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In TSR’s wonderful Masque of the Red Death campaign expansion, we find several character kits, namely Cavalryman, Charlatan, Dandy, Detective, Explorer/Scout, Journalist, Laborer, Medium, Metaphysician, Parson, Physician, Qabalist, Sailor, Scholar, Shaman, and Spiritualist. From Chaosium’s excellent Cthulhu by Gaslight, we expand the Victorian-era background material by including social class (Upper Class, Middle Class, or Lower Class) and several occupations, specifically Adventuress, Aristocrat, Clergyman, Consulting Detective, Ex-Military, Explorer, Inquiry Agent, Official Police, Rogue (not to be confused with the character class), and Street Arab (period slang for Lower Class children “adept at surviving on the street”) (Gaslight, page 12).

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When adapting 5E D&D to the last few decades of the Victorian era, setting-appropriate backgrounds are a must. Let’s take the Adventuress Gaslight occupation and turn it into a 5E D&D background. Direct quotes below come from Gaslight (pages 10-11).

Adventuress

Adventuress is “a euphemism for the woman who, by her association with Upper Class suitors and admirers, managed to gain power, respect, and sometimes reluctant approval from Victorian society. Often the Adventuress has worked in the theater or in some other form of entertainment. Sometimes ruthless, always competent and intelligent, she can greatly influence the life of her suitor of the moment. In fiction, a famous example of an Adventuress is Irene Adler, ‘the woman’ of the Sherlock Holmes Story ‘A Scandal in Bohemia.’ The adventuress may come from any social class. In so far as the behavior of the Middle Classes and Lower Classes directed at her, her effective class standing is that of her current suitor — but only so long as he remains her protector or until her cash runs out. Then her standing reverts to that of her birth. Naturally her protector’s peers always view her in terms of her original social class.”

Proficiencies: 4
Equipment: A set of fine clothes, letters from suitors, a bottle of perfume, and a pouch containing 20 gp

Feature: Name-Dropping: Due to your association with one or more men of repute, people are inclined to treat you with deference. You can gain access to places normally reserved for the Upper Classes. The Middle and Lower Classes make every effort to accommodate you and avoid your displeasure.

And now some notes regarding proficiencies. As touched on in a previous post, tweaking 5E D&D toward the investigative paradigm of The Gumshoe System requires modifying skills. Certain skills become investigative skills, the use of which guarantees discovering clues, assuming the proper skill is used at the proper time. In short, no die roll is required with an investigative skill.

To ensure that an adventuring group has the investigative skills covered means changing the ways a character gains skills. So, for example, instead of a background having a fixed list of skills, tool proficiencies, et cetera, a background provides X number of points that are spent on such things. This increases the amount of customization each character receives and also ensures that no adventuring group can’t find a clue because no member of the group has the applicable skill. I don’t see how either those “ensurances” are a bad thing.

Back to the Adventuress. If I make up a character with this background, I get 4 points I can spend on skills, tool proficiencies, and/or languages. I might decide to spend 2 points on investigative skills, picking Deception and Insight. For the other two, I might choose Performance and proficiency with a disguise kit.

These skills and this tool proficiency would be in addition to those gained from race and class. If my Adventuress were a half-elf rogue, I’d be looking at 2 more points from race and 4 more points from class. All in all, my Adventuress would have an impressive list of investigative and other skills to help her navigate her way through the strange currents of a mystery.

Tags: game play, GUMSHOE, horror

I’ve a confession. I never really cared for Ravenloft, either the classic AD&D module or the setting. To be fair, it probably had more to do with the GMs than the material itself. I understood that Ravenloft adventures were supposed to be scary and suspenseful, but, in my experience, they never were. Ravenloft had its charms, and I like the idea, to be sure, but it never quite clicked for me. Well, never quite clicked for me with one exception: TSR’s wonderful Masque of the Red Death campaign expansion. I only ever played in that setting once or twice, but I enjoyed it. It combined the better elements of AD&D and Call of Cthulhu to craft an intriguing setting.

Before moving on with the further thoughts about Victorian-era Gothic D&D, let’s sum up the conclusion from my last post about using The GUMSHOE System’s concept of investigative skills with 5E D&D.

The GUMSHOE System divides skills into two large group: investigative skills and general. No die roll is ever required to gain information with an investigative skill. If the right skill is applied to the right situation, information is uncovered, and the mystery proceeds apace.

For 5E D&D, the obvious investigative skills are Arcana, Deception, History, Insight, Intimidation, Investigation, Nature, Perception, Persuasion, and Religion. That’s ten skills. In an adventuring group, each of the skills should be found among the proficiencies of the characters at least once. This ensures that no clue will go undiscovered because no character has the right skill for the job.

