Some ways to get a McGuffin from the Goblin King

Cleaning my office this morning, I came across some design notes that struck me as too interesting to throw directly into the recycling bin. I don't quite remember the context, but I must have been thinking about Apocalypse World style "moves" (in-game action types) and generative storytelling. It's probably from when I first learned about Viv, which I still have yet to play with. The paper itself contains a list of the moves that will be included in the third edition of Apocalypse World, a few notes about what it would mean to randomize locations and their denizens, and then an exploration of the different ways one could get a McGuffin from a Goblin King. These are what I came up with as possible stories:

• Find him, kill him, take it
• Find him, convince him to give it to you
• Find him, steal it, escape
• Find someone else, convince them to steal it
• Find him, threaten him, he attacks (jump to another case)
• Find him, threaten him, he gives it
• Find him, beat him up, demand he gives it, get it
• Find him, offer something else in trade, trade for it
• Find him, observe him for leverage, deploy leverage as part of demand, receive it

There are certainly more, and clearly, some of these weave into each other. For example, convincing someone else to do it for you still requires that that character end up having to go through some other matrix of options.

Reading these simple statements starts stories forming in my mind. Each is a seed that could grow into something compelling, but they could also turn into something rather dull. Paying someone else to go questing is economically efficient but narratively unfulfilling.

It stands in contrast to my current project, which involves writing a lot of interactive fiction. This current work requires me to be very careful about branching since each alternative increases production costs. I am playing with the idea that you are a particular character, and so I do not feel like I have to expose all possible options to the player--only those that are reasonable to the character's situation and demeanor. 

I do hope to get back to exploring the kinds of narrative systems analysis that the McGuffin Acquisition represents, but in the mean time, I am finding more traditional gamebook-style interactive fiction to be a rewarding creative experience.

Now I can recycle this paper and get back to cleaning.

An Afternoon with Mythic Bastionland

Professor Dungeonmaster convinced me to check out Mythic Bastionland, a new tabletop RPG from Chris McDowall. I always appreciate Prof. DM's commentary, and he called it a masterpiece. I splurged on the hardcover edition without doing much more research, and I have no regrets.

The book is beautiful in its form. The entire rules for the game are presented in about twenty pages, followed by a generous collection of random tables. The majority of the book is devoted to 144 pages that describe the 72 knights, the seers who knighted them, and the myths that manifest in the world. The knights seek the myths, and the myths are described with just enough detail that the referee can turn them into compelling vignettes. The book concludes with about thirty two-column pages in which the left side narrates the table experience of three players and the right side provides commentary on it. This is a brilliant way to give examples of play and provide recommendations while keeping brief the initial rules explanation. Generous illustrations by Alec Sorenson push the dark medieval fantasy theme right into your imagination upon opening the book.

My two older boys agreed to try Mythic Bastionland with me yesterday afternoon, and we finished a one-shot session in about three hours. It is clearly a game that benefits from campaign play, but I found several resources that helped me to pull together a one-shot in about two hours of prep, not including reading the rules. There is an extensive list of resources on Reddit, but these are the ones I found most useful for quickly pulling an experimental session together:

• Chris McDowall's post about Mythic One-Shots. I followed his "Speed-Shot" approach, opting for a 6x6 Realm with the recommended myth. I rolled four random Knights and filled out their character sheets with everything except the attribute values, which I left for the players to roll. I came across many praises for McDowall's blog posts and YouTube videos; I am curious to look at some of his other content, but I have not done so yet.
• The official character sheets. The official sheet is dry but effective. There are a lot of fan-made ones, some of which are quite beautiful. I could not get this one to print, otherwise I might have used it, although I fear it would look poor on my black-and-white printer. I love the aesthetic of this other one, but it lacks some of the rules references that I wanted for new players (including me).
• Realm Maker online tool for generating Realms based on the game's heuristics. The interface is a bit awkward and I would have liked more printing and export options, but for what it is, it's a handy free tool. I configured it for a 6x6 Realm with one Myth, one Seer, and one Holding, and it came up with something reasonable enough for me to use. I printed up one for the players, then had to take a screenshot of the referee version. I printed this latter one at a smaller scale so that I could write in my notes around it, which worked well.
• Squire and Holdings tables from the Mythic Canvas. Knowing I would have two players, I took the book's advice to give each a squire, and the tables helped give each a bit of character. Similarly, I rolled a random Holding, which gave me a name and an economic focus for it. This ended up being slightly incongruous with the terrain, but it was adequate for a one-shot.

All this allowed me to pull together a one-shot, which I played with my two older sons yesterday afternoon. For me, there were a lot of firsts.

I had not previously run nor played a hexcrawl, but I really enjoyed it. The Myth's early omens provided simple vignettes that gave a sense of the game's setting. The party went straight for the castle to learn more about the local situation, and they got just enough info to set them in the right direction of the Seer. They did receive a crucial tip from the Seer that ended up being used just in time to save one of them from death, although this was all driven by dice, not my plotting. The one-shot only had one Myth so that the party could have a chance of overcoming it in one session, which they did; this made me curious to see how a larger Realm and multiple Myths would impact the feel of the game. Our game-time played out over the course of about a week, but I understand that a campaign would take place over years or decades. It's an attractive storytelling form that I have never explored.

When I run TTRPGs, which is not very often, I usually try to improvise some environmental conditions that establish a tone, such as the weather or a smell. I had not previously tried to rely on tables for such things, but given the prominent place they have in Mythic Bastionland, I decided to try it. I used random results from the weather table for the first few days' travel, but I quickly found that tedious. It was fun to try it, and I am sure that a better use of the tables is for when one is creatively stuck or desiring an improvisational challenge. Incidentally, I also have a copy of Knave on Professor Dungeonmaster's recommendation, and it is even more chock full of tables---but I have not been able to run that one yet.

I had also not previously run a game without roll-to-hit. Mythic Bastionland has combatants roll damage, and these dice can be manipulated through various player abilities. We all found it to be a lovely minigame of risk management and mitigation. It works well with another novelty of the game, where a player who suffers damage equal to half their remaining health is mortally wounded. Of course, the more damage one takes, the less damage is required to deal such a wound. Our session culminated in an epic battle where Sir John was mortally wounded, and as the enemy creature took wing, Sir Asgerald grabbed Sir John's javelin and hurled it at the fleeing monster. The player rolled exactly what he needed to deal a mortal blow to the enemy, and because of the Seer's advice, they were able to heal Sir John of a deadly poison. It was a beautiful ending to the afternoon, all driven by dice and improvised storytelling.

I found some of the nomenclature used in Mythic Bastionland to be hard to remember. The system of armaments is appropriately simple, yet terms like "hefty" and "slow" are used in a technical sense that doesn't match their colloquial use. Realms have Holdings, which seems right, but one of them is the Seat of Power, which sounds arbitrary to my ear compared to, say, "Capital." Each holding has people in the roles of Steward, Marshal, Sheriff, and Envoy, which are used in a historical sense but don't stick well into my memory. This meant there were some awkward pauses while I made sure I was introducing players to the right terms. I am sure that if I played this particular game more often, or even got into McDowall's content, it would be more natural for me.

Mythic Bastionland is an impressive game, and the physical book is a beautiful addition to my collection. The tabletop experience would benefit from loading screens that highlight Sorenson's evocative illustrations. It's another game that I wish I could run again soon, but that's probably not in the cards. This is one of the reasons I write these reviews: when TTRPGs are few and far between, it's nice to have a place to collect these stories or to return for inspiration.

An evening with Torchbearer

I mentioned my interest in Torchbearer in my post about goblins and game design, and I was glad to be able to run my first session of it last night. The group consisted of my two older boys and two of their friends. We had a good time, and I want to capture a few thoughts about the experience here. What follows is a mix of a session report together with my reflections on the game.

Background

I cannot remember all the details of how I became aware of Torchbearer, but I can provide a little background about my interest. It goes back to an interest in Burning Wheel, which is always discussed with reverence and respect despite there being a small player base. The Burning Wheel rulebook is a wealth of brilliant and unique ideas for tabletop roleplaying, but it also feels too intimidating to run without some experience. More recently, I have heard amazing things about Mouse Guard RPG, which is rooted in the ideas of Burning Wheel. I tried for a while to get the Mouse Guard RPG box set for my family, but I heard about it after it went out of print. I even ordered one from a reseller who, after a month, acknowledged that they did not have a copy after all and refunded my money. Now Torchbearer is a riff on Mouse Guard RPG with a setting that appeals more to me, so I decided to get a copy of the core books for myself. 

Torchbearer is recognized for having interesting, interlocking systems, and it did not seem too overwhelming for me to run it without having played it. I am grateful that my players accepted that the game might occasionally get choppy. Good DMs know that rulings are more important than rules, but my players understood that one of my goals in running the game was to understand it.

