that each character class or prestige class or whatever would be interesting but with drawbacks, so you have to craft a competent team but it wouldn't be drowning you in details. Well, that, and making it so that it fits into the high-level D&D framework. It'd take a bit of studying, and then I'd have to decide which damn framework to use. I'd probably just use Labyrinth Lord 'cause it's easy and also free so everybody has it. If you didn't, there's no real excuse to not get it if you were interested, and besides, you'd either want to have some modules to play it with or rely on my procrastination and insanity to generate some, and everybody knows by now that it's not real reliable.

But the point is that there really should be some fun way to play all those modules that sit on shelves because nobody's gotten to level 13 yet (and probably never will) but damn it, trekking across hellish mountains just sounds so cool.

Great Ideas

From toothpastefordinner.com

It's one of the more frustrating facts that great ideas always come about when there's absolutely no way to express them.

For instance, yesterday I took a nap at midday, because I'm on spring break and I'll do what I please, thank you very much.

When I was dreaming, I dreamt that I was in this place where I'd hung out with my friends, like a hockey rink, and everything was so different but so familiar. I found these old notebooks of mine, and opened them up, and there were these bizarre pictures of men with swords and with these wierd, gun-arm things. In the background were enormous white, patchwork-steel towers that projected a translucent blue sheet into the sky. The combination of them made them look like transparent blue plates of glass riveted together, and I knew that the world was ancient, that the technology that goes into protecting the world is being destroyed, and that the blue plates were what were keeping people alive, between the devastated atmosphere and the meteor showers, and acid rain and all of that beauty. The natives were half-barbaric savages, the last remnants of a planet-spanning empire that permeated all of their stories and subconcious. It was a world of destruction and remnants of ruined dreams.

When I got up, I wrote it down immediately.

This stands in stark contrast to when I look at my blog and say to myself, "Dude, you haven't updated in like a month, go write something about that stuff you were thinking about," and so I lazily slap together some words and call it a day because if you don't stay in the habit of writing you'll never write anything.

The other cool thing I thought of in a dream is basically a plugin for magic, where in order to get any magic the spellcaster has to sacrifice something or obey a taboo for each spell, like if they want to cast fireballs they must have a taboo to always carry an open flame, or to always eat raw meat. The cool thing is that it starts with low-level spells so even if the player is smart and gives himself minor taboos, by the time he wants to learn Grobar's Deliberate Frostfire Beam he has to decide that he's plucking out his own eyeball or scarring his face with hideous tattoos or something. And that's if he hasn't already done that...

I get it, you like Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien (right) apparently cackling?

It can hardly be said that worship of Tolkien is primarily a roleplayer's affliction, at least. The movie versions of the tomes were enormously popular amongst the general public, and it was unusual for a while to hear people who'd never rolled a polyhedral die in their lives talk about dwarves and elves and goblins and stuff. And hey, it was a really good movie. Nobody denies that.

But there are so many other influences that could have been taken by fledgling roleplayers, that it's simply a shame. There are the sword and planet novels of the likes of J. Vance, the pulp fantasy worlds of R. E. Howard, the dark cosmic horror of Lovecraft, to name but three. All three have more life, more energy, and more interesting features than Tolkien, but Tolkien's features are still by far the most popular.

Elves that are beautiful and near-immortal, dwarves that are gruff craftsmen, hobbits with hairy feet and skill with slings, evil and enraged orcs, small and cunning goblins- it's almost as if D&D, and by extension, the entire world of fantasy is just another Tolkien rip-off.

Before I get further, I'd like to point out that the real reason it's as annoying as it is, is that every game from the beginning has been influenced /heavily/ by D&D. It's no joke. Every game has the exact same player-to-DM relationship, and in some cases the exact same mechanics. But don't take my word for it. Take the word of the inestimable and occasionally divisive Ron Edwards, via his essay, "Fantasy Heartbreakers." It's a good read, and covers what would take me at least a couple more paragraphs. It ties in, I promise.

The real point that I guess I'm trying to make is that Tolkien is ok. He's alright, but his version of fantasy is overplayed. If I see another elf/dwarf/halfling player race combination, I'll probably go insane. It's gotten so bad that people who do "homage" his works are regarded as "generic fantasy." Seriously, you knew that. Every game that has pretty-boy elves, bearded ass-kicking dwarves, green-skinned brutish orcs, and tiny pastoral hobbits is considered stock fantasy now. And why? There are so many more races to choose from, so many more ideas that have yet to be mined. For example, and this is off the top of my head, you can take the "stout and trustworthy" aspect of dwarves and make a race of people made literally of stone, a la the Herculoids. You could go the other way with Elves and turn them into literal immortals, detached watchers like those one guys whose name escapes me in the Marvel Comics. The Sentinels, I want to say, but I think that's the name of those gigantic purple (?) robots.

