What do you do when a teenager wants to play Evil?

So I managed another quick round of Play the World in YouMedia today. While, according to the others present, quite a few had expressed interest, most of them had just gone across the street for a meal and to study. Bad timing. So I hung out with a few boys recording a food-related podcast and built a few beginner/NPC characters while I waited. With around 45 minutes to go before I had to be elsewhere, the Tiefling-rogue player showed up and wanted to play.

He found himself in the Royal Guard breakroom again getting lectured by the commander. He was instructed to take another guardsman and go see if he could track the escaped golem from last session.

The other guardsman was one of the NPCs I'd just made, a gruff spear-dwarf named Gurka. They headed back to the Temple Quarter of town, where Rylie (the player-character) seemed a little at a loss as to where to start. She went into the temple of Fharlangn (AKA a very busy bar complete with piano player in the background), where the patrons and bartend were reluctant to assist because she and the dwarf were basically cops. Then she approached the Temple of Thor, but the dwarf, a follower of Thor, had to take the reins here. They spoke with an aged, squeaky, forgetful High Priestess, got permission to explore the cemetery, where the melted lock had been given a fine replacement, and found evil-smelling footprints of their quarry.

A few hints and finally an outright Knowledge check helped Rylie realize the darkness spell the golem had used to escape last time was akin to her own natural Tiefling magic. Her quarry was another tiefling.

At this point, Rylie decided to climb to the highest point around to see where the golem might have run to. Gurka dissuaded her from physically using her claws to climb the temple, and instead she climbed the steps to the top of its belfry. Then her player asked if there were trees anywhere about.

?

...

"Um... there's what looks like a sacred grove within walking distance."

"We go there."

So, yeah, this is how I GM. What do the kids want to see? OK, it's in the game.

Off they went, got a little ways in, and encountered a bunch of unhappy tree sprites. Rylie climbed a tree, but rolled badly, fell off, and got to be Gulliver-with-the-Lilliputians for a bit. I think the player just wanted to climb tonight?

Then the Druidic priestess of the grove turned up. She, too, was a Tiefling! With fiery eyes and a desire for vengeance against all that lived, for yet undetermined reasons.

Why does her evil plot involve an iron golem, normally something no druid would touch?

No idea.

A few rolls later, she had used her darkness spell to ensnare Rylie and draw her deeper into the grove and away from her companion. In the center was the golem. The druid explained that she was trying to take over the city and offered Rylie (already a Boxed Crook) a place at her side as an evil henchman.

... The player accepted.

For those who don't play RPGs, this is generally NOT DONE. 

But at the time, since this was a one-on-one game, I allowed it. Rylie murdered the dwarf NPC to seal her pact with the druid, at which point I announced that she had become evil and was now an NPC under my control. The player will be warned not to tell the other players what happened when he turns up with a new character next week and the party is asked to investigate what happened to two of the Royal Guard. I explained afterwards that, when part of a party of other players (which he wasn't at the time), Evil alignment is generally disallowed simply for the sake of cooperation. This will be key in summer, in fact, when the Summer Reading theme is Togetherness.

I pointed out that if he wants to play evil, there are other games to do it in. Warhammer and 40K is a fine choice. He expressed eagerness to try, and was surprised and curious to learn that, hey, libraries can get free Warhammer stuff now. So if he's the only taker next week again, I know what to do.

What do you do when a teenager wants to play evil?

You introduce him to gamer crack.

I am going to Recon 2023 in Kissimmee tomorrow. Next time, a convention-and-loot report!

From the Sewers They Come

 Had another of my 1-hour semi-DnD sessions at work. For once, I had three players, but two of them were fellow staff. This was by design; the other adults are considering running games of their own, most likely as substitutes for mine. (I won't be at work next Thursday, for example.)

• Player 1: Student, playing a Level 3 druid with a chameleon familiar. (This is the same one who played the druid with a cat familiar in the displacer beast incident.) 
• Player 2: Fellow staff with an arcane magic-user, displaced from her own world. (From the Walking Library incident.)
• Player 3: Fellow staff with college-educated magic-user and a powerful magic staff. First game of XD20 for her, but an experienced RPG player and game-master.

When playing games like this, a group dynamic helps enormously, especially when the players know the basic mechanics - not of specific rules, but the social mechanics of working together, searching for clues, and bouncing ideas off each other. This is why I like to draw in adults when I can, even in sillier games like this one.

The party (nominally led by Player 1, who had received a promotion after a previous session in which she rescued a chocolatier held prisoner by brownies), was informed, "There's a giant crocodile coming out of the sewers between Main Street and Taverner's Row! Go handle it!"

They arrived to find milling and fleeing civilians, a giant crocodile clambering out of a pothole, and some nervous City Guard desperately hoping that our heroines would bail them out of this mess.