Character Creation and the Call to Adventure

We started with by-the-books character creation. I expected this to take an hour, but it took almost 90 minutes. I did not present a complete rules explanation ahead of time, but instead taught the pieces of the game that we needed as we needed them. We ended up with a Warrior, Outcast, Burglar, and Magician. The players had just a little trouble with articulating beliefs, but reading the ones from the sample characters was helpful. They had more difficulty with instincts because to write these effectively requires some knowledge of how the game works. The instinct format restrictions helped: for example, one player wanted an instinct, "I always know where the exits are," and I was able to help him convert toward something active, like "I always look for the exit." One of the instincts was, "I always strike first," which sounds exciting and appropriate but is not really workable in a game without initiative. (When we got into our only conflict of the evening, I ended up giving him +1s on his first strike as compensation, and I figured we would just change his instinct if we play again.) The players' goals were reasonable given what they knew from the adventure seed, although no one ended up making progress toward them by the end.

The players decided that the characters did not know each other but were in the right place to be recruited for the "Tower of Stars" adventure from the Cartographer's Compendium. It is shorter than the one in the core books, so I thought it might fit better as a one-off. In fact, we only got through about half of it. I modified one of the introductions slightly to get the party headed toward the tower to deliver a letter to the reclusive Beholder of Fates, allowing us to start the adventure at the base of the tower.

The Adventure

Their initial plan was to split the party, half exploring the surrounding area and half climbing into the ruins. This was a good opportunity for me to suggest, especially in this kind of dungeoncrawl, don't split the party. They succeeded at getting inside, which gave me the opportunity to explain the Grind. This is a beautiful aspect of Torchbearer where every four turns, the characters gain negative conditions—and what makes a turn advance is any roll. It made it more clear to them why instincts were powerful and why it's better to have A Good Idea than to rely on skills. 

In the ruined ground level of the tower, while searching for treasure, the Warrior discovered the remains of a broken basalt statue with a magical rune emblazoned on its forehead. The Magician wanted to decipher the rune, but when he pulled together his dice pool, it was clear that he had little chance. At this point, I explained how he could use a trait against himself, reducing further the odds of success but earning a "check" that would be useful in camp. He described how his Quick Witted trait might lead him to jump to the wrong conclusion. Sure enough, he failed the roll, and it provided me a glorious opportunity to deploy one of the adventure's recommended twists. I described how in the back of his mind, he could hear the name of the rune, but as he thought more about it, he realized he was hearing it chanted all around him. This was when the party discovered that some kind of troll rats had emerged from the rubble, and they were chanting in a mysterious ancient language. Once they were recognized, the rats attacked the party, leading us into the evening's conflict.

Here, I explained to the group a few of my favorite pieces of Torchbearer. First, there are different kinds of conflicts depending on the party's goals. In our case, this was a Drive Off conflict since the goal was merely to get rid of the rats, not necessarily to kill or capture them. (In retrospect, I should have left the rats chanting menacingly and given the party the opportunity to take the initiative here, to decide if they wanted to chase them off or leave them as creepy watchers.) Second, I explained how disposition works, that characters don't have "hit points" until they are in a conflict, and these hit points are only relevant to the current goal. Third, I explained the conflict system itself in which the GM and the players each queue up three actions, each of which are then executed simultaneously.

I could not remember, nor quickly find, how to compute the disposition for a group of enemies. I mistakenly thought I would multiply their Drive Off disposition by the number appearing, but this is wrong: I should have used the base disposition and then added one for each extra participant. Because these enchanted troll rats had such low disposition, it was only a four-point difference. Unfortunately, I also could not remember the rules for whether damage would distribute across multiple enemies once one was eliminated. It does, but I treated it as if it didn't, which was unfortunate since the opening attack by the Outcast was a brilliant and brutal success, and it should have taken out at least two of the rats instead of just one. The battle went on a little longer than it should have, and the Burglar's elimination made me take away the party's Fresh condition as a minor compromise. Even though we didn't get all the rules right, the players enjoyed the excitement and narrative structure of the conflict. They could see that this would be a successful conflict from early on, especially given the Might difference between the groups, but they also saw that they could not be overconfident. During the conflict, we also saw the Magician use Beginner's Luck to take an unexpected swipe at the rats, which was much more memorable than watching him roll a d20 and hope for a high roll.

With the rats eliminated, the Outcast proceeded to work his way up to the crack in the ceiling, fail the Dungeoneering test to get through, and got stuck. This happened to trigger the Grind, and everyone became hungry and thirsty. The ceiling was only ten feet high here, and so the Magician decided to try to push the Outcast through with his staff, soliciting the help of the Warrior. I explained that this was a test of pure strength, so it was a Health check. The Magician's player, seeing that his character had only 2 Health, said that if it's a Health check, he won't bother. I explained that he was already doing it and had him roll. Again, this is a case where a simple rule—if you say you're doing it, you're doing it—gives the game a lovely gravitas. Naturally, he failed the roll. Rather than throw a new twist at them, I decided to give a condition. I described how he was grunting and shoving, standing next to the smelly and crude Warrior, looking up at the Outcast's rear end, and so although they got the dwarf out of his predicament, the Magician came away Angry. The table loved it. The Magician's player had earlier expressed how uncomfortable he was with role-playing and talking in character, but here, right away, he picked up on the series of things that compounded to make him angry: the tower is ruined, I don't know these people, the dwarf got stuck, the Warrior burps constantly, we got assaulted by magical rats... It was wonderful. Unfortunately, I forgot to give lesser conditions to the Warrior and Outcast, both of whom helped. I am still learning the ropes.

The part got up into the next room, where there happened to be a decaying corpse. The Warrior was very excited to check it out given his instinct ("Always look for loot.") and his being corpse-wise. He was surprised, and so was I, that his being corpse-wise didn't actually help him in evaluating the corpse: it would have been useful for him to help someone else do it, but in the absence of fate or persona points, it provided no benefit to him. This was an unfortunate bit of ludonarrative dissonance, and it's also where we decided to call it a night after almost four hours together. All the guys thanked me for running the game, and many expressed their being  impressed with Torchbearer. I think they all had come to understand why I was excited to run it, and they came away with some good stories to tell.

Thoughts on Torchbearer

I love the simultaneous actions in Torchbearer; it makes d20-style combat look like a tennis match.  Not only do simultaneous actions provide interesting opportunities for storytelling, but at the table, you get that lovely feeling of flipping over a card to reveal a secret. It's not obvious to me how much of the action selection is really tactical rather than blind choice, but it almost doesn't matter: it's still fun. On the side, I have been working on an OSR-style dungeoncrawl video game inspired by ICRPG and Knave, but witnessing the joys of simultaneous actions makes me waver in my dedication to traditional turn-based combat.

I was nervous about remembering all the moving parts of Torchbearer. I printed up two different cheatsheets, but I'm not sure either one helped as much as I had hoped. One particular thing I was concerned about was how Fate and Persona points work. It wasn't until my prep the day of the session that I realized that new characters don't have these anyway. I share this for other new GMs so they can reduce their cognitive load on the first session. On the flip side, I had forgotten how Nature works, that when a player is facing a situation where they have no skill, they can opt to use their Nature instead. The party may have missed an opportunity to use these in a narratively interesting way.

The Grind is a brilliant system for putting pressure on the party. It presents time dramatically, tying together time and action, rather than in a simulated way. This is another aspect of the game that inspires me to think more about tabletop-videogame crossover. It's easy to run any number of simulations in a computer, but where is it better to deploy a dramatic tool instead? For example, I think it's more engaging to say that a torch lasts for two interesting moments than for sixty simulated minutes.

The Torchbearer books explain that it is designed to produce stories that unfold over ten to twelve sessions. Mine was a one-off learning session with a collection of players that will be hard to reproduce. I had a great experience though, and it makes me want to run a more sustained campaign to see more about how these systems interact.

On Goblins and Game Design

I recently purchased the rulebooks for Torchbearer 2nd Edition. Something reminded me of the project a few weeks ago, and the free introductory chapter captured my imagination. I have not had a chance to play the game yet, but I hope to do so in the coming weeks.

The Scholar's Guide includes a bibliography akin to AD&D's Appendix N and DCC's eponymous homage. I decided that I would add some of the references to my ever-growing pile of books to read. If nothing else, it will give me a good talking point about "remedial fantasy" during my sabbatical presentation. I started with Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter because it was easy to download from Project Gutenberg while I was on vacation. It contains the most poetic description of Elfland I have encountered: it is a place where poetry lives and some places can only be described in song. Yesterday, I finished The Wizard of Earthsea, which I have known about for decades but never took the time to read. It was an enjoyable story even if it was in the tired child-of-prophecy genre.

The Torchbearer Scholar's Guide describes various creatures that a brave adventurer might find lurking in ruins and caves. Many are classics of the TTRPG hobby described with the default setting's Norse flair. The description of the humble goblin blew me away. 

It is questionable whether goblins are alive in the same fashion as humans or halflings. Rather than being born, a goblin springs from the shadows each time a child tells a lie to its mother or a grandchild steals from its grandparent. They age but do not die from senescence or disease. They can be slain or driven off, but soon after they regather on the margins, hungry for more mayhem.

This is wonderfully mythical. Goblins are not just little green people: they are something else entirely. They are fearsome creatures born of sin. They reflect a dark world where evil is not just a privation of good but itself a creative force. It is both poetic and frightening to the core.

I got onto the Burning Wheel Discord server and asked whether Torchbearer's goblins were inspired by any particular work in the bibliography. I got into a discussion with the coauthors, Luke Crane and Thor Olavsrud. Below is Crane's description of how he designed the goblins, quoted with permission.

