Outward Bounders

So I had this idea a while ago of a sort of reality-hopping campaign. Rather than consecutive scenarios taking place in a continuous world, the PCs would regularly slip into different universes (or planes, or dimensions). This would certainly offer aesthetic changes, as well as changes in the availability of technology, magic and other resources; how much it would change the tone and genre I'd have to see.

I see this as something where the PCs would not be in control of their journeys. They might end up shifting inexplicably, either through some kind of affliction, or under the control of higher authorities (be that government agencies or warring deities). Alternatively, it might be some kind of meandering quest: perhaps they're travelling through a series of unmapped portals, trying to get home, or to reach some other destination. Homeward Bounders is probably my main inspiration here, though things like Mighty Max and even The Wishing-Chair share some of the same ideas.

That doesn't necessarily mean the players don't have any control. A DM with fantastic ideas and a great knowledge of what would suit the group might be able to repeatedly conjure up amazing new worlds for them to adventure in, but it's probably best to do some negotiation with the players to see what sort of places they'd like to visit. It's also going to depend how people see the campaign. A serious dimension-hopping storyline, probably with some kind of genuine plot arc going on, facing the gritty reality of adjusting to alien lifeforms and massive swings in technological ability, is going to be a very different kettle of fish from a madcap journey through Robot Dragon World and the Elemental Plane of Sweets.

Switching to different realities would mean different resources become available to the PCs. In some places magic might be non-existent, but in others, you can't get away from the stuff. Some dimensions might offer fabulously advanced technology that makes our most brilliant scientific advances look like the wheel, while others think the wheel is a brilliant scientific advance. I sort of imagine the PCs accumulating motley abilities as they pass through different realities, though not all would always be viable, or indeed safe. You might end up with a solar-power robot arm, four healing spells, a bottled ghost pirate, and expert knowledge of interstellar navigation and flint-knapping. But try explaining the robot arm to a mediaeval mob. Again, a very down-to-earth campaign might tackle the practicalities and problems of augmetics or magic in other dimensions, while a pulpy one might handwave anything that wasn't cool.

What system?

To handle something like this, there's basically three options. One is to switch to an appropriate system for each hop, which would mean trying to recreate characters in multiple systems (a time-consuming process, with translation loss and gain every time), getting used to new systems regularly, and working out how adapt items, creatures or abilities appropriately if we want to be able to accumulate cool stuff during the campaign.

Yeah, that sounds like a right barrel of laughs.

A second option would be to pick a single system that people enjoy and are comfortable with, and then basically stick with it regardless. Problems would be hacked or handwaved by the GM. No rules for cybernetic implants in your AD&D rules? Treat it like a magic item. No rules for horrific Lovecraftian magic in your Traveller books? Graft some on, or make a ruling on the fly. You want to stuff Wyle E. Coyote's ghost into a Dalek shell and feed him telepathic instructions to hack the Death Star from the inside, in your Hellcats & Hockeysticks game? ...actually, that one probably works.

On the whole, though, that strikes me as a decent basis for a campaign that happens to veer into unexpected territory, but not a good starting point for one that plans to be esoteric and hotchpotch from the outset. You're just asking for trouble, and rulings you make early on could easily come back to bite you in the posterior.

The third, and I imagine the best, is to start from the outset with an adaptable system that can accommodate a variety of settings, and hopefully genres. Obviously any system is going to suit some things better than others, but something designed for generic gaming will probably do better than a niche game. On the downside, those kinds of systems will lack the depth and richness of more specific systems that focus on particular elements of the game, or on particular tones and genres.

Generics

The main generics that I'm aware of are GURPS, BRP and of course, D20. In some ways I'm most tempted by the D20 option, probably because I'm most familiar with it. On the downside, it's quite a fiddly system in some ways, and takes a while to get used to if you aren't. Also, spellcasters are utterly OP after a few levels. On the upside, the fiddliness allows a lot of scope for flavour, genre evocation and creating mechanical differences. It has detailed rules for casting arcane spells, for performing combat manoeuvres, for cybernetic implants and for starship combat. You can temporarily allow or disallow particular classes, spell types, technologies and abilities to reflect character background or dimensional variation. You can vary the background magic level, the abilities granted by different deities. There's a whole array of playable species, many with special feats available reflecting their racial capabilities, like extra-scaly skin or unusually sharp teeth. You can mix classes, allowing characters to gain levels appropriate to the current setting.

On the other hand, a much looser system might be better for a handwavy romp through space and time. In something like BRP, you can just establish some skills and use them for pretty much everything. New and unexpected challenge from a bizarre universe? Invent a new skill. There's simple mechanics for acquiring and improving skills based on use. It's really pretty quick and simple to use. There's bolt-on options for fairies, morris dancing, robotics and superpowers. A downside of the system's simplicity is that signature abilities and tactics are largely non-existent, with differences between characters largely down to skill percentages. This could end up making what should be the cool weirdness of (say) acquiring robot arms or learning from octopus martial artists, into just a few numbers.

Outward Bounders

It was originally just a silly title for this post, but I've actually got quite tempted by the idea of an Outward Bounders setup. If you're not familiar with Outward Bound, it's one of these outdoor education schemes for young people. They encourage hiking, camping, boating, and that sort of thing. One possibility for a campaign would be to have an organisation that encouraged even more exotic sorts of exploring and independence, sending people off on inter-reality journeys. Portal-hopping could work a bit like orienteering, so they have to collect proof of reaching their various destinations before they can return. If their home culture is sufficiently macho or psychotic, then sending them into quite dangerous journeys would be fine - the same's true to some extent if they're part of some tough organisation.

Coming at it from another angle, maybe the Outward Bounders are - like most kids sent on these things - unwilling participants, perhaps suddenly thrust into adventure by some extradimensional authority that selected them as suitable victims subjects candidates for this ordeal highly advantageous, character-building leadership programme. Which makes perfect sense to them, but not to the motley band they've imposed this on. Maybe they're all plucked from different worlds (might be fun), with no way home until they complete the programme. Some might relish it, others hate the whole business.

I'm still not sure what kind of tone I'd like - I think you could get about as much mileage out of this by treating it either as a fun romp, a fairly serious fantastical adventure, or a deadly serious straight-faced game of really ridiculous things happening. I mean, the prospect of humourless Dimension Ranger recruits trekking through a planet of Blytonesque talking animals, being press-ganged into a terrifying school and battling their way out of a chocolate prison (and then moving on to a serious Asimovesque robot planet or the Forgotten Realms) really appeals to me.

Anyway, as with most of my ideas I suspect nothing will come of it. But it's a nice thought.

First impressions of AD&D 2nd Edition

So my Wednesday night group is just starting our new VOIP game, which will see Arthur unleashing us on a lovingly-crafted Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition game. This is actually my first time playing anything earlier than 3rd, outside of Baldur's Gate and the like. I do have a broad idea of how things work - I think I first encountered the rules in a copy of Dungeon bought to placate me on a family visit to relatives in New Jersey, of all things - but I don't have the kind of familiarity I'd like. On the plus side, it's a very knowledgeable group of people who are very good at explaining things.

Our first session was just getting things ready. We're using a new bit of software for VOIP, so had to play with settings and features a bit, and there's a new player that I hadn't met previously. Mostly though, it was chargen.

I read through the Player's Handbook last week to brush up on things, though quite soon it turned into skipping. A lot of the information there is pretty specific, and I don't really need to memorise lists of spells and equipment, or alternative ways of doing non-combat stuff. That's all nice to know, but it wasn't really worth poring over before the game's even started. Anyway, here's my first impressions of the game.