The GUMSHOE System has built into it a limit to how to often investigative skills reveal useful information. In 5E D&D, this same limit can be implemented as X number of uses. I still like the idea of making X equal to the character’s proficiency bonus. Thus, a 1st-level character gets three automatic investigative skill successes. This pool of automatic successes recovers one use after a short rest or all uses after a long rest.

Now for some specifics. In D&D 5E, characters start with at least two skills based on class and probably two other skills from background. If we count tool proficiencies as skills, most characters have at least one more skill. Some have more. For example, a dwarf rogue with the charlatan background starts with a dwarven tool proficiency, stonecunning (a sort of specialized History skill), four class skills, thieves’ tools proficiencies, two background skills, and two background tool proficiencies. If we count most of those as skills, that’s 10 of them (ignoring stonecunning). Change the class to fighter and the character still has seven skills (losing thieves’ tools and two class skills).

Let’s say that we treat the character’s total number of racial, class, and background skills and tool proficiencies as points that can be used to purchase skills and tool proficiencies. Thus, the dwarf rogue (charlatan) gets 10 points. If the character were a right, he’d get seven points. The players and GM make this determination for each of the characters. When selecting skills and tool proficiencies, the top priority is the investigative skills. As mentioned above, each investigative skill must found among the proficiencies of at least one character. Duplicates are fine, of course. Once the ten investigative skills have been accounted for, the players get to spend their remaining skill points on whatever skills and tool proficiencies make sense for their respective characters’ classes and background.

Back to Masque of the Red Death. In that setting, dedicated spellcasters such as clerics and wizards aren’t really a thing. Spellcasting ability is sharply curtailed, and the variety of spells is limited as well. Non-human player character races are also rare if allowed at all. For now, I’m ignoring those aspects, and I’ll likely continue to ignore the limited race selection, mainly because I’m fascinated by the idea that the British Isles are ruled by high elves while France is ruled by drow under the iron fist of their Moon Queen.

What probably merits adapting to 5E D&D are the character kits. For those unfamiliar with 2E AD&D, a character kit is sort of like a 5E D&D background, and turning the Masque kits into backgrounds ought not be too difficult. The kits that would need backgrounding are Cavalryman, Charlatan, Dandy, Detective, Explorer/Scout, Journalist, Laborer, Medium, Metaphysician, Parson, Physician, Qabalist, Sailor, Scholar, Shaman, and Spiritualist. Some of these already appear 5E D&D (such as Charlatan and Sailor), but they might need tweaking to fit the late 19th century Victorian millieu of the Masque.

Of course, no foray into Victorian-era Gothic horror can ignore Chaosium’s excellent Cthulhu by Gaslight. From this fine book, I’m reminded of the importance social class had in the era. Characters are Upper Class, Middle Class, or Lower Class. Occupation is the main factor for determining social class, which in 5E D&D terms means sorting backgrounds by social class. For example, a Laborer is very unlikely to be Upper Class (or even Middle Class). Gaslight offers new occupations specific to its setting: Adventuress, Aristocrat, Clergyman, Consulting Detective, Ex-Military, Explorer, Inquiry Agent, Official Police, Rogue (not to be confused with the character class), and Street Arab (period slang for Lower Class children “adept at surviving on the street”) (Gaslight, page 12). Some of those occupations repeat character kits (i.e., Parson and Clergyman). Even after eliminating repeats, that leaves an impressive list of setting/genre-appropriate backgrounds.

Nota Bene: All of the links above are affiliate links. If you click and buy, I get a pittance.

Tags: game play, GUMSHOE, horror

Well, what an eventful month that seldom saw me leave the house or even move too far from the my official corner of the sofa.

It’s not that I’ve done nothing. I finished up the 2019-2020 school year, including about two months of “remote learning” with my 7th and 8th grade students. Providential was the year-plus that I was self-employed mostly as an on-line tutor. Many of the adjustments that might have otherwise made the transition from classroom to virtual classroom? I’d already done those for months prior to leaving self-employment to return to the classroom.

On the gaming front, little has changed in our schedule. We meet about once a week via remote conferencing. I’m still running my mash-up of d20 Modern, 3.0/3.5 D&D, and old school Chaosium Call of Cthulhu. Our Sunday 5E D&D game goes on. For that latter game, the GM uses Roll20 for displaying maps. For my former game that I’m running, we’re not even that high-tech. No virtual tabletop, no virtual dice, no programmed character sheets, et cetera. Just us sitting in front of computer cameras saying what happens and then rolling actual dice.

I’ve done a bit of reading, but nowhere near as much as I should considering how much time I’ve had on my hands. I did watch season one of Fargo. Good stuff. Started and stopped watching several movies, most of them horror or thrillers, and all of them not worth the time it’d take to finish them.

