Spes Magna Games

It’s Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day! So, here goes: I appreciate Swords & Wizardry. Seriously. In a moment, I’m going to tell you why, but before I do, let me try to make something clear. I’m going to say things about Swords & Wizardry, Matt Finch, and Mythmere Games, and Frog God Games. These things might be true about other games, people, and companies. In fact, these things are true about other games, people, and companies. If I say I appreciate Thing X about Swords & Wizardry, I’m not saying that no other game includes Thing X. In other words, I’m not dissing the games, people, and companies you appreciate.

You might be thinking, “Why the explanation, Mark?”

Well, in doing what passed as research for this blogpost, I came across a whole bunch of snippy bloviation about all things Old School Renaissance, including Swords & Wizardry and Matt Finch, specifically Matt’s “A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming” (for example). High-horse riding seems endemic in many discussions of Old School gaming, and I now avoid them. I’ve got better things to do with my time than listen to some “expert” tell me I’m playing badwrongfun, or that I’m not really Old School, or that what I’m talking about isn’t even a real role-playing game.

But enough snippy bloviation! Let’s do some appreciation!

Why I Appreciate Swords & Wizardry

Let me count the ways!

1. It’s free. There’s even an RTF version available for house-ruling.

2. It has an SRD, which means I don’t even need the book to play.

3. I don’t need the book to play, even if there wasn’t an SRD. Seriously. Not too long ago I GMed a Swords & Wizardry/Stars Without Number mash-up. I didn’t have to refer to the rulebooks once throughout the four-or-so hours of game time. I didn’t even have the rulebooks with me. Everything I needed for the game that night fit on about a dozen or so sheets of paper, mostly character sheets for the players. I’ve been playing (and writing) for Pathfinder almost exclusively for about five years. Pathfinder is a great game that I cannot run for four hours without referring to the rules.

Why I Appreciate Matt Finch

With more counting, or course:

1. Matt’s a fellow Texan.

2. Matt has demonstrated himself to be an approachable game designer who’s willing to take a personal hand in representing his product in a positive manner for consumers.

3. Did I mention that Swords & Wizardry is free?

4. Matt wrote this:

“Most of the time in old-style gaming, you don’t use a rule; you make a ruling. It’s easy to understand that sentence, but it takes a flash of insight to really ‘get it.’ The players can describe any action, without needing to look at a character sheet to see if they ‘can’ do it. The referee, in turn, uses common sense to decide what happens or rolls a die if he thinks there’s some random element involved, and then the game moves on. This is why characters have so few numbers on the character sheet, and why they have so few specified abilities.”

For me, this almost perfectly sums up one of the big attractions of “old-style gaming”. Why only almost perfect? Well, I demur a bit from the third sentence. I think it’s quite acceptable for players to have a bigger share in the common sense decisions and dice rolling than stated above. (And, yes, this thinking is one of my thoughts that has been sometimes vociferously condemned as not truly Old School or, terror of terrors!, not even actual role-playing.)

Why I Appreciate Mythmere Games and Frog God Games

1. Did I mention that Swords & Wizardry is free?

2. Both companies exemplify the sort of friendly professionalism that I cannot help but admire. Search around the Interwebz to see that Frog God Games has put right the Razor Coast debacle. I’ve seen numerous examples of company reps responding quickly to problems voiced on social media sites, such as Google+.

3. If the free version of Swords & Wizardry isn’t your cup of tea, you can purchase the rules in lovely book form. Most reviews I’ve seen praise the quality of the books being published by Frog God Games. Check out this review, for example.

4. There’s an impressive amount of product support out there for Swords & Wizardry, and a whole bunch of it, including the core rules themselves, has been released via the Open Gaming License.

Whew! That’s 11 different items I appreciate about Swords & Wizardry. Well, sort of. I mentioned the free thing more than once. If you’ve not experienced the Old School, give it a try. You might like it. You might even like it better than what you’re playing now.

Tags: A to Z 2013, Swords & Wizardry, Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day

I got nothing gaming related for today. I just got in from celebrating my daughter’s birthday. Adrienne doesn’t get mentioned much on this site. My son, Christopher “Giant Boy”, merits a few mentions here and there because he shares my interest in gaming. Adrienne doesn’t. We have other things in common — such as sarcasm and Black Sabbath.

