Not to say I couldn’t make some comments on Naruto, but this post is about character advancement in RPGs.  In particular, I wish to speak of the rewarding nature of advancement and some related items.

On a side note, I can see how MMORPGs appeal to people’s interests in advancement.  Lacking attraction to such, it’s hard for me to relate to any other draw of them.  But, enough about computerized gaming.

Well, not quite.  I’m quite fond of using the term videogame role-playing when referring to what I once would have likely termed hack and slash or dungeon crawl role-playing.  In my mind, it was natural that D&D and its ilk lent itself to a particular style of gaming that was easily computerized, which D&D 4e, in turn, drew from.  Not to say there aren’t other types of computerized RPGs or that D&D didn’t have variety.  Just an observation I continue to find cogent.

Anyway, I’m dancing around the topic.  Advancement.  Advancement is a big deal.  It’s a core element to campaign play and a major point of contrast with one-shot play.  Different player archetypes value advancement differently, of course, and some of what prompted this post is a recent situation that I’ll explain a (long) ways down.

Advancement can even rise to the level of being the primary reward of a campaign.  I see this being the case with the RuneQuest campaign I’m part of.  At times, I see this with Heroes of Rokugan (HoR).  When the story elements and interpersonal interactions are scant, what remains are goals of advancement.

And, that’s how I usually see advancement.  When there are compelling story elements or meaningful player interactions, advancement is pushed to the background.  But, it’s always there.  Always something to fall back upon and always something that covers the typically longer term paradigm of a campaign.

Duration

Because of the importance of character advancement, I would be reluctant to sell a brief campaign as a campaign.  By using the term “campaign”, I think too much thought goes into how to advance a character even when there isn’t a reasonable amount of time for a character to change all that much.

What is too short?  Hard to say.  I would tend to believe that something with less than eight sessions isn’t going to have much chance for character progression even with high rewards.  High rewards would be necessary until something like exceeding a dozen sessions.  Obviously, could do some serious accelerated growth, to where you have, as an example in D&D terms, someone go up a level every session.  Do people do this?  I have the sense that this may happen with situations like playing across multiple conventions, but I haven’t experienced this in home play.

Rate

Within the topic of advancement, rate is the primary issue.  The point of advancement is to reward players.  In certain sectors, a lot of money rides on how to reward players.  I’m not so concerned with those sectors, but it speaks to the importance of getting this right.  Penurious rewards frustrate players.  Abundant rewards change the nature of the campaign at an accelerated rate, which many a GM does not intend.  Abundant rewards can also reduce the satisfaction players have for their efforts.  The appearance of overcoming challenges is itself a reward that I have addressed previously and may well do so again that this post doesn’t have time to go into.

I like examples for not being too general and vague about these things.

Example #1:  Conan d20

My opinion on a benchmark for level progression in Conan, which would also be my starting point for other d20 campaigns as well as possibly any system that had level progression akin to the ~20 level model, is a level gain every three sessions.  In fact, once you move from oD&D’s differing experience point breakpoints for levels of different classes to a single experience point level equals character level for all classes, I would dispense with using experience points at all and simply have everyone level up roughly every three sessions.

This does break something with Conan – certain magics require losing XP to use.  But, that’s a poor system for balance, anyway.  Of more relevance is when it shouldn’t be every three sessions.  The clear exception, in my mind, is at the lowest levels.  One shouldn’t struggle at first level for that long, assuming the PCs start at first level.  As I’m kind of fond of the “early years”, I can see spending a whopping two sessions at first level rather than just moving up to second level right away.

But, it depends.  Not all sessions are equal.  The eight hour session with 3+ scenes and multiple plots is not the same as the “four hour but one hour is eating and adjusting character sheets” session with one or two scenes.  I wouldn’t want to jump from first to second level without having had some sense of accomplishment, even if that accomplishment was surviving a mass battle with Picts/nomads/whatever.

What of the later years?  I tend to believe, though I can probably be argued out of this, that it’s worth planning ahead as to how many total sessions a campaign will have.  Note that this isn’t the same as how long in real time a campaign will last.  A weekly campaign and a monthly campaign are more similar when considering how many sessions are played rather than how many years, though they are likely to have different feels, even if they last the same number of sessions.

If we take the level/3 sessions metric, we get 57 sessions for 20th level.  For a weekly campaign, that’s about a year.  That is rather fast.  On the other hand, for a monthly campaign, that’s more like five years, which seems reasonable.  Because of a lack of mechanical character progression when not leveling up, I wouldn’t be inclined to slow progression at higher levels so much as I’d be inclined to start a new campaign when PCs got too powerful for the sort of game desired.  This was a common topic for Brad and me, when the PCs just kept getting higher and higher in level.

Finally, Conan does have advancement outside of leveling up, but it’s not important.  There’s Reputation and whatever the buddy system is that we so ignored that I can’t recall what it’s called.  As I’m sure I’ve mentioned on several occasions, we tried a system where advancement would happen between the sessions that led to leveling up, and it had problems with players gaming the system for increased power contrary to its intent of fleshing out characters.

Example #2:  Legend of the Five Rings

HoR is sort of a monthly experience.  In truth, if played from the beginning, it is more bunched than that based on module release timing and the ability to coordinate one’s group.  It is also very consistent relative to my other experiences, where 4 XP is the standard, with the occasional 5 XP mod.  It’s so consistent that I tend to think of advancement in terms of number of mods rather than number of XP.  Well, I convert XP into mods.  So, raising a trait from 2 to 3 is three sessions.  Going from 5 to 7 in a skill is four sessions away barring exceptional circumstances, i.e. a mod worth 5 XP, and that’s just the minimum since I rarely focus on any one buy at a time.

On a larger scale, I can project how I want my character to look at certain ranks.  For home play, there may be little incentive to go up in Insight Rank slowly, but in HoR, there are reasons not to rank too quickly, especially to go from rank 2 to rank 3, as it cuts off some mods that the character can play.  So, once I put in my minimum levels of competence in traits, skills, Void Ring, and possibly other such as kata, I know how many XP I need for that rank and can convert that back into mods, which, in turn, can be converted into years of the campaign since HoR is a five year campaign.

There are some ways the math can be thrown off.  It’s possible not to get full XP, but the rare 3 XP from a mod can be accounted for with a bit of buffer.  The more common math thrower offers are interactives and special situations.  With HoR2, it was the norm to get less than 4 XP from interactives.  The charity mod in HoR3 gives less than 4 XP.  Playing “Welcome to the Second City” at Gen Con 2012 was worth 2 XP, while certain charity efforts have given 1 XP.  I don’t worry about these, even the battle interactives of Gen Con that I consistently play in, just figuring these are a bonus that may or may not get me closer to a goal.

Also, a PC can die.  For some, it’s even probable as they embrace the nature of being a samurai either in terms of tragedy or in terms of heroic sacrifice.  The more one expects to die, the more important short term advancement goals.

And, HoR isn’t just about XP in terms of advancement.  Status gains and non-status appointments are often the result of off stage efforts or interactive rewards.  Honor gains and losses can be important, as they were to my primary HoR2 character who had school abilities and kata key off of Honor.  Glory has always seemed irrelevant, but then, my HoR play isn’t as comprehensive as it is for those who attend all of the events and who make more of an effort to get what they want through fictions, et al.

I started speaking about HoR, but that was probably a mistake.  Probably better to speak of how L5R works with Insight Rank.  Given an expected duration of a campaign in sessions and an average number of XP per session, one can project what the limit of Insight Rank at the end of the campaign would be.  For HoR, IR 6 has been possible, but given my predilections for “wasting” XP, IR 5 is my more realistic limit … if I have only a single character.  Since I like having multiple characters (at times, more, at times, less), I did the calculations and determined that I could accomplish a rank 4 character and a rank 3 character barring PC death by playing the full slate of HoR3 mods.  I would have to make numerous buys only for Insight, rather than for power or wackiness.

Amusingly, my plans got derailed to where my backup character now has too much Insight, since I have no intention of ranking him past rank 1, anymore.  Too many “quality” buys would put him into rank 2, as would even some appropriately goofy buys.

I don’t worry about non-XP rewards for HoR since I can’t predict those.  Well, I can work on things like appointments to offices and the like, but I don’t really care to do so.

So, that’s HoR.  What about home play of L5R?

Our home campaign was intended to be weekly, got very confused as not everyone could do weekly, then has gotten back to a mostly weekly schedule.  The average number of XP rose from 2 to 2.5 to close to 3 now that 3 XP a session is common.

So, on the one hand, from a time perspective, advancement is vastly faster than HoR’s ~monthly play.  On the other, the average per session is lower.  I think lower makes sense as 4 XP a session for weekly play does lead to vast improvement in a year or so of play.  But, that might be fine with other campaigns.  One poster on the AEG forums asked whether it was normal to have PCs getting to rank 4 after a year of play, and I did the math that 50 sessions of 4 XP is 200 XP, which makes sense for rank 4.  I posited the idea that it’s only a concern if advancement isn’t matching expectations for power level of the campaign at certain story junctures.

I totally understand why people might want to play a weekly, one-year L5R campaign where people top out at rank 4 or 5.  Can always start a new campaign.  Can even connect the new campaign through children of the PCs, aftermath of what the PCs did “100 years ago”, or the like.

I can also see people playing a weekly campaign where PCs are only rank 3 after a year and a half.  However, something to consider is that the XP rewards could be the same for the two campaigns.  The GM could require suboptimal Insight buys that slow IR progression.  Power doesn’t even need to be contained (much) in doing this.  If power is the concern, can force players to buy Lore: White Tigers In The Dead Of Winter or something less silly like forcing everyone to buy up all school skills, most of which the min/maxer whether maxer in other people’s cases or minner in my case, aren’t likely to buy above rank 1.  If power is not as much of a concern as IR, can allow people to buy up traits to form unbalanced Rings or have everyone run around with rank 7 in primary weapon skill.

Study

In our campaign, we have played 22 sessions by my count, my character started with a lot of points in advantages and an ancestor (non-Insight gaining buys), and has been making buys to meet certain path requirements.  I’m essentially two more sessions (~6 XP) away from rank 2.  That doesn’t seem too crazy.  However, I will be an extremely weak rank 2.  A bushi with Earth 2 and Reflexes 2 is absurdly fragile …

… and I decided to make it worse.  Last session, I could have easily died.  My opponent didn’t have any particular reason to kill me, but he didn’t have any particular reason not to, either.  Because it didn’t feel right to have no repercussions for surviving, I thought about what might be an appropriate punishment.

I don’t like L5R disadvantages, as I have mentioned previously.  I think too many require that you build the character around the disadvantage in ways that isn’t fun.  I think others are cheese for additional XP, e.g. Doubt.  However, as a result of something that happens in play, I find a lot of them are evocative.

For being nearly cut down by my foe’s katana, I went through and wrote down these physical disadvantages that would be thematically appropriate:  Lame; Low Pain Threshold; Missing Limb; Permanent Wound; Weakness (choose a physical trait).  Other physical ones could have made sense, as well, like Blind.

Some people love the image of a one-armed swordsman or the like.  That just doesn’t appeal to me.  In fact, as I’ve said before, I understand any player who would rather a PC be dead than be disfigured or crippled.  Various disabilities just don’t lend themselves to a heroic ideal, at least not as much as a heroic death might.  And, it would be hard to explain why I decided my character would have lost a limb when, in the moment, no such thing happened (infection leading to amputation would have made sense).  So, I wasn’t sanguine about Missing Limb.

Low Pain Threshold didn’t really make sense.  Permanent Wound is a death sentence for anyone who fights in L5R’s 4e because of the horrific decision to invert the wound chart from 3e without changing how this disad works mechanically, so might as well have just died, though I suppose retirement would have been an option with Permanent Wound.  Retirement and death having two different story impacts at the moment.

I rolled a die just to see what would happen, and it came up Weakness, which is what I was thinking, anyway.  But, which Weakness?  Stamina?  Eh, okay.  Strength?  I just didn’t feel the thematic sense of Strength.  Reflexes?  Pretty much a death sentence as well, defeating the purpose of taking a disad in lieu of dying, though Weakness: Reflexes is all kinds of awesome if you can manage to survive combat.  I would have more seriously considered it for a high Earth character.  I kept coming back to Agility.  For one thing, an Agility penalty doesn’t hurt my effectiveness that much, which is an important consideration for being part of a party.  No PC is an island.  The more I penalize myself, the more I penalize the party by being less effective.  With a strong combat party, being significantly less effective in combat might be okay, but we are actually pretty sketchy in combat, an area I should be contributing significantly to.

What eventually decided it for me, as compared with either Stamina or Strength, which would not have crippled the character’s effectiveness either (as Weakness doesn’t affect Rings, lower Earth Ring from a real decrease in Stamina would have been a death sentence), was that Agility is the only physical trait I have above average and the only trait I’ve bought up since character creation.  It’s like that buy was undone, which has the right feel.

By the way, I can see many, many disads being inflicted upon L5R PCs based on events that happen.  Phobia is an obvious one.  But, there are a host of mental or social that could even apply to situations like being stabbed through the gut, with the specific environment helping to determine the best fit.

I spent some time on this retreat-ment because I didn’t want to just speak to the mechanics of character advancement, which I’m sure can be researched online.  I wanted to speak to the idea that characters evolve not just through getting better but through story appropriate results that may be to the character’s detriment when it comes to effectiveness.

Another example of such could be how my Conan character underwent disfigurement when the party abandoned him to some ogre-ish (I like to think of them as trollish in a mythological rather than D&D troll way) race.  That had more narrative impact and less mechanical impact.  It was really more of a disad to the party, as the freak made social endeavors challenging.

Well, there are other aspects of character advancement that I’m sure should be addressed, but I think this was good for today.

One thing I think it takes time for people to realize, and it helps immensely to GM to see it, is that PCs and antagonists don’t have a symmetric relationship to combat.  This manifests in a number of ways.  One way is that PCs will usually be designed for greater efficiency in combat, eschewing certain weapon choices, armor choices, fighting styles, or whatever because they are suboptimal.  On the other hand, “people antagonists” in worlds where stuff outside of combat matters are usually much more focused on combat than an equivalent experience PC.

For example:  In Conan, a dagger is pretty much useless.  Can add poison, can have a bunch of Sneak Attack damage, but you can just substitute some other weapon and be better off.  The thief’s weapon of choice for a PC, assuming you go with some low damage weapon, is a shortsword.  There are examples in Conan of how a PC will go for more well-roundedness with Feat slots or whatever, but a really good example of how NPCs focus on combat was when I played in the battle event at Gen Con for HoR, where rank 2 Bayushi Bushi we fought all had 9k4 attack rolls as compared to my 6k3.  I might not get up to Kenjutsu 5 by rank 3(!!) at the rate things are going due to wanting a high Intelligence and putting points into noncombat skills, neither of which were relevant for one-shot antagonists.

Most of the asymmetry between protagonists and antagonists comes out of the typical fate we look for from each.  All players care about with regards to antagonists is removing the threat of them.  Usually, that means depriving them of life.  Don’t remotely care whether they have all of their limbs, whether they will never be able to breed again, how dented their shields are, etc.  They must be incapacitated, preferably permanently.

Meanwhile, lasting wounds, especially permanent ones, are a resource hit to a PC.  Weapon damage and armor damage – resource hit.  Even if it just takes money to fix something, if the money required rises to the level of significant, then resource hit.  Even survival can be a resource, as various systems have resurrection, usually at a great wealth cost.  Of course, survival can be even more important with the lack of resurrection.

Okay, all this seems obvious.  But, what about crits, fumbles, conditions, bleeding, and hit locations?

Bleeding, and what I really mean by bleeding is not someone in their death throes but someone who can start bleeding from lesser attacks, should be obvious.  Rules for bleeding from casual wounds force PCs to take noncombat actions or to put PCs on a clock.  Who cares whether the goblin bleeds?  The goblin is going to die or I am.

One thing about crits and fumbles is how often they occur and what the results are.  You can build these mechanics in such a way that they favor PCs.  For instance, you can say that fumbles only occur if you suck and make sure PCs never suck.  You can have fumbles reduce the amount of damage or attack percentage when PCs have a huge advantage with either.  Crits don’t tend to be so bad for PCs when PCs have far more hit points than their opponents and all crits do is increase damage.  And, so forth.

Yet, in all likelihood, these two mechanics will punish PCs.  There’s a crucial principle when it comes to RPG combat.  The principle is that PCs want combat to have less variance.  The more predictable combat is, the more reliably the PCs win.

But, you say, what about when the opposition is stronger than the party?  Of course that can occur, but why should it?  Why would the party be favored to lose?  Because … all sorts of reasons, you say.

Sure, there are legitimate reasons to put a party into a losing fight.  Parties choosing to bite off more than they can chew should be at a disadvantage.  Not every fight is supposed to be winnable.  In fact, if you are doing videogame roll-playing, like old school D&D dungeon crawling, the idea is that you go as far as you can as long as you believe you have the advantage and run/hide when you no longer think you can continue.  Though, if you were engaging in this sort of thing, you would expect every first combat in an adventure to be in the party’s favor, otherwise, the party will never get anywhere.

So, back to crits and fumbles.  They increase variance.  But, there are also other imbalances that normally occur.  For crits, antagonists usually make more attacks than PCs.  While this can vary, being outnumbered is a common combat setup for a party.  Even when not outnumbered, monsters often have more attacks than PCs.  There are plenty of RPGs where an animal would get both a bite and claw attacks or a bite and two claw attacks, while a PC will get a single attack.  Everything else being equal, which admittedly isn’t often the case, the increased number of attacks by antagonists leads to more crits.

But, you say, doesn’t this apply equally to fumbles?  Sure, volumewise, can tilt towards PCs.  Fumbles are primarily a screwjob on PCs because of the effects of fumbles.  For instance, if a possibility is to attack a friend or oneself, it’s rather normal for PCs to do more damage than their opponents.  Or, if the fumble is drop weapon, a PC will typically be highly dependent upon a particular weapon where some lizardman or whatever just switches to natural weaponry.  Actually, it doesn’t even need to be that complicated.  PC attacks are more valuable than antagonist attacks, if for no other reason than that the PC perspective is that PCs must win, where antagonists winning is … problematic.