Obligatory THAC0 bit

THAC0, on reflection, doesn't seem as bad as it's often suggested to be. It's not very intuitive, and certainly compared to the simplicity of a Base Attack Bonus (which works in exactly the same way as every other modifier to your die roll) it's arcane. Having both THAC0 and Armour Class start high and improve as they decrease, in contrast to every other part of the game and most aspects of real life, displays a piece of logic that I find completely baffling. I can't imagine any reason why anyone would ever, ever choose to use THAC0 when other options were available.

That being said, I think some of the problem stems from a needlessly confusing explanation. Here's the game's description of THAC0 in use:

The first step in making an attack roll is to find the number needed to hit the target. Subtract the Armor Class of the target from the attacker's THAC0. (Remember that if the Armor Class is a negative number, you add it to the attacker's THAC0.) The character has to roll the resulting number, or higher, on 1d20 to hit the target.

Rath has reached 7th level as a fighter. His THAC0 is 14 (found on Table 53), meaning he needs to roll a 14 or better to hit a character or creature of Armor Class 0. In combat, Rath, attacking an orc wearing chainmail armor (AC 6), needs to roll an 8 (14-6=8) to hit the orc. An 8 or higher on 1d20 will hit the orc. If Rath hits, he rolls the appropriate dice (see Table 44) to determine how much damage he inflicts.

Now what if we imagine the same rules, explained by someone sober?

Roll a d20 and add the target's Armour Class. If you equal or exceed your THAC0, you hit.

Rath has reached 7th level as a fighter. His THAC0 is 14 (found on Table 53). In combat, Rath, attacking an orc wearing chainmail armour (AC 6), needs to roll an 8 (8+6=14) to hit the orc. If Rath hits, he rolls the appropriate dice (see Table 44) to determine how much damage he inflicts.

But it's still not fantastic. So what's THAC0 doing wrong? Well, a mixture of practical and descriptive issues, I think (and bear in mind this is mostly theoretical, partly based on Actual Play podcasts, and with a smattering of Baldur's Gate, rather than direct experience of the tabletop game).

• You need to know the enemy's AC, which the DM must tell you each time, giving away useful information (and reducing any possibility of constructive fudging).
• It requires subtraction, which people tend to find slower than addition - especially when negative armour class comes into play.
• Amour class starts high, then decreases as it improves. Chainmail has AC6, but magic chainmail +1 has AC5, not AC7. Not only is this unintuitive, it's effectively contradicting itself. I can see where they were coming from (pluses are good, minuses are bad) but anytime you can avoid having to memorise arbitrary system-specific exceptions to normal use, you should.
• Under the suggested description, you reverse any bonuses, deducting positive numbers from your THAC0, and adding the value of negative ones.
• Similarly, a dagger +1 gives a bonus that must be subtracted from THAC0, not added to it.
• You're expected to calculate THAC0 for each specific weapon you have, each of which must then be modified to fit the target.
• THAC0 itself is, a lot of the time, a sort of secondary statistical entity, at least one step removed from anything concrete: it's the number you must roll to hit an Armour Class of 0, which you are virtually never doing. This makes it fiddlier to think about, in much the same way that standard deviations or a chi-squared x² value are slipperier to think about than arithmetic. A Base Attack Bonus is a number you add to your die roll; a Bend Bars percentage is the percentage chance you have to bend some bars. These are much more intuitive.

As far as I can see, the switch from THAC0 to Base Attack Bonus must be one of the most sensible decisions in gaming history, at least in terms of making the game accessible.

Layout

The layout also suffers from some organisational issues. Most notably, it's quite hard to actually get all the character information beforehand. Saving throws are under the section on combat, not in character generation - in fact there's no real character generation section. Now, in fairness, they may have deliberately decided it wasn't necessary. For example, you may not strictly need to know your character's saving throws until you encounter the appropriate hazard. However, I did find it very disconcerting sitting with a character sheet, flicking back and forth as I tried to work out where the missing information was. I'm used to systems with a fairly all-encompassing chargen, where you can start at the beginning, fill in your sheet as you go, and then be ready to play. In contrast, AD&D seems almost to leave things so that you only work them out as necessary, which in some ways makes it quite like a Bethesda RPG. I'm not prepared to say that it's objectively a bad thing to do; I'm not remotely qualified. What I can say is that it leaves the game relatively difficult to absorb before you start play; and that that seems likely to cause delays when those rules do eventually come into effect.

Another issue is, the book points you towards specific chapters for things, but only displays chapter numbers on the first page of each chapter. Instead, it offers cutesy symbols on the remaining page: crossed swords are combat, a hand is wizarding, a hand with an ankh is priesting, a random assortment of objects that looks like something off a white elephant stall is class descriptions, a troll snarling in your face is encounters... There are two major problems with this approach. The first is that some of them really aren't very intuitive, but the names of the chapters are given alongside them if you open the pages properly. More pressingly, this in no way helps with the lack of numbers, since finding Combat or NPCs is no flipping use to you in finding Chapter 5: Proficiencies unless you also know what number every other chapter is. Yes, there is an index, and a contents section, but it's much nicer to just be able to flip through the book. This is particularly true when some chapters are only two pages long, and can be pretty tough to find. So, could do better.

I also found the presentation of options in some places cluttered and confusion - for example, there are different ways of calculating effects of encumbrance, and I spent quite a while trying to work out how they fitted together, before eventually spotting that they are alternatives rather than complimentary systems. The table for basic encumbrance doesn't mention movement at all, but is followed on the next page by a table listing detailed movement penalties for encumbrance. As I was trying to fill in a character sheet, I just worked through them. It's only on the third page - after descriptions of animal carrying capacities, stowage for containers, mount encumbrance and magic armour - they they get around to explaining how the basic encumbrance rules work with movement, at which point I very slowly realised something was up. But look, if you have a table called "Modified Movement Rates" that lists how encumbrance affects your movement, I don't think it's that unreasonable to assume that the latter is what you use. Stick an "optional" in the title or something, don't explain that bit in a sidebar that isn't even adjacent to it.

In terms of the burning question "is this laid out less usefully than Call of Cthulhu (6th edition)?", I'm yet to reach a final verdict. I suspect it's going to be a close call.

Saving Graces

The saving throws are really very arbitrary, and read almost exactly like "stuff what's come up in games I ran so far", rather than any kind of systematic attempt to create a system for avoiding effects. There's the random list of quite specific magical effects, with their own little subsystem, but then any other possible effect is just an ability roll. I have to wonder why it didn't occur to them to try and mesh the two.

There's a weak argument you could make based on the text in the book, which for the Everything Else saves says: "When a character attempts to avoid danger through the use of one of his abilities...", implying that the set saves cover passive resistance and everything else is an ability roll. But that's a bit misleading, since it should be possible to actively avoid quite a few breath weapons and some kinds of spell - anything from fireballs to hypnotic gazes to visible tendrils of transmuting energy. While I can see how you might evolve a system of level-based saves for miscellaneous effects, why split them down in this way? Why are Poison, Death and Paralyzation one save, and Petrification another? Why are Wands and Rods different from spells cast any other way, and why are both different from Poison anyway? Why are Warriors more vulnerable to Poison than Rogues are, and why are Wizards better at surviving Breath Weapons than anyone else?

Yeah, I'm not convinced.