But the point is the same, really. Don't copy Tolkien any more. We get it. You like the Lord of the Rings for some reason. So have the other fifty guys before you. Quit it.

Not pictured: Generic fantasy

I want to take a moment and point out an excellent fantasy game that was in no way Tolkienesque- "The Mark of Kri", a Playstation 2 game. The entire game was based around Polynesian myth, if I remember correctly, and was so much more interesting and vibrant than another pale shade of Tolkien that it makes me literally angry that nobody else bothered to get the memo. Is it really that hard not to blatantly copy the name of the biggest and most famous fantasy author in the english-speaking world?

Am I really the only person who would rather look at the Mark of Kri than another Lord of the Rings-styled game?

Character Building?

Thank God I took three levels in Ropeclimb Bowthief.

One of the things that always bothered me when playing WoW, LoTRO, and especially WAR (because WAR was my favorite, see), was that people refused to call their characters that. They were never characters, they were always "toons". "Gotta reroll my toon", one guy would say, or "Just rolled up a new toon today, trying out Choppa," or "Don't play Bright Wizard, I know a guy that has a BW toon and he hates it."

I never understood it. Why would you pick possibly the dumbest name for a "character" and then compulsively call it that? I understand the part about "rerolling" (since it comes directly from D&D, something that the average mouth-breathing MMO player may not know) but not about "toons."

And so my confusion extends to this obsession with "character building." I've complained about Enworld before, but why is it that everybody and their mother wants help building characters? It's dozens of people not asking about cool character concepts or interesting personality traits, but how to make the most powerful character in combat with a certain example. And people will respond,

Oh, start out with 3 levels of Cudgelmaster Nogginbane and then pick up a couple ranks of Swank and then multiclass into Tremulous Spidereater so you can have a base attack bonus of +7 and be able to jump at least 20 miles into the air as well as gain a +70d3 damage bonus against anything with two or more legs.

Or something along those lines. I dunno. And it doesn't really make sense to me. When did roleplaying a game about looting stuff and splitting skulls turn into this wierd competitive mathematics? I'm not playing Labyrinth Lord so that I can try and put together the most classes so that I can deal more damage than you, I'm playing it because I like you, and I want to hang out. That's it.

It's not interesting to me to do differential mathematics with a side of trigonometry every time I sit down to roll up a new half-orc fighter. I'm working on my degree in electrical engineering, the last thing that sounds good after a long day in classes is, hey, more math! Yes, please let me flex my wonderful system mastery so that you can know where exactly to get a +5 coincidence bonus to your attack rolls that stacks with other attack rolls. It's right here in Player's Handbook VII, did you not pick it up? HEATHEN.


Reminds me of some advice I heard recently, on the Atlanta D&D pickup forums. A guy was asking what books he needed to play 4e, and some dude sagely said, "All of the players handbooks not connected to a specific campaign guide."

Oh, all ten of them? Player's Handbooks 1-4, and then all of the "X Power" books, so Divine Power, Martial Powers 1 and 2, Arcane Power, and Primal Power. You need ALL of these to play 4th edition? Isn't asking me to pick up 9 books at $30 apeice a little much? Who is spending $270 to play a game revolving around pieces of paper and plastic dice?


But I digress.

The game shouldn't be about character building, can't be about character building, especially since in this case, your character is a collection of powers and skills with a thin veneer of character by way of explaining how in the holy shit you thought to combine 5 levels of Paladin with 6 levels of Sorcerer.

The Two Potential Covers

This was supposed to happen with the Servants of Plague cover, where I posted two different options for consideration, but if that project stalled anymore, it'd go straight into a death spiral, ending only when it smashed into my head and severed into hemispheres. Nobody wants that.

So in the interest of continued sanity, here is a new prototype I'd been working on. I'm not too terribly sold on either one, but the first one is the layout I'd been using, and the second one is the one I've been working on. It's not a finished prototype, but there are certain things I like about them both.

The current "look" of the V series of modules produced
by yours truly.

Option One
This one is the basic, utilitarian version. It's got a black bar, then a picture, then some description text. It's simple, and unpretentious. It emulates the modules of old without assuming prior knowledge of them. It's clean, and is composed of sharp lines and straight edges. It's got a timeless look to it, as proved by the fact that it's how most adventure modules have looked since, well, adventure modules started looking like adventure modules.

