Writing and Editing for RPGs and Fiction
A couple of weeks ago I was delighted to start as the new fiction editor of Lavie Tidhar’s World Speculative Fiction Blog. So far it’s been as fun and as rewarding as I expected – and as labour-intensive! – so I thought I’d take this opportunity to blog some of my thoughts on the often murky world of just what editing is, and how writers can interact with it.
The biggest difference between editing for RPGs and fiction for me is in the approach to wordcount. By that, I mean the number of words which a given “work” is targeted to have. A lot of people entering the writing field have expressed surprise to me that the number of words they write is such a big deal – but then again, if you think about it from the business point of view, of course it makes perfect sense. The price of printing or producing a book is directly linked to the number of pages it has – the physical amount of paper and ink required, the artwork which must be commissioned (for RPG books), the amount of editing and proofing needed. The balance between the content you put into a book and the number of words you use to express that content is critical.
First up, for RPGs, less is always more. In fiction, you may have a particular turn of phrase which is bang on – beautiful, or euphonious, or just ringing with associations. In fiction, a good editor is going to allow you to express that poetry of words. In RPGs, that matters far, far less. If you can say in ten words what you just rambled through in fifty, your RPG editor is going to ask you to sacrifice that redundant 80% on the altar of brevity. When I sit down even with one of my own RPG manuscripts to edit it, my goal is to kill at least one word in ten – and, if I can, one word in five. Out with those word-hungry passive constructions (“the game master may want to read page 30″ becomes “Read page 30″!), out with the florid circumlocutions, in with terse and tightly-targeted prose. In RPG writing, if you can say it with less words, then generally you should; the flipside is that the reader will then get much more content bang for their buck.
Obviously the same doesn’t apply to fiction. But one thing does: accuracy. There’s nothing worse as an editor when you receive a submission which is riddled with typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors. Honestly: if I as a writer can’t be bothered to make sure my writing is absolutely spot-on correct, then why should I expect an editor to be bothered to read it? Sure, typos do creep in – it’s hard to write 50,000 words and not make the occasional slip on the keyboard – but endemic bad grammar and a clear inability to spell is a massive and unprofessional turn-off to any editor.
A good copy editor of course will always work with your style as a writer. Once you’ve learned the rules and proved you can master them, then you get to occasionally break them, too. Maybe you use a lot of half-finished sentences. Or fragments. Or maybe you enjoy putting together vast, sweeping sentences with gorgeous and oft-archaic circumlocutions; or deploying punctuation like so many battle-hardened troops to achieve your final, military goal of finishing that sentence with a tub-thumping staccato flourish. That (usually) isn’t a crime; nor is it incorrect; and a good copy editor will guide you through its pitfalls without slashing up your own hard-won personal style.
To some extent that holds with RPG editing, too. Some RPG writers write dry, precise prose, like a washing-machine manual or a project management document for NASA; others write like they talk, peppered with colloquialisms and profanities, addressing the reader like an old gamer friend from way back when. Fitting your authorial voice to your subject matter is key, however; just as in fiction, if you write a majestic, Tolkienian text using expletives and street jargon, it really ain’t gonna work, Bilbo, dude. And the opposite holds true, too.
WTF, dude? Just, like, chill.
Here’s one last thing which is often uppermost in my mind these days, both as a writer finishing a manuscript, and when I have my copy-editor’s hat on: what version of English are you writing in? This might seem a bizarre question, but these days there are at least four variants of the English language which a writer might use: American English, International English, British English, and that most wonderfully academic of beasts, “the Oxford spelling” of British English. As a linguist myself, I must admit to a forbidden love of the Oxford spelling (google it), but it’s perhaps just far too arcane these days, despite its linguistically accurate approach, and most of what I write and read is either American or British English. But many writers approaching the business of writing may be unaware that differences between “the Englishes” don’t just apply to spelling – they apply to punctuation, word choice, and even grammar, too. Try checking out the use of speech marks and quotation marks in British and American English if you don’t believe me. Happily, copy editors and proofreaders are pretty merciful when it comes to slips on this level: if a publication brief is “use the Chicago style manual”, and you’re a Brit, you could be forgiven for getting your capitalizations of military ranks or titles slightly wrong, or when to write your numbers as numerals or letters – but, as a writer, it’s always good to be aware of these issues. Forewarned is forearmed, and attention to detail can solve 90% of issues with “the Englishes” before they ever cross your editor’s desk.