Fairly quickly, a divergence in method developed. Player 1, peaceful and with the natural world her responsibility, was pitted against Player 3, who defaulted to the usual violent methods inherent in your average DnD encounter. 

They discussed and explored the situation for a while. The Druid's familiar did its best to help sense the monster's mood (hungry), but she rolled badly on a communication attempt; the croc snapped at the poor lizard, whence it scampered back to its mistress and hid in her robes. Other spells the players tried included trapping it with vines (on a die roll we decided the nearby government buildings were covered with ivy) - they failed to hold it; and a cold spell to freeze the cold-blooded creature in its tracks - slowed it down but no more.

As they continued to discuss possibilities and the NPC guards started to panic, I suddenly demanded awareness and dodge checks. Something tentacled appeared out of the nearest manhole cover.

The situation at this point:
- center: giant croc in pit
- circles around croc: terrified guards
- top: tentacled horror
- "You": the players
- upper right: government building
- lower right: tavern

The guards scattered, most of them heading for a nicely fortified government building; they spent the rest of the session firing arrows at the croc.

Player 1 tried to distract the croc, successfully in the sense that it couldn't decide where to go or what to eat first.

Player 2 generally supported the others, helping lift things or adding power to spells, and also tried her best to stop the tentacled squid-thing from ripping apart a nearby tavern.

Player 3 asked if there was methane in the sewer (there was), then dashed into the bar across the street and negotiated for a barrel of ale. Fine Dragon's Brew XXX, to be precise.

Her aim was not precise (her intent was to drop it into the sewer under the still trundling croc), but a high roll for effect definitely scorched and knocked out the croc. It also stunned the squid.

Unfortunately, it also caused a fuel-air explosion underground. Several more manhole covers disappeared into orbit, and fire belched out of every latrine in the area to set the buildings on fire.

The druid, encouraged and assisted by the others, managed to draw rain from the clouds overhead to douse the flames. Amid a fuming haze and the sound of wailing hand-cranked sirens and protests of the citizenry, the drenched party hauled the monsters off to the zoo for disposal.

Still, mission accomplished, right?

XD20 Session Two

 I had three players yesterday to run another session of XD20.

Bet you didn't know you could game AND snack
at the library.

My previous players returned, as well as a new one and a fourth kid who listened in for a while. A warrior (scared of bugs), a frog (scared of pointy things) and a magic-user (scared of heights). The new player developed her abilities and sense of self over the course of the session - read on.

Today's mission: "The Queen's pet displacer beast has climbed the tallest tree in the hunting preserve. Get it down. No, you're not allowed to hurt it."

This was a challenge for all three, since there were jagged branches everywhere, bugs living under the bark, and the monster was fifty feet up. The magic user (we eventually settled on the term "witch") luckily had a cat with which she could psychically communicate, so was still able to participate through him.

They climbed the tree and eventually found the displacer beast sunning itself on a branch. The cat vaguely communicated with the displacer beast, which didn't want to come down but was starting to get hungry. A small cat and a large frog looked like tasty snacks. The players tried several methods to both  annoy and attack the beast (by throwing things at it), but kept rolling low - particularly the warrior, whose player had to switch out dice several times. Attacks and dodges required an extra 1-in-2 die roll to see if they recognized the beast, or its shadow-image instead. Eventually the cat got the beast to chase it down the tree - right over the warrior, frog and witch, who all took damage. 

Once it was down, a couple potions, a nervous and uncooperative tree guard (this was a special and holy tree, you see), and a hastily set trap served to stop the displacer beast from displacing itself to freedom. Job done. The adventurers took themselves off to the infirmary, while the Queen began to cement herself in my mind as a twit - this is the second time she's nearly gotten the party killed.

What will the party meet next week? No idea.

More XD20 at the Library

 One of the hilarious things about roleplaying games (and occasionally, wargames) is the non sequiturs overheard by non-gamers. As pictures are worth a thousand words:

My players were visual learners.

Not having squared paper or miniatures, this was the method I chose to clarify positioning to tonight's players as they hunted... a giant crab. (Get yer minds outta the gutter.)

0: Characters were designed and characterized. We had:

• A giant frog. Not kidding. She may have been thinking of something like a Bullywug, but my monster manual didn't list it. We decided she was an escaped lab experiment with a very long and sticky tongue. She was afraid of sharp things (problematic, given the genre) and randomly was good at cooking. She carried many cooking potions. How useful these would be in an adventure... well, we're about to see.
• A fairly generic fighter, armed with a trident. Frightened of bugs, but ready to fight for his friends and family.