Fast, Short and Lively

On the upside, I was pretty impressed with the speed of basic character creation. Filling in the sheet took quite a while as I rummaged through the book in search of saving throws, equipment weights or whatever. However, actually rolling up Oswyn was really simple. Six lots of die rolls, followed by a fairly simple choice of class: generally you won't be qualified for about half the classes as they have ability prerequisites, and if you have one or two high scores you really want to pick the matching class.

As it happened I had generally decent scores, but high Strength and Con, so a fighter was the obvious way to go. Also, to be fair, I wanted something straightforward for my first game in the system. Having picked a fighter, all there was to do was pick a couple of weapon specialisations and go shopping. No skill points to carefully apportion, with an eye on feat choices a few levels later. No feats to choose. Admittedly I actually rather like feats, but that's not the point: they do add another, really quite large, layer of complexity. Also, in fairness, we aren't using weapon proficiencies (only specialisations) nor non-weapon proficiencies, which does save some time. And we're aiming for a human-based campaign. We did roll up backgrounds to help with character inspiration, though. But yes, I was impressed than in about an hour and a half, we managed to test the VOIP software, introduce ourselves as necessary, establish some background, create characters, shop, start working out party backstory and do a fair bit of nattering.

So far, my time breakdown looks pretty much like this (in order of time spent, not in chronological order, in case you're really confused by my apparently bizarre approach to chargen):

1. Fill in character sheet: ~30 mins
   1. of which ransacking rulebook: ~ 24 mins
   2. of which entering information: ~5 mins
   3. of which arithmetic: ~ 1 min
2. Choose name: ~10 mins
3. Invent character: ~5 mins
4. Pick class and character abilities: ~2 mins
5. Roll attributes: ~1 min
6. Pick class: ~30 secs
7. Pick race: ~1 sec

whereas a typical Pathfinder breakdown might look more like:

1. Pick class and character abilities: ~30 mins
1. of which reading feat descriptions, synergies and prerequisites: ~25 mins
2. Choose name: ~10 mins
3. Pick class: ~2 mins
4. Fill in character sheet: ~5 min
1. of which entering information: ~3 mins
2. of which ransacking rulebook: ~ 1 min
3. of which arithmetic: ~ 1 min
5. Invent character: ~5 mins
6. Pick race: ~1 min
7. Roll attributes: ~1 min

Finale

So on the whole, I've got some reservations about the actual product. That doesn't really affect my anticipation for the game: as I said, I've got an experienced DM, everyone else has solid prior experience with the game, and I don't really expect to run into any problems. So I'm pretty excited.

And obviously, this is an early RPG, and it's not entirely fair to compare it to more recent developments and try to draw some kind of direct equivalence between them. Later editions of D&D, and pretty much everything else, have... well, at least had the opportunity to learn from AD&D 2nd edition, both in terms of actual rules, system coherence, and also fluffier issues of layout and organisation.

So yes, a not particularly deep non-review of a twenty-year-old RPG system. Woot. I can't imagine why this blog hasn't acquired a fanatical cult following yet.

Inspirations: the Sands of Time, part five

A while ago I started looking at whether you could take anything interesting from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for use in RPGs. I've had a quick overview of general ideas and issues, and then considered how you might handle things in Pathfinder or BRP. I've also looked at the combat system in detail, and considered how it might be converted for tabletop.

Homebrew

For the sake of interest, I'm going to consider an entirely new mechanism. We want PCs to successfully fight against multiple opponents; in POPSOT, the PC attacks faster and more accurately than the monsters, and is better at defending.

The Necromunda and old Warhammer 40,000 combat system appeals to me for this. For each opponent, you both roll d6s equal to your Attack score, add your Weapon Skill and any modifiers (such as terrain or multiple attackers), and the difference in scores is the number of hits taken by the loser. A more skillful fighter will typically win a fight without a scratch, as their high Weapon Skill gives a higher final figure. A fast-striking fighter can overwhelm an opponent, because they roll more attack dice and have more chance of getting an optimal roll. A single fighter can fight multiple opponents, rather than having to pick one to fight while the others attack freely. A skillful fighter can defeat multiple opponents without automatically being overwhelmed, because each fight is largely independent; but statistically, fighting several opponents is still more dangerous, because there are more chances for a poor die roll to scupper you.

As I'm aiming for a fairly streamlined system, I'm looking at something inspired by this, but reducing its complexity somewhat. Here, you'd simply roll opposed dice, but different creatures would have different die sizes. A PC might have a d8 compared to a normal enemy's d4, for example. Weak enemies have small dice, and powerful enemies have large dice. What would that look like?

Crunching dice

With a PC d10 versus an NPC d4, the PC will win 30/40 combats. With a PC d8 versus an NPC d4, the PC will win 22/32 combats. With a PC d6 versus an NPC d4, the PC will win 14/24 combats.

Matrix of possible results

Die size	PC die			d3	d4		d6		d8		d10		d12
Enemy die		1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
	1	-----	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11
	2	LOSE	-----	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
d3	3	LOSE	LOSE	-----	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
d4	4	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	-----	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
	5	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	-----	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
d6	6	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	-----	1	2	3	4	5	6
	7	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	-----	1	2	3	4	5
d8	8	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	-----	1	2	3	4
	9	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	-----	1	2	3
d10	10	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	-----	1	2
	11	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	-----	1
d12	12	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	LOSE	-----

Proportion of PC wins

Die size	d3	d4	d6	d8	d10	d12
d3	1/3	1/2	1/3	3/16	2/15	5/48
d4	1/4	3/8	7/12	11/16	3/4	19/24
d6	1/6	1/4	5/12	9/16	13/20	17/24
d8	1/8	3/16	5/16	7/16	11/20	5/8
d10	1/10	3/20	1/4	7/20	9/20	13/24
d12	1/12	1/8	5/24	7/24	3/8	11/24

For multiple opponents, each combat could be rolled separately, or PCs could roll one die per opponent and then allocate them against the enemy results. The second would give them a significant advantage, since the combat system already favours the PC, allocation reduces randomness, and randomness favours the underdog. I think this might be too strong as the standard mechanic, and I also suspect it would make combat against multiple opponents actually easier than against one.

Sequential versus allocated rolling in mass combat

Logically, let's say an enemy can only beat you on opposed d6s if it rolls a 6 and you roll a 1. This will happen, on average, one out of 36 times. If you fight two opponents in succession, by rolling separately for each opponent, the chance of you losing at least one fight is...

At this point, I realise I've forgotten nearly all the statistical knowledge that I painstakingly absorbed at school. I spend some time researching probability distributions.

Okay. The other version is easier. If you win unless you roll a 1 while they roll a 6, your probability of victory is 35/36. If you fight two opponents and roll separately for each, the probability of you winning both is 35/36 x 35/36. This makes 1225/1296, or 0.95. The probability of losing one or more fights is 0.05, or about 5%. For three opponents, the probability of flawless victory is 42875/46656, or 92%, while there's an 8% chance of you losing at least one.

Next, you fight two enemies using the roll allocation mechanic. If the enemies roll 5 & 6, and you roll 1 & 2, you simply allocate your 1 against the 5, and your 2 against the 6, countering both hits. The only way for you to either combat is if either both roll a 6 and you roll at least one 1, or if you roll two 1s and they roll at least one 6.

Wow, my maths is somewhat rusty, but that actually looks like a much nastier calculation than I initially thought... I'm sure there probably is a nice, statistical way to manage that, probably using Poisson distributions and factorials, but I'll stick to basics.