The relationship between writing and editing is endlessly fascinating, and it’s a privilege to be able to play for both sides. Editing other people’s work is a great way to see the glaring holes in your own writing; and, likewise, writing manuscripts and submitting them to an editor with a humble prayer is a great way to gain insight into the impact and effects your own editing will have on other writers. At its best, it’s a beautifully productive exchange of ideas, and – at those times when it clicks – it’s a magical moment of creativity in its own right.
The Worm Within – novel #1 of The Chronicles of Future Earth
A man will come. A man with a future long dead. And he will change the world utterly.
In the Post-Historical Age, everything that can be known has been known long ago, and then forgotten. Even history itself has ceased, as the light of humanity wanes into stagnation and extinction.
All that is left is prophecy.
In the Autarchal Palace of the ancient city of Korudav, Lord Jakai Tellisan is uneasy. Something is rotten in the Venerable Autocracy of Sakara, oldest of the Springtide Civilizations. After fifteen millennia, an ancient foe seems poised once again to destroy the lands of humankind, and yet the Avatar of the God-Emperor does nothing. And now there are rumors of ancient things stirring in the rusted tunnels beneath his timeworn domain — ancient things from a time when humans ruled the cosmos in glory.
A man has come. A man who remembers a time before history began. But is he a force for good, and hope for a bright future, or will he bring the fossilized ways of the Venerable Autocracy crashing down in flames and chaos?
The forces of destiny gather. Is this the last flicker of the light before the death of humankind? Or can humanity itself rise to this last great challenge—and save its future from the Worm Within?
-
A week or so ago Chaosium Inc announced my new novel, The Worm Within, the first novel in my Chronicles of Future Earth setting. Although I’ve already written several RPG products for Chronicles, this is the first time the far future science-fantasy setting will appear in fiction. It’s a very exciting moment for me – I’ve been wanting to tell the story of the Springtide Civilizations for a long time, and now at last I have the chance…
The first written incarnation of The Chronicles of Future Earth began some thirteen years ago, back in 1999, when I first sat down to write up a setting for the then-new 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons. It was an idea I’d been playing with since childhood – a dream of the farthest future of our species, when the aeons of glory and interstellar majesty are behind us, and the dotage of humankind has begun. Since then, it has undergone many mutations, and an awful lot of expansion, and now finds itself a setting for Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying RPG, where it truly feels at home. It’s a world of the far, far future, faded yet glorious, alien yet familiar, filled with melancholy, wistfulness, and wonder; a world of flying machines so old no one understands them, bizarre creatures and hominids mutated or genetically engineered in forgotten prehistory, and mind-numbing sorceries bestowed by incomprehensible transdimensional gods. And secrets of a terrible past, returning to life…
Alongside the creation of the Chronicles setting, a story has been building – a story of the unimaginably distant destiny of the human race. Elements of that story are built into the RPG setting, and more will be revealed in future RPG books in the line, where you’ll be able to play through your own story of the far future post-history of humankind.
But I’m delighted to have the opportunity to tell that story as I want to tell it, too – in the novels of The Chronicles of Future Earth. In the coming months, I’ll be sharing experiences and thoughts from writing the first novel, and snippets of the book itself. I hope you’ll come along…
The Worm Within will be published by Chaosium, Inc, in 2013.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a pitch for a World War Two supplement for Call of Cthulhu called “World War Cthulhu”. Since then, the idea has gone through many be-tentacled mutations, and I’m absolutely chuffed to bits that it’s going to see the light of day at last in the awesome Achtung! Cthulhu, published by Modiphius, the new imprint by my colleague and oftimes co-conspirator, Chris Birch. Achtung! Cthulhu looks set to be a huge line of adventures and supplements, and Chris has been stunningly busy recruiting an army of truly awesome writers, artists, layout and graphics specialists, to take your Cthulhoid adventures to a terrifying new level!