That gave me some useful ideas. Both characters met in the break room of the Royal Guard barracks where they had obtained jobs. After introductions and descriptions, the Captain came in and announced that the Queen was hungry for giant crustacean tonight. Our two heroes were ordered to head through town to the nearby coast, kill and retrieve a monster crab.

Off they went to Murder Rocks. To get there, they had to pass through the Wizards' Quarter, and passed a potion-supply shop with open displays of colorful beetles outside. This enabled our first tests - fear for the fighter, and hunger for the frog. The frog was also wary of running into her former master, but they made it to the coast.

This was a steep, broken slope of black rock and coral (sharp, thus intimidating the frog), with a huge flat crab sunning itself at the bottom (intimidating the fighter).

Zoom in to follow along by the numbers.

1: Our heroes scrambled down the slope - the frog assisting the fighter by letting out her long tongue for him to slide down.

2: The fighter, terrified of the crab, thought it might help if he couldn't see it. We decided that one of the frog's many potions was one for blindness. He drank it, then using his innate sense of the space around him, leapt onto the crab.

3a: He rolled low, and ended up slipping off and lying under the monster. He stabbed it with his trident, but couldn't really move and was drenched in stinking black ichor. (Grossness brings kids to attention like nothing else.)

3b: So the frog dropped a "lightness" potion that caused the crab to levitate.

4: It drifted away towards the sea. Not a good thing, since their job was to capture it. The fighter, recovering from his blindness, followed it and batted it back until it crunched into the cliff.

5: At which point it flipped on its back and died.

Our heroes used the last of the levitation potion to move the crab up along the coast road, through the town and back to the palace, at which point the warrior took a shower and the frog joined the cooks. Adventure complete.

Let's just say I gamemaster by the seat of my pants, and XD20 is perfect for that. The teens enjoyed it, and I think it was a fair introduction to DnD. They seemed eager to try again. This was the first time I was able to get more than one player, which helped enormously; there is a distinct atmosphere in a group game where players can bounce ideas off each other, and it was great to see them cooperate in achieving the goal. Hopefully, more exposure will bring more players and more adventures!

Painting and DMing

 The last couple days were extremely busy. Managing a library is far more than just dealing with books (which isn't as easy as it sounds, either). Preparing for programs, preparing for outreaches, scheduling programs and staff, catching up on training... let's just say I don't get to do much of what I got into librarianship to do anymore.

I'm still the teen librarian, though, so I can (ahem) use some of my interests in programming.

Despite some advertising and actively reminding the teens, though, I got only one taker for each event this week. And one of them was a fellow staff member.

It was still at least mildly relaxing. Between the interruptions, at least.

Wednesday was mini-painting day:

Painting started with lots of paper, about a dozen GW paints,
and a handful of 3D-printed sea-life models, undercoated with
Army Painter Skeleton Bone spray.

I'd tried to get the teens to design and print their own models.
This is Luffy, from the popular comic and anime One Piece.

This is my model for the day - a goldfish, now basecoated with
Averland Sunset.

My guinea-pig working on his figure. He was impressed
by the Contrast paints.

Not using Contrast, or having a wide selection, I tried
shading with Agrax Earthshade, then highlighting with a
little more Averland Sunset. I got a very dirty-looking goldfish.

This bottle of GW white was in pretty horrid shape,
even though I'd only just opened it,
so we used some craft Titanium White instead.

The finished Luffy - red shirt and hatband, blue pants,
white cuffs, black sandal straps and a little Agrax Earthshade
on the hat and sandals. We'll try touching it up next week,
but not bad for a first-timer!

Thursday was roleplaying day. One of my co-workers was excited to try, which was a good thing as I got no takers among the teens. (This is why, in the past, I resorted to playing with younger kids - but I was a children's librarian at the time.)

I used XD20, the same rules-on-a-postcard set (recently upgraded to Second Edition) I started with about five years ago. Building a character is lightning-quick - three rolls, one calculation, and answering a series of questions. My fellow librarian had had her character in her head for a long time, just never having a chance to play it. (This was not the first time this has happened; some of my best players have been ones who have always been on the outside of the game looking in!) What she had in mind was a magical type with a Quantum Leap background. Like Scott Bakula, she'd been separated from her own universe and her children, and was trying to get back, every so often falling through another hole in reality.

You'd think this would make it hard to fit her into a party, but it's what my proprietary campaign was made for. The city of Redwater is a large, cosmopolitan port with many immigrants and passers-through - some of them quite odd. (This is not the strangest character concept I've seen.) The Queen's Own Troubleshooters (think fantastic SWAT team) take anyone, partly for the breadth of ability and experience and partly for expendability. Even though I only had one Player Character, I could and did give her a couple non-player guards and a library acolyte to help her with her task - chase down and stop the city library, which had just stood up and started walking away on giant chicken legs.