Anyway, as I was saying, we celebrated her birthday this evening. We went to a nearby Japanese restaurant for sushi. Lotsa sushi. I had a large hot sake. I ate my wife Katrina’s miso soup. Adrienne and I split a tempura ice cream. We giggled a lot. I don’t normally giggle, me being a man in his mid-40s, but giggling with Adrienne is acceptable.

Adrienne’s birthdays are always special since she’s kind of like our miracle baby. About three-fourths or so of the way through the pregancy, doctors told us that there was a 50-50 chance that Adrienne wouldn’t be born, that Katrina would miscarry. In the end, everything worked out just fine. Adrienne was born today fifteen years ago, and she was quite the pudgy baby, weighing in at a bit more than nine pounds.

So, happy birthday, Adrienne! I can’t imagine what my life would be like without you.

Tags: A to Z 2013, Daughters

Well, here’s another week gone by, and I’m working on my post for the day kind of late. I didn’t home ’til a bit after midnight last night, and I was up early this morning to go help a local non-profit write curriculum material for math. After that, it was naptime, and I still hadn’t figured out what I was going to write about. On top of that, the XBox Live wasn’t working. Horrors!

So, I pulled up Netflix on my laptop, and I started to watch Hypothermia, a modest little film starring Michael Rooker (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, The Walking Dead) about two ice-fishing families and a gill-man (see also this Hypothermia trailer and this fair-minded review of the film). After being interrupted by dinner, I finished watching the movie, and I had my topic for today.

Arctic Gill-man
Hit Dice: 3
Armor Class: 4 [15]
Attacks: 2 claws (1d4), or fin slash (1d6 + infection)
Saving Throw: 14
Special: Feel vibrations, infection, surprise opponents on a 1-4
Move: 12/15 swimming
Alignment: Neutrality
Challenge Level/XP: 5/240

The arctic gill-man is a monstrous hybrid of fish, reptile, and humanoid that dwells in some lakes of arctic regions. It breathes both water and air, and it can survive on land for a several hours without discomfort. This monster is territorial and intelligent, and it will seek to defend its territory against trespassers, especially those that fish the lake or hunt along its banks. When submerged, it can feel the vibrations caused by creatures in the water or moving on the lake ice. The arctic gill-man is quite stealthy, attacking by surprise against even alert opponents with a roll of 1–4 on a d6. In combat, it attacks with either its claws or else by slashing with one of the spiny fins growing along its forearms.

The gill-man’s fin slash carries a potent toxin. A living creature struck by a fin slash must make a saving throw. Failure means the injury caused by the fin slash cannot be healed by natural means. The failed save also means a fever sets in after 1d4+6 minutes. A feverish creature suffers a -1 penalty to both attack rolls and Armor Class. Magical healing is required to overcome the injury and infection. Furthermore, as long as a creature is affected by gill-man infection, the monster and its victim have a psychic link. The gill-man can infallibly track the infected victim and can communicate with the victim via telepathy as long as the gill-man can see the victim.

Tags: A to Z 2013, monsters, Swords & Wizardry

In most RPGs, the player characters make their living through killing and looting. It’s sort of a shared fantasy version of just about every Hollywood action blockbuster. You know the type. Some Bad Guy pushes the Hero in some evil way. And not just pushes him, but pushes him Too Far. The Hero unleashes death and destruction and, just before the credits start to roll, walks away without the Authorities wanting to so much as have a polite chat about all the bloodshed and explosions. In other words, there is something profoundly silly about most PCs in most RPGs.

This becomes even more apparent in RPGs set in modern or futuristic settings where the PCs operate largely within the confines of urban centers. Some sort of metanarrative justification explaining why the Powers That Be tolerate a gang of murderhobos kicking down doors and busting caps is needed to avoid the silliness (assuming avoiding silliness is a goal). PCs taking the law into their own hands, becoming judge and jury and executioner and repo man, ought to very quickly run afoul of the campaign world’s authorized judges, juries, executioners, and repo men.