It may seem like too many of my “typical” scenarios would be ones where the party is fighting a larger, but less skilled, force.  It’s also common to fight a single big bad or two badasses.  In these cases, if fumbles are just as likely and the effects of fumbles are normally things like losing attacks, losing defenses, attacking allies, or whatever, then fumbles can be worse for the antagonists.  At the same time, fewer opposition tends to go with more skilled opposition, so in theory, they will fumble less often, depending upon the system.

Again, though, we run into the idea of asymmetry.  If a party gets an easy fight because the opposition rolls badly, then the party is inclined to seek out more fights, to the extent such things are possible within an adventure, balancing out the results, or the party will be more successful, which, as long as it isn’t the norm that combats are easy, is likely not to make the players sad.  Meanwhile, a fight that goes badly because of unexpected results can either prevent the party from continuing on towards a goal or can result in permanent losses, which somehow seems sadder to the players.

As I’ve pointed out in the past, not even that long ago, while GMs can establish that the costs of failure be measured in things like lost reputation, prevention of story goals, being captured, and whatnot, the norm with FRPGs is death or other results that are of a similar severity.  Losing out on treasure, for instance, can be just as bad as dying in systems where stuff/wealth is critical to success.  I stopped playing my first RuneQuest character in part because he lost a bunch of Intelligence, reducing his skills to where I became more inept than I was at initial character creation.

Conditions are more nebulous.  What are conditions?  L5R 4e has a list that I recall fairly well that includes, among others:  Dazed, Fatigued, Blinded, Prone.  Pritnear every system has rules for being poisoned.  Attribute loss would be similar to a condition.  Some systems make these more permanent than others.  Permanent conditions, of course, are a major screwjob on PCs.  We played for over a year with a blind character in Conan.  There were unusual reasons why it worked at all.  In most cases, any sort of permanent injury means retiring or suiciding your character to get one that is whole.

But, what about temporary conditions?  Much less clear how they punish PCs.  Still, predictability.  That’s what we look for.  Dazed is an interesting condition in L5R.  It tends to be extremely bad in a fight, unless the one Dazed has nonattack combat abilities.  For instance, while not great for a shugenja to get Dazed, a shugenja can still cast spells.  A badass bushi Dazed is essentially useless, same with the vast majority of creatures.  I’ve GMed where a PC could Daze enemies, and it made fights insipid, in the favor of the party.

So, why bring up conditions?  Because conditions are more commonly inflicted on the party than inflicted by the party.  The whole point of supplements like the Monster Manual is to throw different stuff at parties and “different” often comes with special abilities that do weird things to enemies.  Also, an easy victory by the party due to blinding the enemy dragon tends not to be as problematic as an easy PC kill when your tank or spellcaster or whoever goes blind.  Anyway, that conditions are more commonly relevant to a PC than to an antagonist means having to deal with something outside of the norm, greatly increasing the reduction of efficiency of the party.

Conditions are things that have more impact the fewer combatants on a side.  If you kill a mook a turn, then you don’t really care if one of those mooks is also stunned.

Hit locations is interesting in that I see them being a PC screwjob whether the PCs are outnumbered or whether the party outnumbers the enemy.  While the Conan forums may have always given the impression that PCs fight similarly built NPCs, I have rarely played any RPGs where the antagonists were often built like the PCs.  Feng Shui, with named characters, comes to mind as a case where antagonists were akin to PCs, but usually, you either have a horde of mooks or a small number of big bads.

Obviously, if fighting your doppelgangers (not the monster but identical builds), hit locations would be fair.  But, when fighting inferior opposition, do you really care whether you hack off an arm or a leg when the enemy is dead either way?  Then, hit locations usually go with spreading damage around, i.e. the target can potentially receive more damage than a straight hit point system.  Even in RuneQuest, there’s some truth to this for PCs in that taking out a limb caps damage from a single attack.  I would argue that RQ is a good example of how this screws PCs on the other side – the big bad side.  If you spread damage around on a big bad, all that ends up happening is you end up taking far longer to kill the big bad.

But, you say, RQ has pretty severe penalties for losing a limb, so doesn’t this suck that much more for big bads, which are being outnumbered by the party?  No.  Hit points in systems with hit locations don’t tend to follow a “balanced” scale.  If you take a RQ character and give it 10 more hit points with the normal increases in each hit location, it becomes far, far more resilient.  How do I know?  I had such a character for a time.  One of my characters had roughly a 50% increase in hit points, and he became ridiculously more resilient to damage.  A big bad is not only going to have these defensive benefits but also improvements in offense to justify being a party challenge.  But, even ignoring the offensive side of the game, spreading damage on a high hit point target is awful for a party.

Note that one of the most played systems, if not a FRPG, which uses hit locations is BattleTech.  While BT is its own thing and lacks a lot of similarities to hit location systems in FRPGs, it is interesting to note just how resilient spreading damage can end up being in BT, something I think is a good thing in the game.  Of course, where limbs come off all of the time in BT and the player can not be too displeased, limb loss at the humanoid PC level is something I equate with a dead PC, displaying a way in which I find hit locations to be a screwjob to PCs – you would rather take generic damage and live or not live than lose the use of part of a body even if you do live.

Okay, you say, I get it – you just want PCs to never be threatened, for adventures to lack any sort of challenge, any sort of adventure.  Free XP and gold for all.

Actually, several of these mechanics I’m fine with, if handled in a reasonable way.  The ones I’m never fine with are bleeding, hit locations, and equipment damage; not specifically because they screw PCs but because they generate a bunch of accounting hassles while punishing PCs in ways I don’t see any benefit in.

Yes, I do realize that not having bleeding makes for some undramatic situations where you can just leave a horribly wounded person lying around forever.  Actually, let me make an exception or modifier to my feelings on bleeding.  Bleeding from any sort of damaging attack is annoying since it generally requires being taken out of a fight to deal with, which is crippling to parties.  Bleeding to death from something like being in negative hit points might be fine, preferable even if the alternative is you just die when you hit negative hit points (or the equivalent).  Conan, for instance, has bleeding to death rules that I’m fine with.

I’m generally anti-fumbles not because I have no sense of humor and hate variance but because too many fumble systems are disproportionately brutal to a PC, and it’s not often funny if fumbling directly leads to dying.  Maybe, it’s the systems I’ve played recently that have colored my thinking.  In the past, when I played less gamist systems, fumbles were more entertaining.  Immortal saw a 10% chance of fumbling every single time you used your magical powers (that everyone pretty much had); it even seemed like the intent was that you would fumble so that you got weird disadvantages from being tainted.

Really, more my point is that GMs/groups need to be aware of how these sorts of mechanics affect party results.  In particular, the more of these mechanics, the greater difficulty PCs have in being functional, a major takeaway from my RuneQuest experiences.

Maybe this is another case of my being inconsistent or having a hard time articulating a point of view that hits a sweet spot on a spectrum, but I’m hardly in favor of predictable combat.  If I know success is inevitable, I’m inclined to not fight it out at all.  At the same time, I have no interest in combat just being a randomfest of randomness, where anything can happen.

Why?  Because high levels of randomness undermines strategy and tactics, as well as undermining character building.  Decisions should matter.  If I want to attack the enemy but just end up shooting my commander in the back every time due to fumbles (this basically happened in a Mekton game I played in for our party), then I have no attack strategy/tactic left.  Why does my build matter if combat is highly unpredictable?  I might know next to nothing about first aid and be an aggro character, only to find myself repeatedly being removed from combat to stop bleeding.  Or, maybe I’m the tank healer who just sucks up attacks and keeps everyone else alive … who gets critted repeatedly or who fumbles parries repeatedly or who takes a head shot and gets immediately knocked out.

Sometimes, I realize I don’t come across as the most consistent person in my arguments, opinions, and whatever.  In some cases, that’s due to being far more precise in what I mean than what is conveyed.  In some cases, I make an exaggerated statement for effect that undermines precision.  In some cases, I’m just not consistent, something it took me quite a while to realize.

Then, even if I were always consistent, as much as I try to describe thoughts in precise terms, it can be torturous to be precise or try to be precise.  Meaning isn’t always conveyed better by adding descriptive modifiers in an effort to be more specific.

There are times, like when it comes to RPG campaigns, when it helps to be clearer in what is desired out of the campaign.  Since I haven’t tried to write down my favorite things about role-playing sessions, I often don’t clearly express what experiences I want to have.  Yesterday, I wrote a couple of e-mails to one of my GMs about the sort of things I enjoy.  While I’m sure it’s kind of painful to follow, at least it’s a start and putting it in writing is better than trying to talk through points.

So, what experiences do I want out of a RPG session?

The Spotlight & Contributions & Cool

I’m not a spotlight type.  To argue for the validity of astrology, I could see someone using studies with sufficiently large sample sizes.  Otherwise, it’s far too subjective.  I bring this up because one of the features of my Sun sign is hating the spotlight.

Many times when I’m being spotlighted, I feel uncomfortable, feeling like I’m taking up other people’s time with things they don’t care about.  This is, yet again, another way that RPGs and fiction differ.  In reading a book, the reader doesn’t need to share the experience.  Role-playing is a social activity.  Meanwhile, I don’t mind other people being spotlighted for stretches.

I build bad characters, just like I build bad decks with CCGs and choose bad strategies in boardgames.  The goal isn’t to suck.  In fact, it bothers me when I can’t contribute my share to games.  Even two-player CCGs, where a lopsided game can be quickly conceded, the experience would have been better by not sucking.  Much of my drive that leads to sucking is the overwhelming desire to be unique.  I might play other people’s decks, but I don’t build other people’s decks (with rare exceptions).  I hate having cookiecutter characters.  I hate taking the well-known strategies in boardgames and, on those rare occasions I play them, wargames, miniatures, etc.

The thing is is that it’s pretty easy to discover most effective strategies.  In order to do something different, one has to either end up using an inferior strategy or discover something new.  Most of the time, it’s the inferior path.  With Conan d20, I tried a low Strength fighter.  Now, Conan is quite favorably inclined towards low Strength Thieves as Sneak Attack damage is insane.  It is not remotely favorable to those without copious amounts of Sneak Attack damage.  Even with new Feats in splat books, Strength or Sneak Attack damage or spells are what matter in combat.

Given my predilection to building (mechanically) offbeat characters, I still want to contribute.  I still want to pull my weight.  What that weight is varies by group.  In some groups, everyone needs to strive for effectiveness; for such a group, I will work harder to make a more effective character.  In other groups, being “sidekick level” or “spearchucker level” is good enough.  Usually, there’s something in between where a party weakness can be addressed.  That Conan character ended up being the primary diplomat of the party and a backup religious expert.

Okay, great, blah blah blah … why does this matter?  So, there’s designing a character and there’s playing a character.  Both should be meaningful to the GM, but GMs often have enough things to worry about without figuring out exactly how a party is going to function before it has some time to work together.  Given a particular build, in this case, a L5R build, to contribute, certain things need to happen.  My L5R character is knowledgeable about spirit realms.  If other (Rokugan’s realm is also a spirit realm) realms are never important, then that facet of the character serves no purpose and my contributions decline.

I don’t want the campaign to be all about spirit realm stuff (travel, invasions, etc.) just because I built a character that relates to that since I don’t care about the spotlight nearly as much as I think others do.  Well, I realize that quite a few people I play with are just as disinterested in the spotlight as I am, but some people care more.  But, since that’s the direction I went in character creation, it should be an element of the campaign.

Here’s where we get into consistency issues.  On the one hand, I eschew the spotlight and am often happy being a lesser contributor.  On the other, I like doing cool stuff.  I like to sneak up on people with awesome, which means being bodacious at least occasionally.  Of course, everyone has different ideas of cool.  I don’t find massive combat overkill cool, maybe when it’s a surprise.  I’m more into saving people who appear lost, holding off a superior force, or making emotional gestures.  Though, sure, sometimes I like one-shotting the high priest who is going to eat all of our souls, too.

In general, doing things others don’t is important to cool.  If everyone studies the glyphs, it’s just rolling dice.  If everyone else is looting the sarcophagi while I study the glyphs, that’s interesting to me.  One of Robin Laws’ gamer archetypes is the specialist.  I came out in the quiz mentioned in this post as 58% specialist.  That sounds reasonable.  I don’t always feel the need to be an expert in some area, but I like having my niche.

Looking back at the examples from HoR2 mods that I listed for my L5R GM, it’s clear that doing thing others didn’t and, maybe, couldn’t pleased me.  Though there have been instances where combat prowess or the like have been these things, usually it involves interactions with NPCs.

The World As We Know It

This is not going to be all that enlightening, but without a world (and people in the world) to interact with, interactions with NPCs aren’t going to happen.  So, one of the things I look for from my GMs is having NPCs, preferably NPCs with some depth, even better NPCs who are recurring characters.

I’m not going to like every NPC.  Nor am I going to hate every NPC.  But, I should fancy some NPCs and despise others.  To an extent, it can be forced.  A party villain may have done horrible things to every PC’s family.  I’m very much into subtlety, especially my own, but when it comes to NPCs, I don’t know that subtlety matters much.  Some things about a world just need to grab the player.

On the other hand, I realized only recently just how little interest I take in other PCs.  It’s not that I don’t care about them being successful, it’s that I don’t feel a need to interact with them since they don’t help the plot move along.  I am, after all, primarily a storyteller archetype, so I care a lot about plot.  Sure, sometimes I like to interact with another PC, but that’s typically because the PC’s player is female.  Then, there are campaigns where players drive what happens, not campaigns I play in nor campaigns I would be all that excited by as I hate driving the action – I have an extremely reactive personality.

There are other things I like to see in the world.  I like the world to be biased towards the PCs.  Yup, I said it.  I’m not looking for fair, though fair is a step up in some cases.  I want the world to be more pleasant than the real world.  Otherwise, might as well play real life.

I want the world to be oriented towards telling stories.  I play RPGs to get away from mundane crap like worrying about money, worrying about my career, worrying about food and shelter.  Shopping is not an adventure.  Nor is a lot of the other minutia that crops up.  Not every moment needs to be about dramatic challenges, but I want to do things that are sufficiently engaging that I would write about them later.

What about the PCs’ place in the world?  While I’m a high fantasy kind of guy, when it comes to RPGs, I don’t know that it matters a lot to me how important the PCs are.  I don’t want to be constantly reminded of lack of importance, of course.  Look at L5R.  A newb character in most campaigns is going to be Status 1 or 2, maybe be an Emerald Magistrate with effective Status of 4.  If a campaign constantly pointed out that the Status 3+ NPCs got to sit at the big kids table and we were nobodies, that would be fairly irritating.  On the other hand, knowing that there are lots of more important folks but having them be off stage is fine.

Eeps & Toys

I hate stuff.  Not always.  Not even usually for some kinds of stuff.  But, in general, equipment, magic items, and the other stuff that define the specialness of D&D characters, et al, just turns me off.  I can’t stand the idea of a +1 sword or a Bag of Holding.  Those are videogame toys.  I don’t even like the idea that armor is useful and I have virtually no interest in distinguishing one weapon from another beyond ranged vs. melee.

However, I do like rewards.  I like experience points, especially in games where you can buy precisely what you want rather than games where you only level up.  In terms of other rewards, there are a couple I like.

I do like “useless” stuff with flavor.  L5R has a lot of potential for this where superior equipment is scarce but a scrap of the banner held by some dude when some force held off a thousand goblins means a lot.  My favorite mod experience in HoR2 came from Words and Deeds.  One of the things that happened in that mod was gaining possession of a notable shogi set.  It had some mechanical benefit, in fact even a benefit I used in the mod to win the shogi tournament, but the coolness to mechanical benefitness ratio was extremely high.  I think part of it was also that it had a significant cost.  I burned a bunch of allies and/or favors to afford the set.  And, when I gave it away at the end of the mod, I was quite pleased with myself.

I’m also more inclined to favor stuff, even useful stuff, when it’s one of a kind and is the result of what a character does.  Being handed Stormbringer is not interesting.  Fighting Yyrkoon and Mournblade to get it is somewhat more interesting, only being kind of a fail because someone has already done that.  Forging one’s own blade from a scale of a dragon that the character slew – that works.

I’m even more into intangibles.  I liked the Reputation mechanic in Conan until I eventually gave up on it as it wasn’t serving to distinguish characters from each other and it was just a tedious accounting exercise.  I like that L5R has a Glory mechanic, though I wish it actually did something – a suggestion I made to my GM.  I like being thought of favorably (or feared) by nations, towns, NPCs, factions, cults, etc.  There’s a reason people donate money to universities, et al, and have their names put up on the buildings.  And, think about the adventure creating advantages of having a library named after your character; that library ain’t burning down without a pile of corpses.

Rocks Fall, Massive Damage Save Of 50

I don’t feel a need to be constantly challenged.  That is, there are times when playing when it’s okay for things to be happening that aren’t an obstacle.  On the other hand, weak challenges are lame.  More specifically, if I think the challenge was easy, I’m not interested.  Even if it is easy, if I think it felt challenging, then I’m happy (just don’t tell me differently).

In particular, I hate easy combats.  For whatever reason, even though I can get deeply into what proper tactics should be, combat just doesn’t interest me a lot to begin with.  Pointless combats or combats that are just resource drains are annoying, even in videogames.  I hated random encounters in the slums in Pool of Radiance because they just wasted my time getting to interesting stuff.

Dangerous combats are a different story.  I often get excited by combats that don’t seem survivable, though it helps if the system isn’t insipid.  Then, combats where there’s a particular goal, like rescue a kidnap victim or protect a helpless character or prevent some building/object/whatever from being destroyed, tend to be interesting to me.