This made the first challenge a basic roll - can the party keep up with the library, weaving through crowds of confused and alarmed citizens?

Well, no. She kept rolling low. She suggested a magic spell that would essentially reduce friction, enabling her to slip between obstacles, but it failed. The library was getting away. At this point I had one of the NPCs (being natives and thus more aware of options) suggest an air taxi. They flagged down a small dirigible.

As we were at the reference desk, I turned to the computer
and looked for a picture of the first (1852) dirigible.
I instead found photos of pre-WWI types like this one.

The party hitched a ride and raced off ("Follow that library!"). I left it up to my coworker as to how they would get in - I assumed she would try to drop onto the roof from a hovering position, but her ultimate solution was a lasso. A fifty-foot rope and a bit of magic later, the encounter looked like this:

The wizard, the librarian and the two daring guards ziplined over to the tower, which was glowing from its windows and door. They hurried down the stairs, then picked their way through the stacks towards the high-security vault from which the light emanated. After an encounter with a glowing green tiger, they made it into the vault to find a glowing magical book open on a plinth.

The player crept up, stabbed it with her dagger and tried to close it. As usual for her physical checks, she rolled poorly, and instead it fell to the floor, face-down. At this point, the librarian moved in and closed it. The library now settled back to the ground, much closer to the harbor than it had previously been.

This was a hasty session, partly because I had to leave for an outreach event, and partly because we were forced to play at the reference desk. Surprisingly for the time of day, though, it was not busy and we weren't interrupted often. While I'd been basically running in place to keep the session going, my coworker seemed to enjoy herself, and felt it was a fair introduction to fantasy roleplaying. We'll try it again next week, and her (ahem) experience will help. One interesting thing she noted was that (being a neophyte) she'd needed help to think up solutions and actions that a larger group of players would have provided. She's absolutely right about that - Dungeons and Dragons is very much a social game. We'll have to try harder to get the teens' attention - either that or resort to the kids.

Ah, well, it was an enjoyable one-shot anyway, and a good test of the game mechanics. See you next time!

Playtesting XD20

After weeks of coaxing and beating around the bush with the teens at work (who would generally prefer to be doing techy things in the library's tech lab) I finally got one of them to build a fantasy roleplaying character and playtest XD20 with me.

XD20 is Dragonlance author Tracy Hickman's pared-to-the-bone version of Dungeons and Dragons. This one has an interesting character sheet that focuses more on imagining the character than on determining his stats. In particular, there are three questions to answer that not only help create the character but provide ready motivations for play, and would be useful in any game. 

Once my player realized he could make anything he wanted ... he wanted to make a Yugi-Oh character. 

Now Yugi-Oh is not a game or story I know anything about. I don't go in for collectible card games. But there is something in allowing players to start with their favorite universes when devising characters. I've done it myself when creating NPCs and entire armies for Warhammer - my go-to Imperial Guard regiment was basically Bill Slim's 14th Army in 40K, complete with bush-hats and kukris custom-made by Eureka Miniatures. Stereotypes and popular culture are good for one thing - they engage the mind, providing shortcuts to the nature of personality and even images in the mind's eye.

Our hero for tonight's session is a 1st-level mage with a curious ability. He owns a magical pack of cards that summons monsters to fight for him.

I decided that the game mechanism for this would be: whenever he draws a card, a monster will be selected at random from the DnD Monster Manual, and he may use its abilities, at the cost of his magical Stat, which will fall with repeated uses. He may dismiss the monster at will, and it will disappear into a veil of magical sparkles.

Unfortunately, I didn't have a Monster Manual handy. I had Monsters and Creatures: A Young Adventurer's Guide by Jim Zub.

Now, I'm not saying this isn't an awesome book (and series!) But it does tend to focus on the larger and more dangerous critters of the DnD-verse. Read on to see.

Our hero stands outside a dark cave, which he is told contains monsters and treasure. What will he do?

He draws a card. I opened the book at random:

Before marching into the clearly dangerous cave, he had the banshee howl into it. There was nothing within, though the howl was reflected back out the cave into his ears, and a door at the back of the cave was shattered, revealing a tunnel.

Hoping to have something else investigate the tunnel, our hero summoned an:

This turned out to be a very large owlbear (did I mention I watched Grizzly the other night?), which could not get into the tunnel at all and was rather disgruntled. Our hero marched down the tunnel. He triggered an alarm trap and goblins at the other end started shooting at him. He used his backpack to shield himself, advanced to the end of the tunnel, and summoned a:

Which barely fit in the smallish cave, and automatically squashed the five or so goblins within, their nest, and their treasure. Our hero got the spoils - a bloody, messy cave and some coins which, having been mashed against the walls, were no longer legal tender.