I’m delighted to be writing the first product for the Achtung! Cthulhu line – the fiendishly oppressive yet action-packed Three Kings, which takes place on the eve of the Second World War in occupied Czechoslovakia. Three Kings is the first of a series of linked adventures set during World War Two in a campaign called Zero Point, which we’ll be releasing once a quarter for the next couple of years. The theme of the Zero Point campaign is ‘Cthulhoid investigations during World War Two’ – it aims to keep the dark and suspenseful atmosphere of RPGs like Call of Cthulhu, Trail of Cthulhu, and so on. You can play it as gritty or as two-fisted as you like, and play academics, investigators, agents of the OSS, British Intelligence, or even the Ahnenerbe – and of course Resistance fighters or World War Two soldiers sucked unwittingly into nefarious Cthulhoid intrigues!
I’m so excited about the whole Achtung! Cthulhu line – it’s been a hell of a lot of research over the past couple of years, but the theatre of World War Two is just screaming for an action-packed Lovecraftian treatment, and I hope we’re going to give you that with the awesome line of products coming for Achtung! Cthulhu.
Three Kings is in layout right now, and should hopefully be available for purchase in a matter of weeks. I’m currently writing the second episode of the Zero Point campaign, Heroes of the Sea, and it should be available this summer.
All together now:
“Broadsword calling Danny Boy… Castle appears swathed in a dark mist… We’re going in… Wait! Those soldiers… they aren’t… no, that’s impossible… Arrgh… For God’s sake SOMEBODY HELP ME….!!”
“Danny Boy calling Broadsword. Are you receiving me? Come in, please? Danny Boy, are you there? Over…”
RIP Prof MAR Barker, Creator of Tekumel
I never got to meet Professor MAR “Phil” Barker. Indeed, I even came to his remarkable science-fantasy world, Tekumel, only some 15 years after my life as a roleplayer began. But nevertheless Tekumel has been so important to me, that I thought I’d write a short post here to mark the Professor’s passing, yesterday, at the age of 83.
There are three or four fantasy worlds famous in roleplaying which pre-date the hobby’s existence. There’s Middle-earth, of course; Moorcock’s Young Kingdoms; Greg Stafford’s Glorantha. And then there’s Tekumel, the world of the Petal Throne. Each of these was born before the era of roleplaying games, each in response to very specific creative urges expressed by their authors. But Tekumel stands apart.
Most fantasy worlds are reflections of their own authors’ worlds – the history, myth, folklore, society, and even (Tolkien, I’m looking at you) atmospheres of their native cultures. Almost uniquely, though, Tekumel is none of those things. It’s very, very alien, and throughout its existence this has been its blessing as a work of fiction, and in some ways its curse as a setting for roleplaying games.
Like Tolkien, Professor Barker was a creator of languages. But unlike Tolkien, whose linguistic passions were for Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, the languages of Dark Age northern Europe, the Professor’s passion was for the languages of India, Meso-America, and their periphery – languages laden with structures and concepts far removed from the comfort zone of traditional roleplayers. Tekumel is literally another world – a planet, colonised by Earth in the far, far future and terraformed as a pleasure world before a cosmic cataclysm casts it into its own pocket universe and technological and social chaos. But even there the traditional tropes of science fiction are subverted; the future Earth which colonises Tekumel isn’t the future of our own, Western, Caucasian society, like so much of our sci-fi: no, our society, races, and cultures have long since been wiped out by nuclear devastation in forgotten prehistory, and the future Earth which colonises Tekumel is a society derived from India, China, Central and Southern America. It has very different roots.
And a very different type of fantasy emerges. There are no taverns and inns on Tekumel. Personal heroism and the ‘Western’ glorification of individualism has no place in its societies. Even human life has a different value. When you create your characters and set foot on Tekumel, you really are roleplaying – trying to put yourself in the mindset of a very alien culture.
That, of course, is fascinating. But it’s also hard. Much of roleplaying games relies on shared assumptions – we can all roughly guess how we should behave in the fantasy and scifi worlds we’re playing in, because they share much in common with our own. Not so Tekumel. In a world where human sacrifice is common, pretty much everyone walks around naked, and there’s a rigid caste system and very little personal freedom, you can feel like you need a doctorate to work out how your character should behave.