Similarly, other challenges should be engaging.  I tend to find riddles to be obnoxious.  Usually, either someone knows the answer immediately or it’s just painful trying to come up with an answer.  Other forms of puzzles, like logic puzzles, don’t really work for me, either.  I like logic puzzle books, some more than others, but the experience of having a bunch of people try to work a puzzle out is not one I’m interested in – I don’t like shared efforts for such things.

Talking to NPCs can be good or bad.  Arguing a point, court drama style, might be good.  Bartering, negotiating terms, and the like tend to just be irritating, which is probably why I’m so uninterested in HoR’s political interactives.  Logistical challenges don’t do it for me, either.  It’s too close to “accounting nonsense” to worry about how much water we have, how fast a horse can go in a day, and so forth.

Traps are not as exciting to me as intelligent opposition.  Some traps, like ones where you have to figure out what order to pull levers in and the like, don’t interest me at all.  I’m more inclined towards physical challenge traps resolved with dice rolls.

I do want decisions to matter.  However, very often, there’s not enough information to make an educated decision, in which case it didn’t matter.  Just recently, our party had a decision as to whether to take a shortcut or not – there wasn’t enough information to determine the advantage over one path or the other, just a guess that the shortcut’s increased risk would make up for the shorter path, so it was a non-challenge and an irrelevant decision.

Like combat, other challenges should tie in some way to the party’s goals (or PC’s goals).  Arbitrary obstacles, whether traps, puzzles, or whatever, are just as bad as arbitrary combats.

Grandpa, What Happened?

Ultimately, the experiences I’m looking for are ones that make for good stories after the fact.  I want to do things I think are cool without bogging things down for everyone else or stealing their thunder.  To be cool requires that there be context, with the world being the context.  I want to be rewarded for things that I do, appropriately of course.  I want to overcome meaningful challenges, i.e. challenges that seem challenging, whether they really are or not.

First of all, what games are FRPGs?  I don’t mean so much whether Shadowrun counts as fantasy or whether mixed genre games should go in their own, though this is relevant.  I mean more that there’s a particular subtype of fantasy role-playing that I have in mind.

Conan d20 is certainly a FRPG, but it isn’t what I’m concerned with at the moment.  Conan simulates swords and sorcery, a genre with limited magic and where supernatural elements are typically rooted in the “bad”, the enemy.  Or, if “good”, only show up to counter evil.

What I’m wondering about these days is what system would I play something like Wheel of Time in or Spellsinger or Young Kingdoms – worlds where magic is in the hands of the heroes.  There is a Wheel of Time d20 supplement, yet there’s no way I would want to use d20 as a base.  Young Kingdoms is covered by the Chaosium model, which I have no interest in either.

Why not these systems, though?

d20

Too mechanical.  Too much accounting.  I feel like I’m playing a MMORPG, which should give an idea of how pointless I view 4e D&D, which is an obvious MMO ripoff.

Starting characters are too weak.  Experience benefits are too slow and awkward.  Feats are boring.  The only thing I actually like about d20 is the skill system and “improvements” on d20 keep trying to “fix” the skill system.  I don’t even like how d20 or any D&D version does attributes, even though it’s the 3-18 system that I was first introduced to and has been used extensively in RPGs.  I hate using a d20 for resolution as to me it produces far too much variance and too many dull rolls.

I can’t speak to how well the magic system works for D&D d20, too little experience too long ago.

Chaosium

RuneQuest, Stormbringer/Elric, Call of Cthulhu, Basic Role-Playing, etc.  d100 resolution has the same problem as d20 resolution, only providing more “empty” values – rolls that don’t interest me in any way.

All of these games are far too crippling to PCs in my experience.  In our RuneQuest play, I just figure that a limb will be lost every fight, that death is two or three hits, that combat doesn’t really work unless you are superior to the enemy, have a bunch of potions (mainly Heal 6′s to restore limbs), and enough PCs know Healing 2 or Xenohealing 2 for recovery and stopping bleeding.

It’s RQ that inspired me to about a few things.  The first is the usual problem I have with features such as hit location, bleeding, fumble charts that screw over PCs.  Other than building the “there’s no symmetry between PCs and what they fight” arguments for why these things suck, which is kind of interesting when you think about just how much difference there is and how that impacts game design, there’s not much gained from this line of thinking.

The more interesting line of thinking for me that got me on this kick was two-fold:  what sort of magic system I want to see when the PCs are expected to be spellcasters; how games should handle recovery.

The more I’ve come to participate in RQ’s magic system, the less it makes sense to me from a marketing standpoint.  Much like Vampire: The Masquerade made a mistake by having variety of abilities at discipline dot levels PCs wouldn’t have and not at the levels that players care about, RQ is all about having this giant world of magic that PCs barely touch.

Even Battle Magic, which is readily attainable, depletes power points in a death spiral way and the costs of learning it are absurd relative to our income.  My recollection is that, in fact, the intention is to limit each PC to a few spells.  Unfortunately, that rules out the focused spellcaster and just causes everyone to look the same, which is the number one thing that I complain about.

Then, there’s Rune Magic, which seems like it would be important.  It’s laughable how poor the incentives are.  Sure, we are dumb and don’t sacrifice to learn Rune Magic every chance we get, which seems to be the way the game is supposed to be played.  But, even so, when I knew a Rune Spell, I never wanted to cast it, just like any one-shot effect that seems good is something no one wants to ever use.  Even at Rune Lord, every spell is a one-shot.  To actually play the game they talk about requires a bunch of Rune Priests, which I’ve been told shouldn’t be adventuring, anyway.

So, what should a “PC magic” system look like?  Daily spell slots?  It might get tiresome to hear, but I do think it works with L5R, though maybe only because the need to cast is relatively rare.  I actually have found, in my not so recent experiences, that D&D spell slots work okay.

Power points?  I don’t find this to work.  It’s all about replenishment rate.  In games with this mechanic, I find someone blows their wad out in a fight and, then, can’t do anything forever.  In Conan, sorcery is better suited to bad guys as they can replenish with human sacrifices.  But, then, Conan isn’t a “PC magic” system.

Fantasy Hero

Which brings us to Fantasy Hero.  The Hero engine was intended for Champions, and it often shows in how the system often doesn’t capture the flavor of genres without a lot of work under the hood.  On the plus side, the engine is so customizable from a power standpoint (the skill system blows), that you can eventually find a particular flavor.

Anyway, if you play it without a bunch of limitations, casting a spell is pretty much just a factor of making a skill roll (which blows) and spending END.  Rechargability is easy, so you can produce consistent effects (depending upon making skill rolls) each and every fight.  This is more what I’ve been thinking of when it comes to recovery.

I find that recovery can be a huge problem.  In Conan, sure, you will get your hit points back after three days of rest, but fighting back to back major fights is crippling.  L5R is not remotely designed for multiple battles in a row – shugenja will run out of Water slots for healing fast and possibly all slots; Void Points will be gone by the second fight.  Another case of how D&D does things better, as the whole engine was built around the idea of multiple fights.

Take an extreme example.  You fight a major battle with everyone a mess and half your offensive spells gone.  Clerics replace enough hit points and the other half of the offensive spells enable a second engagement of the same level.  When tapped out (spellwise), you are done for the day.  Now, of course, D&D’s dungeon crawling philosophy is predicated upon the idea that you can secure a part of the dungeon long enough to refresh, which is not different from other situations where you know when you have to stop and you stop.

With Fantasy Hero, if you want to enable an easily recharged battery, it’s simple to have that recharged battery.  Can take five phases, or whatever, to replenish END every fight.  I think a lot of people are opposed to this.  I’m not sure if they’ve thought it through or not, but I can see how it sounds wrong.

If you can instantly recover (heal, have full spell options, etc.) after every fight, then what’s the real cost of a fight?  Preventing death could be, though death is not a viable option in some worlds, like worlds that make any sense.  A lot of adventures don’t have a viable alternative to winning a fight.  In fiction, you would just get captured or you would fail some mission critical objective, like preventing the damsel from being whisked away or a village being burned to the ground.

Being captured has often been considered worse than death in the hack and slash world.  After all, can get resurrected, but being captured means losing stuff, and stuff is the game’s god.

Precious

Okay, I forgot to mention earlier another thing that always bothers me in FRPGs that I’m choosing to dredge up.  I hate stuff.  I hate external power.  To me, characters and not just fantasy characters should be defined by what makes the character special and not how special their stuff is.

Admittedly, in certain cases, a character is tied to stuff.  Elric is tied to Stormbringer, even if he is special without it.  There’s a certain allowance that can be given to a character, though only when the stuff is unique.

I particularly hate armor.  I quickly got tired of AD&D’s armor system where you always chose the heaviest armor you could.  RuneQuest is exactly the same way.  I don’t care if it’s realistic or not.  It has terrible flavor, and again, it makes everyone the same.  I find that in RQ, every single one of my characters gets exactly the same armor because any other choice is moronic.  For a variety of reasons, Conan has grown in my esteem, but one thing I always credited it with was that armor was something to be minimized.  Sure, it’s hecka useful to have some, more so than I thought for quite a long time, but in a world where the outdoors matter, anything above light armor is suicidal.

So, what system succeeds in the stuff department?  Conan does a very good job, even though some weapons are much better.  L5R does well enough, though 4e is a step back with how powerful armor turns out to be.

None Of The Above

And, so it goes.  I may really like L5R at the moment, but I have major questions as to how adaptable it is to more generic fantasy with even just the system.  I suppose anything can be house ruled, with house ruling the closest system being more sensible than another.  I could change basic healing in L5R to something where you pretty much restore all your wounds after every fight without Path to Inner Peace.

But, I wonder.  I wonder if I’m overcomplicating things and missing an obvious choice if all I wanted to do was dungeon crawl or reflect a specific fantasy genre where magic resided heavily in the party.  AD&D or oD&D would probably be fine for dungeon crawling.  As for high fantasy, I’ve already argued that the nature of it is antithetical to mechanics.  Medium fantasy, for lack of a better term, is not even something I have a clear grasp on.  Maybe Spellsinger would fall into it.  Maybe when you cross swords and sorcery with high fantasy, as Moorcock does, you get a balance rather than two different genres.

Maybe if I understood Ars Magica better.  Maybe if I went to the trouble of playing around with Fantasy Hero (and just ignore how much I hate skills in Hero).  Savage Worlds isn’t going to do it – I never developed a good sense of the mechanics.  RQ, in theory, could be made more palatable to me, but it would completely change the nature of the game, and it would likely be less palatable to others.

Going to include my tier ratings.  One thing about Conan is that there are far more skills I roll often, so the average tier should be far better.  Another thing is that I can’t reasonably comment on what I’d expect “average” Conan play to be like, so I’m going to rate based on our play, which has some clear biases.  I’m also including the “named” skills for the macro skills as there are good reasons some are presented so prominently in the book, the book being 2e Conan d20.

Appraise  [3]
Balance  [1]
Bluff  [1]
Climb  [1]
Concentration  [4 scholar, 5 anyone else]
Craft (alchemy)  [2]
Craft (herbalism)  [2]
Craft (any mundane)  [5]
Craft (macro)  [5]
Decipher Script  [2-3]
Diplomacy  [1]
Disable Device  [4]
Disguise  [5]
Escape Artist  [5]
Forgery  [5]
Gather Information  [3]
Handle Animal  [3]
Heal  [1]
Hide  [4!]
Intimidate  [3, 1 for a certain build]
Jump  [3]
Knowledge (arcana)  [1]
Knowledge (geography)  [2]
Knowledge (history)  [5]
Knowledge (local)  [4]
Knowledge (nobility)  [4]
Knowledge (religion)  [1!]
Knowledge (rumours)  [4]
Knowledge (macro)  [2-5]
Listen  [1]
Move Silently  [4!]
Open Lock  [4]
Perform (macro)  [P: Ritual 2-3, other 5]
Profession (macro)  [5]
Ride  [4]
Search  [2]
Sense Motive  [1]
Sleight of Hand  [4]
Spot  [1]
Survival  [1]
Swim  [1]
Tumble  [3, but should be 1]
Use Rope  [1]

Going to break out some unofficial groupings of skills.  While maybe some of my tiers should be adjusted as I didn’t spend a whole lot of time assigning them, it’s fairly clear that Conan tends toward more like three tiers:  necessary; useless; in between.  The reason I say this is because L5R’s skills tend to be bottom heavy, with a lot of skills being flavor.  Conan’s skill list, on the other hand, is top heavy to where there’s little ability to invest in flavor.

Outdoorsy Skills
Balance  [1]
Climb  [1]
Jump  [3]
Survival  [1]
Swim  [1]

A clear bias in our play.  Jump is the only skill that’s even remotely uncommon.  Swim might vary depending upon where we are, but the three most likely things to kill a PC in our play, in order, are:  failed Climb; failed Swim; failed Balance.  The first PC to ever die died because of rolling three straight 1′s on Climb checks.  Obviously, having an outdoorsy GM and a world that is relatively realistic with being outside of civilization as a major theme creates this environment.

When I rant about how much the soldier sucks, I make an effort to temper my remarks with “as long as your campaign cares about skills”.  Not only does the soldier suck in our play because there’s no way it will be able to keep up with some of these skills, but heavy armor is suicidal in our campaigns, something that also kind of sucks for the noble.

Anyway, the point of this isn’t to generally comment on Conan skills but to look for ways to shorten the list.  I don’t think anyone would get to this number, but I put the list length at 42, retaining all of the broken out macro skills and slots for the macro skills themselves except for Craft (macro) which is not sufficiently distinct from Craft (any mundane).

One of the common suggestions for skill consolidation – yes, there are those who float the idea of skill consolidation or even do it – is to consolidate some of these and the likes of Tumble into an athletics skill.  For our play, this has massive impact, far more than what I’d expect with other groups.  I don’t like that a PC should need to be good at all of these and a bunch of other skills, but it’s hard to envision us consolidating Climb and Swim, for instance, together.  Jump should go away, with Tumble being a natural partner.  Balance, Jump, and Tumble together is fairly thematic and since we way underuse Tumble (the best D&D skill according to various sources), it wouldn’t have that much impact.  Still, seems a really tricky area as I both want to have an athletics skill but don’t want to lose the distinctions between Climb and Swim and other stuff.  Note that we lack the Emphasis mechanic of L5R, so there’s no specializing in a broader skill.

Social Skills
Bluff  [1]
Diplomacy  [1]
Gather Information  [3]
Intimidate  [3, 1 for a certain build]
Sense Motive  [1]

This is where it gets really funny in terms of biases.  One can see where outdoorsy skills are prominent given our GM and players.  One does not as much understand where the social theme comes from.  We usually have a highly social party.  Where other groups seem to be broke bandits barely tolerated in towns, we are or keep the company of nobles and diplomacize or “diplomacize” the hell out of NPCs to where we rarely fight people.

As for consolidation, Gather Information could maybe be merged into Diplomacy, even though Diplomacy is already awesome and it’s so easy to get synergy bonuses into it.  Intimidate and Bluff are virtually the same thing in some cases but incredibly different in others.  “Manipulation” might be a plausible thematic skill to cover both, though it’s not clear whether both should be covered.  It makes the Steely Gaze/Feint build that much more efficient.

Knowledge Skills
Knowledge (arcana)  [1]
Knowledge (geography)  [2]
Knowledge (history)  [5]
Knowledge (local)  [4]
Knowledge (nobility)  [4]
Knowledge (religion)  [1]
Knowledge (rumours)  [4]
Knowledge (macro)  [2-5]

The more I thought about it, the more I thought about how cool it is the diversity of skills we use in Conan on a regular basis.  You can’t say we are too far into man vs. nature or too far into the social realm (for Conan) or too much about esoteric knowledges.  At some point, having more strong skill themes means that it’s just skills in general that matter a lot.  Of course, to compensate, combat matters less for us than it seems for other groups.

One of the really terrible things 2e did was create K: Rumours, taking away a lot of what K: Local covered.  K: Local never made any sense.  Was it knowledge of your home area or knowledge you picked up about wherever you happened to be?  The former is largely useless to PCs while the latter seems to be something you would gain from Gather Information.  That K: Geography often ends up being important, that K: Nature which isn’t even listed but is a required skill for the Nature sorcery style and is also quite important, that random stuff like K: Architecture, K: The Planes, K: Warfare come up often enough gets kind of annoying.  Now, I do like that our PCs have different specialties in many cases.  Sure, a scholar may be better than my character at K: Religion, but I blow away the non-scholars which has proved extremely useful.  I have K: Warfare, which no one else has.  Another PC is kind of a jack of all trades but is one of our few K: The Planes knowers.  So, there is some benefit to the diversity.  There are also very few skill ranks to go around and being strong in K: Religion has come at a price.  My borderer is not really an outdoorsy borderer, being more of a social, infidel sort of borderer.  Having tons of hit points does help with the many falls from failed Climb checks.

I don’t know that there’s anything to do.  Knowledge: X is just the same as Lore: X or whatever games have for their knowledge skills where the things people know are distinct from each other.  I can see some house rule about rolling a similar skill at a penalty.  HoR mods frequently mention different die rolls to know something, often with different TNs.

Other

One thing that would help with Craft skills is having a clearer idea what sort of craft skills make sense and which might actually be useful to a PC.  My archer has Craft: Bowyer, but it’s so hard to get good enough at something like this to be reliable that I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t get a number of ranks/modifiers from fictions I wrote.

Concentration has no reason to exist.  It’s a screwjob on scholars since it’s intended only for them casting/maintaining spells.  Concentration is incredibly easy to replace with an attribute roll, which should probably be Wisdom, not Constitution.

Because of how useless so many of the relevant skills are, I can see there being a “thief” skill.  It would include Disguise, Disable Device, Escape Artist, Forgery, and Open Lock.  While I love the thief for its many skill ranks per level, those ranks need to go into physical skills, knowledge skills, and social skills.  Disguise and Escape Artist were both skills I thought would get used more often.  Escape Artist is awful, being frequently the worst way to get out of a grapple and a generally inferior way to escape things since a high Strength is so awesome in the game that so many characters have a high enough Strength to break out.  In actual play, it’s just pointless.  Disguise has the problem that we are either in situations where it’s impossible to feasibly disguise or it’s unnecessary because nobody will know who we are.  Forgery has problems in a world where many are illiterate.  Open Lock and Disable Device are often replaced by “Hulk smash” and “how many hit points of damage?”/”what’s the save?”.  They are great to have in the party, but it becomes a burden that only one PC is likely to carry.