As I continue work on Tiamat’s Throne, this issue lurks in the back of my mind. In grand space opera fashion, Tiamat’s Throne features an Evil Empire with an interstellar reach. The Powers That Be in the campaign’s space sector not only jealously guard their official prerogatives and functions, they actively oppress and even murder dissenters and lawbreakers. When I start playtesting Tiamat’s Throne, I’m not planning on putting any limitations on the nature of the player’s characters except for this one: The PCs don’t work for the Empire. I’m not saying they have to be rebels, but they aren’t going to be collaborators.

For this reason, the players will need to exercise caution. A gang of murderhobos ranging the cosmos, looting and pillaging as they go, are very quickly going to end up with some very powerful, angry people gunning for them. Avoiding this danger will likely require the players to focus their murderhobo-ism somewhere out of the reach/notice of the Empire, such as undead-infested Castor, or else be much more circumspect about the types of adventures they go on.

Of course, I’m writing Tiamat’s Throne to include enough options to support a variety of genres and play-styles. The emphasis on tyranny lets players be freedom fighters. The emphasis on corrupt corporations let’s them get involved in Shadowrun-style espionage. Castor caters to survival horror. There’s a water world for people who want to make fun of Kevin Costner, dungeon crawls in the subterranea of Elanor, et cetera, et cetera. I’m even going to work in a dinosaur world.

So, while Tiamat’s Throne may encourage my players toward a specific type of looting and pillaging, the fundamental activities of adventures in the dragon-ruled space sector remain the same as most other RPGs. Tiamat’s empire is a big place. There’s a lot to kill and loot.

Tags: A to Z 2013, Stars Without Number, Tiamat's Throne

Today I talk about initiative. Yeah, I know. It should be I for Initiative, but I did I for Ichi, and today is J.

Anyhoo, I have a love-hate relationship with initiative checks. Too often, I’ve experienced initiative something like this:

GM: Roll for initiative!

Players: Yeah! Combat! Woo! Excitement!

GM: Okay, here we go! Twenty? Anyone? Anyone? Nineteen? Anyone? Anyone? Eighteen? Bueller? Bueller?

Then, to add to the excitement, I get to further experience players who want to delay and/or specify conditions for when their PCs take their actions. And let’s not forget the monsters. They get to go too. What should be an exciting combat ends up being an intiative roll call where most of the time most of the players sit around watching another person do stuff.

Of course, there are many techniques for speeding up initiative. I know about them (well, probably not all of them). I’ve used several of them. They help. For example, I “chunk” initiative in my current campaign. I roll for the monsters. The players roll for the characters. Any characters who beat the monsters get to act in whatever order the players want. Then the monsters go. Then the rest of the players go. I usually default to letting the players win intiative ties. This speeds things up quite a bit.

Still, most of the time initiative checks up end being almost unnecessary. I mean, unless my monster kills a PC, it usually doesn’t matter if the monster hits the PC before the PC hits the monster. Back in 1E days gaming while stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, we only rolled initiative when a PC or foe was killed or otherwise incapicitated, and then only to determine if the victim would get in a one final whack. From what I remember, it worked like a charm.

One of the neatest initiative check systems I’ve seen is in Dyson Logos’s Geodesic Gnomes. Here’s how it works:

“Then the Game Master announces initiative numbers starting at 4 [N.B. The lowest possible score] and counting upwards. If the initiative count for your character is called and you haven’t acted yet, you must declare your action now. On any initiative count anyone with a higher initiative count than the number called may declare their action. In addition, once an action is declared, anyone with a higher initiative count than that person may declare an action to interrupt them.”

This system has the “I want to interrupt him because I’m faster than he is” option built into it. I’ve not had a chance to test this out at length yet, but I going to run a Geodesic Gnomes session next month for Friday Game Night.

Perhaps most intriguing of all is Dungeon World, which doesn’t have initiative checks. Refresh your memory by looking at me fiddling with the rules. Notice that Dungeon World‘s attack mechanic doesn’t require initiative checks to resolve who goes first between the monsters and the PCs.

Well, that’s it for this one. I’ve got to get back to work on my Villains & Vigilantes adventure for tomorrow evening.

Tags: A to Z 2013, Dungeon World, Dyson Logos, game play, Geodesic Gnomes, initiative