XD20 does not do XP; the players level up when the GM says so. But I think our hero has learned some valuable lessons about using his newfound powers...!

Roleplaying Methods for Beginners, and Thoughts on Programming

So, my attempt at using RPG methods to run a wargame for beginners didn't work out too well. This appears to have been because of confused expectations on the part of new players. I still intend to try the rules solo, as I won't have complaints or arguments. (This is not to say that the complaints or arguments were a bad thing! I made sure to tell the teens that afterward - that it was a playtest, and that I genuinely appreciated their feedback.)

I intended it as a testbed and taster for the weekly RPG I intend to run in summer. Several years ago, using free kriegspiel was successful, but these aren't the same kids or quite the same environment. I'm undecided whether to run FKR at this point (easier for me and any substitute GMs) or something with greater structure and granularity to excite the teens and get them to come to the next session to use their levelled-up stats.

Friday, the American Library Association Gamer Round Table had a short webinar on quick-and-simple RPGs for library programmers. I missed it, but excellent timing anyway, as just this week, I received the PDF version of a new edition of the book that got me started on that first campaign, Xtreme Dungeon Mastery by Tracy Hickman. 

I initially used the ruleset in the first book, eventually converting it to a set inspired by XDM and written by Andrei Baltakmens of the RPG Tinkerage blog. The Hickman rules have changed a bit and are slightly more granular - thus possibly more appealing to teens who, like my players last week, wanted greater specificity in their rules.

The book itself, while retaining the humor, is less wacky and better arranged, partly by putting the tables and over-the-top bits in the appendix. The sections on designing and running a game have been significantly expanded, technical aspects are updated, and there is an extremely useful added portion on making the game accessible, comfortable and safe for "nontraditional" players.

The rules are also better arranged - particularly the character sheet, which was barebones in the first book but now has sections for things like equipment, skills and background. It's also a more traditional "roll-over a target number and add your stat" thing (the three stats range from 1-8) and has more guidance and examples for the XDM. I will try it. My hope is to playtest some roleplaying rulesets and settle on one before the official weekly program starts in June, and I'm lucky to have a tolerant YouMedia staff and two potential backup gamemasters for emergencies.

What I do have to be careful about is making time for the playtesting. I was unable to run Dragon Rampant on Thursday because the day's schedule was already set in stone and I was on desk at the best time to play with the teens (4:30 to 6, it seems). I'll have to make sure that I'm free more often at that time for such impromptu games, and I have selected it for the registered programs. It was encouraging to know they wanted to play again, but discouraging to disappoint them - though when I poked my nose in the door of the teen space I found them making their own card standups of Warhammer Fantasy Skaven! So on Friday I brought in a few old Warhammer army books to whet their appetites. I have a couple Fantasy starter boxes that would be good for giveaways, game experiments and possibly painting-program test subjects.

This post was supposed to just be about the rules I was thinking of using, but at least that dovetails with other aspects of programming. I've two sets in mind at the moment - Gateway and my own "hack" of  Baltakmens' work.

Gateway is a free cut-down version of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - it really retains only the skills, and uses the Advantage/Disadvantage system for adjudication. For those unfamiliar with DnD, this is a simplification of earlier rules which provided specific bonuses and detriments for specific circumstances: -2 for dim light, +2 for having masterwork tools, and the like. Instead, you roll your normal check with a D20, but include an extra D20 and choose either the highest or lowest score, depending on whether you are at an advantage or disadvantage. So character creation is fairly simple - you enter pluses and minuses on the character sheet to, for example, note that your Wizard has Advantage on Magic and Lore checks, but Disadvantage on Melee and Survival checks. Play involves no math - no addition and subtraction of skills, stats and equipment bonuses.

In the past, I've found that new players still struggle to build their first character, even though it's just selecting skills or abilities to give pluses or minuses, and devising starter characters beforehand is better. The reason I'm considering it is that my teens prefer games where they can level up, and it is easy to improve a character quickly by selecting new skills to have Advantage on, or Disadvantages to erase. It's relatively simplistic and openly designed not as a long-term campaign game, but as a "gateway" to more complex games. This is why it deliberately uses the simplest DnD mechanic, but there remains room for tinkering.

My other tentative set is the one mentioned above, a one-page, 500-word "hack" of Andrei Baltakmens' work. I haven't actually run it, but I've been writing and rewriting it off and on for several years, and it would be a good idea to actually playtest it before it becomes a mess, as things you rewrite over and over tend to do. I also condensed it into 200- and 100-word versions; you'll find the 100-word version here.