They roll two 6s and you roll one 1: 1/36 x 10/36
or
They roll one 6 and you roll two 1s: 10/6 x 1/36
or
They roll two 6s and you roll two 1s: 1/36 x 1/36

10/1296 + 10/1296 + 1/1296 = 21/1296
= 7/432
= 0.016

If my maths is accurate (a dubious thing), the chance of you taking at least one hit in a fight against two opponents is only 1.6%. What about three opponents?

They roll three 6s. You roll a 1. (1/216 x 25/216) - three arrangements
+
They roll three 6s. You roll two 1s. (1/216 x 5/216) - three arrangements
+
They roll three 6s. You roll three 1s. (1/216 x 1/216) - one arrangement
+
They roll two 6s. You roll two 1s. (5/216 x 5/216) - nine arrangements
+
They roll two 6s. You roll three 1s. (5/216 x 1/216) - three arrangements
+
They roll one 6. You roll three 1s. (25/216 x 1/216) - three arrangements

Multiplying all the possible arrangements of all the possible combinations gives a probability of 406/46656, or 0.009ish. This means that in combat against three opponents, the chance of you taking one or more hits is a mere 0.9%.

Under sequential rolling, you have a 3% chance of injury when facing one opponent, a 5% when facing two, and an 8% when facing three. These figures are, however, exactly the same as if you fight three enemies one after the other.

Under allocated rolling, you still have a 3% chance of injury when facing one opponent. Against two, that drops to only 1.6%. Against three, it's down again to 0.9%. Combat gets easier the more enemies you're facing! While this might be a nice mechanic in some situations - for example, if you're going for a comedy tone where the clever PCs can make opponents get in each other's way - it's not really appropriate for this one. Too much Law of Ninja for my taste.

Sorry about that. Probably my longest tangent ever, but I'm not going back to check.

So yeah, as I thought, sequential rolling for the win. I'd probably give a small modifier for each subsequent opponent, just so there's some advantage in numbers.

Combat Options

Defensive fighting might let shrink your die size. For every size you drop, you can parry two hits you would otherwise take from each opponent you face. Is this worth it?

If you're fighting an opponent with d8, and you have a d8, on mean you'll take zero hits. However, you can take anywhere up to 7 hits if you roll badly. One to four hits is relatively likely (mode 1, standard deviation 3.5). A PC in bad shape, or who has a lot of opponents to fend off without much support, may not be able to take that. By dropping a die size to d6, you slightly increase the number of hits you're likely to take (and significantly reduce your chance of scoring any hits yourself), but can ignore two of them: the likely pool of damage increases from about 3 to about 4, but two are ignored, giving a slight defensive bonus. Dropping even further, to a d4, means you could readily take up to 5 hits, but can parry four of them. A d3 allows up to six parries, at which point it's very difficult to damage you at all. While I don't claim to be mathematical expert, it looks to me like this mechanism would actually do what's intended.

versus d12	d8	d6	d4	d3
MEAN	-2.18182	-3.27273	-4.36364	-4.90909
STD	4.305958	3.940111	3.615798	3.476381
Parry	0	2	4	6
RESULT	-6.48778	-5.21284	-3.97943	-2.38547
versus d8	d8	d6	d4	d3
MEAN	0	-1.14286	-2.28571	-2.85714
STD	3.495452	3.064919	2.650746	2.455315
Parry	0	2	4	6
RESULT	-3.49545	-2.20778	-0.93646	0.687542
versus d6	d8	d6	d4	d3
MEAN	0.571429	0	-1.2	-1.8
STD	3.064919	2.690981	2.23842	2.00713
Parry	0	2	4	6
RESULT	-2.49349	-0.69098	0.56158	2.19287

There could also be a reckless fighting stance, which gives you more hits but makes you more likely to take damage yourself. I'm not quite sure how to do this, as simply increasing the die size just makes you more likely to win the combat, without risk. A slightly complex option would be to grant an increased die size, but to calculate enemy hits with a penalty, perhaps half the number rolled. For example, you might upgrade to a d10 and roll a 7, which compared to the enemy 5 grants two hits. However, for defensive purposes it only counts as a 4, and so you also take a hit.

This system doesn't immediately lend itself to any kind of active defence, which is a slight downside. It ought to allow fairly fast and simple combat, though. But if we're looking for something more tactical, I'm not sure this would be great - it might actually be better to have a more complex system if combat is going to be a major aspect of the game, just as D&D fleshes out things significantly. While I could go with a Necromunda-style system of simple modifiers to die rolls, it's just not very interesting for an RPG, however well it works in a tactical miniatures game.

This system also has the downside that it's a homebrew. Which means I'd still have to establish systems for handling everything other than combat, and it's probably riddled with flaws. So to be honest I'm probably better off sticking with something established. Still, I had fun.

Inspirations: the Sands of Time, part four

A while ago I started looking at whether you could take anything interesting from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for use in RPGs. I've had a quick overview of general ideas and issues, and then considered how you might handle things in Pathfinder or BRP. Last time I started looking at the combat system in detail, and now I'm going to think about how they could be converted to tabletop.

Here's a quick checklist of key points about POPSOT combat:

1. Player-driven, not character-driven
2. Combat success is a kill; damage isn't permanent
3. Matching special moves to weaknesses for efficient combat
4. PC acts faster than enemies, so can fight several at once
5. Can combine attacks with movement or defence
6. Enemies stay with PC during combat
7. Enemies are static and unavoidable
8. Ability to retry failed actions or avoid damage taken
9. Interaction with companion
10. Multiple waves of enemies to prolong combat

How does each feature relate to tabletop RPGs? And what do we want to keep?

Converting to Tabletop

Player versus Character

First up, player-driven actions. RPGs typically determine success based primarily on character skill. While player input is always crucial, it typically consists of choosing courses of action, sometimes including quite granular tactical decisions (e.g. which attack type to use). The actual resolution of the action still depends on character attributes, with or without a random factor: you roll attack dice, play spell cards, or use the magic ring of bouncing.

There are a few exceptions around - Magicians is on its way there, and I believe The Riddle of Steel used player minigames to model combat. The former is designed specifically for language-learning, and that's really not what I'm after here. I know basically nothing about the latter.

To be honest, I'm inclined to ignore this aspect. Player skill makes perfect sense for a first-person action platformer, but character skill is a well-established aspect of RPGs and I'd be very reluctant to mess with that without a good reason. Also, it would automatically prevent me from using any familiar RPG to run the game.

Kill-Based Combat

In a typical RPG, it usually doesn't matter much how you inflict damage. You can crush an enemy quickly with a few powerful attacks, perhaps taking a risk in the process. You can fight cautiously, staying defensive and only striking back when an opening presents itself, constantly whittling down their stamina. You can use evasive tactics, launching occasional devastating sneak attacks before disappearing into the shadows. For most enemies, the end result is the same: death.

POPSOT enemies don't work the same way, because unless you coup de grace them, they regenerate entirely. On the other hand, there are specific moves that take an enemy down in one hit ready for a coup de grace.

You could quite easily model this by doing pretty much the same thing: unless the PC spends an action/round to coup de grace the enemy, they simply resurrect at full health. You could soften this by having them recover enough to stand up, but a single hit will fell them again. You could even give them constant regeneration, though if all enemies had this it would get very fiddly to track.