On the other hand, it's fairly basic looking. There hasn't been a lot of innovation in module design, and it mostly looks like this. There's nothing wrong with that, per se, and it certainly beats some modern designs. There's a lot of modules that look like this, and that's kind of a problem. Mostly, because any comparison of my hobby's products will pale in imitation to the original greats, or especially anything that the OSR comes out with. Much like any other form of lazy presentation, it makes one wonder as to the effort made inside. If they can't be bothered to create an original and appealing cover for their work, what makes anybody think they put any effort into the inside? Of course, that's vastly unfair to those of us who are not artists by any stretch, but such is life.

Option Two

The potential new "look" of the V series of
Labyrinth Lord modules.

This cover keeps the solid background and the emphasis on text over art, but adds a splash of color in the corner and a little beveled text boxes, two things which help the cover stand out at least a tiny bit in comparison. In addition, there's room for a silly little woodcut graphic of a knight, an image I like very much.

The cons? Well, I'm not sure about the red, or the bevelled box for the title, or the fact that it cuts over the image. In addition, I'm feeling that the "V2" text should be white, not black. Other than that, it's ok. It seems perhaps like it tries a little hard to have a "new and improved!" feel, when it's really impossible to improve over the balanced and classic design of the originals.

What do you think? Emulate the originals, try and improve on them, or try something else entirely?

EDIT: Hybrid Option

This is a hybrid design, taking the rounded box and font of version two and keeping the more reduced aesthetic of version one. The knight on the lower left is still there because, after all, he's still pretty cool. The attribution could stand to be a little bigger, and the knight image a little smaller, but still, tweaking isn't such a bad thing.

If this ends up being the final design, then it'll be absolutely no problem to edit Servants of Plague to conform to this standard, since these templates are made in Inkscape, which is about the best format known to man, as far as ease of use goes.

I kind of like the hybrid, to be honest with you. It might end up being the "final draft" so to speak.

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.

Pocket Mod: Use Them

Recently my gaming has improved tremendously. How?

Introducing Pocket Mod. It's basically a piece of paper folded a couple of times to make a miniature booklet. The cool part is that you can customize it. I've taken to printing them out and using them to record the dungeons I make up during gameplay, and also to make a little cheat-booklet of the monsters I plan on using, as well as some ideas for traps and pitfalls and whatnot. The notes will probably get distilled into a short adventure module which will undergo serious revising and then get posted here and various other places.

But the point is about the Pocket Mods. Try printing one, and see if you can't think of a thousand uses for it.

Sorry for sounding like a shill, but it's really fairly cool.

Ditching Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings

A thought struck me.

To be entirely honest, it struck sometime last week, but this is the first time I've really put any thought into it. That is, the thought of ditching or changing entirely the demihumans. See, it came about when I was explaining to one of my players that he doesn't have to be an "Elf" if he doesn't want to. He can take the class and be a half-dragon dude, or a humanoid rhinocerous or whatever it is he likes. He eventually decided to play up the elfiness of it all (not the least of which was because he fully expected the elf to die before the night was over), but the short conversation in my head left reverberating echoes in my noggin.

See, I've never really liked other fantasy races, at least not in D&D and other games where I'm the one having to make up the entire world. They're either played for laughs, or they're basically skinny/short/beautiful/ugly/hairy/goofy humans who live in places where humans normally don't. There's no real sense of alien-ness to them, which I think is a huge part of life.

To use a real-life example, I was watching  a show about some african tribesmen where the women paint themselves red and have all these interesting beliefs and omens and tribal shamans and whatnot. It was absolutely fascinating, but their worldview was entirely alien. I mean, I'm a middle-class college student in a fairly secular society, and they're all hunters and farmers living in a world of spiritual contact with spirits or whatever it is they believe. If me and them had a talk on the streets (assuming we could speak the same language) I'm not sure we'd get anywhere at all.

And so it would be with elves, dwarves, and halflings, at least. Their world-view, their ideas, their senses of duty and self preservation and everything about them would be different, if for no other reason than that they live in relative isolation, with their own languages and cultures and, hell, lifespans.

So I think that, next time I run Labyrinth Lord, I'll have the elf turned into a human Spell-Sword, the dwarf into a Dungeoneer, and the Halfling into, I dunno, a Scout, with their bonus to armor class explained away as quickness and their inability to use big weapons as a fighting style. Or something.

This way, there can still be dwarves, elves, and halflings, just like there are still ogres, orcs, demons, and kobolds, but they're potential enemies and roadblocks instead of Grumpy McBeardybeard, greedy, stout, and loyal face-hammerer.

I think any other treatment is unfair to the source material that the demi-humans come from.

The Secret Of Steel Notes III: Fascination

Although my long, rambling notes hardly make this clear, my labor of love is formed of a great many things. First and foremost is an improvement of the hobby that started when, rummaging through the boxes in the basement of my parents' house when I was but a wee lad, was this:

And so it was born.

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.