The inspiration came while editing tb2e and, as it often is for me, it was born of frustration. I have seen so many goblins slaughtered in my time as game master in D&D. Goblins as vulnerable diminutive anthromorphs might make sense from an evolutionary niche perspective, but it’s entirely unsatisfying to me in terms of a supernatural cosmology in a fantastical world.

As Thor points out in his example, categorizing supernatural beings is never easy. By their nature, these beings defy classification. The difference between trolls, giants and ogres, for example, is best left for the academics to debate. Adventurers should be more concerned with more pressing matters.

So for goblins, in the editing process, I needed a way to use Thor’s taxonomy of beings that demonstrated the vibrancy of these Others and gave goblins a reason to be. They needed a supernatural niche, not an ecological one. So I cackled to myself (out loud!) and gleefully muttered: Spirits! What if they’re spirits?

Since we were developing the spirit conflicts in the LMM [Lore Master's Manual] at the same time, I knew this classification would create problems and possibilities for adventurers.

To support this idea with the description, I attempted to reach into tropes found in folklore. What if those warnings to children about not lying and stealing were true? A second cackle emerged as I imagined goblins sprouting like weeds in the shadows of towns and steadings throughout Middarmark, while grandmothers fruitlessly wagged their fingers and plead with their charges to behave.

Even better, this supernatural provenance sketches a supernatural economy. Why should the simple folk of this land tolerate magicians, theurges, shamans and sorcerers? They are the only ones capable of banishing this incessant plague of goblins. Or what of a witch-queen who inveigles children to lie and steal for her, and so creates an army of mischief?

The possibilities are many, and they wear a different mask than that of the fearsome descendants of Azog and Bolg.

I love how his explanation combines mythmaking and systems. To me, that is the essence of good design, where the narrative and the mechanisms support each other, creating an engine for interesting experiences.

Some thoughts on Fate and Forged in the Dark games

Yesterday, my two older boys and I played a tabletop RPG session with a friend and his two oldest children. We had done a one-off OSR game years ago, and I was surprised when my son reminisced about it and wanted to so something similar again. After some discussions about his hopes and goals, I decided to try a session of Fate, which I haven't done in years. I played Fate once five years ago, and though that was my most recent experience with it, I find myself referencing it frequently as a touchstone in RPGs. I think it would be interesting to play Fate under the direction of a GM who had mastered the system. In the absence of such experience, as with my last play, I felt like I was a little underprepared, despite the system being relatively light.

I settled on Fate Accelerated (FAE) as a ruleset for a one-shot game with our friends, and we had a fun time exploring the work of a secret, elite, international organization in the 1930s that was funded by a mysterious benefactor to pursue justice. It was very pulpy and inspired in part by a cousin's fondness for Doc Savage. 

I looked for some advice online about how best to use FAE for a one-shot, which reminded me to skim the excellent Book of Hanz. An old Reddit thread suggested using the Phase Trio from Fate Core for character creation, and that sounded like so much fun that I decided to try it. It was a lot of fun, being essentially a narrative minigame in itself. It took a while to get everyone involved, in part due to unfamiliarity (mine and theirs), and I think it may have also shown different player's comfort levels with this style of character creation and with tropes of 1930s pulp. If I do it again, I should probably send out some introductory materials and preparation suggestions before the game to help get players in the right mindset.

We ended up with a ragtag team of specialists who had some complications in their backstory. The group played into the idea that character aspects can be strengths and weaknesses, and this was a lot of fun, although it's harder to play this up equitably in an ensemble cast. I tried to spread the spotlight around, but five players is hard to manage (and more than the rulebook's recommended maximum by one). Many scenes took much longer than expected, but one marvelous outcome was that the group discovered a completely unexpected way to resolve the main plot. The climactic ending involved explosions and petty vengeance, which is an excellent way to end pilot episode.

A quick turnaround of events meant that we did not have much time for a debriefing conversation after the game, but in a short chat with my boys, I found myself comparing Fate and the Forged in the Dark games. Both games are designed to give a fiction-first adventure, but they accomplish it in different ways. Fate encourages a cinematic approach, but its mechanisms do not demand it. For example, in our game yesterday, the team received a call that had them flying to Havana. Rather than cutting to the flight, some players wanted to start itemizing what gear they were bringing along in case they need it. Now in a movie, you'd have a Chekov's Gun scenario: if the camera shows a character packing a particular gadget, that gadget better be used later in the show. With player-driven story, though, how is one to know what will be useful later? The instinct is good from a player's point of view, and it's not exactly anticinematic, but it is dull. I pointed out that any player could always spend a Fate Point later to simply declare that they had brought some particular gadget with them, and I realized immediately that I had just turned Fate Points into Blades in the Dark's flashback and load system. This helped the players understand the various uses and robustness of Fate Points, but in reflecting on the experience, it also pointed out how brilliantly Blades ties the flashbacks with Planning and Load. Get the competent characters into a situation with little fanfare and let the details be clarified through play. I like that better than having players trying to lay out the perfect plan and hope it works.

The other piece from Blades in the Dark that I missed was player-facing rolls. In truth, I struggled to remember the distinctions between Fate's Challenges, Contests, and Conflicts, each of which are almost synonomous in English. I had hoped that the players would face one of each, but we never had much of a direct Conflict. Or, put another way, we could have, but I ended up handling it using what feels like a faster player-facing, elective-order system. I find the idea of tallying each side's Speed and then taking turns with each NPC to be tedious. It's the kind of thing that I may have enjoyed in my youth DMing D&D2e, but those games had a more tactical and simulationist bent. Now, I much prefer the rhythm of letting the players act and watching the world react.

Still, one of the most compelling ideas in Fate is the robust aspect system, and I quite like the action of creating advantages. We had only one good example of that, but I think it's because a player could see that there was interesting on-screen ways that his character could lead another character to an exciting spotlight moment. I have not seen any Forged in the Dark games that have something equivalent.

One other criticism that I have of Fate Accelerated in particular is that, after playing through the game, I don't like approaches over skills. I like the idea of describing how characters approach problems, but practically speaking, it was too easy to alter one word of a story to get a systemic boost. If you're in a boat race, are you necessarily driving "speedily"? It seems to me that there's not much difference between saying you're doing it speedily, flashily, cleverly, or even forcefully. What really matters here is that you know how to drive a boat. (Do you "drive" boats? Whatever.) So, one of my takeaways is that I want to take a closer look at Fate Condensed as an alternative. I think it would have really helped some of the players, especially in the large group, to have an obvious spot where their particular skills could be brought to the table—that they can do a thing others cannot do, not just approach something in a way that's essentially the same as their neighbor.

In preparing for the session, I came across the It's Not My Fault! cards, which I have ordered and am excited to try, so this will certainly not be my last experience with the Fate system. I suspect that this set may be a better tool for one-shots, although I have no regrets about exploring the Phase Trio for character creation. However, it also makes me want to get Scum & Villainy back to the table. I want to try running it using the Deep Cuts systems changes to Blades in the Dark. I also want to rewatch Cowboy Bebop, and maybe these things are coupled.

That's my hodgepodge of thoughts collected from an enjoyable game yesterday. My boys have been on an unexpected TTRPG kick lately, and I need to talk to them about whether they want to pick up the Scum & Villainy campaign we started last Autumn. Incidentally, folks who like Blades in the Dark should check out the recently released video game Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, which is obviously inspired by it and draws liberally on its systems.

A Morning with Scum & Villainy

After writing about my first experience with Blades on the Dark, I heard from a friend who recommended that I also look into Scum & Villainy. It is a sci-fi interpretation of the Blades in the Dark rules following the Forged in the Dark license. I use "sci-fi" intentionally since the rules and setting lend themselves to space westerns or space operas—anything with scoundrels on spaceships—but it would be difficult to do science fiction with them. The rulebook makes it clear that it's drawing on the "rag-tag group of outlaws traveling across the sector" trope as seen in Firefly and Cowboy Bebop. Both are clearly space westerns.

This theme is a good thing, and those two shows are among my favorites. It is a shame, then, that one of the first things one notices on opening the book is that it doesn't mesh with these themes. Blades in the Dark sings out its theme in graphic design and illustration. In contrast, Scum & Villainy feels like it cannot decide what it wants to be. This is exacerbated by the initial impression given when the structure of the book and much of the copy itself are taken verbatim from Blades in the Dark. None of this is inherently bad, but it gave a negative first impression after having been given such a strong recommendation to read it.

The few mechanisms added to Blades are quite good. Developing your ship rather than your headquarters captures the theme well, also lending the feeling of an episodic series. Getting bonus dice from gambits is a welcome addition to my group, since they have a penchant for beating the odds by rolling consistently low.

My favorite addition consists of the three starting scenarios, one for each of the ships. Playing Blades in the Dark, or even just reading and imagining it, it wasn't quite clear where to start. Scum & Villainy gives more tightly scripted introductory scenarios. At least two of them boil down to simple chase sequences, but there is nothing wrong with that. Each of these scenarios has just enough background to fill in details as needed, and each one provides clear hooks into the next episode. On top of that, there three outlines for other, unrelated jobs that are fit for the theme of the selected ship. 