More than anything else, Hide and Move Silently need to be consolidated into “stealth”.  Both skills are full of problems separately and become a ridiculous burden together as multiple purchases.  Virtually none of the many NPCs that I make or my PCs are good at these skills because it’s just too expensive to be reliably stealthy when there are so many essential things to take.

I haven’t come up with a lot of ideas for consolidation, but it’s just because I don’t happen to be in a ruthless enough mood.  I’m sure with enough remembering of how painful it is to assign skill ranks that I would cut at least 25% off of this list.  That still leaves 30+ skills, something that doesn’t sound great.

By the way, most irritating thing about Conan skills?  How awful Perform and Profession (and most Crafts) are.  Perform: Ritual might get some use, but, then, it’s not really a Perform skill so much as a “do nebulous, non-explained magic” skill.  It makes sense that adventurers aren’t great at professions since they are … adventurers, but it’s prohibitively expensive to Profession up a NPC unless you expect that the difficulty numbers for Profession checks will be generally low.  Why do I even care?  Couldn’t I just ignore them?  Goes back to flavor.  I like flavorful skills.  With this system, the flavor skills are too rarely used and there are so many necessary skills that it’s crazy to invest in them.

Putting aside the thief (and weirder stuff), oD&D/AD&D had none.  My sense is that this is a reason why some like to go old school and play those games.  You don’t worry about being able to climb a cliff or talk to a NPC (maybe throw a Charisma check in) or know anything about anything, not even doors.  Nope.  Just figure out the optimal way to kill monsters or use spells to solve all mundane problems.  Spider Climb or Breathe Water replace athletic skills, Charm Person solves diplomacy, Identify/Detect X/divination spells replace trivia.

I find this kind of bizarre.  It’s so gamey.  There are reasons to avoid getting bogged down in detail or mundane activities – I’m actually lacking in interest in either.  But, it just seems so primitive.  I think it was someone I came across in person who was saying how great D&D 4e was because it fixed the skill rank system of 3e by forcing skills to be binary rather than tailored.  *cringe*  The skill rank system is the only thing I like about d20.

Yup, I like skills.  It may seem strange when I (relative to the norm) vastly prefer high fantasy and other cinematic genres, but I see skills providing the reality to contrast with the fantasy of magic/psychic powers/mecha/etc.

Before getting into greater detail, I wonder if my declining enchantment with the Hero system had anything to do with how boring and tacked on skills came across.

One thing I’ve thought about on and off again for ages, at least beginning with when we got into our Conan play, is how many skills a RPG should have.  The usual problem is too many.  Probably not a chicken and egg situation, but it’s fairly common for too many skills to result in skills not being that important.  In one system, it might be because skills were never supposed to be a primary mechanic even if there are a bunch of them, like D&D 3e where there are plenty of skills but many classes only get 2+INT per level, such a paltry level that it’s clear that they weren’t essential to solving problems.

In another system, the needed skill set is one of breadth rather than depth to where you can’t feasibly specialize.  Systems with harsh unskilled penalties but relatively easy difficulty targets are like this.  Generally, stronger attributes determine effectiveness … but I’m getting off topic.

More than many, many other things, what I want out of a RPG is that every PC be unique.  If everyone has the same abilities, then, sure, play first edition AD&D or whatever where you are pretty much described by level and class.  Skills can be problematic in this regard when going to either extreme in volume or when certain skills are far more important than others.  Let’s say a system has three skills.  How likely is it that characters will differ if the three skills are important to effectiveness or, not that unlikely, two skills are important to effectiveness and the third is just for flavor?  Or, let’s say you have an appropriate number of skills, whatever that might be, and have one be a primary combat skill and everything else not be all that relevant to combat – it’s not hard to imagine what players will do.

Besides being the two systems I’ve played the most in the last five years, Conan d20 and L5R (3e or 4e) are two systems where I think they aren’t far off the mark on the right number of skills.  It’s because I believe they miss just a bit high that I wanted to go into depth on each.

Legend of the Five Rings (Fourth Edition)

High Skills
Acting
Artisan (macro)
Calligraphy
Courtier
Divination
Etiquette
Games (macro)
Investigation
Lore (macro)
Medicine
Meditation
Perform (macro)
Sincerity
Spellcraft
Tea Ceremony

Bugei Skills
Athletics
Battle
Defense
Horsemanship
Hunting
Iaijutsu
Jiujutsu
Weapons (macro)

Merchant Skills
Animal Handling
Commerce
Craft (macro)
Engineering
Sailing

Low Skills
Forgery
Intimidation
Sleight of Hand
Stealth
Temptation

Did I say miss the mark by a little bit?  Written out, this is just scary long.  In my mind, I envision around 12-15 skills, including macros.  Macros?  That would be skills where you have to be more specific in what the skill is for.  With both L5R and Conan, there’s no general knowledge of a macro skill – if you know Games: Go, you know nothing about Games: Shogi – no partial credit, as is the case with some games where you can roll either a similar skill at a penalty or the general skill at a penalty or whatever.

Not only are there a bunch of macros, with some being incredibly important, e.g. Weapons, but L5R also has Emphases – ways to specialize in a skill that may even end up opening up an ability not available otherwise.

Getting back to diversity of characters, a list should be varied enough as well.  As long as this list is, which one of my players thinks is absurdly long, I actually find that it works decently for being able to do what you want to do while being able to do what you need to do.

Let’s go section by section, I’ve added tiers (ratings of usefulness from 1 best to 5 worst):

High Skills
Acting  [4-5]
Artisan (macro)  [3 with fast diminishing returns on additionals]
Calligraphy  [3]
Courtier  [1]
Divination  [3 ... if used]
Etiquette  [1]
Games (macro)  [4-5]
Investigation  [1]
Lore (macro)  [2-5]
Medicine  [2]
Meditation  [1]
Perform (macro)  [3-5]
Sincerity  [1, not as common but hugely important]
Spellcraft  [1 shugenja, 5 other]
Tea Ceremony  [2]

A lot of these skills are particular to L5R’s world.  The world is highly socially rooted.  Some of these skills will rarely be used (unless the player forces them), but there are entire schools (aka classes) built around Acting, for instance.

Should Acting exist?  No.  Perform is a macro skill that clearly covers this thematically.  As long as we retain macro skills, and I don’t see a good reason not to, it should be rare to extract out skills as rare as this.  Calligraphy?  While Calligraphy has a strong individual identity, what does it hurt if it’s an Artisan skill?  “But, if you condense many of these skills into macro skills, anything that pumps all of a macro skill will pump a ton of skills.”  That seems good.  I find Calligraphy to be about a third tier skill … out of about five tiers.  A third tier skill is something that gets rolled maybe 10-20% of the adventures.  That’s something that needs help.

Courtier, Etiquette, and Sincerity (and Temptation) form the core of the courtier’s skill base.  Rather than having a generic social skill that covers them all, which is a bit odd even though that’s exactly what a weapon skill is for combat, I’m good with having distinct social skills.  Temptation is not one of them.  Temptation is clearly just an Emphasis of Courtier.  Sincerity used to be an Emphasis of Etiquette and I can see an argument for going back to that.  It’s funny how 4e really screwed skills by taking away most Insight bonuses and the Free Raise at rank 5, and, then, on top of that, forced social characters to take a third social skill.

Divination is strange.  It could probably be a Lore skill, but it has its own unique mechanics.  It could be an Emphasis of Theology, except in 4e, Theology is a Lore skill (in name) rather than a separate skill, like in 3e.  I don’t really mind it being separate due to having specific mechanics.  Similarly, Medicine has specific mechanics to where some skills really do need to be separated.

Speaking of Lore skills and macro skills in general, in 3e, the most obnoxious thing to me about skills was how someone good at go knew nothing about shogi and vice versa.  Games should just not work like other macro skills as individual Games skills are tier four to tier five, the ~5-10% to ~0-5% of adventures rolls.  I would have Games be a skill with individual games as Emphases.  Because Games would still be a distinct skill and not rolled into something like Perform, it could have skill specific mechanics to where an Emphasis gave an unusually significant bonus.  This, theoretically, solves the problem of the go master being a shogi master, Fortunes & Winds master, Sadane master, Letters master, etc. at the same time; though, it wouldn’t bother me that much if skill in one meant skill in another – we are talking about a tier four skill.

The most obnoxious thing to me in 4e about skills has to do with Lore skills.  Whereas, I can live with someone being good in all games simultaneously – it’s not super implausible in real life … or in Yu-Gi-Oh! (the TV series), I can’t deal with someone being a generic knowledge master.  Which, by the way, is why Sage is so dumb.  I’ve actually had a player roll Lore: Doors because his character had Sage.  It’s not just that Sage makes buying Lore skills lame, it’s that buying Lore skills is already lame with the changes from 3e to 4e.  At least, with 3e, you got extra Insight from taking these tier four skills.  Not all Lore skills are tier four, though.  Lore: Shadowlands is tier two based on its usefulness bumping it up from its commonality of use.  Lore: Theology is tier three along with History and Heraldry.  Still, there should be better rewards for both the better tier Lore skills and the obscure stuff.  In terms of consolidation, there’s nothing really to do, already separate 3e skills of Lore: Shadowlands and Theology were consolidated.

Investigation is hands down the most used skill in the game.  Okay, I’m sure there are campaigns where Defense (passive bonuses) and Weapon skills are far more important.  Campaigns I’m involved in, it’s Investigation.  What’s funny about Investigation is that’s kind of like a macro skill where you get every individual skill under it.  In d20 terms, it’s Spot, Search, Listen, Gather Information, Sense Motive, and sometimes a tracking skill all in one.  For HoR play, always, always take at least two ranks in this.  I’m okay with this.  It’s not ideal, but it’s further down on my list of things to fix.

Perform, as is the case in any game that has these sorts of tier five skills – tier five being the “Whoa, really, I have to roll a Dance skill?  Come on, this is so unfair!” level of skills, should function like I described how Games should function.  I’m okay with skill in one being skill in all, even if that produces some odd scenarios, and that might be fixable by having there be special Emphasis rules.

Spellcraft is, amazingly, okay.  It was arguably too good in 3e, but that didn’t overly bother me, either.  As long as it doesn’t define how good a shugenja is at casting spells, I can see it existing on its own, even if it is kind of a Lore skill.

Meditation and Tea Ceremony are fine as is, being necessary skills for the genre and having special mechanics.

Bugei Skills
Athletics  [1]
Battle  [3]
Defense  [1]
Horsemanship  [4 even for Unicorn]
Hunting  [2]
Iaijutsu  [hard to rate]
Jiujutsu  [in 3e, 4, in 4e, 1]
Weapons (macro)  [1]

I like that there’s only one non-weapon martial arts skill.  Can anything really be removed here?  Hunting could be cut with Lore: Hunting and Investigation taking over its uses, though that only makes Investigation that much better.  In 4e, they specifically wanted to split Weapons: Spears from Weapons: Polearms, but I think they were crazy, as I don’t recall seeing either rolled by any 4e PC.  While half the Weapon skills are useless or nearly so and the mastery abilities are way out of line with each other, I’m perfectly fine genrewise with there being some imbalances in the Weapon skills.  If only more weapons were viable …

Merchant Skills
Animal Handling  [5]
Commerce  [3]
Craft (macro)  [n/a]
Engineering  [5]
Sailing  [4-5]

Some oddities, here.  Thematically, it’s important that Commerce not be a high skill, that Animal Handling be distinct from social people skills.  I’m not sure why Engineering needs to be a separate skill, not really sure why it’s a merchant skill.  While Craft is a mess in Conan, it’s okay here.  Sailing is odd, really odd when you consider that in 4e it’s a two trait skill, which does make sense.  I guess I can live with all of these the way they are.  They are pretty obscure skills, being on average tier five, with Commerce being maybe tier three, but they have distinct identities as, well, merchant skills.

Low Skills
Forgery  [5]
Intimidation  [4]
Sleight of Hand  [5]
Stealth  [3]
Temptation  [4 for PCs]

Forgery, okay – it’s scuzzy and more than just a Lore or Perform.  Temptation, I already talked about – should just be a Low Emphasis of Courtier.  The others have similar problems.  Stealth is frequently not a Low skill.  By far the most common use of Stealth I find in my play is sneaking up or away from bad guys, not guys we don’t like, but Shadowlands monsters and bandits and other scum.  It’s not dishonorable in such situations.

Sleight of Hand?  I’m sorry, but by far the most common use of this I see is entertainers entertaining children and stuff.  The idea that hiding something is insincere is so absurdly out of line with how lying besides to bolster one’s reputation is not in any way dishonorable.  Check the tables.  It’s inglorious to get caught lying.  The only time I really see a PC use Sleight of Hand, it’s against enemies of the Empire, palming jade against Tainted dudes or the like.  It’s also a good choice for making a Perform skill, with there being two reasons it likely isn’t – one, the false belief that hiding objects is dishonorable and, two, that it has distinct mechanics.  Which, since it’s like a tier five skill, it doesn’t need to have distinct mechanics.

Intimidation is another social skill that shouldn’t exist by itself.  It’s also another case of being a skill that is not honorable but not dishonorable in virtually any sort of normal situation.  Sorry, again, but by far the most common uses of it in play are by samurai telling peasants what to do and magistrates telling criminals what to do.  The idea of browbeating a courtier with it or whatever, well, that may be dishonorable, but that’s because it’s a dishonorable thing to do in the situation, where being courteous to half-people and scum is honorable, not not dishonorable.

At most, I’m looking at cutting six skills.  Yikes!  That leaves 27(?) without even taking into account macro skills being large groups of skills and Emphases being kind of like different skills.  And, yet, … and, yet, I don’t know.  I don’t feel that it’s that painful.  Maybe, it’s because I typically get 4xp per session and one rank in a skill is 1xp.  I tend to be bothered far more by how it isn’t worth buying up skills than by how many skills I should buy, by how tiresome it gets to raise traits or, in 4e, the Void Ring, or how kata, memorizing spells, and other random stuff take away from planned trait/ring/skill improvements.  There still seems to be something wrong, like how maybe Meditation and Tea Ceremony are awfully similar in role, if not in flavor or mechanics.

There definitely are too many tier four and five skills, which is frustrating.  On the other hand, a way to use a skill more often is to … use it more often.  Force its use.  Play shogi with every NPC.  Cook like you’ve never Artisan: Cooking-ed before.  There are ways, more so in home play but even in HoR, to leverage bad tier skills.

So, this ended up being far, far longer than I expected.  I thought I’d run through L5R and Conan in under two grand words.  Guess this is part one of a two parter.  Stay tuned for the next episode of “roll what?!?”

But, how about the NBA playoffs?  For those following the first round, it’s been a lot less unbalanced than what was expected at the beginning of the season.  What is the draw of sports?  Sports are predicated on the idea that on any given day anyone can win and anyone can lose.  The Lady Huskies lost in the NCAA Women’s Tournament to someone who was neither Baylor nor Stanford.  Memphis won their first playoff game in franchise history against the #1 seed (admittedly, with a star out).  Buster Douglas.  Miracle on Ice.  Etc.

A game has to have that same level of unpredictability, otherwise why bother playing it?  Even games that can be reduced to math, like chess, a handicap can make the game sufficiently close to create an unknown result.

But, what of a role-playing game?

I see RPGs as being a way to model fiction, usually fantasy fiction but whatever genre appeals.  There’s always been a dissonance between the two, however, in that (typical) RPGs really haven’t been designed to model fiction; they’ve been designed as … games!  D&D stole a lot from Tolkien, but it didn’t steal a predetermined narrative.  One could try to make the case that fiction doesn’t have to be predetermined and can be modeled with RPG mechanics.  Sure, things work out in dramatic ways, but there’s no requirement that RPGs be less dramatic.

Is there?

The typical RPG has a random resolution mechanic to show success, failure, and frequently levels of success or failure.  Most use dice, as dice are easily grokable and attainable producers of random results.  There’s also infinite variation on how to use dice.  Deck of cards is a more visceral randomizer to me but has a different aesthetic than dice, where some folks just love dice, and has less straightforward math to make a coherent and/or balanced system.

So, you get to the end of the quest and everyone is down except you, the wizard, and you got one spell left with which to fell the tyrannical dragon and save your party’s reputations as adventurers.  Roll the dice, need whatever result on the die roll (casting roll in some systems, damage roll in others) and you blow it.  Total party kill.  Start back off at zero XP.  Back to being a goblinkiller rather than something cool.  A great story ruined by bad luck.  Perhaps.

One of my favorite categories of abilities in RPGs is the category of controlling luck or just controlling results.  I don’t mind failure, in and of itself.  Failing at things is often funny and makes a character more interesting – there’s a reason fiction isn’t written where the protagonists always succeed.  I do find certain types of failure aggravating, however.  I don’t like failing at things my character is supposed to be better at than anyone else; that sounds kind of ridiculous, but I don’t design characters to be good at the usual things or even things that are actually all that useful.  If I design a character who is the acknowledged expert on dessert toppings, I don’t want my one roll in a campaign that actually involves making dessert toppings to fail.  Obviously, from a game balance perspective, can’t expect to succeed at important things all of the time just because that’s one’s forte.

Of more relevance to the idea of whether a RPG should model fiction or not is how aggravating it can be to fail a roll when at a climactic moment in a session.  Or, sometimes in not so climactic moments.  While plenty of things have bothered me about playing Conan – archery sucking, barbarian being the only fighter worth playing, low Strength character without spells or a bunch of Sneak Attack is useless in combat, etc. – the most discouraging element of play (rather than theory) has been how many times my character has failed Terror checks.  Oooh, it’s scary.  I run away.  Have fun guys during this scene that I’m not a part of because I can’t make a coin flip.  Beyond the fact that it’s absurdly unheroic, it’s brutal to the party to have a member run away at the onset of combat.  So, I did things to improve my save vs. Terror.  Still failed them.  It’s just the nature of the game that characters built a certain way have an unusually high chance of running away.  Not fight kind of badly, like … well, I’m not sure what since failing a Fear check in L5R is brutal even if you don’t run away and rolling on the Fear Table in Solomon Kane has seen PCs get three heart attacks … but flat out take yourself out of a combat for at least a couple of rounds.