One of the frustrations in POPSOT was that the Prince could easily end up overwhelmed, unable to actually coup de grace any enemies because the others obstructed him, and fights would go on for a long time. In a party RPG, some version of resurrection would probably work okay. At any time, there'll probably be someone free enough to finish off the fallen. Depending on the system, this could end up being the least combat-oriented character, your resident wizard or whatever. However, combined with the dagger-recharge mechanism, you'd then end up with that character gaining all the charge but being perhaps least likely to use it. That could make for an interesting trade-off decision, or you could simply allow transfer of charge between characters.

Tacticality

Different RPGs have different approaches to 'special moves' like knockdowns, trips, disarms and backstabs. Tactically granular ones like D&D have these as slightly separate mechanisms from standard attacks, sometimes derived from different stats and modified with skills, feats or class abilities. Looser systems like Call of Cthulhu don't offer these at all by RAW, though a mechanism using opposed stat rolls could be added easily if the situation came up.

In either case, adding enemy-appropriate special moves would be fairly simple. Resolution of these almost always depends on some attribute of the enemy, such as a Dexterity score, though these may end up affecting too many vulnerabilities in certain systems. Specific enemies could also simply be given vulnerabilities or resistances to particular attack types: heavily-armoured foes might be vulnerable to tripping due to balance problems, double-handed wielders resistant to disarming. The combinations would depend on what special attacks are available and what enemy types exist, because I would very much like them to make sense in context rather than being arbitrary mechanical features.

Using these special moves sensibly should make combat significantly easier. A single appropriate special attack would effectively remove an enemy from the fight; the precise mechanism would depend on the system. Some systems have quite granular modelling of being disarmed, tripped or taken off-guard, others would need systems creating or a "counts-as" rule put in place.

This is a feature I do think we want to keep, and some level of tactical awareness is a standard part of RPGs. It doesn't necessarily exist at such a high level as in POPSOT, but I think it could be reasonable turned up a bit without completely wrecking existing combat systems.

Swashbuckling

In POPSOT, the Prince acts notably faster than enemies, both in terms of actual movement speed and actions-per-round. He can attack several times in the time it takes an enemy to strike once, and mix action types. This means he can make hit-and-run attacks, overwhelm a single opponent with rapid attacks, or fight several opponents simultaneously by parrying at suitable moments. The Prince isn't really more powerful than his opponents, he's just able to do more in a round, which tips the balance in his favour.

Most games don't immediately allow for this possibility, because they have a fixed quantity of action for each participants, be it Major Minor Move or "do something". In most cases, you can move and attack in the same round; defence tends to be an alternative to attacking, though. In many games "an attack" is an abstract thing covering several seconds of combat, so one attack roll doesn't necessarily correspond directly to one strike in POPSOT, especially as it always takes several strikes to down an enemy.

Call of Cthulhu combat does more or less allow this, since many Keepers don't use the Dodge or Parry rules with NPCs and monsters; this effectively means PCs can take a defensive action as well as whatever else they do, while enemies only get their main action. Let's see what other possibilities there are.

The first is simply to increase the number of actions a PC can take in a round, allowing them to make extra attacks, or to use aggressive and defensive actions. The GM might need to limit what can be done with this time. In Call of Cthulhu your turn consists of "doing something", which is a pretty broad category to double. In Pathfinder or D&D 4E, the GM would pick a type of action for you to gain and therefore restrict your options somewhat. However, doubling standard actions (for example) doesn't just speed up attacking; it also lets you drink two potions, or cast two spells, which might not fit the intention.

Conversely, enemies could have their actions restricted. This holds true to the source material, where the enemies are quite slow. D&D in some cases limits the actions of slow creatures like zombies already, although this mostly just prevents them moving and attacking - they can still attack once per round, just like you. In general it's harder to slow enemies down than to speed PCs up.

You could also take a slightly bigger hack at things, and grant subsidiary actions. Maybe attacking gives you two attacks, not one. Maybe your first attack doesn't count as an action, so you can always do something else, like dodging or parrying. Maybe PCs can always attempt a parry. Exactly what's useful is going to depend on system.

In Pathfinder and related games, attacks actually increase with level anyway. As I mentioned in part two, I'd almost certainly be modelling this sort of play with a significant level disparity between PCs and NPCs, so PCs would probably have multiple attacks per round by default while enemies wouldn't. This would handle the matter in a straightforward RAW way: you can either spend a whole round to use all your attacks, or take some other action (like moving) and make a single attack. I would, however, still have to create a system for active parrying as Pathfinder doesn't use it.

Persistent Enemies

The fights in POPSOT are basically compulsory. It's a completely linear game, with no path but the one they designate that runs right through the enemies. This really shouldn't be the case with a tabletop RPG, though. One to ditch, deffo.

A more slippery point is enemy movement. In POPSOT enemies do nothing but stand around waiting for you to turn up, and will return to their position if you leave the room, rather than follow you. This is a perfectly sound strategy, because of the aforesaid railroad. Sometimes they don't even bother to wait, but just appear out of thin air as you approach. There are a few quite specific situations where static enemies work in tabletop (guarding key points, for example) but generally it's both nice and logical for enemies to move around a bit. They won't necessarily be deathless sand-creatures like in POPSOT, for one thing. But also, things like patrols to avoid, ambushes to set and generally outthinking the enemy are some of the joys of roleplaying. On a more meta level, enemies that stay put in one place are ineffective in tabletop, because you're not forcing the players to follow a single designated route as outlined last paragraph, so they can just avoid the enemies. So while this would be very easy to replicate, I wouldn't want to. That doesn't mean there can't be any enemies that stay in one place, just that it's not the default. Similarly, it should be possible for PCs to draw enemies into tactical locations, send them off afted red herrings, and otherwise overcome them by cunning.

A feature I have no intention of copying is the POPSOT flawless teleportation. I really don't know what they were thinking with that one, which only serves to annoy you and make the game less interesting. Enemies in Time Faffers will be stuck with ordinary movement under ordinary rules, perhaps spiced up with the odd special ability. This will allow players to unleash their tactical genius, make use of environmental features, and concentrate their strength on specific targets, rather than spending every single fight in combat with every single enemy at once. You could, however, easily replicate this feature: you just allow enemies further than X from a PC to teleport to within reach of one when it's their turn to move.

Similarly, there will not be reinforcements spawning throughout the fight to prolong it artificially. Reinforcements will come from nearby areas. With resurrection mechanics already in the game, having a monster finally die, only to be replaced by an identical monster anyway, is just plain rude.

Companions

The transition to multiplayer RPG will provide the good bits, hopefully without the frustrating elements of escort-questing.

Rewinding

The final and most innovative part of POPSOT is time-rewinding, and that's definitely something I'd like to include. Helpfully, RPGs have a long tradition of letting you do things again, in the shape of rerolls. The POPSOT version lets you decide how much time to rewind, up to about 10 seconds (frankly not very long, but hey), which complicates matters; that's potentially several rolls, and even more than one person's turn.

Off the top of my head, I think the model I see as most interesting is to split into minor and major charges. Not because that necessarily makes the most sense narratively, but because it corresponds to mechanical actions

A minor charge would simply be a reroll of a single die that directly affects the PC, which would include attack and skill rolls, as well as attacks aimed at them. This corresponds in story to the PC rewinding from a missed attack, from setting off a trap or misgauging a jump, or from failing to dodge an enemy strike. You could tweak this slightly, on the basis that the PC has actually seen the future, so that they can either reroll a single die, or negate a single die roll directly affecting them. This would mean the PC can try their action again in the light of seeing how it might go wrong (but with no guarantees it won't go wrong in a different way), and can also avoid a single negative consequence (since things will go down in exactly the same way, they can reliably avoid it). I would allow players to see how much damage they'll take before negating an attack, as it's all part of the same attack action. I might also grant a bonus on PC rerolls to make the mechanic more satisfying.