We got the game to the table yesterday morning, and I played with my three eldest sons. My third son had previously expressed disinterest in tabletop roleplaying games, having not enjoyed whatever fantasy game we had tried together once years ago. I convinced him to try this one, knowing that he's a storyteller at heart, and he and his two older brothers had a great time. They chose to be bounty hunters on a Cerberus ship, playing a Scoundrel, a Pilot, and a Mechanic. We played the recommended started mission: tracking down a member of the Ashen Knives gang with multiple bounties on his head. There was a little hiccup due to an ambiguity in the scenario description, but once we got into that, we had a blast. The two older boys had a handle on the action resolution protocol as well as the role of flashbacks. They used flashbacks much more successfully as part of the storytelling than in our two Blades games, using them to set up a two-pronged assault on the mark's location, and then using one to set up and soup up hoverbikes for big chase scene. A glorious failure by the Mechanic led to a potentially disastrous desperate situation for the Pilot, but he used a gambit and pushed himself to ace it. It was exactly the kind of thing one wants out of a chase scene.

There are a few places where Scum & Villainy falls short of its august predecessor, doomed perhaps by its own lineage. For example, in Blades in the Dark, there are sensible limits on how much coin (or value in coin) a person can carry or that one can stash. This is actually quite interesting, a point that I don't remember seeing before: you can only carry so much money, and you can only have so much liquid cash, particularly in a Victorian setting. Scum & Villainy borrows this mechanism despite it describing money as being kept as software on credsticks. Also, while both games admit that any given action may be sensible under multiple action ratings, the action articulation in Scum & Villainy feels more forced than Blades'. I suppose, due to my career, I am particularly puzzled by how the Doctor action rating is for "doing science" and the Study action rating is for "doing research." It makes me wonder about how I would take the Forged in the Dark idea and put it into a setting of my own choosing, as many others have done. For example, making Kapow! years ago was a great exercise in understanding how Powered by the Apocalypse ideas could apply to campy 1960's superhero action.

I find the setting of Blades in the Dark to be more intriguing, but the setting of Scum & Villainy appeals to me personally while also being a "safer" space to explore with my boys. One could do a sci-fi criminal gang drama, but maintaining a ship vs. expanding gang turf really pushes toward the Firefly vibe. Scum & Villainy certainly stands alone, although there are parts whose rationale would make more sense if one is familiar with Blades in the Dark. Reading the Blades book was enough to see why there has been so much excitement about it,  even though I know I'm late to the party. The Scum & Villainy book may have lacked some of this pizzazz, but the table doesn't lie, and we had a great time. 

An Afternoon with Blades in the Dark

I heard about John Harper's Blades in the Dark tabletop role-playing game from a talented undergraduate student around 2018. He was creating his own RPG as part of a games research group I was running, and he regularly brought up Blades along with the Powered by the Apocalypse movement as inspirations. I came across it again when looking for information about non-hit-point damage systems, which Blades has, although not via inventory manipulation—the particular topic of my investigation.

I bought a copy of the rules, read them while on family vacation at the end of the summer, and found them quite inspirational. It made me want to run a session or two in order to see the systems in motion. As anyone who enjoys tabletop games knows, it's one thing to read the rules and another thing to try running them: the latter exposes ones incomplete knowledge from the former. I hesitated to invite my boys to play though because of the vicious nature of the game. Blades in the Dark is a game in which you play a scoundrel who is part of a criminal crew. You advance in the game through illegal and immoral activity. I prefer to encourage fantasies about heroic living. Yet, I found myself thinking about how one can learn from stories of heroes and of villains, and if nothing else, I knew my boys would also enjoy experience the game and exploring its setting. 

In my retelling of our experience, I want to highlight places where I felt unsupported by the book and online resources. This is constructive criticism meant that I hope myself and others can use to improve future sessions of this and other games. Note that in this blog post, I will be freely referencing rules and lore from Blades in the Dark. If you are the type who enjoys reading or playing role-playing games, I recommend you pick up a copy. That said, you can also get an overview of the rules from the public System Reference Document.

We played for about three hours on Sunday afternoon, during which time we created characters and crew and completed one score. I had downloaded and printed the recommended materials, and so we dove into character creation. I had also crammed a lot of lore into my memory, which made it harder to introduce the game at a high level. I would have liked a canned paragraph I could read to set up the experience for new players. It was also too late for coffee, which could have been a contributing factor. Also, my boys, because they are my boys, are probably not familiar with any of the cultural touchstones that are referenced in the rulebook: we just don't watch stories about criminals and antiheroes, and I myself had not heard of most of the things in the list.

The playbooks were useful for letting the boys start creating their characters. One picked a Leech (saboteur, tinkerer, alchemist) and the other, a Hound (sharpshooter,  tracker). Among the first decisions one makes in character creation is choosing a heritage, and here is another area where a handout would be useful. The book has short descriptions of each, but the playbook only lists the name. A simple handout that gives a single sentence about each would be sufficient for a table of players to pick the one they like; otherwise, the GM has to explain each while players hold the lore in their heads. When it came choosing vices, we had a similar problem: I explained that one had to choose the category of vice, then the particular vice and its purveyor (for example, "Poker at Spades' Tavern"). The boys looked at me rather blankly: without knowing more about the world, it was not at all clear what kind of creative boundaries they had for this. I remembered that there was a list of vice purveyors in the appendix, so I turned to page 299. They readily chose from this list, and this makes me think that this, too, should be a handout in the starting materials.

When we turned to creating the crew with the corresponding playbooks, I realized that we should have inserted a step before the character creation: a quick discussion about what kind of game we wanted to play. They didn't talk much during character creation, but when we got to crew selection, it became clear that the Leech wanted to do sabotage and the Hound wanted to do assassinations. I ended up encouraging them to compromise and create a Shadows crew, which leans more into Leech styles but should have room for the Hound as well. In part, I was thinking about an initial score that would resonate with their crew playbook, and I did not want to open with an assassination.

We had some trouble with defining the crew's hunting grounds. The district map from the downloadable resources was useful, and the players figured that their lair could be in Crow's Foot while their hunting grounds was across the river in Whitehall. After all, wouldn't a band of spies want to spy on something worthwhile? I looked up more details about the district in the rulebook, and I found that it was listed as having maximum wealth and maximum security. That doesn't seem like a reasonable target for a crew that is just starting out. Mechanically, the Shadows were Tier 0 but their targets would all be much higher tier. If there were a recommendation for new players, we could have just taken it. In the absence of this, setting up the crew felt overwhelming, being high-stakes and made almost blindly. We ended up shifting the hunting grounds to also be in Crow's Foot. 

A related complication came up in the required decision of how to deal with the faction that controls the turf containing your hunting grounds. Unfortunately, there is no concise summary in the rules about which factions control which hunting grounds. For Crow's Foot, I remembered that the Crows claimed control over the whole district, but that there were also smaller factions who were trying to take it over. When the crew thought they would use Whitehall as their hunting grounds, I had no idea who controlled it. Would the Bluecoats—the corrupt law enforcement officers—be the faction that gets paid off? This is another case where a simple reference or a table of defaults would really help new GMs who don't have the spare cycles to memorize the litany of factions. A GM can always override a default, but in the absence of a default, I felt stranded in 150 pages of lore.

The book gives a recommended starting score that brings in three competing factions and gives the player some choices about whom to trust and whom to target. I was intimidated at the thought of doing this because it introduces several important NPCs and multiple factions, and the scenario is still likely to require improvising believable within this complex setting of Doskvol. I had previously searched for tips about how to start a Blades game, and I had read an article by Justin Alexander about alternative starting situations. I liked the simplicity of his "Aim at a Clock" advice. The book provides long-term goals, with progress clocks, for each of the factions. Given that, Alexander recommends picking a faction whose goal plays into something the crew could do, then having them pick up a score on behalf of that faction. This felt more controllable, and so as the players were finishing up their crew details, I had already started pulling pieces together: the Red Sashes and the Lampblacks each want each other eliminated, the Lampblacks are pushing some new drugs in Red Sashes territory, and the Red Sashes want the players to stop the production of these drugs. This would advance the Red Sashes long-term goal to eliminate the Lampblacks, and it would give the upstart players a powerful ally. However, the players had already decided that their crew had paid off the Crows for their hunting grounds, which also introduces a little conflict, since the Red Sashes and the Crows both want control of the district. Also, while arson is hardly virtuous, I liked the idea of having my boys focus on stopping the manufacture of drugs rather than, say, assassinating a union leader.

Part of the art of running and playing Blades in the Dark is knowing how much planning is too much planning. It is so important that the designer put the planning constraints right onto the character playbooks: choose a plan and provide the detail. The crew knew where the drugs were being manufactured, but they knew they did not want to go in guns-blazing. They asked where the raw materials came from, which is a great question. In the moment, I decided that this was an Information Gathering move. That would make this the first dice roll of the afternoon, and in retrospect, I don't like it. Information Gathering is a roll without stakes. I would not have recognized how this put the wrong foot forward until reading Matthew Cmiel's thought-provoking (although hyperbolically titled) article, "The Unbearable Problem of Blades in the Dark." I like his heuristic that dice rolls should always be with stakes, but Information Gathering just gives you better results the higher you roll. Also, it wasn't clear to me if the fact that an action rating was being used for Information Gathering meant you could aid each other, take it as a group action, or push yourself. Looking back at it (in light of Cmiel's analysis and other reading), I think the intended answer is no. In any case, the players rolled, and they discovered that some materials come by carriage regularly and some come by ferry intermittently.