For that reason much of Tekumel roleplaying revolved around ‘foreigners off the boat’ arriving at Jakalla, the City Half as Old as the World. That way your characters were already strangers in a strange land – they were your actual proxies in the alien society of “Tsolyanu”, the core society for most Tekumel roleplaying. It was an approach which worked well.
I always wondered therefore why Tekumel wasn’t much more popular than it was. It’s an awesomely fascinating setting, deep, complex, and yet filled with scope for pulpy, action-packed adventure. There are lost artifacts, truly ancient ruins, mysterious gods and mind-wrenching sorceries, nefarious and evil aliens, wildly imaginative monsters, and a richly-textured setting that you can delve into at will – or just beat the hell out of with a sword, if that’s your bag.
My own theory is that Tekumel never got the ‘campaign pack treatment’ which, IMHO, it so richly deserved. Something like Borderlands or Pavis for Glorantha, Waterdeep for Forgotten Realms, the G-D-Q series for AD&D, The Enemy Within for Warhammer. There are a few adventures for Tekumel, and currently there’s a very cool ruleset using a Tri-Stat variant a la BESM. But no compelling, cool-as-all-hell campaign pack, which would make people pick it up and exclaim, “I’ve got to play me some of THIS!”
A couple of years ago, I toyed with the idea of writing a Tekumel campaign pack for FATE, based on the Legends of Anglerre rules. I may try that again some day – Tekumel really deserves so much more exposure, and a kick-ass campaign pack to really exploit its richness.
But that’s a maybe future. In the 16 or so years since I belatedly discovered Tekumel, its depth, artistry, and sheer craftsmanship has profoundly influenced me. In some ways one of the (many) roots of my own Chronicles of Future Earth setting lies in an attempt to engage Tekumel in a dialogue: where Tekumel is alien by virtue of being based on an alien world and on alien cultures, Urth is alien by virtue of being a truly far, far future version of our own planet, unbelievably changed, yet somehow based on the distant echoes of our own, Western cultures. Likewise, Mindjammer is perhaps set somewhere in the notional backstory of Future Earth: for me, Urth came first, and therefore in some ways the New Commonality of Humankind was kicked off by my thinking of the sort of society that could undergo a collapse into the world of Future Earth. And maybe I wouldn’t have got there, if not for many moons spent wondering what had happened to the rest of humanity when Tekumel got propelled into its pocket universe tens of thousands of years ago – or in our far future.
If you know and love Tekumel, you’ll probably grok my thoughts above, and the debt of gratitude we all owe the Prof for his wonderful creation. If you don’t know the world of the Petal Throne, do yourself a favour: find out. There are games, some very readable novels, websites (check out the gorgeous www.tekumel.com!), even whole languages and histories out there, waiting to be plunged into and enjoyed. Maybe you’ll never game there, but you won’t regret the ride.
Long live Tekumel. And rest in peace, Prof Barker, and thanks.
Sarah
(The two images here are linked from www.tekumel.com and thetekumelclub.blogspot.fr. Please visit those excellent sites and support Tekumel!)
Roleplaying Character Arcs: The Blade Runner Challenge (Part Two)
Last time, I laid down the challenge of trying to describe in roleplaying game terms what’s actually going on in the rooftop scene between Deckard and Batty at the end of Blade Runner. Most RPGs are capable of describing the physical externalities of that scene in mechanical terms, but few (there are some) can reasonably attempt to describe what’s actually happening in ways which make for an exciting and satisfying game experience.
So, what are we really talking about with Deckard and Batty?
Essentially, we’re talking about internalized narratives. The whole point is not so much the externalities of the plot (the jumping around on that rooftop, ramming nails through wrists, breaking fingers), but what’s going on inside the characters – their “character development”, in literary terms. I was watching Seth Bullock in the “Deadwood” series last week, and how his thwarted relationship with Alma Garrett is both superficially unsatisfying for the viewer, and yet has a profound significance for Bullock’s internal character development – how he chooses to adopt a moral stance, even if it runs counter to his instincts. I wondered how this could work in an RPG.