A major charge would be more drastic. You could handle this very mechanically by letting the PC step back a whole round, negating all actions that have taken place, and then starting again with a decent idea of what the enemies will do. This would, however, mean tracking a roundsworth of events separately from the main character sheet - in particular changes in hit points, time charges and other resources. Alternatively, you could treat this in a very narrative way, allowing the player to negotiate for one substantial thing to change over a period of maybe three rounds at most: perhaps they took a different fork in the passageway, or rushed over to rescue an ally rather than engaging an enemy. The consequences of this in terms of regained resources would have to be worked out, either by keeping track of three roundsworth of resources, or simply making a reasonable guess.

I think to make this feel like a flavourful game mechanic, you'd want to keep other potential for rerolls quite limited, and try to emphasise in description that what's happening is actual manipulation of time, not just the strictly mechanical rerolls that so often crop up.

As a side note, in the Call of Cthulhu ruleset I'd be quite inclined to introduce SAN costs for rewinding time. After all, you still remember what happened in the other timeline, most of which is pretty unpleasant (otherwise you wouldn't be rewinding it). You still saw your friend die, or felt the spear pierce your guts - you just travelled back in time to change the timeline. On the downside, this could actually discourage people from using the mechanic, which is what you don't want. Hmm. One rather oddball possibility would be for a rewind mechanism to transfer HP damage to SAN damage, and to then introduce more lenient mechanics for regaining SAN and handling insanity, so it manifests in ways more suited to an action game that features mundane rather than non-Euclidean horrors. Rather than developing fetishes or eating disorders, you'd probably be looking at emotional effects.

WoD percentifier

BRPifier

A work in progress: discussion on the Dr&Di thread.

This is a fettle in response to Arthur's modest proposal on Dreamers and Dicepools.

This script will (I hope) convert a World of Darkness-style dots and targets system into a percentile chance, allowing a quick and dirty conversion into BRP or some similar system. You can use this to determine what skill percentage corresponds to a dot rank.

How many dots do you have? (skills and attributes) 1 dot 2 dots 3 dots 4 dots 5 dots 6 dots 7 dots 8 dots 9 dots 10 dots What's the target number? Target 1 Target 2 Target 3 Target 4 Target 5 Target 6 Target 7 Target 8 Target 9 Target 10

Your percentage chance of success is:

 

WoDifier

But that's not the only option. You may be keen to import your old Call of Cthulhu characters into the World of Darkness, and who am I to stop you? This called for actually quite a lot of effort.

What's the target number? Target 1 Target 2 Target 3 Target 4 Target 5 Target 6 Target 7 Target 8 Target 9 Target 10 What success rate do you need? 40% 64% 78.4% 87.04% 92.224% 95.3344% 97.20064% 98.320384% 98.9922304% 99.39533824%

You need this number of dots:

 

Note: At some point in the rather complicated process of moving things between HTML editor, spreadsheet, plain text editor and back again repeatedly multiple times, the exact numbers to many decimal places have apparently got slightly broken. So this will in fact mostly return very slightly inaccurate numbers, until I get round to fixing that.

So it looks like it's actually probably a Javascript issue with logarithms, not an error in the data. This might take longer than I hoped. Or I might come up with a nasty hack for it. Nasty hack found, and not actually all that nasty. Javascript is actually not that good at maths, it seems...

Nerdy calculationy bit

The Percentifier is a rough and ready option, right there. But it would be nice to have a way to convert the other way, right? To be able to convert a mathematically-elegant BRP character, with its straightforward capabilities, into WoD’s dicepools.

This, unfortunately, is going to call for maths. Wait, I don’t dislike maths. I just don’t have to do very much of it these days.

The calculation for turning the dicepool into percentages basically points down to:

p = 1 - ((t-1)/10) d

where p is the probability of success, t is the target number, and d is the number of dots (or dice).

At this point I realised I couldn’t remember high-school maths. Things like “what’s the general term for the power of something, like ‘squared’?” which would help answer other things, like “how do you calculate the value of that thing I can’t remember the term for?”. Luckily, at this stage my dad called for a chat. Amongst his many excellent qualities, he is professionally good at maths, and reminded me about logarithms and the word ‘exponential’. Thus:

p + ((t-1)/10) d = 1

1 – p = ((t-1)/10) d

LOG(1-p) = LOG(((t-1)/10) d)

ln(((t-1)/10) d) = LOG(1-p)

dLOG((t-1)/10) = LOG(1-p)

d = LOG(1-p)/LOG((t-1)/10)

Arthurfier

But there's more! Arthur has a suggestion for making skill more relevant in WoD, and suggested how it might work, so I've fettled up a quick Arthurfier (for want of a better word) to see how that does.

EDIT: This doesn't, in fact, do what Arthur suggested: it just triples the relative value of Skill vs. Stat dogs dots. It's been a long few weeks, okay?

How many skill dots do you have? None 1 dot 2 dots 3 dots 4 dots 5 dots How many stat dots do you have? None 1 dot 2 dots 3 dots 4 dots 5 dots How valuable are skills vs. stat dots? 1:3 1:2 1:1 What's the target number? Target 1 Target 2 Target 3 Target 4 Target 5 Target 6 Target 7 Target 8 Target 9 Target 10

Your percentage chance of success is:

 

Arthurfier II

Thanks to me rolling a critical fail on my Reading, the Arthurfier doesn't actually do what Arthur suggested. Oops.

Enter the Mark II.

How many skill dots do you have? None 1 dot 2 dots 3 dots 4 dots 5 dots How many stat dots do you have? None 1 dot 2 dots 3 dots 4 dots 5 dots How valuable are skills vs. stat dots? 1:3 1:2 1:1 How challenging is the task? Trivial (+3) Simple (+2) Easy (+1) Average Tricky (-1) Difficult (-2) Formidable (-3)

Your competence at this task is:

 

Your percentage chance of success is:

 

Descriptions

I eventually managed to track down the descriptions from WoD.

Stats

• * Poor. Unexercised, unpracticed or inept.
• ** Average. The result of occasional effort or application.
• *** Good. Regular practice or effort, or naturally talented.
• **** Exceptional. Frequently applied, tested and honed, or naturally gifted.
• ***** Outstanding. The peak of normal human capacity. Continuously exercised or naturally blessed.

Stats

• * Novice. Basic knowledge and/or techniques.
• ** Practitioner. Solid working knowledge and/or techniques.
• *** Professional. Broad, detailed knowledge and/or techniques.
• **** Expert. Exceptional depth of knowledge and/or techniques.
• ***** Master. Unsurpassed knowledge and/or techniques. A leader in the field.

I can definitely see why Arthur was unconvinced.

Inspirations: the Sands of Time, part three

A while ago I started looking at whether you could take anything interesting from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for use in RPGs. I've had a quick overview of general ideas and issues, and then considered how you might handle things in Pathfinder or BRP. Now I'm going to go back and examine POPSOT's combat in a bit more detail, because it's such a major part of the game's flavour.