Jennifer's version of XD20

Like XD20, there are three stats, which I've named more clearly as Physical, Mental and Spiritual. I've also added two elements from the Fantasy Flight Warhammer 40,000 RPGs I was reading at the time: Corruption and Sanity mechanics, and a drastically simplified crit chart:

Roll a D10:

• 1-3: minor injury - bruising, scratches, etc.
• 4-6: major injury - bleeding, lost extremities etc.
• 7-9: critical injury - bleeding out, lost limbs, etc. At DM's discretion, roll to stay conscious or alive.
• 10: dead.

The corruption and sanity can be left out (except perhaps for Halloween sessions?), while for gritty games the crit chart can change to 7-8 crit injury, 9 dead, 10 messily dead, as in the 40K games. So basically a combination of Baltakmen's own very useful Rough Chances chart, Dark Heresy, Tristat, and DnD, suitable for quick creation and beginner play in any genre (though I'll stick to generic fantasy for now).

Which will I use? No idea at this point. Still hoping to get a wargame in next week, and after that I'll try to playtest simple RPGs and poll the players on what they think works. Wish me luck!

Convention Gaming and Trying DnD5E

 I went to Supercon yesterday, a local geek convention that I usually try to make. Last time I got to go as an exhibitor, at the library system's table, and even demonstrated a couple simple wargames. They didn't do that this year. So for me, this was a shopping trip at a markup, and an opportunity to game. In previous years, there were wargame and boardgame demos set up (mostly Games Workshop), but the gaming this year was a mix of family boardgames, videogames and Dungeons and Dragons. No miniatures gaming.

I partly went to get some dice and a tray. It turns out 8mm dice are not made in bulk by the suppliers I found, so that idea for using my not-quite-12mm unit markers is out. Perhaps I'll buy the 16mm markers and use 12mm dice.

I never have sat down for DnD 5th edition, but the con was an opportunity to play at a table for the first time in forever. I was surprised at how easy the pregenerated character sheet was to read and play - I probably could have run Free Kriegspiel with it:

The GMs were able to run adventures mostly off the cuff. The players were able to just adventure, with, as a commenter pointed out on an earlier post, the nuts-and-bolts of the game safely out of view. Spells weren't described, only the name providing any context, but most weren't combat spells that would require you to know how much damage they did.

There were some nuts-and-bolts, of course. DnD is mostly a skirmish game, and most adventures are mostly about fighting.

My character's at the back, with the excuse that
she's standing on the steps to get overhead line-of-sight.

The stereotypical starter adventure starts with a bit of scene-setting, continues with a march to the scene of adventure, optionally has a puzzle or roleplaying in the middle, and ends with a fight. So the two adventures I played in went. The first one did have an interesting puzzle that I might have to swipe for my own adventures, and the minis were pretty cool, especially given my increasing Paperboys collection. I may need to buy some:

Flat plastics from Arcknight Miniatures. I like the clear bases!

I've learned that character improvement is a useful motivator for bringing players back to the table. I leveled up my character between adventures with help from another player, which turned out to be a good thing in the next adventure. I used a new spell (Sleep) to neutralize an enemy that, under the circumstances, probably would have killed the party otherwise. It was only icing on the cake that our job was to capture this fellow alive. The disadvantage was that we weren't using minis this time, just a map and what is called "Theater of the Mind." A good GM can paint a picture in the mind's eye - I'm not quite there yet.

Another useful thing about DnD is, of course, the gamemaster, who was able to adjudicate rules without resorting to the rulebook. Players (especially new ones) always come up with unusual ideas and actions, and the GM can rule on things the designers never thought of - or things they did, if he's in a hurry and doesn't want to look things up.

Now, the fighting took up the bulk of both sessions, and part of the problem was that there were six or seven players in the adventures. (DnD has a "sweet spot" of four plus GM.) There's always a "hurry-up-and-wait" aspect to combat in war games of any sort, and DnD has a bad reputation in this area. But the low complexity of the rules and the table banter helped quite a bit, and reminded me why I enjoy this sort of play. There are plenty of historical RPGs out there - even variants of Dungeons and Dragons itself. Some of the methods - particularly the Move/Action/Bonus Action mechanism that players choose from on their turn - may work for the skirmish wargames I'm planning.

I'll have to check out DnD again.

Free Kriegspiel methods

I caught the tail-end of a discussion on Discord recently between several readers of Justin Alexander's Alexandrian blog. The topic was "how to run mass battles in your RPG."

Now, unremembered by many players, Dungeons and Dragons has miniature wargaming in its blood. The trouble is that the immediate forerunners of what became DnD were skirmish games. 

This:

Not this: 

Justin made the point that, in part because of this, players focus on the available rules for mass combat when a big battle comes up in-game, rather than on the singular characters they're running. In fact, a lot of games do. Justin spent a year at one point analyzing DnD 4th Edition for its flaws, chief among which was the "dissociated mechanic."