So, I’m into rerolls.  I’m into result substitution.  I’m into luck points/fate points/whatever that can manipulate results.  I’m a huge fan of Honor Rolls in L5R, which is why the 4e rules bother me so.  I don’t think of it as a bonus to high Honor characters.  I think of it as a right that every PC has to greatly increase the odds of making a roll in a session.  But, that’s me.

What of drama?

In fiction, drama is created by challenge and by the writer making things seem important.  In a RPG, the players don’t have the same level of control over what’s important.  Arguably, the GM shouldn’t have control over what’s important, either.

And, that’s the crux of it.  Should drama be planned or be unexpected.  I’ve long been of the mindset of planned drama.  I create scenes in my mind and provide my players with the tools to enact the results I expect.  And, then, they screw it up.  As a player, the story unfolds in my mind, I can see where the script is taking us; our short term ineptness and stupidity will only make the awesomeness we will unleash against antagonists all the more bodacious.

Should we be allowed to screw that up?

Random results produce drama.  A TPK is going to be fairly dramatic for me since it’s so rare in my experiences.  One-shotting a big bad, throwing the expected challenge level of a session completely off, can be far more interesting than an expected struggle against a worthy foe.  Of course, a GM needs to be adaptable.  But, how much should a GM be adaptable while adjusting things to produce the planned result or be adaptable by saying “wow, that was unexpected, roll up new characters guys” or “wow, that was unexpected, good job ole chaps, babes and booze for everyone”.

If we look at oD&D, we see a game predicated more on the idea that the story comes from the results of the die rolls.  Sure, there’s Raise Dead, et al.  There’s rolling up a new character.  There’s plenty of ways to punish parties that are unexpectedly successful.  “Oh, what great wealth you adventurers bring back, only 80% taxes on treasure.”  But, like other games, the results aren’t scripted.  Virginia Commonwealth slays Smaug.

Should fiction be limited to fiction?  Or, should fiction be reinterpreted to be less scripted than, well, it is.  Maybe the writer uses a randomizer to determine what will happen.  I’ve rolled out combats in fictions I’ve written for RPGs, though it was more for the elements during the combat and less about the result.

I’m increasingly of the mind that I should be less rigid in my perspective of story.  Many people I enjoy the idea that luck affects their characters’ stories.  I may continue to believe that a lot of wasted opportunities for really good dramatic situations occur when you leave things up to chance.  On the other hand, chance can easily develop a character or story in ways that scripting won’t.  My main Conan character has always been more animal-friendly than the others.  That only happened because I kept rolling 20′s on Handle Animal early on.  I’m not sure if there’s an optimal point of balance between telling a particular story and leaving it up to chance, nevermind where that point would be, but it’s certainly reasonable to stop carping about how RPGs fail to deliver like fiction does.  Sometimes they deliver something else that’s just as good.  And, sometimes they do deliver just like fiction.

Some trivia:  The player was a friend from growing up that I hadn’t seen in over 20 years.  The character’s artwork was female though we referred to the character as him.  The premise was some gadgeteer who had some sort of high-tech cables that did stuff – main attack was a huge Entangle.  I actually comment in the dream that as I got further down the list of powers I realized that the character’s powers really didn’t have any sort of theme and it was just a “I want to be able to do this and this and this” character.  I got into a discussion on the character’s +3 SPD with a -3.5 disad of [Publish], which I naturally interpreted as meaning the character had +3 SPD only while publishing (journalist job or something) as a single 3.5 disad is absurd and would need to be so narrow as to make the ability essentially useless, but my friend couldn’t remember what the disad was supposed to mean and was trying to convince me that it would increase his SPD in combat.

The other players were sitting around a table waiting for me to finish reviewing, and I was quite concerned with time and whether everyone else was ready.

Oh, by the way, for those who don’t follow such things, Cable is a Marvel mutant, Scott and Jean’s son from the future who creates X-Force.  I finally found out (this was like 15 years ago) that the name Cable was some not terribly cool reference to how he was a cable between the past and the future or two sets of mutants or something.  Still find the name okay for some reason, must roll off the tongue.

Anyway, how am I going to make use of this dream?

Champions in particular, but Hero System in general, has incredibly involved combats.  The noncombat system is actually far too simple for me, with basically it just being roll 3d6.  I also rather hate 3d6 resolution since it generates lots of average results and extreme results, like a 14, don’t feel terribly extreme.  But, I want to focus on combat.  I could focus on character building with its incredible precision and heavy accounting-like math, a system that has historically been my favorite for character creation; I once, as far as I know, owned every Champions product up through around Demons Rule.  But, I want to focus on combat.

I don’t dislike all combat.  I just dislike far more combat than a lot of people I’ve played with.  Mostly, it is because of boredom.  Often, it’s because the party is destined to win and there’s no real reason to be involved and there’s nothing terribly interesting to achieve as a personal goal in the combat.  Combats where the party looks like it’s going to lose I’m all in favor of and get enthusiastic about, at least as long as they don’t have anticlimactic endings where the party gets bailed out by something dumb.

Ultimately, I suppose, it comes down to the fact that I don’t like rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice.  I’d much rather do something creative in combat that doesn’t involve rolling dice than just roll attack/roll damage in round 1 of a 6 round fight.

So, combat length.  There’s always minimizing realtime waste.  Some systems leave people with more time to sit around and wait for others to act.  Then, there’s making quicker decisions, not looking up rules in books, etc.  Then, there’s in-combat length, reducing the number of rounds that combat lasts, which is more in my mind.  However, I’m going to address these things individually since they do connect to my greater theme [which is?].

1.  Turn Length

There are a variety of reasons why PCs might have to wait longer or shorter for their turns to come up.  Rather than try to get into every possibility, I’m going to focus on bad guys’ turns and overly involved mechanics.

I’m a big fan of all bad guys going on the same initiative, at least when GMing.  I know it’s unrealistic and takes away from some battles where the bad guys have names and are a serious threat, but as a GM, I find that I can’t focus on things like I can as a player, so it’s far easier to process as many things at once as possible and helps with enemy tactics.

Lots of bad guys equals lots of time for players to blithely ignore how they should be thinking of optimal tactics to win the fight.  Really, I hardly ever see players think about what the party should be doing once combat begins.  I am accumulating infamy for my wolf battles – I’ve run two fights at the beginning of sessions against wolves merely to setup what happens next only to find that the combats last hours longer than I wanted.  Is this entirely due to numbers of bad guys?  Of course not.  It has a lot of something to do with making the wolves too resilient.  If I ever run a game where werewolves are the bad guys, prepare for a TPK.  I’m drifting off topic.  Number of bad guys.  I’m not thrilled with having only one bad guy since it makes too many fights too easy for PCs, but I’d probably say that two tough bad dudes is good times.  Hordes are painful unless they can be abstracted – I personally hate rolling half a dozen or more attacks by dorks but don’t play with folks who seem enthusiastic about rolling for the bad guys for me; on the other hand, I don’t mind it as much as a player where there’s some suspense as to whether I get hit or not.

Then, we get to systems where individual turns take way too long.  I’m not talking about decision time which I’ll get to in a moment.  I’m talking about purely mechanically being overly involved.  Multiple attacks can greatly extend turns.  Hit location tables or, really, any sort of special tables often add virtually nothing yet draw out actions.  Now, long turns isn’t as bad as highly variable turns.  I find that a lot of the time someone will be done in under a minute and someone else will take considerably longer.  For instance, a fighter may just swing sword and hit or miss (miss really sucks when you aren’t doing much) where a spellcaster does something far more complicated.

In terms of turn length, while people play much faster the better they know the system, I’m pro L5R.  I’m going to bring up L5R often because its streamlined combat system is more what I’m looking for.  With Solomon Kane, I find that there’s a great disparity in turns, though that has something to do with having party minions and with my countering with baddie minions.  With Conan, I don’t feel like PC turns take the wrong amount of time, maybe because the massive damage save rule speeds things up, except when people are indecisive and/or don’t know what the rules are.  At least, with Conan, when someone is doing something more complicated, it’s probably more interesting to those who are observing.

2.  Decision/Rules Time

Some people just aren’t sufficiently engaged in what is going on.  That isn’t a system issue.  What is a system issue is when a system offers too many options or when the options are too complicated and require either adjudication or, more likely, looking up rules.

Feng Shui is supposed to be fast-paced Hong Kong Movie style adventuring.  I’m a big fan of it but not its combat.  Combat, rather than being quick and exciting, is often incredibly mechanical and slow.  Part of the slowness can come from players trying to get into the spirit and do heavily descriptive things, which is fine.  It’s more how tedious it is to either gun down a bunch of mooks or how hard it is to put something named down.  Then, the shot system, much like the Speed system in Hero, is extremely mechanical.  I find shot management even more accountingish than Speed management as, usually, in Hero, you do stuff on your phase where shots are often used for things like aiming or get pushed down with active dodge.  Is FS a good example for this section?  Probably not.  Reason it came to mind was that players I play with often don’t grok the shot system and how long their abilities take, which causes indecision and greatly slows down play.  For me, once I got it and understand what my character does (which was harder, of course, in one-shots than when I ran a gambler in a campaign), my shots were pretty much aim or attack with deciding whether to active dodge coming down to what shot number I was on.

Conan is a case where things work okay only because the players don’t know what they are doing.  I built an alt character (who promptly died because he was heroic and the party wasn’t) who took advantage of my experience-gained knowledge of what was effective in Conan.  I was constantly paralyzed by indecision as he had simply too many combat options:  how much to Power Attack for; whether to Improved Feint to do Sneak Attack damage; which playmat square to occupy to maximize effectiveness of attacks; whether to fight defensively; how much Combat Expertise to use; etc.  While that was an extreme case, our players simply don’t think of all of the options available to them or plan ahead for when there are decisions like Power Attack.  And, I’m just talking about basic combat.  Add in maneuvers and our players are inept tactically.  I constantly forgot to use the Aid Another option to help our barbarian kill everything since my attacks were ineffectual, and that’s one of the most basic maneuvers.  We don’t even remember maneuvers in the main book, let alone maneuvers in anything else.  Is that bad?  No!!  If we used everything available to us, while it might make combat more interesting, it would be insane in terms of figuring out what goodies or baddies should do.  I came to the conclusion at one point that a PC can pretty much only recall using one special maneuver.  If that maneuver is too effective, then the GM counters and the PC moves on to the next maneuver.  Whichever maneuver the PC is on is the PC’s schtick.

Another comment on Conan – I despise the grapple rules.  We end up looking them up constantly even though we’ve looked them up so many times that one would think we would know them by heart.  Some on the forum thought they were simple to remember.  Um, only if you do basic things.  What happens when you have multiple grapplers?  What happens when a monster can grapple in addition to doing other things?  We couldn’t even remember how to move a grapple or how it worked to give up attacks to break a grapple, which are basic things.  Simply way overcomplicated rules for something that doesn’t interest me at all.  But, since they are a good way to inflict pain on PCs, they are a key element to the GM’s arsenal.

I’ve played a lot of systems where there were far too many choices.  Someone just asked about the Oz RPG, I assumed the Oz: Dark and Terrible RPG.  I remember that combat was incredibly frustrating when I demoed it in 2009 because it was so counterintuitive and had too many phases.  Too hard to think of others off the top of my head as too many systems blur.

Again, I like the number of options in L5R.  Sure, I don’t use knockdown, disarm, feint as often as they should be used, but I don’t find that there’s an endless list of maneuvers like Conan or too few to where a character bad at normal stuff is useless.  Though, I am against the extra stances in 4e, which I don’t think added anything besides making Defense Stancing shugenja way better in combat than they should be.

3.  Kill!  Kill!  Kill!

I seek combat that lasts 3 rounds max (well, see below).  I don’t want 3 rounds of “I punch/slice/shoot”.  But, people should go down … fast.  Those wolf battles were supposed to be of the 3 round type.  I’m often engaged in 3 round L5R fights where, in contrast, I’ve become bored with the attrition wars that I’m finding to be too often the case when running HoR2 mods with 4e rules and minimal bad guy stat changes.

By the way, if you ever consider comic book fights, they are quite interesting when translated into RPGs because they don’t work like how one might expect.  Comic book fights last a long time, but most of the panels are taken up with someone thinking to oneself or with soliloquy or conversation or being out of the line of fire.  When someone gets hit by an attack, it’s often ineffective or takes them out in one-shot.

This can be simulated in Champions by people taking phases to recover or get away rather than just keep attacking, but normally, I find that people only recover or evade when they feel they need to.  What doesn’t work so well in Champions is the idea that one attack will take someone out (or be completely ineffective, as both extremes produce balance problems).

Not every single combat should be quick, but really, a lot of combats are combat for combat’s sake and not terribly important to the story.  While I’m quite fond of how quick 3e L5R combats went in HoR, the combats typically felt tacked on to give bushi a chance to show off, so they shouldn’t have lasted longer than 3 rounds.  An epic battle, however, that decides how the story will go or whether PCs survive, I can see going on longer – wars of attrition are fine when they are the climax to the adventure.

However, the option to make any battle quick should be available.  This is where I’m having a lot of trouble with Solomon Kane.  I made it way more brutal by making raises openended for damage, yet, it still often bogs down for me into round after round of “When are things going to go down?”  I’m not sure how I can make it nastier, but then, I haven’t thought too much about the details yet.

The Theme

The point of this post was to comment on how I want combat to be fast and brutal as, everything else being equal, that makes them more interesting.  L5R 3e was great for this sort of thing, with one exception – characters could die way too easily.

Sure, L5R 3e wasn’t perfect as a fight might be over before your initiative even came up and one’s attack and damage rolls might mean that any attack was an auto-kill, but I found that there were plenty of subtle tactics to make combat more than just “I swing, you die”.  There needed to be an extended way to avoid death to prevent GMs from having to not keep high dice to keep characters alive.

At the rate things are going, I have no idea whether I’ll ever end up running SK again, but if I do, I want to figure out a way to make combat more brutal but also more interesting to the PCs who don’t have armies of minions.

For game designers out there who give a fig what I want:  don’t give characters too many options; don’t have wildly disparate combat builds, such as one dude with one attack and another with five; don’t use a bunch of tables or special cases; don’t make it too hard to take something down; don’t overuse mooks who are a complete bore most of the time to nuke; don’t require that PCs be smart in their decisions to be successful; don’t have combat feel like accounting; make things go down fast so that we can spend more time on role-playing and less on roll-playing.

Forum Death

Mongoose no longer has a separate forum for Conan.  I’m not sure why it’s important to consolidate forums.  As often as the Conan forum was frustrating for how oblivious people seemed to be about game balance, it was still a place that discussion occurred.

Being heavily in favor of house rules, it was a place where house rule discussions were reasonably common.  Perhaps it is a good idea to remove massive damage saves from the game, though I don’t think it changes that more damage output is always better, which still means that two-handed, high Strength fighting and Sneak Attack are grossly more powerful than anything else.

House Rules

I did look back at my posts to our Yahoogroup to see if I had forgotten any major areas of changes I’d like to see when we start anew.  I think I only missed one.

The primary change I’d like to see is to balance the classes.  I harp on this all of the time.  It’s not even terribly difficult.   Why shouldn’t nobles have 8 skill ranks per level?  Why shouldn’t soldiers have more skill ranks than barbarians?  Some argue that soldiers are the idiot grunts of the world, but that’s clearly not true.  Professional soldiers of pre-history are not somehow that removed from modern soldiers in needing to be capable in a variety of areas.

Just as an example, since it blows my mind that people don’t think of it in this way, let’s say you have an average Intelligence soldier.  You can max out two skills – that’s one more than one.  Class skills are:  Climb, Craft, Intimidate, Jump, K: Geography, K: Local, K: Rumors, Perform, Profession, Ride, and Search.  Actually, this is a pretty pathetic list.  What of Listen and Spot?  What of Heal? What of K: Warfare?  Well, the last is probably just because the RAW is kind of poor at covering metaskills like Knowledge.  Anyway, I’d imagine that a flavorful (rather than minmaxy) cavalryman would max out Ride and either Intimidate or Jump, which leads to someone who doesn’t know how to do his job professionally, doesn’t know anything about where he is, can’t take care of his weapons or anything else.  Sure, this list is not a list of the most essential skills in the game (again, would help if Spot were on here).  In our campaigning the only crucial skills on this list are Climb and Search, with K: Geography being the next most useful.  Every other class in the game gets at least twice as many skill ranks.  While it may not seem like that huge a deal to get 2 more skill ranks per level, it’s kind of a huge deal to get 2 less skill ranks per level when the 4/level classes are scraping for ranks, themselves.

If I had to go with what offended me the most when I started playing it was Codes of Honor.  I’ve since lost my deep and abiding hatred of the mechanic, though I’m not sure why.  If you can’t stack Code of Honor’s +3 Will saves with Faith’s +2, then not everybody has to have a CoH.   Still, why not?  It’s money for nothing and chicks for free.  Okay, somebody argued, then just have everyone take a CoH and everybody is equally benefited.  My problem with this is it’s a minmax play that flies in the face of character integrity.  I can’t stand things in games that you are required to have in order to compete; yes, this does apply to CCGs, but it’s not as clearly argued a lot of the time.  The concept of a Code of Honor is quite appropriate, but the benefits are so outlandish – 50% better than Iron Will, which you have to use a feat slot for – that even someone with a lobotomy would always start with one.  Also, as much as the book likes to say that there will be no pirate’s code of honor or thieves’ code of honor or whatever, the fact is that there are exactly such insipid codes.