Character-Driven

The fundamental thing about combat in POPSOT is that it's player-driven, not character-driven. Your character's accuracy in combat depends on what you do, not on some characteristic or skill of the Prince himself. You hit enemies if you deliver an appropriate attack when they're in range and approximately in front of you. You parry attacks by using the Parry command at suitable times. You dodge attacks by moving the Prince away from them. You perform special attacks by pressing the right buttons when you're in the right position, and they succeed if you picked the right attack for the target.

Success in Combat

The combat is fundamentally kill-based, rather than damage-based. You can chop away at enemies all you like, but the only way to destroy most enemies is to perform a coup de grace (in this case, using the Dagger of Time to drain the magic from a downed enemy). If you leave a fallen opponent for even a few seconds, they'll regenerate entirely. Only specific rare enemy types (birds, bats and scarabs) can be actually killed by normal attacks.

Downing an enemy requires a certain threshold of damage. Four or five hits is enough to do this, but un-downed enemies seem to recover from your hits if left for a while, perhaps while you fight off another target. Ideally, then, a seamless string of blows from focused attacks is needed to down the target, followed by a coup de grace to destroy it. This coup de grace also recharges your Dagger of Time, allowing you to use special abilities.

There are also two special combat moves available: somersaults and wall jumps. Somersaults let you flip over a target's head and backstab them. Wall jumps let you use a wall as a springboard to launch yourself at a target. Either attack will insta-down most enemies, but certain enemy types are immune to one or the other, and in some cases will damage you instead. Further into the game, special moves become the most sensible and effective way of downing enemies, and most combat consists of holding off opponents until you can work yourself into position for an appropriate special move.

The Prince acts much more quickly than any enemies. He can attack several times in the time it takes an enemy to strike once, as well as attacking and rolling away, or attacking and parrying. A single "round" for an enemy is often enough time for the Prince to cut down an enemy with repeated blows, and prepare for a coup de grace. He can also outpace them on foot, although...

Movement and Manoeuvring

Enemies can teleport in order to keep pace with the Prince. If the Prince moves a certain distance away from them, rather than keep running, they'll simply teleport. The animation takes a second or so at each end, and makes a noise, so he has a moment to prepare when a monster appears next to him. This ability means that the Prince can't easily isolate individual enemies to defeat, but must always fight several at once. In addition, he can't use his manoeuvrability, acrobatics or intelligence to gain an advantage by finding safe spots to lurk in, or separating groups of enmies.

Enemies sometimes wait in place, but this mostly applies to rooms you enter. In most cases, enemies materialise around you to begin a fight. During the fight, further enemies materialise as reinforcements, typically appearing within combat range. The Prince cannot avoid combats by timing movement or skirting around enemies. Enemies do not patrol or take any ordinary actions. Combat is therefore mostly a compulsory set-piece experience.

Other Factors

The Prince can use the Dagger of Time to manipulate the flow of time. He can rewind time to negate an undesirable result, such as taking a mortal injury or being knocked down. He can freeze an enemy in time for a few seconds, allowing him to kill it with a couple of follow-up attacks, without needing a coup de grace; this also takes an enemy out of the fight temporarily. Finally, he can slow down the perception of time, allowing the player slightly more time to control and consider actions and reactions - though it doesn't allow him to actually act faster than enemies. Again, these are mostly tactical decisions, though rewinding time is more complicated. To be honest, I never found the other abilities particularly interesting or useful in POPSOT, and used them mostly by accident, so I can't say much about them.

Finally, there's your NPC companion Farah. In theory, she helps out by shooting at enemies with her bow. There are a handful of situations where she's a net plus, mostly when fighting annoying birds, which she can kill far more easily than you. The rest of the time, she needs protecting from the guards. Her attack rate is glacial, she can't actually kill anything, and she's not clever enough to just run away and resume firing.

In many ways, then, combat in POPSOT is a sort of tactical minigame. You match appropriate manoeuvres and attacks to the situation, and try to execute them accurately. Success depends on your ability to select and execute manoeuvres, not on the Prince's skills. When she's around, you must also keep track of Farah's status, drawing enemies away from her, and occasionally rushing back to catch any that have her pinned.

There's one final thing to bear in mind about POPSOT combat: all too often, it gets boring. Combats go on too long, with multiple waves of enemies. Teleporting prevents interesting tactics. There's not enough variety in enemy types for the amount of combat, and your own attacks and manoeuvres are too limited to stay interesting. This is something we really want to avoid.

Next time I'll think about how these things could be modelled in tabletop, and whether I'd actually want to.

NeverWinter Orcs

A big chunk of my gaming comes from our regular(ish) Wednesday nights, where a few of us lark about in Neverwinter Nights, playing through other people's mods, or more recently, homebrew content. We had a brainstorming session about what to play, and settled on an orc-themed campaign - because hey, orcs. You know the tattered remnants of the Dark Lord's armies, driven high into the mountain wastes by a desperate alliance of the civilised races after the Dark Lord's fall, still lurking there to raid the boundaries of civilisation? That's us. It's comeback time.

As you can imagine, being orcs has been enormous fun. From our point of view, of course, we're the good guys. The other species are weak, cowardly, and just plain un-orcy, and the Dark Lord Malketh was - in the opinion of our tribe, though not all of them - not quite up to scratch, but he did at least get round to creating us. Our orcs are a sort of cheerful amalgam of Tolkien, viking, and of course, Warhams: for example, Gork and Mork were more or less immediately absorbed into the setting. Our DM Dan carefully drew up some in-world background for the traditional orc life-paths, which effectively limited class choices to a thematically-appropriate subset for the fairly low-magic setting we were looking for.

We started with a party of a classical hardy orcish warrior, a devious Orc Supremacist rogue, a bard (who unfortunately vanished early on due to technical issues) and my own somewhat philosophical orcdom-is-battle ranger. Between us we steer an erratic course between pantomime, grandstanding high fantasy, and gleeful Warhams fanfic. I think it says a lot that, despite the quite overt mechanicalness of gaming in NWN, I am genuinely concerned about my ranger having inherited the chieftainship, and therefore the heavy responsibility of guiding the clan (thankfully alleviated by my siblings' advice).

One of the great things is the largely unfurnished world, which has been constantly fleshed out by our own inventions, with things like orc beliefs, practices and behaviour invented on the fly by common consent of whatever's most interesting at the time. For example, discovery right at the start of two dead clan members led to discussion of burial practices. As we already had a mechanic for eating the hearts of slain enemies, we felt like that would be appropriate, and quickly ended up with the idea that strength lies in the heart, so orc clans retain and augment the strength of their clan by eating the hearts of their own honoured dead and of worthy enemies they defeat, while denying that strength to enemy clans. Humans and elves and other despicable creatures let the bodies of the dead rot away in the ground, or burn them, so the strength fades away, which is also why they're weak. When we started facing undead, which we decided we hadn't actually seen before but knew from legend, our characters created explanations based on this same principle: because the humans are buried with their strength, it lurked there even after the flesh rotted, and then drove them to force a way out of their graves, probably trying to find its way back to its clan to rejoin them, or to seek vengeance for their neglect.

