The Urge to Tinker

The clarification revision of Flying Swordsmen 2E is nearly done, though I haven't had a ton of time to work on it in the past week or so. I've been busy with work, family, and other duties, including organizing our local Busan Tabletop Gaming Convention (tentatively scheduled for Sunday, Nov. 30). More on that in a future post. 

Today, well, since yesterday really, I've had the bug to stop working on FS2E, and start a new project. Bad idea, I know. But Gamer ADD isn't just linked to wanting to run new campaigns and try new game systems. It has an effect on game design motivation as well. 

That new project? Well, it's actually an idea I've had in the back of my head for some time now. But my brain is telling me now is the time to work on it. And no, it's not the Castlevania megadungeon! I've got an odd sudden urge to try and reverse engineer an OSR version of d20 Modern. 

By that, I don't just mean take BX or AD&D or OD&D and add guns and cars and electronics. I want to take the ability score centered Base Class/specialized Advanced Class system of d20 Modern and peel away the skills, the feats, and limit the talents. I want to make something that has similar, but simpler, character creation, but gives the freedom to mix classes and backgrounds to be able to emulate nearly any contemporary (or recent past/near future) type of character. 

I don't think it would be that hard. I would keep some "skills" in the game, but they would be more like demi-human abilities or Thief skills in BX/BECMI. They'd be set by your Background and Class(es), and the Class granted ones would likely improve as you level. The Talents would be simplified, and would be used to specialize in the things that each class does normally. 

I know that Everyday Heroes gave d20 Modern the 5E treatment, updating it to play like the currently published version of D&D. I'd like to do the same, only going the opposite direction: a d20 Modern game that plays like old school D&D. 

I'll try to hold off on that urge for now. I do want to get this revision to Flying Swordsmen done, and then suspend my TS&R campaign for a month or two to play test it. Once that's done, maybe this OSR Modern idea can take up space in my brain. Either that, or (as some people have requested), make an "Arabian Nights" expansion to Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins. 

And thinking about it, would this OSR Modern game be an expansion to TS&R as well? I don't see why it couldn't. That would simplify many things for me on the design end.  

My Next Sci-Fi Campaign

I don't know if it would be Star Frontiers, Stars Without Number, or something else (never played Traveller...maybe I should give it a try?), but this galactic map would work well for whatever sci-fi game I decide to run if I ever wind down the Star Wars game. 

Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars

Yesterday, I met with Justin and a guy we met on the TTRPG in Korea Discord group to play Zone Wars, a tactical tabletop skirmish game based on the Mutant Year Zero RPG. Peter wanted to get some war gaming in over the long Chuseok holiday. Sandwiched between National Foundation Day on Friday the 3rd and Hangeul Day (Korean written characters get a holiday...yeah, a day to help prevent Koreans from overworking) on the 9th, we've got an entire week off, 10 days in a row for people who can take the 10th as a holiday. 

Free League link

Board Game Geek link 

The game plays pretty similarly to Stargrave, which my son and I played with Justin a while back. I thought I'd posted about that game here, but apparently I didn't. Both games have players managing a tactical team across the "board" to defeat the other teams or collect enough loot to win. 

When we played Stargrave, I quickly realized that the loot collection was the key to winning, so getting loot and getting my figures off the board was my strategy. And it worked. 

Zone Wars has a similar strategy. There are artifact tokens across the board (it's a post-apoc setting, after all) that score victory points. But you also get points for defeating other players' figures.  To cut to the chase, Peter used my strategy from the Stargrave game, while Justin and I were more into duking things out. Peter won. 

The initial set-up. I'm yellow, Peter is blue, Justin is green.

The game has four factions (two in the base game, two in the expansion): mutant humans and mutant animals (base), androids and psychers (expansion). There are five characters/figures for each faction, but you have to choose three of them for your team (at least for the first scenario that we played). 

Justin's dudes teamed up on my gatherer, and stole his loot.

Each comes with starting equipment and mutations set, but with a bonus random mutation. Justin took the mutant animal team, I took the mutant human team, and Peter played as the android team. And we all seemed to take one tough/melee figure, one ranged expert figure, and one balanced figure. I'm not sure about the other factions, but the two I left behind were another ranged expert and another balanced figure.

My melee guy takes out Peter's sniper just before 30-50 feral hogs rampage through me!

The game has a lot more randomness than Stargrave. Not only do you roll dice for actions, but the initiative is done by pulling chits from a bag. There's one chit per figure, and four Zone chits, which trigger events. And there's a ticking time bomb in the form of Trigger events that scale up the acid rain which will kill anyone still on the board once four have been drawn. 