Racial imbalances are trickier.  I recommended a change in the favored class rules ages ago and my suggestion hasn’t changed, surprisingly.  But, that’s only one feature.   I like Shemites thematically, but they get shafted by something that sounds kind of minor at first, -1 saves.  It’s just a simple bullet point among a host of others that sound pretty decent if unspectacular.  Without any drawback, Shemite would be a stronger race in the game mechanically.  But, that simple line has huge mechanical impact.  Maybe we make more saves than most, especially Reflex saves, but as you progress up in levels, saves become the primary rolls in the game.  Actually, most folks don’t seem to get their Conan characters up above 12th level, so our high level adventures are even more save happy.  Meanwhile, other than all classes favored, the Hyborian benefits don’t sound like that much hotness, but it’s all upside and what may be lost in magnitude of power is made up for in versatility.

Initial skill ranks is an annoyance that only compounds the problem of differing classes getting differing skill ranks per level.  My house rule that I used for NPCs I created was to give everyone 20 + 1 level of class and either 1 level of Int bonus or normal Int bonus.  That Int is strongest in the beginning and gets less and less relevant is a problem, but one I don’t know an easy fix for.

Speaking of attributes, there are, of course, imbalances, with Strength being far too useful of the physical and Int having a strange life cycle.  Where all other attributes add increased value over time, except arguably Charisma for some characters, Int’s increases are nowhere near as important as its starting value.  My personal hierarchy?  Int (starting), Str, Con, Wis, Dex, Cha with the first two being far more important than the others, though there are some differences when playing certain character types, especially a scholar.  Still, Strength is so useful for noncombat effects, like carrying unconscious party members, that it’s always desirable, nevermind that sometimes scholars have to fight physically, too, and doing more damage is always superior.

New

So, why be concerned with house rules now?  We have started a new campaign.  While I don’t see it being necessary to put a lot of thought into how to do things differently now that we have learned so much from our 6 year-old campaign, as the real measure of enjoyment is enjoyment, not doing things “right”, at the same time, I wonder if we will end up regretting not having planned a bit more.

My perception is that the new campaign will function much like the old, mechanics aside.  It doesn’t have to, of course.  Maybe this time around the party will have a reason to adventure together after it gets past initial difficulties.  Maybe this time around the party will be more motivated, make fewer bad decisions, use better tactics, release fewer demons upon the world.  Not that these bother me overmuch, really, the only thing that ever drove me nuts was party motivation.  What are we trying to achieve?  Why?

It would be a good role-playing stretch for me to play a character who cared about material things, but it’s not likely to happen.   I just don’t understand treasurehunting as a goal.  I suppose that intellectual curiosity can work similarly to treasurehunting.  But, I’ve seen in our Conan play how different it can be.  There was the one adventure where we were running for our lives and some of the party stopped to check out a cave.  A cave.   What’s interesting about a cave?  Buried treasure?  Sorry, I’m not playing Terrance or Phillip.   While I could see checking things out if we weren’t fleeing from overwhelming force, the motivation of “there might be treasure” was absurdly flimsy.  To be fair, it’s not so much the fact that it was a cave, even if a cave is intrinsically less interesting than ruins, a temple, green stone city, or whatever.  It was that we had a goal and ignored it.  The two times I got truly pissed at our antics both had to do with the party completely ignoring the obvious goal.  If you don’t care about the story, might as well just spend the time setting up scenarios on the battlemap and doing nothing but fighting.  That’s not without merit, but it’s a different experience.

Old

Our old campaign isn’t done yet.   I keep suggesting that we focus on it as my concern is that the enthusiasm that comes with newness will lead to a dearth of enthusiasm for finishing up the old.  We’ve talked on a number of occasions about rebooting, but in those cases, we weren’t close to the finish line.  We are halfway or so to 18th level and getting close to our archenemy and the end of the world.  I figure about six more sessions and we can resolve things while having played 20th level characters.

It’s so much easier not to have to juggle multiple storylines and an extra set of characters.  We already have problems with people remembering what happened in the previous session.  And, none of us fully utilize our characters’ abilities.  Closure, tis a good thing.

CCGs

A bit of wisdom that is passed around in the V:TES community is to look at what cards you discarded over the course of the game and remove or, at least, consider removing them from the deck. While I don’t think that many players actually use this – I don’t in any sort of rigorous sense, it is a relatively easy way to weed out (likely) suboptimal cards. The closest I come to applying this process is keeping in mind that virtually every Crocodile’s Tongue and almost every Diversion I put into decks ends up getting discarded, which is why I never play the former anymore and play the latter more as a joke. For instance, the latter shows up in my Striga deck, and we all know that Striga is so broken that even joke cards “work”.

So, great, a way to tune decks. But, then, I rarely tune decks, so I’m more interested in other applications of the same sort of thinking. What is the core concept? That what people actually play has value and what people don’t is lacking. Particularly profound? Not so much. Underutilized as a system for balancing games? Way underutilized.

Balancing games? … moving on to playtesting. There were all sorts of reasons to be frustrated by playtesting niche CCGs. Rather than rant about yesteryear, I’m focusing on a particular aspect of playtesting that should be more worriesome to game managers (if anything about playtesting is). The usual situation, in my experience, is that a small amount of a new set gets an inordinate amount of attention and much of the set gets no meaningful testing. Let’s think about the logic of this. Certain cards or groups of cards attract for various reasons, but the primary reason is power level. Sure, I tried repeatedly to get Walker Smith printed for B5, and I playtested Gerontocracy so much more than anyone else that I’m credited as its designer, but taking out individual interests, groupthink tends to lead to focusing on power cards. So, logically, cards that are ignored are, on average, below the power curve.

In my ideal playtest world, the playtest manager would force everyone to provide a list of all of the cards they didn’t want to test. Why not just force people to actually play every card? Because, really, playtesting is painful enough without the mindnumbing process of trying to generate interest in chaff, nevermind that the interest level will be so low that any testing is questionable, anyway. So, you get the lists. Because you allotted enough time and resources, because you are terribly clever, or just because you’ve gotten fed up with junk playtesting far too often, you start the playtest with the bottom of the set. Well, after you test any new mechanics or other stuff you expect to undergo major overhauls. Not that you actually play-test the crap. You brainstorm reasons why people aren’t interested in it. Throughout the playtest, you repeat the process so that there’s no cards left behind. In theory, every card will rise to the level of interesting enough to people that they do get tested. No, this doesn’t provide some sort of balance of power, since it is well-established that different players look for different qualities in cards, but it should reduce the variance in attractiveness of cards.

Dominion

Whereas the idea of tracking what gets played and what doesn’t is underutilized in my experience with CCGs and RPGs, my friend who runs lots of boardgame events is a proponent of using this methodology with Dominion.

What we do, since Dominion plays fast, is take a look at what people buy and remove those cards for the next game, repeating until we stop playing. Now, I don’t like Dominion. I actually believe it’s insanely overrated. I am of these opinions because I find that Dominion lacks variety, i.e. within any given game, people mostly buy the same cards or, at least, the people who have any chance of winning buy the same cards. While it seems like the process we use to weed out obvious strategies has some effect, each individual game still sees rather little strategic variety. Not finding the variety between games all that compelling … at least it’s quick – tellingly, a common justification for why people should continue to play Magic even though so many of its games suck.

RPGs

I consider there to be three classes in d20 Conan: barbarian; scholar, thief. I keep mentioning this even though it’s a waste of time to try to convince non-analytical people of anything. Borderer? Barbarian strictly better. Noble? Mechanically crippled. Nomad? Pretty much a borderer. Pirate? Not bad, but easily replaced by barbarian/thief. Soldier? The worst class yet the hardest to convince people that it sucks – skills matter in Conan (so do saves). Temptress? Just a scholar/thief or thief, depending upon what you care about.

Obviously, if I’m right, then the game is flawed. If the game is known to be flawed, it shouldn’t be printed (in some imaginary world where balance matters more than anything else), or if not caught until too late, then it should be repaired. RPGs are trickier than CCGs, of course, as they aren’t competitive and speak to different interests. Actually, one wonders whether the psychographic profile system of Timmy, Johnny, and Spike can be applied to RPGs. Given that I’m somewhat more of a Spike when it comes to CCGs and I’m a big powerlessgamer in RPGs, probably not. Anyway, while little can be done on the publisher’s end for Conan (don’t see a problem, not publishing the game anymore!) and everything can be done on our playgroup’s end (a feature of RPGs not shared with CCGs), I still find the exercise of determining balance, both in terms of mechanical balance and in terms of interest balance, based on what people decide to play and what they don’t a compelling one. Given that the playerbase, if accurately represented on the Conan forums, for this particular game is so out of step with my analysis, maybe my analysis is just off. But, probably not.

To me, Conan made no attempt at balance. Based on comments I see, such as “barbarian should be more powerful”, imbalance could have been entirely intentional. But, what of L5R 4e, where an obsession with balance seemed to take hold. I can see little value in trying to chart clans and families, after all, the differences mechanically are mostly trivial except for how you combine with schools. In particular, there’s no benefit to rating clans when there are hardly any mechanical benefits at the clan level, nevermind that people strongly attach to clans and the like in RPGs for flavor reasons. It’s really about schools or the combination of schools with families for doublestacking traits or avoiding getting saddled with a trait bonus that one doesn’t care about. It could be argued that Crane and Scorpion having multiple doublestack possibilities makes those clans stronger, but anyway, back to spotlighting schools.

Which schools will people eschew? Is it for power reasons? Of Scorpion schools, I tolerate Bayushi Bushi and none other for flavor reasons. Likely, many others have similar personal interests that are hard to account for. But, maybe the methodology can be tested. For instance, it might be quite interesting to see how many people play Mirumoto Bushi in 4e vs. a hoped for apples to apples comparison with 3e. Mirumoto Bushi in 3e is broken. In 4e, I only see a subpar and dull school. This is quite unlike how Akodo Bushi is quality in 3e and, arguably, the best bushi school in 4e. My sense, which is quite specious at this early date, is that few are interested in Mirumoto for HoR3 where I commonly adventured with Mirumoto in HoR2.

Another observation is that few players play Agasha Shugenja and many play Isawa Shugenja. This may be an intentional imbalance as the world calls for far more Isawa than Agasha. But, what of Asahina Shugenja? They were grossly powerful in 3e, I believe nerfed in 3r, and I don’t know what in 4e. I like the school, but I like defensive powers. The meaningful comparison, of course, being between Asahina and other shugenja schools. What of people’s inclinations when doing Different School? I see Daidoji Iron Warriors being an attractive option, especially if not terribly concerned with doublestacking. I don’t see Yoritomo Bushi being an attractive Different School (or school to begin with).

What of the Imperial schools? The minor clan schools? With cool RPGs, everything gets adherents based on flavor. So, there’s always going to be the Boars of the world. But, check out the ridiculously synergistic Badger/Badger build.

What won’t a meaningful number of people play? If something, that something was a waste of ink better used for coming up with something people will play. Of course, this comes from someone who thinks about Omoidasu builds, so whatever.

The eccentric and uncooperative genius* (professor, scientist, holy person, whatever).  It’s a good character archetype.  What would Back to the Future be without it?  What would Doctor Who?

*  See Aquarius I for why this is relevant.

So, I have a task to spec out another NPC for the Conan campaign.  Since party NPCs who do the magic thang should be kind of less cooperative than usual to force the PCs to get stuff done on their own merits, why not have Aquarius in mind?  Actually, I think a player is going to play the character.  Yet, the player is eccentric and uncooperative (and friendly), so nothing really changes.  Not that the character’s personality is up to me, but it helps visualize the character which helps me with numbers.

Speaking of numbers, STR: 14, DEX: 13, CON: 17, INT: 17, WIS: 23, CHA: 18 seems about right for this 14th level scholar.  Got to love heroic character generation where this is an average character of such a level.  Even with an okay Con, I still need to make sure he has Great Fortitude as a feat to avoid the “squishy scholar” problem that can arise.  76 hit points would be adequate for someone who avoids doing dumb things, but our group isn’t known for that.

He totally should have Summon Elemental as a spell based on a writeup that our GM did, so that means Master Wards and Signs which means having four sorcery styles prior to 12th level (i.e. not foregoing a sorcery style).  Counterspells, Prestidigitation, Oriental, and?  Hypnotism will help with Wars of Souls.  Curses enables Gelid Bones for the one cheesy combat spell in Conan.

Expertise in Knowledge: Arcana and Decipher Script are obvious needs.  Knowledge: Religion makes sense for a priest even if it’s less of a need.  Can get into the mysteries mechanics, which I dislike for overcomplicating a game (d20) that doesn’t need complications.

Lightning Reflexes and a coherent plan for what to do in combat are likely important.  The former because Reflex saves actually matter in our campaign and a bump in initiative is okay.  The latter because the previous scholar’s plan was to act like a barbarian and go unconscious at inconvenient times.  Though, if Gelid Bones is going to happen, then the combat options are more limited as Combat Expertise is nonsynergistic, as would be Intricate Swordplay.  Even fighting defensively should be out, which makes 5 ranks in Tumble less important.  Hmmm.

The other think Oriental opens up is the Meditation path for Power Point recovery, awesome to have Greater Meditation compared to the rarely easy to pull off human sacrifice plan.

Not being very Aquarian in this post, going back to Wikipedia, we get links from Aquarius to the god Ea, which opens up a number of interesting possibilities since we are in the right part of the world for Middle Eastern gods.  Possibilities that require further research.

Back to the Olympics.  Hey, they are an Aquarius kind of thing.

Terrible inconsistency?  Possible hypocrisy?  How can I be so obsessed with balance in one RPG and so nonchalant in another?

I think I’ll come back to this later.  Before then, what is the context of RPG balance?  As I argued in college philosophy, stuff doesn’t have meaning without context.

Given that every campaign I’ve ever played in, including living campaigns, has had house rules and that GMs have carte blanche to disallow or change anything they don’t like and GMs (typically) create challenges not for some abstract and objective party power level but for actual parties, in what way does balance at the publisher’s level even come into the discussion.  After all, unlike other games that have objective environments, RPGs are subjective and just tools for the play group to have make believe adventures.

Of course, there’s an obvious fallacy there.  If balance didn’t matter at all, then the mechanics wouldn’t matter at all.  There must be something about the mechanics that causes them to justify themselves.  To steal some verbiage from someone I met with today, few things are binary.  It’s not that RPGs will ever have perfect balance and they obviously don’t function as rules sets for games when there is no balance.  There’s some spectrum where some points are acceptable and some aren’t.

Why does balance (fairness) even matter to me?  Doesn’t it matter to everyone?  Sure doesn’t seem like it when you read other people’s comments, but I just think it’s a matter of them having a greater tolerance for unfairness than I do as opposed to a complete disinterest in the issue.

It seems even more odd that I should care so much about balance/fairness when I’m so willing to play sidekicks, when I’m so willing to intentionally design weak characters.

It’s not actually weakness that I crave.  It’s uniqueness.  As with optimal strategies in boardgames and tier 1 decks in CCGs, well designed characters in RPGs are usually nothing different, nothing special.  Oh, look at my high Strength barbarian in Conan or my Mirumoto blender in L5R – whatever.  In my attempts to create uniqueness, whether it’s characters or decks, I frequently mine suboptimal territory.  Then, with RPGs where competition shouldn’t exist, I have no real incentive to create powerful characters, just useful ones.

Referencing my last post, I don’t care nearly as much for boardgames because there’s really nothing unique you can do.  In my mind, every character and every deck should be unique and that’s only possible when you have variety.

But, variety is a function of balance.  There’s no point in playing a deck that can’t win or a character who adds nothing to the party.  To be value add to the party means not being completely overshadowed by other player characters who have better builds.  Now, it’s true that loser PCs can add value just by taking up space, just providing more hands or more chucked spears or more hit points.  But, NPCs can do the same thing, so why bother playing nothing but a spearchucker?

My ranting about how pointless the borderer and nomad classes are and how awful the noble and soldier classes are in Conan stems from having a character who was essentially a spearchucker.  After being fairly useless most of the time, I started crunching the numbers in the game and realized that you can very easily make strictly superior characters.  Ironic within the context of comparing and contrasting with L5R is that the classes in Conan aren’t that imbalanced in comparison.  Borderer is strictly inferior to barbarian, but it’s not an unplayable difference, just an idiotic one.

Idiocy.  This is getting to the crux of the matter.  Conan d20 is a very rigid game, a relatively flavorless game because d20 mechanics are flavorless.  There’s just no comparing d20′s Improved Two-Weapon Fighting to Feng Shui’s Both Guns Blazing.  Because Conan d20 is so mechanical, mechanical imbalances should not only be easier to pick out but mean more in defining what your character is about.

It’s not just that L5R is less crunchy than Conan, it’s that it’s so much more flavorful.  While one can ignore that L5R’s ethos lends itself to brokenness far more than Conan’s by noting that any brokenness is problematic, imbalances are more acceptable when they come with cool flavor and, getting back to the importance of uniqueness, unique identity.  In Conan, there’s no real flavor difference between a barbarian and a borderer for all that people want to pretend there is.  In L5R, a Hida Bushi occupies entirely different design/play space from a character in another bushi school.

That the Hida Bushi/Elite Guard combo the person is complaining about is broken is within the context that lots of other builds are broken in other ways.  Actually, the game is highly broken to where someone complaining about this or that rank 5 build is fairly laughable to me as I consider playing the game above rank 2 to be an exercise in excess.

There certainly is an element to why someone should care about one broken thing in a game rife with brokenness.  Would I feel the same way even without the superior flavor and vastly more options that L5R provides just because it’s idiotic to complain about smoke when the house is on fire?

A lot of the argument against the person’s complaints involves pointing out how you can deal with such a character easily enough.  There is a strong rock-papor-scissors element to L5R that I just haven’t seen in any other RPG.  I’m never in favor of games becoming RPSish as it, again, means a lack of variety.  What’s the point of playing a game if only three (true) options exist?