We've also been adapting things as we go. Our rogue decided that, while orcs distrust sorcery, sources of enormous power aren't to be sneezed at and has been guzzling dragon blood and acquiring magical artefacts on the sly. Despite the initial low-magic premise, she fairly soon ended up gaining magical power (in mechanical terms, respeccing as a rogue/wizard) and much hilarity has followed with increasingly implausible attempts to explain the odd things that happen around her. My favourite being the appearance of her familiar (and running joke) panther Nero, which we were extremely suspicious of, considered eating, and have now largely accepted, only occasionally pausing to note that actually, the big talking black cat in the snow-covered mountains is still weird. Luckily, most things so far have been explicable as lucky coincidences, animals that just happened to turn up from somewhere to follow our sister around, bardic chants or handy potions she'd picked up somewhere. Because bardic and nature magic exists to some extent (though it's not treated as magic proper) she's got away with it so far. She's now pretty clearly on the Dark Lord track, and has already used breaking the hereditary mental chains that bound our clan to the Dark Lord's service as an opportunity to redirect that loyalty to the leaders of the clan - us. However, there's a lot of secretive plotting going on, and DM note-passing, so the rest of us are delightfully in the dark about some of her machinations, though Arthur keeps up pretty well-informed about most of it, so we can work out what we notice and how we feel about things generally.

Hacking for Orcs

Dan's managed to hack the NWN engine about to produce a distinctly orcy feel to the game.

The first thing is the aforementioned heart-eating mechanism: humanoid enemies drop hearts, which can be used as a light heal, or a temporary buff (Cure Light Wounds, Bull's Strength, Cat's Grace) to represent the surge we get from eating them. This is a great and thematically-appropriate little boost. Because of the low-magic setup, and the clan-based background without much in way of economy, there's very little of the usual CRPG looting going on. It wouldn't be worth our orcs' while to pick up ordinary weapons and clothes to drag back to the clan caves, and we're not trying to scrape together cash to buy something from a merchant. Instead, we get equipment directly by looting, or sometimes as RP awards - for example, we killed some wyverns and had the clan tanniers craft us some wyvern armour. The hearts mean there's something we can gain from a fight, which is very appropriate for orcs.

The low-magic setting also means no clerics, and little in the way of magical healing. Since there's a lot of combat, that can be an issue. We're also using a limited rest system, where it's not necessarily possible to just rest when you're injured (I haven't checked the mechanical details, and it's partly an RP thing) - this works pretty well, particularly as we don't have many spells to regain. So the hearts are a great balancing mechanism to help us regain our strength after a difficult fight.

Another of the hacks is a way of making us properly orcishly tough. This also, once again, helps deal with the healing issue. Dan's created a script that gives us a limited amount of regeneration on death, providing we stay within a certain negative HP threshold. This means we can go down, but then recover from our wounds to just above the point of consciousness, as long as the rest of the party can draw the attackers off us. It's been extremely useful, and it creates a nice spectrum of recovery from normal healing, through regeneration, to the actual respawn mechanism - which then feels less in need of excuses, because you can view it as just a particularly draining form of regeneration.

He's also put a lot of time into orcifying and customising our gear, creating brutally orcy rapiers for my ranger, wyvern leather armour that looks okay on orcish frames, and a boar helm made from the skull of the legendary giant death-pig we slew. Which, in one of my favourite moments so far, he dropped into the game shortly after our characters invented the legend to get one over an NPC.

Gaming in NWN

NWN is great in some ways as a D&D experience. It models some pretty complex things for us without constant calculations, helps with quick levelling, and has built-in monsters and items you can drop into the game. Also, pretty graphics. It does have some practical downsides though, both for DMing and playing.

One of the downsides is that while content generation is very easy within specific limits, it's impossible outside them. Dan can't create new areas on the fly, even if we only need a cave or another bit of mountain; they have to be created in-engine and saved to the module, which would mean a break while he made the content and we logged back into the new version. Nor can he easily create items or creatures during play, though you can use existing ones and adjust them slightly with DM powers. This means quite a bit of prep time is needed between sessions, whereas in tabletop you can often invent areas without any prep time.

Also, the same AI and scripting that streamlines a lot of the DMing aspects can be a two-edged sword, because the problem with computers is they're precisely as intelligent as you make them. Sometimes creatures attack us when they weren't intended to, at least until we'd talked, or when we were supposedly invisible or carrying out some sneaky plan. Creatures we cleared out from an area need to be DM-killed on the next session, because they respawn unless you delete them from the module between sessions. We found that enemies would continue attacking 'dead' regenerating orcs, and sometimes kill them properly, so Dan had to manually pause and redirect their aggro. Continuing damage spells like Meld's Acid Arrow can remain on characters even after they die, occasionally leading to the same attack killing you two or three times.

Similarly, the problem with using existing NPCs is that it can take a lot of checking and testing to completely understand what they do. Many creatures have abilities or powers that aren't immediately obvious, and which only show up once combat starts. Giants turned out to have infallible long-ranged rock-throwing attacks that could take out half the party before we reached them. Some creatures ended up immune to most of our attacks. Demons that were carefully nerfed combat-wise had some insanely dangerous spell-like abilities lurking around. Often these are unexpected - in our recent 'season finale' session, we faced down one of the ancient Dragon-Blooded in their lair, but the combat collapsed into immediate farce because her bat familiar had an unexpectedly powerful fear effect that left all of us unable to act for several rounds. In each case, Dan had to pause the game, nerf or DM-kill enemies, reset the combat or otherwise deal with the fallout of the NWN engine's quirks.

Writing your own scripts is very powerful, but can still have pitfalls because you need to write exactly what you want. Dan added a mechanism so that once hearts have been expended as buffs, we can physically devour them for some XP. However, the script for doing that has a couple of disadvantages. One is that it isn't clever enough to pick only expended hearts, so you can accidentally eat unused buffs. This means we tend to end up waiting until we've used up all our hearts before eating any; but there's a fairly regular flow of new ones. The second is that you can only eat one heart at a time. What tends to happen, then, is that we suddenly realise we have half our inventory full of hearts, carefully (and individually) drop all the unused ones, then use the special widget to go through the script to eat each heart individually in a mammoth heart-nomming sesh, then pick up the unused ones again. Quite often this is when we level up, because we get quite a sizable dose of XP this way. While the idea "use a heart, eating it in the process" is very simple to articulate, actually scripting it is pretty complex and so Dan hasn't had the time to work out anything smoother.

Another issue that just doesn't exist in tabletop is the purely technical side. A couple of people were completely unable to get NWN running, or to maintain it for online play. At one point I was plagued by crashes, dropping out half a dozen times every session to immense frustration. Not only is this directly inconvenient, but you can end up losing valuable or even plot-critical items, and missing out on battles. It also tends to mean fall short on XP, both because you haven't saved since you got it, or because you temporarily stopped existing while the big fight was coming to an end and missed the XP reward. Thankfully that's now stopped, but there are still occasional crashes.

And of course, you can just accidentally do things in a way that doesn't happen in tabletop: losing a spell because you accidentally walk away, or getting confused because you can't tell the relationship between what you're trying to do, and what's show on the screen, particularly in terms of whose turn it is. My character, for example, is built around high Dex and parrying, which requires you to actively adopt Parry Mode. However, it's not a toggle you can keep on: you have to get into combat, select Parry Mode, and wait for your turn to come around so you can switch. At times it gets quite hard to tell whether it's actually working, or whether your character's doing something else for some reason.

Future Plans

We're now taking a break from NWN, which Dan's been running for about a year, to give him a rest and mix things up a bit. The current idea is to switch to just running tabletop games over Ventrilo. It's not settled exactly what we'll be doing, but it looks like the indefatigable Arthur will be running some flavour of straight-faced High Fantasy, as a change from the rather knowing tongue-in-cheek games we tend to run.