After having thought about it, I think this step could have been a small score of its own. It would have made a decent introductory mission to gather this information as part of a long-term plan to take down the factory. Indeed, this would have helped me meet my own goal of understanding the whole Blades in the Dark system, including downtime. As it is, we did not have time to wrap up the score or do the downtime actions since real-life obligations interrupted the session—including the need for the dinner table.

The crew decided that this would be a stealth mission, sneaking into the factory via the river, starting a fire, and then getting out. A few times, the players wanted to get into details such as whose gondola they could use, but I assured them that Blades wants us to get to the action. They made a standard engagement roll, and we picked up the action with them silently sliding their boat into the factory. I described an enclosed dock with several rowboats moored to it along with two thugs, chatting and smoking. The players and I had a good short discussion about how to use the game's rules to indicate the character's goal in a fiction-first approach, and they decided that their goal was to sneak past the guards and into the main body of the facility. They succeeded at this but with the complication that the factory floor was just beyond the crates. 

The players talked about trying to sidle up to the work tables and pretend to be laborers, and we discussed how a flashback could be used to set up an insider. Instead, they decided to go for broke, with the Leech tossing a vial of flammable oil into the midst of the work area while the Hound fired off a few rounds to cause a panic. I told them that this was a desperate move, and the Leech botched the roll. Here is where things started to go badly for our Shadows. The Leech badly failed the roll, getting all ones and twos. Since it was a desperate move, I described how he botched the throw and spilled the oil mostly on himself, inflicting Tier 3 Harm. This allowed me to introduce the rules for Resistance rolls as well as Armor, and by using both, he reduced the consequences to minor burns, Tier 1 Harm.

As part of my post-play reflection, I realize now that I violated one of the GM rules for Blades in the Dark: "Don't make the PCs look incompetent." I treated the roll like a critical failure in part because of the incredible number of ones that the player rolled. It was also funny, in a tragic sort of way. However, if I could do it all again, I would have had him throw the vial and have it hit something else, something dangerous to them but not immediately deadly, and certainly not something as incompetent as wandering onto a factory floor and setting himself on fire. Alternatively, since I had already established that the workers were dealing with open flames as part of the production process, they could have immediately followed a fire suppression protocol.

Their cover blown, the Hound decided to use his special ability to lay down suppressing fire to buy them some time. Unfortunately, despite having taken a Devil's Bargain that this action would anger the Crows who claimed control of the district, the Hound botched this roll, too. This was clearly a desperate move, and after accounting for armor, he took a bullet in the chest, Tier 2 Harm. 

At this, the crew decided to beat a hasty retreat while trying to start a fire near the docks. The Leech had plenty of fire oil to attempt this. They wanted to escape, but they also wanted to succeed, so I offered them another Devil's Bargain: they fling the fire oil recklessly and end up setting fire to the very boat they came in on. The Leech took it and got a partial success, so I described how this area went up in flames, but several Lampblacks from the work floor were charging at them, wielding pistols and clubs.

The crew charged at the two guards who were still standing by the rowboats, and the Hound incapacitated them with some quick shooting. The complication for this filled up the clock I had started for the Crows' tolerance. At this point, the big faction controlling the region was going to take action against our Shadows for causing such chaos. The crew was more concerned at this point about survival, so they tried to unmoor a boat and get out before the charging reinforcements arrived. You guessed it, they botched this roll, too, and both of them took a beating in the attempt (Tier 2 Harm). 

Faced with no other viable option, they undertook a desperate maneuver and dived into the water to swim away. This, dear reader, resulted in the first and only six that they rolled the entire afternoon. Despite their burns, bruises, and bullets, they swam out of the dock area and into the river. To me, the fiction demanded that some of the Lampblacks grabbed a boat and chase them, but I also realize that this was a place where we could have made their exact goal more precise in our discussion: did they think that their diving into the water was to get completely safe or to simply get out of the immediate scrap? I interpreted it as the latter, but we could have been more clear.

I started a four-slot clock for them to evade the Lampblacks and gave them one tick for swimming out into the river. The players thought their only choice was to swim for shore, and I pointed out that there were some other options, such as swimming out into the river, or pleading for their lives. That said, swimming for shore made the most sense in the moment, so they tried... and botched the roll. The Lampblacks in the rowboat got into the river and took a few shots at them. This was enough to max out the Leech's Stress, and he took the Trauma of being Unstable, which is completely understandable given how badly this mission had gone. 

Now we were in a strange situation. I had established a progress clock for the crew's escape, although it was down to just the Hound now. He said he would just swim for shore, but I recognize that this would violate the Blades GM advice, "Don't roll twice for the same thing." It felt like it would just be "Swim again, but better this time." That didn't feel right, so I retconned the previous situation so that the Lampblacks had brought their boat between the swimmers and the shore. Hence, the Hound could do something like swim out into the ocean (with his punctured lung and bruises) or do something else, like beg for his life. He chose the latter, and I don't blame him. I offered him a Devil's Bargain on this attempt to sway the ruffians: he could have an extra die on his attempt if they let out their bloodlust by killing the Leech. To my surprise, he took it. The Hound knew that they were both as good as dead anyway. It was better for one of them to live than for both of them to die. The Hound succeeded at a cost, so they beat him with Tier 3 Harm and left him for dead on the shore.

We completed neither the score wrap-up nor the downtime activities. Both seemed moot with half of the crew dead, and as I previously mentioned, there were real-world pressures to clean up the table and get one of the boys to a youth group meeting. I plan on reading through the rules regarding how to wrap up a score later today so that I can do a mental walkthrough of how it would go. If the three of us play again, I think we'll just start afresh with a better understanding of the world and the rules.

And I would play again. Despite the game going badly for the crew, we all enjoyed the experience. It was a little rocky at times when I had to reference rules or lore, but that's the way it goes when you learn a new system. Every review of Blades that I have read says that you have to play several sessions before you really get into its way of playing. Although I would play again, I do not currently have plans to play again. I think it would be great fun to play with an adult group with beer and snacks, but getting a bunch of fathers together for a game night is already a desperate move where the dice are loaded. In the meantime, my boys and I got to share a fun afternoon together, and now they have a story to tell about what happens to those who turn to a life of crime.

Representing character damage through loss of skills and equipment

I was surprised to come across two recent tabletop RPGs that both eschew "hit points" as a means of representing character damage: Lester Burton's Grok?! and Runehammer's Crown and Skull. Neither cites the other nor any common inspiration, which makes me think that there's an interesting games history project hiding in here: is there a common ancestor or is it convergent evolution?

In Grok?!, the player has seven resource slots that can hold items. When a character suffers duress, there are a few possible outcomes. The player may choose to create, remove, or change one of their items, or they may take a condition that uses up a resource slot. These are intended to be temporary, but if a character has no more slots, then the character is incapacitated and the condition instead becomes a permanent trait. A player may also voluntarily add conditions to their character in order to roll additional dice after failing a check. Grok?! is clearly a story-focused game, using an elegant universal resolution system that invites creativity and narration.

Crown and Skull has an intricate point-based character-creation system in which players determine a character's skills and gear. Taking damage involves crossing off skills and gear, which is temporary, and sometimes destroying gear, which is permanent. Damage is classified by whether it targets skills, equipment, or both, and it is further classified by whether it is a random target or whether players choose. Runehammer describes this as an attrition system, and it's easy to see how it invites more interesting narration than "You lose five hit points." Crown and Skull is presented as a game that the players themselves get better at, learning more about it by playing it. Part of the challenge of the game is learning to create and manage a versatile, robust, survivable character.

I have played a lot of CRPGs, but I don't remember ever seeing a system like this—one where damage is exclusively represented by the temporary or permanent loss of gear or skills. It makes me wonder how well such a design could be adapted into a video game. Could such a system be adapted into a satisfying video game experience, or are these formal systems too strongly coupled with the improvisational storytelling of tabletop games?

The Endless Storm of Dagger Mountain: A short adventure game that is Powered by the Apocalypse

Introduction and background

Last night, I released a new game into the wild: The Endless Storm of Dagger Mountain. I submitted it to Crossroads Jam 2024, a statewide game jam sponsored by the Indiana Gamedevs community. 

This game scratches a creative itch that I've had for over two years: what happens when you apply Apocalypse World style rules in a digital game? I've had this as a component of a few different design explorations, none of which bore any fruit—sometimes because they weren't fun and sometimes because their scope exploded. In fact, in May, I started work on a project that was growing too large, and it included PbtA elements. By the last week of May, I had put that side project to rest. I decided that I could use Crossroads Jam as an excuse to isolate just this single design idea—digital PbtA—and package it up into a jam-sized game. Readers may be interested in looking at my previous exploration of tabletop PbtA, which took the form of Kapow! The Campy Superhero Role-Playing Game. I also wrote an essay comparing the math of PbtA and d20 systems.