Land Shark! (unfortunately, no one was eaten)

The random mutations and events, and the ability to not only switch factions but experiment with different teams within your faction should add to replayability, but will also make the game take a little longer to really sus out the best strategies for each faction/team composition. There's obviously an optimal strategy of grabbing loot and running over fighting (due to the built in time limit of acid rain), but where's the fun in that time after time? 

My runner recovered and knocked out Justin's dudes with his mutation...but my sniper was downed.

Anyway, we're planning to meet again in a few weeks, hopefully with a fourth player if we can find one, to play it again. Peter also seems interested in trying Stargrave or Frostgrave, so we may try one of those out as well in the near future.  

A robot named Bender grabbed a bunch of loot and made it off the board before the acid rain fell. Fitting.

 

October Means Castlevania

 Last month, I replayed Castlevania Symphony of the Night. I'll probably replay a few more CV games over the course of this month, as we head towards Halloween. And of course, as I've mentioned before, some day I want to create a Castlevania megadungeon and run that campaign. I've made two abortive attempts at it in the past, and way way back, when I finally made my version of The Haunted Keep in Karameikos (BECMI Known World), the dungeon was heavily inspired by Castlevania. But it wasn't a big, sprawling, exploration-focused megadungeon. It was really pretty railroady looking over it these days.

While on my evening walk with my 11yo the other night, we were talking a bit about gaming (computer and table top), and he was asking about my SotN replay. I finished it off last weekend (I took a trip to Istanbul, maybe more on that in a future post). And I mentioned I'd like to run a D&D Castlevania game some day. But he suggested I should run it not with D&D but with d6 System. 

That's something I hadn't considered before. Besides D&D, I have considered RetroPhaze, the OSR game designed to emulate 8-bit and 16-bit JRPGs as the game engine. I think it might make a decent fit for the game. I've also considered modifying d20 Modern/d20 Past for the game. But honestly, I don't need to get back into the headache of running the 3E-era d20 system again. 

d6 System may be easy to run, but as I was saying in my previous post, one thing it (and many other games) lack is a good step-by-step procedural system for managing exploration. Star Wars d6 assumed you'd be running the game almost like an interactive movie, jumping from scene to scene. And while that would work if I wanted to emulate some of the NES CV games (and various remakes), if I want something like SotN, where exploration of the environment leads to hidden treasures and access to new areas, D&D is still the way to go. 

Or port some of those systems into d6, something I could do. I did it with 5E, and more or less it worked. I quit running 5E mostly because it's too focused on the simple core mechanic but with way too many exception-based special abilities. 

If I ever do this, it will still likely be old school D&D based. The monsters, character types, spells, mechanics, etc. are all there. I'd be going through and removing some options from what exists, rather than adding in new stuff that isn't there to begin with. That's always a lot easier to do. 

This is making me reconsider my revision to the first draft of Flying Swordsmen 2E. I've been going through it and streamlining the presentation. Simplifying my wording. Making the martial arts techniques simpler and easier to understand and hopefully implement. I'm nearly through the techniques, having about half of the Ku (black magic) techniques, the final set, left to pare down. I've done the Introduction, How to Play, Character Creation, and Skills sections. Once I get through with Techniques, I have Equipment, then GM focused stuff. As I revise and slim down my verbiage in the GM section, I may be putting in a few procedural systems for running exploration, NPC interactions/relationship building, martial arts training, etc. It's already there for Combat, of course. 

I've got a real good feeling about this revision to the draft. I think it may end up being my best bit of game design. We'll see.  

Are You Missing the Forest for the Trees? Plant an Orchard.

Recently, JB at BX Blackrazor wrote a long post (he does that) on why he doesn't like "rules lite" , primarily OSR/NSR style, games. Adam at Barking Alien wrote a reply on why he does like rules lite games (OSR or otherwise). I'm somewhere in the middle. 

I like enough mechanical crunch to make the game feel like I'm actually playing a game, not just doing some group story exercise with a bit of die rolling. But I don't need an excess of systems that bog down the flow of the game, either. Hence my preference for TS&R, where I take the simpler (but not rules lite) BX/BECMI D&D rules, and graft on the bits and pieces of OD&D, 1E, 2E, and even more modern games that I like to it. Along with a few of my own house rules, of course. Just enough complexity for me, without getting too burdensome to run.