It’s not that I’ve done no reading. I’ve finished about half of three books. I also read through the SRD for The GUMSHOE System as well as skimmed a couple of the settings for that game. I’ve yet to play GUMSHOE. I like the theory behind it, but I’m not sure how much I’d like it in actual play. Of course, as I just said, I’ve not played it, so I’m probably wrong, and I would like it. That remains to be seen.

But about the theory of GUMSHOE. To quote the system’s site: “GUMSHOE is a system for designing and playing investigative roleplaying games and adventures, emulating stories where investigators uncover a series of clues, and interpret them to solve a mystery.” I like mystery stories. Lots of character interaction and intriguing clues punctuated by acts of violence. Good times. Unfortunately, most game systems don’t handle mystery well, which leads to many GMs also not handling mysteries well (myself included at times).

Two problems may pop up when running a mystery scenario using a traditional RPG, such as, say, 5E D&D:

1. A single low die roll grinds the investigation to a screeching halt.
2. A single character ability makes finding clues way too easy, as might be the case with certain divination spells.

I encountered the hazards of clue finding once at a gaming convention. We were playing Empire of the Petal Throne with an Important Gaming Person as the GM. Everyone was having a grand time as our characters set out to track down the bad guys to mete out some justice. About half way through the session, every player at the table blew a difficult but important check to find the hidden entrance into the bad guys’ lair. At the point in the convention event, the game just kind of trickled to a halt. The Important Gaming Person explained that that’s what happens some of the time, and implied that that’s part of the fun. He was half right but not about the fun.

The solutions? Well, in my experience, the most common are these:

1. Ignore the die roll and/or modify the scenario on the fly.
2. Figure out ways those pesky clue-finding abilities won’t work.

Neither of those solutions have much merit. If a write a scenario and then have to ignore die rolls and/or modify the scenario on the fly because of a bad die roll, I didn’t put enough thought into the design. Why did I have so much hinge on a single die roll? If failure was not really an option, why have the die roll to begin with? Why didn’t I already have other avenues of investigation built into the scenario?

“Solution” 2 is even worse. It’s just bad form to tell a player that his or her character’s abilities don’t work. It’d be like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writing a story in which all of Sherlock’s amazing deductive powers failed at each important point in the story. That would ruin the story. The fun of Sherlock Holmes is not wondering if he’ll notice the clue. The fun is watching Holmes in action and then having him explain how what was elementary to him should have been elementary to anyone who was paying attention.

GUMSHOE gets around both of these problems by proposing two different solutions:

1. A die roll is never needed to find an important clue.
2. A character’s special clue-finding abilities always work when applied to the correct situation.

For example, persuasive skills exist as investigative skills in GUMSHOE. A character might have Charm or Bureaucracy, for example. Consider Charm, which says, “You’re good at making people want to help you, whether you utilize compliments, flattery, or flirting.”

A player running a charming investigator applies the Charm skill against an NPC, and the NPC will reveal at least one clue, assuming the NPC knows anything to begin with. No die roll is needed. It happens, and the interaction is roleplayed. This same concept applies to other investigative skills, such as those relating to specialized areas of knowledge and technical skills.

What’s more, as part of the character creation process, the players build their respective investigators so that at the characters as a group have skill in every one of the investigative skills, divided up between the different characters with some duplication highly probable. No more not being able to find a particular clue because no one in the party has Skill X.

There’s no good reason why this same concept can apply to pretty much any RPG. Consider again 5E D&D. The obvious investigative skills in that system are Arcana, Deception, History, Insight, Intimidation, Investigation (duh), Nature, Perception, Persuasion, and Religion. That’s ten skills. When putting together the adventuring party, the players and the GM should work together to ensure that each of these skills is known by at least one PC. This probably requires tweaking starting skills a bit, but so what? It’s not going to unbalance the game if a fighter starts with three skills instead of two.

During the mystery scenario in which these D&D character find themselves embroiled, no player ever rolls a die to get information using one of these skills. The player describes the skill in action, and the GM describes what happens. If the situation is one in which that particular skill can reveal useful information, then useful information is revealed.

GUMSHOE does have built into a limit to how often investigative skills reveal useful information. Each skill has a pool of points of sorts. When a character is out of points, that character can still use the skill, but it doesn’t work automatically. In 5E D&D, this same limit can be implemented as X number of uses per long rest, for example. My first thought is to link the number of automatic successes with investigative skills to the character’s proficiency bonus. Thus, a 1st-level detective fighter would get three automatic investigative skill successes per long rest.