This refers to any mechanic that pulls you out of the game and makes you forget you're supposed to be roleplaying in a universe not your own. For example, if you know your unit has sixteen hit points and +2 in combat vs. goblins, you're counting those points and modifiers rather than focusing on the fact that your two hundred solders with rusty blades are hungry, tired, and probably would rather not be fighting goblins right now.

Wargaming does this to an RPG because, in the middle of your adventure, you suddenly stop to play a tabletop wargame. Cards do this in some games because you suddenly stop your wargame to play a card game. Magic does this in many roleplaying-game rulesets because, after 100 pages of explaining how ordinary characters do things in the game, you stop learning the rules for the game and spend 100 pages learning how magic-users follow completely different rules.

If you're going to break out the miniatures when your players are leading an army against hordes of the Evil Empire, well and good. But you don't need to change the rules you're playing under.

I used this pic in a previous post about playing wargames with RPG techniques. Let's consider it from the opposite perspective of an RPG using wargame techniques:

If you're playing an RPG set in the Napoleonic Wars, it's probably going to be more Sharpe than Waterloo. If you watch the otherwise excellent Sharpe series, you'll notice that the mass battles the episodes are set against are very much in the background, largely because unlike the producers of Waterloo, the producers of Sharpe never had an entire Russian army to work with. It is a rare episode where more than one hundred soldiers appear. By the same token, Zulu wouldn't have been as effective without an entire tribe of actual Zulu led by an actual descendant of Ceteshwayo, and Gettysburg wouldn't have been nearly as impressive without 5,000 reenactors on the original battlefield. 

So Sharpe, and the above page, represent a far more typical gamemaster who hasn't painted up more than a handful of miniatures, or as in Knights of the Dinner Table, is using M&Ms, cardboard chits, or whatever else he can find on short notice. What is he to do?

Well, he can read the above page, and wing it. That, to me, is pretty much the entire point of a GM.

"You lead your French regiment forward. [French are rapid marchers and change formation quickly] They respond well to your commands. [Landwehr are terrible] Your Prussian-militia allies are NOT looking happy at that [Russians are not very good, but there are lots of them and they don't break] stolid mass of Russians ahead."

"Where are the Cossacks?"

[Cossacks are chicken, but very fast] "Not attacking, but racing around your flanks towards your baggage."

[Cuirassiers are super] "We'll send our cuirassiers after them."

[Except when attacked from behind] They're so slow compared to the Cossacks it's like watching one of those movies where the big guy is telling the little one to 'Fight fair!' The Cossacks are circling behind them and hitting them in their unprotected backsides."

We've just spent thirty seconds using our common sense and knowledge of history, rather than counting modifiers, measuring ranges, and rolling dice for several turns of combat.

That's Free Kriegspiel.

Vicissitudes of a hobby butterfly

I've been a bumbling little bee this last week, doing bits and pieces, experimenting, but not playing or making much progress on any single project.

Starting to sort my games, as part of a housecleaning effort. A box's worth of conventional board games that should probably go to work with me, a selection of previously-scattered wargaming and roleplaying books and magazines, a box/folder to keep the scores of pages I've printed out...

Adding to my small medieval project - only a handful of bases, but I'm quite proud of myself for making a whole extra base out of "extra" figures, which are intended to be stuck between ranks for a more irregular look. The way they are presented on the page makes it easy to line them up in the same orientation as on a regular base. Since one of the archers has a standard pole, this becomes a command base of sorts.

Reading another simple RPG - Spotted via my blogroll, no less. The ability to keep track of my favorites is a reason for this site in itself. The game even has some solo tips, and it fits on a single page: Play All the Books

Trying new Paperboys 18mm ACW - Challenging owing to having to glue paper edge-on to the base. My coworkers are flabbergasted that I can cut these so neatly, but it's really not that hard. I have the urge to run First Bull Run on its 160th anniversary, but I doubt they'll let me!

Coloring the edges of Wofun figures - Looks okay. I used a standard brown Sharpie on this WoSS French sergeant. Will try entire bases next.

Demoing Catch the Moon, a Jenga-like dexterity game, at work. Both kids and parents seem to enjoy it. Of course my free-association skill led me to notice that some of these ladders are in scale for 54mm figures to assault something...

Watching five episodes of Sharpe - ... which could easily lead to a skirmish-scale Forlorn Hope scenario. And speaking of Napoleonics...

Basing 1/72 plastics - After a little frustration and indecision, I decided to try basing my 20mm plastics on 15mm MDF bases that came as extra with my last Wofun purchase. Here's the first unit - Napoleonic British militia.