I was a little disappointed that the theme "severe weather" won the polling on the Indy Gamedevs Discord. Since this is the first Crossroads Jam, it seemed like a great opportunity to highlight something positive about the state. You know, like corn. More seriously, there are a lot of great things about Indiana, including globally-recognized events like the Indianapolis 500. And corn. But I digress, and others preferred "severe weather." I had been wanting to explore some pulp fantasy writing a la Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, which I read a few years ago. This presented a good opportunity: a lone, stoic hero, making a long journey up to the top of a mountain where dark magic has brought about the destruction of the innocent.

Game and Narrative Design

Most of the writing is really just a first draft. Despite years of gamedev, I have done barely any game writing. It felt good to get my hands dirty and create enough content to carry the gameplay. I estimate I spent about 15 hours just writing content for a game that takes a few minutes to play. The writing was enjoyable, but especially as I got tired, I couldn't shake the feeling that much of the text was low stakes. Each dice check has at least three paths—succeed, succeed at a cost, and fail—and I tried to keep them equally interesting. I do not spend a lot of time with interactive fiction, but I quickly ran right into the same problem that any narrative designer has: with chance or with agency comes the loss of authorial control. There are a few specific scenes in the game that I would like to spend more time on, to make the story more compelling and to evoke Howard more strongly.

I was not able to pull in all of the tabletop inspiration that I originally wanted. In tabletop games, I love the idea of the Countdown Clock or what Runehammer calls Timers. A simple timer that ticks down becomes a source of tension for the player and, in the system, it's another formal element to manipulate. In my first draft of Dagger Mountain, I had a timer that, if it ran out, would cause the game to end before the player could summit the mountain. This worked well as a penalty, especially when asking the player to choose between attribute reduction and advancing the timer. However, the game ended up being too short to make the timer meaningful. In fact, one of the problems that inspired me to think about removing the timer was the trouble of visually representing a "timer" as something with only two or three units. I could not reasonably balance it and give it a significant value: a timer with two clicks feels more like it's depleting some other resource rather than feeling like time.

The other common PbtA element that I didn't add was what Apocalypse World calls "reading a sitch." The idea here is that a player can spend an action trying to understand a situation, where success or partial success determines how many questions they can ask about it. Systematically, this is simple: I could have a preconstructed list of questions and answers, and these could provide lore and setting information. As I got into building the narrative, this felt like it would not have a good return on investment: every other decision produced changes in the world state, such as modifications to attributes, and I didn't want "reading the sitch" to be a wellspring of mechanical benefits. It would be relatively easy to add this into my software since it was in mind from the beginning, but it did not find its way into this project.

Speaking of attributes, I still have something of a pipe dream that one could make an RPG attribute system that is consistent with Thomistic philosophy. Consider that the legacy of Dungeons & Dragons presents a sort of dualism, that the mind and the body are separate. Yet, as confirmed by a recent conversation with a weight-lifting friend of mine, the two must work together: it's not clear that Strength (as physical might) and Wisdom (as willpower) are independent variables, for example. I couldn't find a way to distill a more Aristotelian view of the human person into three or four attributes, but reviewing Apocalypse World's attributes, I was reminded that they describe how one does something rather than what someone is. That's a great hook for future design work. In the meantime, for this project, I made a list of actions that I wanted the player to perform, knowing the genre and setting, and I categorized these into the three attributes that are in Dagger Mountain: bold, determined, and savvy. I admit that there are a few stretches in the game where penalties might be hard to classify in these ways, but I will be curious to hear what players think about them as a trio.

Technical Considerations

Inspired by Knights of San Francisco and the beauty of Dart, I started writing Dagger Mountain in Flutter. It's a beautiful way to write applications, but there's a significant difference between declarative and imperative UI programming, and I find that I stutter a bit when I hop between them. I set up the essential architecture and was enjoying myself until I tried to implement some UI features, specifically the scrolling list of text and buttons along with placeholder animations. There is a lot of typing required, animations were hard to debug, and it wasn't always obvious where my problems came from. I am sure there was a lot to learn from the endeavor, but I was on a deadline and wanted to get things up and running quickly. In transitioning back to the comfort of Godot Engine, I realized something: while dart's asynchronous programming features are wonderfully expressive, there is a real power in GDScript's simple signal syntax. It is hard to get more terse than that, although it comes at the cost of not having explicit control over things like Futures. I returned to Godot Engine, re-creating everything I had written in dart in very little time. With the design decisions made, I just had to interpret it in the new environment and type it up.

I spent too much time in Godot Engine adding dynamic font resizing. I knew I wanted the game to run comfortably on a desktop or mobile browser, and giving the player control of font size seemed the best way to do this. It required a lot of shenanigans with theme overrides, and as I added more visual elements such as the visible dice, it got more and more convoluted. Near the end of development, I just gutted this feature from the play experience and put a configuration on the main menu, which allowed me to just fiddle with the values in the main theme rather than deal with distributed theme overrides. What really irked me was when I started working on deployment, realizing that the cleanest solution for the player would be to use the browser's built-in font rendering and resizing... the way that a Flutter app would have done. Sigh.

Here are a few summary observations along these lines. Flutter is great for its static typing, robust asynchronous programming support, autoformatting, built-in browser font resizing support, spread operator, null safety, and most importantly, refactoring support. Godot Engine clearly wins on terseness of signals and tweens and the ability to rapidly build and test scenes independently of each other. To clarify that last point, I regularly decompose my Godot Engine programs into scenes that I can run and configure by themselves, confident then in how they will work when instantiated as part of a larger system. In Flutter, I wish I could easily say, "Spin up one of these widgets by itself and let me tinker with it," but I have not found anything that comes close to Godot Engine's rapid development support this way.

Incidentally, I did briefly consider other options than writing my own engine. I am intrigued particularly by ink, which I have never used. I was hesitant to jump into something with such a different syntax, although I am sure I could learn a lot from it, too. What killed the deal for me though was that it wasn't clear to me that I could easily plug in the PbtA aspects that I wanted. I discovered a Godot Engine integration, so perhaps I will investigate that later this summer. It wasn't until my family was testing the game that one of them mentioned Dialogic, which I haven't used since Godot 3.x. I haven't looked at it to see if it could have been modded for my purpose. However, writing for Dagger Mountain made me appreciate why narrative designers need better tools than just piles of scripts and a notebook sketch.

Dagger Mountain is my first released game that uses an event queue to isolate the game rules from the interface. I have tinkered with this pattern in several abandoned projects. Two summers ago, I spent a lot of time studying egamebook and its architecture, and I learned a lot from it even though that particular summer project was never released. 

My approach separates the software into three parts. The module is the content of the adventure itself, the story of Dagger Mountain. Each scene in Dagger Mountain is a GDScript file that is given a reference to an Adventure object. The next part is the rules engine, which is manifest in an Adventure object. The scene is given a reference to an Adventure object, and the module tells it to do things like show text, modify attributes, or present a series of choices to the player. Internally, the rules engine generates events to correspond to these interactions, posting them to the event queue. The final part is the presentation layer, which subscribes to the event queue. It dequeues events, processes them, and then notifies the rules engine when it is complete. The code is all free, so feel free to look at the prelude scene for an example of how this works.

I decided early in the project that I would repurpose GDScript as my narrative scripting language rather than create an independent data format that would be interpreted. The primary reason for this decision was the pressures of time: GDScript is already a scripting language, so using its support for functions and conditionals would be faster than writing my own. This is true, but I hadn't considered all of the costs at the time. The game runs through function calls in the module layer, which is nice for terseness but actually makes it hard to test in a modular fashion. I am sure that if I had used TDD, I would have had a more testable architecture. I would much rather have test coverage of the whole state space of the game; instead, I have to hope that my manual testing was adequate.

I did add integration tests near the end because of the need to await basically every call in the module layer. Missing a single instance will break the player experience. I wrote a test that reads through the module layer and looks for cases where await is missing. It took a little time get the test working, but it immediately found a case that I had missed, so that was worthwhile.

Conclusions

I enjoyed building The Endless Storm of Dagger Mountain, and I hope you enjoy playing it. I think I will go and tweak some of that text with this morning's remaining coffee. Despite its small scope and shortcomings, I feel good about having built it. Not only does it explore digital PbtA in a way that I've been imagining for a few years, it also gave me an opportunity to do some creative writing and build more empathy for narrative designers. 

Regarding digital PbtA, I think the jury is still out, since for every promise it has, it comes at the cost of dramatic increase in content creation costs. For interactive fiction, using PbtA resolution requires writing an enormous amount of text, much of which will never been seen my players. It is, of course, not the same feeling as the give and take of a tabletop RPG. However, I can see opportunities for using this resolution system if there were more supporting systems. In a larger game, for example, one could put back in "reading the sitch" style actions that give clues to puzzles. I prefer losing attribute points over the abstraction of hit points, particularly for a narrative-focused game, but I think this would benefit from more explicit representation. Gaining statuses like "confused" or "twisted ankle" would help carry the narrative forward, but then these would be most meaningful if worked into the other systems or stories of the game. All that being said, I appreciate how the PbtA elements feel more like a description of a whole human person than do hit points, armor classes, and the six classic attributes.

Thanks for reading. Let me know what you think of the game!

An evening with Microscope

I heard about Microscope from Ben Robbins' interview on Justin Gary's podcast. It is a game about creating a history: the rules guide the players in the collaborative creation of the periods and events that make up a historical arc. I became intrigued, and it seemed like the kind of game one would have to play to follow a conversation about it. I borrowed a copy of the rulebook and convinced my wife and two elder sons to try it out with me.