Tags: game play, GUMSHOE

About every other Saturday, friends come over and join my son and me to play 5E D&D. Overall, it’s been rather enjoyable despite my initial misgivings. I’ve not learned not to be skeptical about new things, such as new editions of D&D. For example, I continued to play 1E for years after 2E was released. I started 2E because I couldn’t find a 1E group while stationed in Hawaii. The only reason I started playing 3.0/3.5/Pathfinder was because a good friend had purchased the 3.0 Players Handbook and insisted that I give it a try. I never touched 4E, and I played 5E for the first time because I was out of town at a conference and bored one evening while just down the street from the hotel was a game/comic shop hosting D&D night.

Most of us Saturday gamers enjoy 5E well enough, but there is one persistent complaint (mostly from one player), which is that the characters aren’t advancing in level quickly enough. The problem, however, has less to do with the game system itself, and more to do with how often we play, which is, at most, twice a month for about 4-5 hours each time.

The 5E Dungeon Master’s Guide has some XP suggestions and alternatives, all of which have been echoed in other books. For example, is there really a good reason not to give an absent player’s character at least some XP even though the character might not take part in the current session? Not really. As the DMG points out, “Few players will intentionally miss out on the fun of gaming just because they know they’ll receive XP for it even if they don’t show up.” Currently, we don’t do this. We’ve talked about it, but, for whatever reason, it’s not happened so far.

The DMG also suggests giving XP for noncombat challenges (which I’ve done for years and years) and for completing a goal or for reaching an important milestone (which I’ve done for years and years). Since I’m already using these suggestions, and the perception that characters advance too slowly remains, it doesn’t seem as if they’ll solve the perceived problem.

Next we get to “Level Advancement Without XP” (DMG, p. 261). Here’s where things get interesting. The book informs me that “session-based advancement…mirrors the standard rate of advancement, assuming sessions are about four hours long.” This means that a 1st-level character needs one session of play to reach 2nd level, another session of play to reach 3rd level, and two more sessions of play to reach 4th level. That’s a session per level up to 4th level. After that, a character should level again after every two or three sessions.

This is not what our characters have been doing.

I’m pretty sure this is because no one is building encounters using the XP budget system described in the DMG. That’s too much like work for me. Session-based advancement, however, isn’t like work. It’s like counting, and I can do that with a minimum of effort. So, since I’m currently the DM for the Saturday group, that’s what I’m going to do.

Which means after our next session that all the characters will level up, even the characters whose players don’t make it to the game because real life has gotten in the way.

As an aside, the excellent The Black Hack uses session-based advancement for characters. If don’t own The Black Hack, you’re wrong. Life’s too short to be wrong. (Nota Bene: That link The Black Hack is an affiliate link.)

Tags: game play

The picture to the left above is the “Gnome Lair” map on page X62 of the 1981 printing of the D&D Expert Rulebook. The picture to the right is my version drawn isometric style with some changes happening because I reached the edge of the page and others being more thoughtful. (Clicking a pic embiggens it.)

My version is not a gnome lair. It might have been occupied by gnomes once upon a time, but no more. Now strange magical forces have turned the lair into a dangerous maze. Notice there are two sets of keyed areas: those with Roman numerals and those with Arabic numberals. Let’s start with latter.

Those Arabic Numerals

When an explorer gets line of sight on an area marked with an Arabic numeral, roll 1d10 before describing what the explorer sees. On a 10, the explorer sees a dead end. Otherwise, he or she sees whatever is at the indicated area. For example:

Eric (playing Agios): Agios descends the stairs cautiously while Cinder and Tupke wait in the hallway above.

Mark (the GM): Agios nears the bottom of the steps. (Mark rolls 1d10 and gets a 6.) He sees that after the landing, the hallway advances about ten feet and then turns to the right. (Mark makes note that if Agios continues, he’ll end up leaving the area marked “6” and advancing down the hall.

Every time a numbered area is not within line-of-sight, the magical effect resets. For example, if Agios continues down the hallway to the intersection, and then returns to area 6, Mark would roll 1d10 to see to where (if anywhere) the path now leads.

Those Roman Numerals

Whenever an explorer triggers the magic at an area marked with an Arabic numeral, there is a 1 in 6 chance that some randomly determined monster or monsters will be summoned. If so, consult the appropriate table, and then roll 1d6 to see in which area marked by a Roman numeral the encounter appears. These monsters behave appropriately for their type, and they too may decide to explore, triggering Arabic numerals areas appropriate.

Mark rolls 1d6 and gets a 1. He consults the specially prepared random encounter table, rolls 1d8+1d12 and another 1d6. As a result, two grells appear at Roman numeral I, not too far from where Agios might be heading should he choose to continue without the party.

Tags: game play, place of power