Reading Henry Hyde's Wargaming Compendium - Did you know the Hoopla Digital library app has wargaming ebooks? Check it out! They have seemingly everything by Pen & Sword.

Ridiculously Easy Roleplaying Games for Beginners

 I haven't said anything about role-playing games yet. Now's the time. Kids are returning to the library, and my county is, as of last week, completely shorn of Covid restrictions. Good idea or not, this means we'll be crowded soon, and require activities to keep those kids busy. We have plenty of board games, a couple card games, a rug with chess and parcheesi boards, papercrafts, stories, my badly-played guitar...

The theme this year is animals, and I may post another time about some of the different RPGs available where you play various critters. (One of the best - but most confusing - things about games is their incredible variety.) For now, I'm going to discuss "lite" rulesets that I've experimented with and found perfect for beginner players (and their parents, and their game-masters).

My first was Tracy Hickman's XD20, which I discovered via this review on rpg.net.

I ordered his book at once. It was a touch disappointing. The thing is, it's not actually a game, or a guide for newcomers to roleplaying. It's a rather bizarre mix of gaming humor, the life of a game designer, how-to-do magic tricks, and advice for dungeon masters (The "D" in XD20). It recommends a rather balls-to-the-wall approach to play. These games are supposed to be exciting, so don't stand back cautiously, throw yourself into adventure!

The game, such as it is, takes up the last three chapters. But, broken down, it all comes down to a single rule for the players to remember. Just one:

"The DM tells you what to roll."

That's it.

You have a knight and he's charging at a fire-spitting dragon ten times his size? Roll an 18 or better on that twenty-sider. Oh, he has flame-retardant armor and a magic lance? A much better chance now, say 11. Does he want to charm a princess? Roll a 5. Cook a five-course meal? A 20 - obviously he lets underlings do that for him and would be lost in a kitchen - though he'd be fine cooking over a campfire in the wild, say 7 or better. Clean his armor? No need to roll, any knight knows how to do that.

Once I discovered this method, I never looked back. It takes no thought. There are no charts, no lists of equipment, skills and spells. The DM picks a number, and you roll. In wargaming, the Germans called this Free Kriegspiel - the DM determines everything, and there are no rules other than those in his head.

This is difficult for him, but it's absolutely wonderful for the players, who just have to play. No math to do, no rules to remember. Just adventure.

Also, these rules (and those following) work for any game, any genre, any period.

Searching for other, similar games, I came across the RPG Tinkerage blog, written sporadically by Andrei Baltakmens. I've tinkered with and playtested his games ever since, and he's been kind enough to let me rewrite and distribute them to the kids and teens I play with.

Here's a D20 adventure game - The first of Andrei's games that drew me; basically a (slight) expansion of XD20. I've expanded on Andrei's rules myself in a few different varieties.

The rough chances - A basic D20 chart is all you need to run basic games. Just assign an appropriate chance of success to a character's task.

And Play - Rough Chances with D6 rather than D20. Handy for giveaways, since virtually any home will have a couple six-siders somewhere.

Play the World A newer game with a more even mechanism, it uses 2D6 rather than 1D6 or 1D20. Why? Because two dice provide a bell curve with "average" results. (This post provides useful guidance as to what the results might mean in-game.) It is deliberately similar to the earliest forerunners of what became Dungeons and Dragons. For that reason, it appeals to me as something I can legitimately advertise as "D&D for Rank Beginners." Because library administrations prefer formal, planned programming.

But that doesn't mean I have to spend hours or days planning it. My game sessions are typically on the fly. When the noise rises in a crowded computer lab, I switch off three or four computers and instruct the kids on them to come to the nearest table instead. Then it takes just sixty seconds (not kidding) to build characters, and we're off, usually with a challenge or small dungeon I've slapped together in those same sixty seconds.

To show you how quick and easy it can be, here's an entire game in less than a hundred words, complete with sample character (based on my grandfather):

1. Choose a genre (fantasy, adventure, space opera...)
2. Name a character (gruff dwarf, daring archaeologist, crack space-pilot)
3. Add a few skills... (mining, swashbuckling, piloting)
4. ... and some gear (axe and ale mug, pistol, hat and whip, blaster and laser sword)

Start play. When attempting a task, choose a likelihood of success on the following chart and roll that number or higher. If desired, roll again to suggest effect.

2+: Probable

3+: Likely

4+: Even chance

5+: Difficult

6: Exceptional

Name and role: Private Joe, 13th US Armored Division, 1945

Skills: Rifle, Tank Operation, Cooking, Punching Racist Officers

Gear: .45 pistol, goggles, winter clothing

Obviously, you could run a simple skirmish wargame with this character; you could even use these rules for larger battles. But that's for another post...