The rulebook gives specific advice on how to introduce the game, and I appreciated being able to follow the script. Our first decision was the overall theme of the history, but we could not settle on one that we all liked. We agreed to take the first one of three that were recommended for players like us who weren't sure how to start: three nations are united as a single empire.

Our next step was to bookend history. One of my sons recommended that the end of the history should be that three nations, each on the back of a turtle, come together under one emperor. We then came up with the idea that at the beginning of history, there was one nation, on the back of the Great Mother Turtle, but she died, and the nation divided onto the backs of her three children.

As we got into the game, we created the history of three turtle-nations who lived in harmony until a blight caused scarcity of Turtle Orchids—the only food eaten by the giant turtles. The three turtle-nations separated to search for new sources, and their cultures evolved due to the different environments under which they found themselves. We never got into the details of how the turtle-nations came back together after this separation, especially not how they resolved religious differences that emerged, but we know they did, and that it was positive for them.

There were some rocky spots, as to be expected in any first play of an RPG where only one person has read the rules. The last page of the rulebook is a convenient rules summary, but Robbins has not provided this as a downloadable player aid. I feel like it would have helped the players—including me—keep some of the terminology and sequencing right. 

One scene did not go particularly well. Scenes answer particular questions in history, and this one was supposed to answer the question, "What monsters attacked Medium Turtle that caused the society to become more militaristic?" It was only our third played scene, and we jumped into it with gusto. It didn't seem to go anywhere, though, as no one roleplayed an answer that satisfied the question. At one point, I just put the kibosh on the scene, suggesting that the answer seemed to be that we didn't know. This was a little unsatisfying, but so was the scene at that point. 

I did some work afterward to better understand the rules for played scenes. The introductory advice that we followed had us start with a played scene, and that one had gone well. In re-reading that portion of the rulebook, though, I was reminded that playing the scene is a combination of narrative and dialogue. We had only been engaging in dialogue, and if I were to teach the game again, I would make sure to open a scene by using both. We also were too light with setting the stage, which is an explicit part of playing a scene: while we had established who and where we were, we had not established what we all knew and what happened prior. 

I came across two interesting resources during my post-play research. One is this rules cheat sheet created by Nicole van der Hoeven. It may be a good way to introduce someone to the game, but it's a great summary of the rules. Reading it provided a more convenient reminder about the core rules over re-reading the book itself, since the book necessarily combines rules and exposition. Seeing the topic list on van der Hoeven's site, I think I may spend some more time exploring her notes on other topics as well.

The other interesting resource I found was a recent blog post by Robbins himself. It presents alternate rules for scenes which I am sure would have given us a better experience even in our first play. Among the benefits of the revision is that it eliminates the need for "push" rules. These are the rules that allow players, during a played scene, to push back on something that someone has introduced into the world. They seemed necessary but secondary in the book, containing more details than I could hold in memory when teaching the game. They were to be deployed in reaction to play, which also meant that I did not want to review them while we were actually in the game. I am not just happy with the simplification of the scene rules, but I am also chuffed to see a designer improving a game he published over ten years ago.

In summary, I enjoyed my first play of Microscope, and I would like to play again, now having a better understanding of the rules and a handy revision thereof.  If I were teaching my game design class in Fall, I would likely bring this in as an example of an RPG. In an era where all of my students are at least aware of Dungeons & Dragons, it would be a great example of how "role-playing game" is bigger than that.

Nine-year-old notes about The Burning Wheel

Opening up Facebook this morning, I found a "Facebook Memory" from nine years ago in which I shared my reaction to having read The Burning Wheel. I'm glad I read it, but the odds that I would ever find it again on Facebook are pretty low, so I am copying the post here.

I finished reading The Burning Wheel, and it is a very interesting system. I hope to play a game of it someday, but even without playing, it was enlightening to read about this cult-favorite system. Thinking back on it, I think the most important piece is one of the most mundane elements, but something that can be brought into many interactive storytelling scenarios. When a player wants to act, he must identify his intent first, and only afterward to identify his task. The intent is the goal, the intended outcome, the reason for doing anything, and it ties into the systems' articulation of Beliefs. The task, then, is what the player actually does, and it is the task that is tested with dice and rules.

I can imagine how this would help a table of friends understand who the other characters are. In many settings, I have seen (or engaged in) players describing only what players are doing, but not why. The result is that other players have to guess at motives, infer what characters are about. This is the nature of social reality outside of the game, and it takes time to get to know people and their motives and beliefs. By making these explicit in the game, we model the idea that characters can get to know each other, and that we players are separate from them. That is, the players can get on with telling a good story because they understand more than just what is in their own character's head.

This works into another Burning Wheel rule, which is that the outcome of any die roll is articulated prior to the roll's being made. Hindsight is golden, but this strikes me as an essential rule for handling characters' social skills. Just as "hit the target with my sword" is the (potentially unstated) effect of succeeding at an attack roll, there should be a similar established context before a social roll. For example, "If you succeed, you convince the Duke to lend you his magic sword." Getting that explicit means that appropriate situation modifiers can be established. This, too, ties into BW's "Let it ride" rule, which says that once the dice have been cast, there's no do-overs in the same situation, whether it's social or combat. If you didn't convince the Duke, you didn't convince him---tell an interesting story about it and move on.

I have not played this RPG in the intervening nine years. 

A Review of Scotty McFarland's EZD6 RPG

Gareth Barrett publicly claimed that Scotty McFarland's EZD6 is the "greatest RPG ever written." That's quite a claim, and he makes it without equivocation. While it's impossible that he has read all RPGs, I'm sure he has read a lot, and he makes specific comparison to some that I am familiar with, including Dungeon Crawl Classics, Dungeon World, Index Card RPG, and The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen. He is comparing this newcomer to some of the most lauded and recognized fantasy role-playing games, and this was enough for me to pick up a copy of EZD6 for myself.

The rulebook was a breezy read. The rules of the game are simple, and they presented in a mostly straightforward way. However, I was quickly disappointed in the quality of the book itself. The presentation is scattershot, with technical terms used before they are defined. The writing is functional but inelegant. The result is that the book feels like a rough draft that should have gone out to external playtesters. The book is published by Runehammer, whose own ICRPG went through several rounds of significant editing after its initial release. That's a great benefit of digital publishing, but I don't get the impression that EZD6 is due for this kind of maintenance; indeed, perusing YouTube comments, I see instead that McFarland is currently working on supplements for separate sale.

Particular mention should be made of the strained metaphors. The book insists that what other systems call "characters" are, in EZD6, called "Pushers and Shovers." That phrase hardly rolls of the tongue, and throughout the book, they are referenced regularly as "characters." There's a good reason to do this: they are characters, as agents in a story. Similarly, the book insists that what most systems would call a gamemaster is a "Rabble Rouser." This term doesn't have the right connotation and so it comes across as a sloppy attempt at novelty. You have a "hero die" that is not a die at all but a token you exchange for a re-roll. The worst offense is the use of "Strikes" to denote health or hit points. "Three strikes and you're out" is an easy and memorable concept. The problem is that characters have three strikes, and when you get hit, you lose a strike. You're "out" when you have no strikes. The metaphor is upside-down. This might be a pet peeve, but I feel like the icing on the cutesy wordplay is the gratuitous use of "k" in the word "magick." It puts the "ick" in magic.

The unprofessional editing and poor use of language is enough for me to say that this is not the greatest RPG book ever written. (For exemplars of "bookness," check out Paul Czege's The Clay that Woke or the aforementioned Baron Munchhausen by James Wallis.) An RPG book is not just a book, though, and the systems of EZD6 are where it shines.

The core system is clear: roll a d6 and beat a target number, usually 3. Situations may get you a "bane" or a "boon" in a manner similar to D&D 5e's disadvantage and advantage system. The math and adjudication are much simpler here, and it's not clear to me that anything is lost in the coarse grain. That is, I don't think it matters that taking a -2 on a d20 gives a 10% difference in outcome whereas having a +1 target on a d6 is a 16% difference: the human brain is too bad at statistics for this to really matter. The real value here (as Barrett points out) is the karma system. Players start with three karma, and they earn karma on each failed roll. Karma can be spent to improve any die roll on a point-per-pip basis. This works very well with the d6 system: each failure means, in a sense, you're banking a 16% chance to succeed at something later. It's simple, it takes some sting out of failure, and it adds up even in a short adventure. It also feels heroic in the narrative. This kind of system would not work with a d20 system because the opportunities and impact would be diffuse.

Given the elegance of this core system, I was surprised that the magic rules muddied it up. I agree with McFarland's stated design goal that magic should, by definition, feel different. I think D&D has always dropped the ball here but that Dungeon Crawl Classics has a wonderful interpretation. In EZD6, you basically roll some dice against some other dice and get what you want, and you can use your hero die but not your karma, among some other restrictions. This system does succeed at feeling different from the rest of the game, but it falls short of feeling dangerous and mysterious. The best contribution here is not the resolution system but the division of magic into circles of sorcery. A spellcaster can come up with any effect they can imagine, within the gamemaster's adjudication, as long as it is within one of their known circles. This is an important restriction on a free-form magic system, preventing the spellcaster from outshining all the other classes.