But, then again, this RPS nature to L5R is one that becomes more obvious when you have broken fight broken, when characters are far more powerful than I think is playable.  So, just the lack of caring about high rank builds is a difference to my analysis of Conan where I can clearly see how I’d build a far more effective character than my main by switching which classes he took, which attribute assignments he made, etc.

To be consistent, which is important to me, I can’t argue against the whiner’s arguments that are rooted in the idea of improved balance.  Lots of obviously broken stuff has been dealt with by the AEG folks, even underpowered stuff has been addressed, something that CCG companies so often ignore.  So, it’s entirely reasonable to have the company look at a possible new problem caused by the rule errata.  By the way, the new errata changes the game back to how it used to be played; the rule that has been overturned was instituted to address problems such as the one the person has brought up.  Now, whether this build is any more broken than a lot of other stuff appears not to be the case.

RPGs are flexible in ways that more objective games aren’t.  Yet, they still are games that provide mechanics for resolution.  Those mechanics should strive for balance.  Perfect balance is never achieved but not striving for it produces far more imbalance than what would be achieved otherwise.

GMs/play groups can fix anything they don’t like for their home campaigns.  Challenges can be tailored to provide worthy challenges to actual parties rather than be generated out of theoretical exercises.  Yet, the better the tools given to play groups, the better the experience.  Less work needs to be done fixing things.  Less energy can be spent on the idea of fixing things.

And, yes, as a final comment, RPGs aren’t really supposed to be about mechanics but about telling good stories.  Worrying about how strong something on a character sheet is comes after worrying about who your character is (personality, appearance, etc.), what your character is doing, what your character is trying to do, and what has happened to your character.  At least, ideally.

Conan, being a d20 system, doesn’t have much in the way of mechanics that directly tie to personality.  However, certain interests or inclinations can be shown through mechanics.

Attributes:  For most RPGs, I envision characters through attributes first.  I vastly prefer a system like Vampire: The Masquerade to d20 for envisioning human(ish) characters as the granularity is more intuitive.  For example, it’s much easier for me to grok the difference between 2 dots and 3 dots in V:TM than a 13 vs. a 16 in d20.  The former is better defined against the real world whereas the latter tends to depend upon what other characters’ (PCs or NPCs) stats are.

Strength, Constitution, and Wisdom are not what I think of with a Gemini.  Dexterity is the natural physical attribute fit for this mutable, air sign.  Intelligence can mean a lot of different things.  In d20, it’s the one attribute I feel like I can calculate cleanly – just take IQ and divide by 10.  I tried finding IQ data based on astrological signs and came up empty.  I don’t know if any sign is more intelligent or tests better in IQ tests (which measures only certain types of intelligence), but Gemini have a reputation for seeming intelligent.  There are various reasons for this, but one may very well be that the Gemini is a relatively personable sign (at least at first or when in an up mood).  This leads into Charisma, another attribute I associate with the quintessential Gemini.

So, Pedrono, a Zingaran (“Spaniard”) 5th level pirate, 2nd level soldier who is one of a PC’s mates could easily be quick, smart, and personable. 

Pedrono will get a good number of feats as both his classes are favored.  For a different sign, I could see focus and ruthless effectiveness.  For a Gemini, I can see esoteric, versatile, and shallow.  While I don’t see it for this character, Dabbler is just the sort of feat one could expect from a Gemini – a flair for exotic abilities but with only superficial understanding.

Skillwise, it’s clear:  breadth over depth.  Pedrono won’t be the consummate professional but a jack-of-all-trades.  Bluff, Diplomacy, Gather Information, and Sense Motive are appropriate social skills.  Intimidate, less so.  It would be effective to put more ranks into Dexterity and Intelligence based skills, but it’s not hard to imagine this Gemini getting by on his natural talent and taking interest in other areas, Climb for instance, for diversity or just to confuse people.

Finally, there’s things like Reputation, Code of Honor, and religion.  Typically, Geminians aren’t into being the center of attention; they like claiming the spotlight only when they are performing.  Second edition Conan ties Reputation more closely to level and Charisma bonus, but I don’t see any particular reason this character would exceed those like I might with, say, a Leo.  Anyone can follow a code, some are just better suited to it.  Consistency, a key element to having a code of behavior, is not a Geminian’s strong point.  As a sign wired to think as opposed to feel, religion isn’t something I see coming easily.

Time to move on to L5R.  Now, I don’t need to make this pirate in L5R for anyone, but as an exercise, the obvious thing to do is to make this multiversal counterpart a Mantis.  Mantis, actually, isn’t too hard to see with Gemini as it’s a clan composed of a collection of other clans.  Crab, Lion, and Scorpion would be the harder ones to get a feeling for.  Moshi family gets +1 Intelligence.  Tsuruchi family gets +1 Reflexes.  As a pirate, the Yoritomo Bushi School is the obvious school, but if I were going to get away from occupation and go with interests in a very, very different world, I’d be unsurprised to see a Gemini favor the Moshi Shugenja School or – in typical Gemini fashion – take the Different School advantage and go into a courtier school of some other clan.

L5R’s attributes are nicely laid out by element – air, earth, fire, water plus Void.  Gemini is an air sign, seems like the Air Ring’s traits of Awareness and Reflexes are a natural place to start.  Earth’s Willpower and Stamina?  Nope.  Water’s Perception and Strength?  Perception, maybe.  Fire’s Intelligence and Agility?  Sure.  Void Ring?  Not as much because, again, Geminians don’t tend to be deep.  Now, more Void Points are great for a free wheelin’ Gemini and help any character be somewhat proficient in a lot of different areas, so I wouldn’t ignore Void as a way to help a Gemini be more Gemini-ish.

Honor and Glory:  Can view these much like how Codes of Honor and Reputation are viewed above.  But, these mechanics are much, much more important to playing L5R than those mechanics to playing Conan.  So, one should be careful not to make the character inappropriate for Rokugan.

Feats in d20 are mostly mechanical, lacking much flavor, and having little to do with personality.  Advantages and disadvantages in L5R, however, aren’t so limited.  Advantages I can easily see:  Absolute Direction, Ambidextrous, Benten’s Blessing, Clear Thinker (don’t try to confuse the confuser), Combat Reflexes, Crafty, Daredevil, Different School (a natural), Forbidden Knowledge, Jurojin’s Blessing (the perpetual teenager of the Zodiac), Languages, Luck, Multiple Schools (but, of course), Perceived Honor, Quick, Read Lips, Wary, Way of the Land.  Disadvantages:  Ascetic, Bad Health, Compulsion (only some), Contrary (O-M-G!), Fascination (many), Insensitive (maybe - thinker not feeler), Meddler, Rumormonger.

One thing I should iterate is that the intention with being inspired by astrology is not to be ruled by it, nevermind that people have lots of planets in their horoscopes which supposedly influence personality in different ways.  Two Geminians (there are always at least two in every Gemini’s body) should not be alike any more than an Aries and a Taurus would be alike.  The idea with using astrology is to inspire and to guide to achieve more realistic and coherent personalities/characters.

The Warrior’s Companion is a sourcebook designed to add new elements of martial prowess and skill to the more militant or pugilistic classes of Conan the Roleplaying Game, giving them new depth and ability.

Section 1:  The Way of the Warrior

This section talks about warriors from a thematic perspective.  First up is a new code of honor.  I can’t help but point out that I’m tired of new codes of honor, besides that I despise the mechanics for the original codes of honor.  Codes in Conan are money for nothing and chicks for free.  But, isn’t your behavior constrained?  Judgment call; I’ve yet to see anyone lose one.  But, whether you lose one or not in the first 5 minutes of play isn’t important.  It cost nothing to start with a code and you lose nothing except the bonuses for having one from losing one, so you got 5 minutes of a free character feature stronger by far than highly playable feats like Iron Will.

Anyway, the proliferation of codes is absurd.  With Hyboria’s Fallen’s “Honour Among Thieves” and the like, I can just imagine that someday there will be (as I said to my GM):  Code of Honor – Beggar; Code of Honor – Villain; Code of Honor – Demon-pacted Sorcerer.  Why is there not just rules for developing one’s own code, like exist in many RPGs?

Moving on, there’s explanations of how different warrior’s live.  The concept of saying something on such fluff topics is fine with me; I like getting a better sense of the world.  But, I don’t get any sense of the world from a lot of these sorts of sections.  It’s just so obvious, bland, and/or nonspecific.  There’s also a comment in the barbarian part that my GM and I find offensive.  The author talks about how more experienced barbarians switch from high damage weapons to two-weapon fighting with jank.  That is contradictory to the well-established problem in the game that the two-handed fighting style is vastly superior to other fighting styles for anything besides thieves.  It reminds me of advice in Hyboria’s Fiercest about how to assign skill ranks that would be suicidal in our campaigns.  Look, not playing the same way we do is fine, but enough with the bad advice.  Possibly the thing I find most bothersome in the splat books is the lack of advice on how to make an effective character, and here we get more advice on how to make an ineffective one.

Section 2:  Warrior Nations

After fluff about warriors of different classes comes fluff about warriors of different nations.  Again, too generic and obvious to offer anything of value.  Why can’t we get something like a unique character created from each race with analysis of how to assign attributes, what feats to take, what role the character will serve in a party?

Section 3:  The Art of Bloodshed

Finally into something crunchy, we get permanent wound rules.  I have two problems with this.  Before that, though, I’ll say that different RPG players are into different things and mechanics-related stuff seems to sell books better than fluff.  The first problem is that impairing and/or permanent damage rules just screw player characters.  Who cares if you take out some monsters eye, it’s just going to be slaughtered anyway?  Meanwhile, who wants to play a cripple?  People who play fantasy RPGs (and most other RPGs) are engaging in escapist behavior where they can pretend to be something greater than themselves.  I play poorly designed characters all of the time and have virtually a sidekick mentality, but I can totally understand someone creating a new character rather than playing a cripple.

What’s the second problem?  For me and quite a few others, the d20 system that Conan uses has plenty of mechanics, very possibly too many.  Why add more mechanics that don’t address a problem or weakness in the game?  Oh, right, to sell books.  Silly me.

Narrative combat rules, on the other hand, in my opinion, address a need.  We’ve used them twice in two sessions, already.  Combat is slow in most RPGs and Conan is no exception.  Combat with lots of units and a clear outcome should not be played out like meaningful combats should, but I do see the point in there being some cost to engaging in combat.  Are the rules good?  Eh, they seem strange, but I’d much rather use them than play out a lot of the trivial encounters.

Another concept that has merit is the Duel of Fates mechanic.  As the author says, having the epic one-on-one battle in the middle of a larger battle is problematic with the standard rules.  But, I have a number of problems with the execution of this idea.  Why would there be “No Tricks” when tricks are frequently used by villains and outclassed heroes in epic one-on-one clashes?  The mechanics may work, but I doubt it.  The Constitution damage sounds unlikely to be fair and the simplified attack/defense rules eliminate all of the interesting maneuvers and subtle differences in ability/equipment that would seem to be the point of running a duel in the middle of a combat.  Then, the victory rules are inconsistent with all kinds of epic showdowns in fiction.

New class benefits is more shrug-worthy stuff.  Sure, I’ll take Terrain Tactics over Guide because Guide is useless, except borderer is useless as a class in the first place since barbarian is pretty much strictly superior.  It’s the usual mix of “Why does this minor variant of something need to exist?”, “This sounds cheesy.”, and “OMG, not more borderer styles!!”

Ah, new feats, the lifeblood of d20 sales methinks.  I noticed Deadly, I think, in the preview.  My group thinks it’s abusively good.  I think it’s a win more effect where the feat slot spent on something else would be more valuable whether due to better flexibility, addressing a weakness rather than adding a small benefit to a strength, or whatever.  As usual, most of the feats are crap.  I just can’t imagine the thinking that goes behind wasting people’s time with feats that are only usable when sundering a shield (how about cutting the enemy in half instead, which is easier?) or when an enemy is trying to feint you (how about cutting the enemy in half instead, which is easy when you spend feat slots on useful feats and not this sort of junk?).  As one of our players said recently, it’s like you should get three of the awful feats when you spend a feat slot.  Actually, we did have a mechanic for getting feats we’d never spend a feat slot on, but it was being abused, and it still wouldn’t justify the absurdly narrow crap.  I could almost see taking War Cry.

More maneuvers, of course.  Much like feats, there seems to be no effort to balance maneuvers.  Get esoteric maneuvers that involve all sorts of obscure prerequisites mixed with an unlikely combat situation on the one hand and “Wouldn’t I always do this?” on the other.  The concept of combat maneuvers is nice, but the increased complexity is just painful.  We used called shot rules (and impairing/”permanent” damage rules) for a while, and it was just more overhead for little benefit.

The monastic scholar rules are too involved to analyze without playing.  It seems like various powers are overcosted, but then, Power Point costs are weird in that the right character in the right group could end up with vast amounts of PPs while our sorcerers typically run out of PPs in a few rounds of combat.  At the flavor level, I just don’t care.  If people want to play warrior monks, my vision of the Conan world allows for some of that.

Section 4:  Skills of the Warrior

The more I think about this section, the more it will irritate me.  Conan has too many skills already.  For some reason, supplement authors like to create new skills in addition to coming up with new uses for existing skills.  I’m actually quite happy to get new uses of existing skills, though why there isn’t a lot more effort put into making suck skills better escapes me.  But, new skills?  Come on.  Only high Intelligence, 8 skill rank class builds ever seem to have enough skill ranks to be good enough skillwise, and we are expected to spread skill ranks out even thinner?  Particularly galling in this book is how the Tactics skill is thematically the same thing as Knowledge: Warfare.  It’s just laughable to think that there’s some player out there thinking, “Knowledge: Warfare helps with my character concept, but, boy, I wish I could really spend these extra skill ranks I don’t have on another skill that does what it should have done.”  Considering that I consider soldiers unplayable due to their paucity of skill ranks and considering that the obvious character concept to have skills like Tactics would be a soldier, I wonder if there’s some sort of author’s joke.  It’s just sad that what Tactics actually does is what K: Warfare should have done, so we will likely merge the two skills.

Challenge and Sharpen are both just dumb.  The former is easily handled with one of the existing social skills and is broken as written, the latter with a craft skill (you know, all of those craft skills besides Alchemy and Herbalism PCs never bother putting skill ranks in because they never get used).  And, the idea of having a skill to cover such minutia … argh.

As for the new uses of skills, I do want to use Subtle Threats and the concept of personalizing weapons is good, though why it needs a mechanic escapes me.  I could imagine using Temporary Aid, but it seems like, with many things, there’s not enough explanation of how something works.

Section 5:  Wood, Stone, Steel

Equipment.  Some people are fascinated by shopping.  I’m not one of them.  I don’t think different stuff should have different stats as it just causes players to min/max with nonthematic arms and armor, as we clearly see with the common use of bardiches in Conan games.  Maybe there’s some optimal weapon or armor in this batch, but with the existing brokenness of two-handed weapons, my give a damn is busted.

The other new equipment and the arms/armor modifications are just way too much detail to interest me.  I should mention that I’m a big believer in internal power, that having a character’s value be based on gadgets and things just annoys me.  Conan is relatively good about characters being powered off of their attributes, feats, specials, skills.  It’s another reason that the imbalances in equipment out of the main book irritates.

Section 6:  Many Paths, All Warriors

Ah, prestige classes.  In some people’s minds, the reason why D&D 3.5 was unplayable.  In other people’s, the reason to buy a lot of the supplements for that game.  Conan has been interesting with prestige classes.  There are a number, but you need certain supplements to find most of them, and they are mostly very narrow and very terrible (for PCs).  These don’t seem so terrible.

Axeman has crappy skill ranks, but they are better than soldier.  Weapon Focus (prerequisite) is an awful feat, but the Axeman’s saves are surprisingly good, especially getting decent Will save bonuses at higher levels, and the class sounds very beatstickish, which is like, um, good, in this game.

Duellist just doesn’t sound like a PC class.  The whole supplement may be trying to encourage one-on-one battles, but I just don’t see it coming up often enough to be so specialized.  But, a significant amount of the material in Conan is only relevant to NPCs, including IMO half the base classes.

Pit Fighter is better, good base attack bonus, yet again with the classes in this book, better than expected save bonuses.  But, still, it’s not PC material – low skill ranks and too much focus on combat, where’s it’s easy to have a strong build, dooms it.

Savage also has the skill rank problem, but I can see someone wanting to be a savage beastie.  Tenacity is the hotness.  Greater Acuity is good for a Thief/Savage build.  Felling Blow doesn’t hurt.  Saves besides Tenacity are solid.  No weak prerequisites.

My main problem with Warlord is, of course, that I don’t consider Soldier a viable class in the game due to the horrid number of skill ranks it gets.  Never Surrender sounds good, though it’s probably trivial.  Embodiment of Victory sounds like it has a lot of strange potential.

Wrestler … oh grapple rules, how I hate thee.  Seriously, the grapple rules are painful.  Sometimes, they are painful for what a hose job they are on PCs.  Sometimes, they are just confusing and timewasting.  I don’t think people realize how complicated multiple grapples by multiple parties all using special animal/monster abilities that follow different rules can get.  Anyway, I see value in a PC “countergrappler”, a party member who is highly effective at keeping other party members from being grappled by being awesome at grappling him/herself.  We have a wrestly character in our party right now.  The 2 skill ranks per level is typically awful.

Section 7:  Famous Warriors

Two thing come to mind:   Can my character take these guys?  Mostly … no.  Are they good examples of reasonable builds?  Power Attack + high Strength is the bomb, so they can fight, but I don’t find combat builds difficult to stat up.  And, what, can’t make a female combat monster?

Section 8:  Martial Disciple

Seems like a far, far better combat character than the Pirate, a class that kind of isn’t so good at much (I’d always rather play a thief/barbarian).  The damage reduction path is cute.  I wonder how I’d multiclass.  Thief for Sneak Attack damage and better skill ranks might be the way to go.