That's all preamble to what I really want to write about today, though. These two posts, along with Adam's follow up on there being too much combat in old school fantasy games, got me thinking about something I'm sure I've addressed before, but probably years and years ago. 

One of the big strengths of original D&D and the Classic D&D line, in my opinion, is that is is explicit about the procedures for each stage of game play. Dungeon exploration turns -- spelled out and given a checklist to follow. Wilderness exploration -- also spelled out and given a checklist to follow. Encounters (both dungeon and wilderness) -- spelled out and given a checklist to follow. Combat rounds -- spelled out and given a checklist to follow. Reaction rolls and morale -- you get the idea. 

These are something that has been lost in a lot of newer games. Now, I haven't checked out every single OSR/NSR game out there, so I'm sure there are some that do these things. I know retroclones like Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy still have these procedures spelled out explicitly. But WotC D&D, any version, really only does this for the combat side of the equation. And even then, some areas like Reactions and Morale are done away with for the most part. And it seems like many of the newer, rules lite games like Into the Odd, PbtA, and Black Hack derived games lack these as well (but I've mostly experienced these games from the player side, so I could be wrong here). 

I looked through my 1E books, and was surprised that the dungeon exploration turn doesn't seem to be spelled out explicitly anywhere. The process for wilderness exploration is described in the DMG (but not with handy checklists like BX and BECMI have), including for maritime, airborne, and planar adventuring. Combat procedures have maybe too much detail (those pummeling/grappling rules for example). But a simple explanation for the DM or players about how to structure an exploration turn for a dungeon seems to be missing. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Most of the guidance for that is in the PHB, but how to run a turn doesn't seem to be spelled out. 2E seems similar. Each individual mechanic is described with how it operates, but how they all fit together in the exploration turn or encounter seems to be more vague.

Procedures provide structure. Games need structure. Without structure, you can have game elements. You have mechanics for action resolution. You have mechanics for advancement. You have mechanics for spells/items/abilities. But you need a frame to hang them on. Without procedures for game turns, it's like you have a big box of LEGO pieces for your RPG, with an incomplete or missing manual to tell you how they fit together. 

Now, plenty of older games also fall into this trap. I'm loving playing and running d6 Star Wars, but while it gives you lots of good advice on setting up situations within the fictional world and a mechanic for action resolution, it is a little light on procedures for running non-combat activities. I get that combats need to be the one area of the game where the mechanics are most clear and transparent to the players, so they feel like they win or lose fairly. But the rest of the game should be transparent in that way, too. 

I know I've had times where a new player didn't understand how the procedures worked, and since they were joining my game which included veteran players, I didn't fully explain them. And then things are a mystery to them. I need to be more aware of this, and explain not just how to make a PC or how combat works, but how exploration and interactions work step by step. 

I like having those procedures spelled out, even if I don't always follow them to the letter. They are there when we need them. And of course, as old grognards, those of us who've been running these games don't need them spelled out. I know I personally used a lot of Classic D&D procedures when I ran 5E. The game lacks them, but I knew what to do because of my earlier gaming experiences. I imported the procedures that 5E lacked, but eventually tired of trying to shoe-horn in these elements to a game that fundamentally didn't want you to use that sort of procedure. WotC D&D, some old school non-D&D games, and a lot of the recent "lite games" seem, from my estimation, to want DMs to just present players with encounter situations and get to the skill checks/combat to resolve them. 

It's not railroad play in the traditional sense that players have no choice in what to do and where to go. But it is a sort of stunted play, where tactical choices are limited to "how do I do the most damage in this situation?" or "who has the best skill modifier to complete this task?" With set procedures, that are known to players as well as the GM, players can make more informed choices. GMs can tweak the procedures for special occasions, but most of the time will rely on them to keep the game moving. Players can engage in all the play-acting of their PCs they want during this, and that can be fun. But the procedures keep us from getting too bogged down in the role play or the mother-may-I style exploration interactions. 

Now I know some play these games FOR the role play. The more free "describe what you do, I'll tell you what happens" style play is also popular, and I can see why. I think it's good to have both in your games. But you need to enforce some order in the game to have choices matter. Procedures for exploration and interaction do that. I think it's a shame that most games have gone the path of only providing these procedures explicitly for combat. 

Individual game mechanics are like trees. An RPG that doesn't show you how the game mechanics connect and work together to make the game advance is like a forest. A game that connects and orders the various mechanics in a way that gives players choice and GMs flexibility to use or modify them as needed at the table -- that is an orchard. And it will bear the most fruit.