One of my greatest disappointments with the EZD6 book is that it does not include any scenarios or characters. There's nothing you can use out of the box. Compare this to ICRPG from the same publisher: it includes "trials," which are small but compelling scenarios designed to expose new players and GMs to the rules, as well as sample adventures. 

For my trial, then, I put together a short three-encounter adventure for my family: my wife and my four sons, ages 7 to 15. Not all of them like tabletop roleplaying games, but they were all willing to join in for a one-shot. My eldest son helped everyone make characters while I designed the quest. I decided to pick something that would highlight some of the miniatures we recently painted together—our first batch of mobs from Massive Darkness 2. (Expect a blog post about that once they're all done.) The party were called upon to eliminate a mysterious evil from a haunted cemetery. This involved battling gargoyles, skeletons, cultists, and a summoned demon. As always, I found myself deploying tricks from ICRPG in designing the scenario, particularly the inclusion of "Timers, Threats, and Treats." Everyone enjoyed the game, especially the karma system. We did not get much experience with the magic(k) system since the lone spellcaster only cast one spell, which was to blind the chanting cultists. This didn't really do anything since they were already in a trance. I have to wonder if his own imagination about how to use magic stunted by his reading too many RPG rulebooks that codify spells.

Is EZD6 the best RPG ever written? No. But it is pretty good. Playing this game with my family was a lot smoother than ICRPG or Dungeon Crawl Classics, and it seemed to be equally enjoyable by both the older and younger crowd. I recommend it as a rules-light game for those who want to emphasize narrative but still be in a GM-crafted D&D-style adventure. Rather than compare it to something crunchy like Apocalypse World, I think it would be better to compare it to FATE, and perhaps that's something I can do later this summer. However, if what you really want is a collection of advice about how to run a game, I maintain that Index Card RPG is still the best resource available, even if you don't ever use the systems it presents.

(Did you know I released a free PbtA tabletop roleplaying game about campy superhero adventures? It's called Kapow! and you can read about it here. I ran into some folks at Origins who have a completely different game out called Kapow!, but I can't blame them. It's a good name.)

Family Adventures with Dungeon Crawl Classics, Part 2: Reflection, Critique, and Future Directions

(This post is part 2 in a series about playing Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG with my family. Read Part 1 here.)

Playing through "The Old God's Return" was the longest RPG series that my family has played to date. As I mentioned above, this is partly due to the two-hour cap on session duration, which I think worked well for us. There were certainly some points where I was willing to go a bit further, but given the range of age and experience, I will call this a successful move. It helped that it was one continuous module, with a coherent beginning, middle, and end. This took a lot of pressure off of me compared to my experience with other games like ICRPG, Fate, and PDQ, where I had to do the additional prep work of making a story. 

One concrete lesson I learned is neither original nor particularly insightful, but I will record it here. I really should have copied essential material from the module into my little notebook, such as the tontuu's stat blocks. This advice is given by basically every RPG pundit on YouTube, but the truth is that I haven't run someone else's module in a long time. The sometimes month-long gap between sessions would have also meant that my notes would have been a good refresher of the essentials, rather than having to re-read the module as prep each time.

DCC RPG manifests the OSR aesthetic. The world is dangerous, and the heroes are pressed up against it. I understand the appeal of such systems, and I could see myself really enjoying a continuous campaign with players who understand that they should not get too attached to their characters. Regardless, conversations with my wife between sessions made me realize that there is a gap in the design. When facing a dangerous world, good luck is needed, but one would hope that wit counts for something. However, there were almost no points in the game where cleverness was rewarded: more often, it was just a matter of rolling dice. 

I would like to explore that in a bit more detail, drawing upon our experience with "The Old God's Return." It was a good idea for Seth to scout the area around the top of the floating glacier, but he failed the roll, so it was fruitless. The players know that he failed the roll, and that there was nothing they could do except move forward and hope, which led to Seth's first fall. DCC RPG has no concept of failing forward as one finds in games like Dungeon World. Fail-forward strikes me as a much better way to reward players for cleverness and creativity, not to mention narrative-centered moves such as roleplaying a situation to the point of personal danger. Later, when facing the wall of rubble, Seth again decided to scout, but this time he made the rolls, and it led to that cinematic ambush. When the dice are with you, it works, but when they are not, it can feel like punishment.

One could say "That's just the OSR aesthetic" and be only partially right because of one particular and excellent rule: the fighter's Mighty Deed of Arms. Whereas the other classes have a laundry list of abilities, the fighter has essentially just this one, but it is a doozy. On any attack roll, the fighter can try to accomplish some mighty deed, such as tripping the opponent, knocking away a barbarian's axe, or grabbing the magic chalice out of the sorcerer's hands. It's a strangely narrative moment in an otherwise statistical game. This mechanism accomplishes the stated design goal of differentiating the fighter from the other classes, which I consider a great success over the earlier D&D distinction, which was basically that fighters have bigger numbers.

Mighty Deeds of Arms introduces a contrast that highlights the lack of robustness in the rest of the system. The fighter is the only one who can use the environment to his advantage in combat, and while it's fun to be the thief who finds the trap, that happens rarely, and there's a lot of time in combat. Put another way, it may be more consistent for the fighters to just have bigger numbers. DCC RPG has no concept of 5e-style advantage or ICRPG-style hero coins: there is no mechanical way to encourage players to do something contextually interesting, so it boils down to who rolls well. By way of comparison, it's worth looking at Phoenix Point: Dawn Command, which had the best environmental interaction system I have ever seen. For each scene, it provides a list of items from the description that can be used to the players' advantage, but each thing can only be used once, akin to boosts in Fate.

Playing games like DCC RPG and PbtA games, players are often choosing from a menu of options. With DCC RPG in particular, there is a sense that if it's not on the menu, it cannot be done. This is not technically true, of course, in that a good DM will come up with a reasonable, systemically-appropriate way to handle special cases, but keep in mind that I am playing with a broad range of ages. I already mentioned how Joe the Cleric's player was clearly overwhelmed by the number of things he could do, and enough time passed between each session that almost nobody could remember how to read their own character sheets. An anxiety manifests in my wife, who claims that the family "is not good at" these games; as I have written about before, I think this is a sort of UX problem, where the system does not present itself as learnable. This came up in the final battle with Tjaptar, for example. When Joe commanded the Old God to flee into the woods, my wife started looking for interesting things that her character could do... but the only thing she could do was go attack the Big Bad, which is a false choice since it's the only one. Indeed, it's slightly worse than that: the party had earlier learned that Tjaptar's power was centered in his antlers, and that they should attack those. This meant that every shot had to be a called shot at -4, which for the party meant a success only on a natural 20, or, with about a 7% chance and restricted only to fighters, a successful mighty deed. The choice becomes really less than meaningful then: do you shoot Tjaptar in the regular way and have nothing good happen, or do you take a crippling penalty? You can see why morale was low at the end of the penultimate session.

Now, of course, I could have put a mystical amulet on the altar in the back of the room that was a nexus for Tjaptar's powers, and foreshadowed its existence, and given her the option of getting Joe to cleanse the evil altar... but now I'm doing the work of writing a module rather than the much easier work of running a module. Once again, if a group wanted exactly this kind of OSR experience, then more power to them, but looking at it as a designers and as someone playing with my family, I am left hungry.

My family has been talking some about the experience, and no one is clamoring for more DCC RPG right now. My wife insists that she does not like dice, although as the session report indicates, she was certainly the most emotionally responsive to their fickleness, the first to moan at a 1 and the first to squeal on a 20. I suppose one does not have to like that feeling, but an outsider watching the game would think it was her favorite part. Regardless, our conversations brought us back to more narrative-first games, and Fate in particular. I played a fun ad hoc session of Fate with the older two boys which I think they were excited to continue, but for which I ran out of steam. The whole family played one session of Fate together with a setting that only resonated to a few of us. In both cases, I feel like I was an amateur at running the game, moving too slowly through things that could have been left on the cutting-room floor. I was also improvising without much direction, while trying to keep the needs of the family in mind.

I think our next move will be to try Fate again, but with a few specific constraints. One will be to limit the duration of the game, which will be good for all of us—maybe especially me, so that my creative juices do not run dry. I will need to have in front of me a copy of the players' character sheets, because I realized that it was too much to try to remember their aspects from across the table. Another constraint will be to use a familiar setting. Our previous family game of Fate was about exploring an unfamiliar planet with a B-grade sci fi aesthetic. However, because the genre and setting were unfamiliar, most of the players had little sense of what they could do in that environment. Instead of introducing a fantastic new environment, we will definitely be choosing settings that all the family can understand. Fortunately, they read a lot, and so there are a lot of options. Unfortunately, our conversations have not led us to one that everyone is equally excited about. Part of me wants to do a medieval fantasy setting just because I have all these excellent miniatures that could be used with zone rules, and I know the boys can draw on their experience watching classics like Hawk the Slayer or the MST3K riffing of Cave Dwellers. On the other hand, I find myself thinking about Sherlock Holmes' Victorian London or Indiana Jones and wondering whether these can be laced with some fantastic elements and secret societies. I think if we focus on a one-off, then there won't be pressure to saturate the world, and we can see where that takes us.