Do I like the concept?  Not really.  I can tolerate some monk action in my Conan, but I dread having a party turn into one of those parodies of fantasy role-playing where player characters make no sense adventuring together or even being in the same world.  Here’s my pirate, here’s my ninja, here’s my dwarf, here’s my druid … just say no to silly genres.  I kind of like the monastic scholar more because it has more diverse abilities.

Friday, I got to the con later than I wanted but earlier than I needed.  Once upon a time, at local cons (I still do this at Gen Con), I signed up for lots of scheduled events and I was busy all of the time.  Then, I started hanging around the same people all of the time, people who have minimal agendas.  We talk about doing things but do very little.  I do like just seeing and talking to people I see only/mostly at cons, but talking about what to do for hours is terribly unproductive.

With nothing in particular to do, as the V:TES demo wasn’t going to happen Friday night, I played in the Alara block, Magic sealed deck tournament.  I wasn’t too happy with my deck build and it was trying to be tricky – I maximized my removal at the expense of reasonable creatures.  Tricky was not a good idea when I hadn’t played competitively forever and hadn’t played with any of the new sets before.  I made one obvious mistake in playing a creature I thought had flying but doesn’t.  Another mistake I noticed later seemed to be putting in the wrong 2 casting cost black enchantment.  I lost badly to my first opponent, didn’t help that I played horribly in using my removal.  I beat three other players who were very inexperienced to win a pack of Conflux and a pack Alara Reborn.

I forgot to bring any Type P Magic decks.  Type P is an open, sealed league format for Magic that sprung up in the area and has only seemed to be exported to the Northern Virginia area by a friend of mine.  I should do a dissertation on P sometime.  Anyway, without P decks and without time to make my sealed product into one, I had nothing else to do except get dinner.  A pattern at the con was to forget to bring food from home.  I did eat lunch late, so I wasn’t starved like I was Saturday and Sunday. 

Saturday, I wasn’t clear on what I needed to be ready for.  I’ve been trying to run the Solomon Kane RPG at local cons to have more to do, but my primary player had tentative wargaming plans.  I tried to be ready for SK, for our Conan campaign, and for V:TES while bringing Type P decks.  I hung out for a bit in the morning until my main P partner (these days) showed up in the afternoon and played some P.

I brought some of my more interesting decks.  First game of first match, I got the Urzatron!! (you have to understand P to understand that no one else has even tried to get all of the Urza lands for one of their decks) out on turn 3!!! but couldn’t get it in games 2 or 3 and lost the match.  I turned my sealed product into a P deck and lost a couple of games only to sweep the next match I played.  I played my samurai rat deck in its Myojin of Cleansing Fire configuration, winning one game off of rat tokens and getting crushed in the others.  That might have been it for Saturday.

Saturday night, after we went to one of my favorite restaurants on Broadway in Millbrae, we played our Conan campaign.  The campaign was in a story arc I cared a lot about (I try not to care about what the party is usually involved in because it’s too frustrating when the party starts doing random, stupid stuff).  We blew through a lot of resources – I was perfectly winning to get my 14th level character killed to achieve some level of success and it could have happened - and had one of those “at the time” strange ways for things to turn out that actually had some long term value.  I was happy almost entirely due to the results as things worked out the way I was hoping for the most part.  We talked about whether we wanted to continue on with the 5 year old campaign and decided we still had unfinished business.

Didn’t get home too late, but still, commuting was annoying and I was short on sleep.  Sunday morning, I had failed to try to get into a game I was interested in so decided to assist our Conan GM with his Conan game that he was running as a scheduled event.  I ended up playing.  It worked out well.  Maybe, I did too much explaining of tactics, but having spent years and years watching players ignore sound tactics, I couldn’t help it.  I did create all of the PCs, so it was more useful for me to explain things about them than the GM.  One PC died saving my PC, and the ending was funny and useful with one of the PCs betraying the rest of the party to escape the demon-infested isle.  Very much a successful event.

Sunday night was my V:TES “tournament”.  One person had been told it had been cancelled, probably because the person doing the demos Friday and Saturday flaked both days.  I was annoyed by the lack of caring, but then, none of the local cons give a damn about CCGs anymore.  We had 7 different people, three 5 player games.  I was really tired and impatient in the first game I played (game 2) but got better for game 3 and had fun.  Guy who never gets to play, coming from Monterey, “won”.

Monday morning, I had signed up for Stormbringer.  I had never played Stormbringer before, I don’t think.  I did run a couple of adventures when I was in junior high school of first edition (this was fifth).  The adventure was based on The Fortress of the Pearl, a book only the GM and I had read.  The adventure unfolded very linearly.  It was good but not great.  One of the players did a great job playing a beggar.  Too many players.  I’m a believer that more than 5 is too many and find 3 to be best.

The GM thought that this particular book would make for a good RPG adventure.  Could be.  But, I do think that adapting stories to adventures requires some extra effort of thinking about how a party can do things differently from the characters in the story so that one doesn’t feel railroaded.

Friends were around after I was done, so I played some more Type P.  I played some of my better decks and whooped ass.  The first game of the match where I played my squirrel deck was one of those highly unsual Magic games – an interesting one.  I love Magic.  I love CCGs.  I find Magic to have only one flaw:  it’s rarely fun to play.  Far too many games are blowouts.  Now, CCGs typically have lots of bad games.  It took me years of playing the Babylon 5 CCG to realize just how many games sucked.  But, Magic’s percentage of fun games is just so low.  Sure, the bad ones can go quickly, but a fair number don’t, and it just feels so hollow playing the game.  At least in comparison to thinking about the game, as the analysis for Magic is awesome, which is why I read daily articles about it even though I don’t normally play the game.

Anyway, my opponent’s deck was full of removal, so I would play something strong and he’d nuke it.  He almost got control of the game between his annoying creatures and his removal, but I kept playing threats and getting small amounts of damage through until I could burn him out.  Game 2 was a blowout as I sided in land destruction and cut two of his colors while he had manascrew.  In the next match, my Mirari Madness deck got Mirari in play both games … and used it, which pretty much blows opponents away.

A fair con.  I did stuff I wanted to do.  It just felt like nothing great happened and playing that much Magic was suboptimal.  I just wasn’t into things as much as I’ve been in the past, which could have been a function of not being better prepared for the con.

I’m currently arguing on the Conan d20 forums that noncombat builds in Conan aren’t especially useless in combat in comparison to other systems.  But, still, there’s the “playing two different games with one party” problem that occurs far too frequently.  In Conan, it’s actually how useless the soldier class is in any game where you don’t just fight all of the time.

All problems come back to planning and expectations.  If the party is planned well to meet the expectations for what sort of adventures it will have, then there shouldn’t be this problem.  But, let’s pretend that people don’t go to this effort (since they often don’t).  Further, I’m going to assume that the rules can’t be changed to balance things better.

So, the onus gets put on the player to figure out how to be useful in most situations.  There’s being useful in combat and then there’s out of combat (knowledge, social, athletic, perception, thiefiness, etc.).

For combat usefulness, one needs to understand the game mechanics to a much greater extent as combat is frequently more sophisticated.  One also needs to know what the game’s style is.  Is the game extremely lethal like L5R where you either need really, really good defenses to be competent defensively?  Or, is it a game where you can take a few licks no matter how noncombatty you are where having some sort of effective attack may make more sense?

Size of party is extremely important.  The smaller the party, the more defense matters.  The courtier may hide long enough in a group of 6 or 7 to do one banzai attack – assuming the combat isn’t over before the character takes an action - but will just get shredded in a group of 3 or 4.

The Conan discussion is about a temptress in a party with a barbarian and a pirate.  It’s a system where offense is much better than defense but where it’s possible to get all defensive without putting a lot of resources into it.  The small party size and ability to easily take the Combat Expertise feat suggests to me a defensive build.

In Heroes of Rokugan, where parties are often 5-7 and combat is absurdly lethal, I’d like a few defensive “tricks” – Earth above 2, Strength of Earth (to slow a death spiral), TN to be hit bumps, and so forth.  But, I’d look to have at least one offensive angle.  In that system, that means having some way to generate a high attack roll since any hit might do heinous damage.

I’m not sure what to do in systems like Vampire: The Masquerade and other old World of Darkness and new World of Darkness games as I always seemed to end up with combat-useless characters unless I started with combat effectiveness when conceiving the character.

Noncombat can be even worse than combat.  The superskill or magic class/school/whatever may so outclass the combat builds that the fighters have nothing to do while investigation, intrigue, sneaking, infiltration, knowing, or whatever is going on.

For noncombat abilities, it’s extremely important to know what the other player characters are good or strong at.  No sense being the third tracker in the party, for instance.  Usually, if two characters have something covered, better to look elsewhere unless it’s something the party does all of the time.  Sometimes, when stretched thin on noncombat abilities, leave an area entirely up to one character.

L5R makes picking up skills cheap, so having a bunch of rank 1 skills is reasonable, plus there’s using Void to “know” a skill.  Of course, jacking the nonfighty attributes like Awareness and Intelligence above 2 has a huge impact.

Meanwhile, in Conan and other d20 games, some classes have serious disadvantages.  In Conan, I would start every character as a thief, maybe a scholar for a pure scholar build.  (Actually, I’d change the rules, but …)  Going from starting with 16 skill ranks to starting with 32 is absurdly hot.  In fact, except for supercombat builds, I’d have every character take ranks in scholar and/or thief because the difference in skill ranks is so mighty.  Scholar also has the advantage of giving magical abilities, and as usual, magic can do things that can’t be duplicated otherwise.

In Hero System (Champions, et al), overall levels are interesting for making all of one’s skills more useful.  Dexterity and Intelligence, as in many systems, have good noncombat benefits while Dexterity is frequently useful in and out of combat in systems.

Class choices, multiclassing, skill choices, points put into flexible abilities like magic or things that can be moved around like levels - there’s usually some place in the system that enables a more flexible character. 

Because, who wants to sit around while others are playing?

This is the first in a series devoted to making use of astrology in gaming. I have in mind doing a RPG character, a V:TES deck, and maybe get into other gaming areas as ideas come. Perfect time of year to get started. Spring, Easter, rebirth … Aries!

Aries
the infant
“I am”
positive: innocence, wonder, faith, courage
negative: selfish egotism, thoughlessness, aggressiveness, impulsive action
- from Linda Goodman’s “Love Signs” [it was handy]

I could whip up a Legend of the Five Rings character since I’ve been studying the main book recently as my interest in Heroes of Rokugan http://heroes-of-rokugan.com/, L5R’s living campaign, was rekindled by playing a module online not long ago. But, I have an assignment due Memorial Weekend to come up with player characters for my friend’s Conan d20 (http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/home/series.php?qsSeries=7) game, so why don’t I put my effort into that instead?

I was given some guidance: five 7th level characters, at least one pirate, no scholars or temptresses, Dabbler feat would be useful. Aries is about action. There’s no shortage of action roles in Conan, but the note about pirate makes things easy. Pirate is meant to be an aggressive class in Conan what with its Ferocious Attack ability. Being a lover of irony, if I were creating a character for myself, I would be amused by creating an Aries scholar (which I can’t do anyway), but people playing in one-shot games at cons aren’t looking for subtlety and cleverness so much as they are looking to have fun, and it’s easier to give people what they expect than to be so clever as to confuse them.

Race and class are the two most defining flavor elements to Conan characters. I have class. Race is interesting. The adventure is going to be set around the Vilayet Sea, far to the East of where the dominant Hyborian nations and the infamous Stygia can be found. Typically, I’d expect someone building a pirate to choose Zingaran or Argossean for race. It’s not in any way difficult to explain how an individual from an ocean-faring race got to the Vilayet – the Empire of Turan/Hyrkania which surrounds the Vilayet is heavily involved in slaves from around the world. Yet, this seems a prime opportunity to try something different. Why not a local?

Attributes. I’ll use the heroic method and roll 8, 8, 8, 5, 4, 2. A total of 36 would be an average attribute of 14 (36/6 + 8 base), so I’ll move the 2 up to a 3. Normally, I like to have high INT characters as about the only thing I like about d20 is the skill system. There’s nothing unintelligent about Aries or any other sign, but the character should be good at physical action, so strength and dexterity should be high, while charisma should be high for an outgoing pirate and a leader of men (Aries being the cardinal fire sign after all).

Other. While assigning skills is time-consuming, it’s not all that difficult for me. I start with what I think fits the character as I envision it, discover I’ve way overspent, and pare down considerably, often taking out skill themes. Feats are what kill me about creating d20 characters. I pretty much hate the feat system even though the concept is really good. d20 feats are just far too bland, mechanical, and unbalanced. I don’t want a poor sailor for this pirate, so I know I’ll be devoting most of the skills to traditional sailor areas. Unfortunately, 7th level isn’t high enough (normally) to get the Navigation feat, not that navigating on the Vilayet is quite the same as ocean travel.

Names. I dread names. I like to have meaningful names which is hard for fantasy worlds, fortunately, Conan’s world uses a prehistory of ours, so we can look up real world names and be confident they will sound reasonable. My favorite site is http://www.20000-names.com/ as the meanings of names is as or more important than how they sound. From Armenian boy names, I get Dzovag “lake”. From Turkish girl names, I get Pinar “spring”, I don’t know if it’s spring as in Spring or some other spring, but that seems entirely appropriate for an Aries whichever way. Neither Armenian nor Turkish were my first thoughts, I was thinking more Cossack, Tatar, Hun, or Mongolian, but these are probably fine.

Background. As a pure pirate, I envision this character as being from a family who lived by the Vilayet, maybe a fishing family, maybe a child of pirates. But, for more of a hook, I envision someone forced into piracy, pushed into the sea by politics or violence. A desire for revenge on landlubbers and a freedom-loving spirit feed the character’s career choice. With faith being an Aries element, I think it’s important to have this character worship some god or pantheon local to the Vilayet to get the Faith bonus to Will saves (a notoriously weak area for many Conan characters).

Looking over the character sheet below – I apologize for the crummy formatting, I must admit to not being thrilled. This pirate could really use being better at combat, better in certain skills, and more interesting and flexible. Probably best to create the other PCs and see how this character compares, it could just be not remembering how limited characters were at 7th level. More likely, I’ll just start tweaking to make the character more efficient.

Pinar (female) or Dzovag (male)
Race: Hyrkanian Class: Pirate Level: 7

STR 17 3 Fort: 5 +1 6
DEX 18 4 Ref: 5 +4 9
CON 13 1 Will: 2 +1 2 5 (Faith)
INT 14 2
WIS 12 1 Hit Points: 45
CHA 17 3

Parry Value: 13 +3 16 (18 on boat/ship at sea)
Dodge Value: 15 +4 19 (21 on boat/ship at sea)
Magic AB: 1 +3 4

Armor Check Pen.:
VS. Touch Attacks: 19
Arcane Spell Fail:
Flat-Footed: 19 (Uncanny Dodge)

Armor/Protection Type DR MD CP SF Spd Weight
Leather Jerkin L 4 +6 -1 40% std. 5
Steel Cap 1 0 10% 3

Initiative: 5 +8 13

Base Attack Bonus: 5
Melee: 5 +3 8
Finesse: 5 +4 9
Ranged: 5 +4 9

Weapon Proficiencies: All Simple, All Martial, Two-Weapon

Weapon Dam. Crit. AP RI H HP Weight
Hyrkanian bow +3 d10+3 19-20 3** 100′ 5 3 2
arrows (40) 5 1 6
Yuetshi knife (F) d6+3 x2 1 8 1 1
scimitar d8+3 18-20 2 10 5 2.5

Feats:
Far Shot [1] projectile weapon range increment x1.5, thrown x2
Improved Initiative [3] +4 initiative
Mobility [p5] +4 dodge DV vs. AoO from moving
Fleet-Footed [6] +10′ movement

Special Abilities:
Hyrkanian +1 attack rolls w/ bows
Hyrkanian +1/2 attack w/ bows 6/9 range increments away
Hyrkanian no requirements for taking Far Shot
Hyrkanian +2 Diplomacy, Gather Info, Intimidate in empire
Hyrkanian -2 saves vs. hypnotism
Hyrkanian tulwars and Hyrkanian bows as martial
Religion god/pantheon local to the Vilayet, as Erlik
Seamanship [p1,6] +2 Climb, P: Sailor, Use Rope, Balance, DV aboard boat/ship at sea
Ferocious Attack [p1,7] +4 initiative, attacks, damage melee; -4 DV; additional attack; first round
Pirate Code [p2] Vilayet Sea Flags
TSaRoBaS [p2] Coup as a free action
Sneak Attack [p3,6] +2d6
Sneak Subdual [p3] nonlethal
Uncanny Dodge [p4] dodge while flatfooted
Bite Sword [p7] 3+3 rounds/minutes

Languages: 9 – Hyrkanian, Khitan, Shemitish, Zamorian, Brythunian, Kothic, Iranistani, Yuetshi, Vendhyan

Skills (8+16+4,5,5,5,5,5,6 = 59), max 10:

Class Skills Ranks AM MM Key Skill
Appraise 2 2 INT 4
Balance 6 4 DEX 10 (11 at sea)
Bluff 5 3 CHA 8
Climb 2 3 STR 5 (7 at sea)
*Craft (bowyer) 2 2 INT 4
Disguise 0 3 CHA 3
Escape Artist 0 4 DEX 4
Gather Information 5 3 CHA 8
Intimidate 5 3 CHA 8
Jump 2 3 STR 5
Knowledge (geography) 1 2 INT 3
*Knowledge (local) 5 2 INT 7
Knowledge (rumors) 1 2 INT 3
Move Silently 0 4 DEX 4
Perform (sing) 1 3 CHA 4
Profession (sailor) 5 1 WIS 6 (8 at sea)
*Ride 2 4 DEX 6
Search 1 2 INT 3
Spot 0 1 WIS 1
*Survival 2 1 WIS 3
Swim 5 3 STR 8
Tumble 5 4 DEX 9
Use Rope 2 4 DEX 6 (8 at sea)

Reputation: 15 – +2 Bluff, Diplomacy, Gather Information, Intimidate, Perform; -1 Disguise

Fate Points: 2

Corruption Points: 0