In order to emulate this in a roleplaying game, we first have to have some sense of a character arc – that a character will change and develop as part of his experiences. Most RPGs do this in “external” ways – by measuring skills, levels, hit points, etc – and then letting the character improve in those. Because, ultimately, character development is what we want to see in a roleplaying game, even if it’s as simple as someone getting better at killing things.
In the old Advanced Dungeons and Dragons days, DMs often kept “alignment graphs” for characters. This was an attempt to chart how much a character’s actual behaviour matched his or her nominal alignment – and it was something which was tracked over time. If the alignment graph swayed too much to one side – from Lawful Good, say, to Neutral Good, then the DM could actually change the character’s alignment – with possibly wide-reaching effects.
Now, alignment graphs were good for tracking a character’s moral worldview, but character development is about so much more than that. In Batty’s case in Blade Runner, his initial greed for “I want more life, fucker” transforms from a purely selfish wish not to die, into an overarching love for life – not just his own life, but all life. There’s an alignment graph-type phenomenon happening there, but how could you track it in roleplaying terms?
Let’s start with a simple descriptor: “I want more life, fucker”. That could be an aspect, in FATE terms; an ability, in HeroQuest terms; a distinction in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying / Cortex+ terms. But, in “real world” terms, “I want more life, fucker” could morph in a number of ways – it could turn inwards, turn into psychopathy, an “if I can’t have more life, no one can”; it could turn into despair – “I can’t have more life, so I give up”; it could overcome itself, and transcend into something almost religious, like “I love all life – even yours”.
In other words, such descriptors are not simply linear – you can’t simply have a single score for “I want more life, fucker”, and expect it to cover all the possible parameters for character development. Instead, descriptors have multiple axes – stronger, weaker, better, worse, sideways, inwards, outwards. And a single person may have a descriptor moving along multiple axes simultaneously – that’s the stuff great character conflict is made from.
So – maybe there’s a paradigm here. Characters have multiple descriptors – let’s call them Traits, as it’s a nice neutral word. We can improve on that later if necessary. Maybe we can group Traits by category – Moral Traits, Belief Traits, Relationship Traits, and so on. Maybe they have a strength – that’s where an RPG “score” might come in. Let’s use a score from 1-10 for now. So, let’s say a character has the Trait “I want more life, fucker: 10″.
Now, a character can have an experience which directly challenges that Trait. Somehow, in that rooftop scene with Deckard, Batty is so impressed with Deckard’s struggle for life – and his own – that his “I want more life, fucker” Trait is irrevocably changed. That could be something which happens gradually – one “point” of “damage” at a time – or something which happens suddenly, in an instant. Let’s call each moment when such “damage” is done an Inflexion Point. It’s a crap term, but it will do for now. Deckard isn’t consciously attempting to do damage to Batty’s “I want more life, fucker” Trait at each of these Inflexion Points, but from a character development perspective, that’s what’s happening.
This means each Trait can conceivably have a number of Inflexions, each of which pulls the Trait in different directions. So, you could have the annotation “I want more life, fucker: 10 (Kill everyone 2, Love of Life 5)”. Now you’ve got a mechanic where you can track the meaning of a trait in character development terms, along different axes. There are questions to be answered: how many traits can you have, how many inflexions can a trait have, and so on. But there’s the nub of a mechanic there.
Lastly, we need to bring in the character development bit. That’s a bit genre dependent; in a more literary genre, you might phrase the Trait in a way which incorporates an assumed future development – “I’ll do anything I can to get more life”, etc. In other genres, it might be more punchy: “The whole world will bow before me!” In some ways, this is the continuum from pure aspects in Legends of Anglerre through to the “future aspects” we brought in for those rules.
So, there’s a suggestion. Next up, I want to look at the types of traits you can have (combat traits, belief traits, moral traits, etc), and the ways in which you can generate Inflexion Points and Inflexions for Traits – and how they change.
What does everyone think?
Thinking RPGs: The Blade Runner Challenge (Part One)
I’ve been thinking recently about the experiences characters go through in movies and novels, and how they differ from those of roleplaying game characters. Sure, fictional characters come up against obstacles, experiences they have to “get through” in order to move on, but it’s rare that these obstacles present themselves as so many physical opponents which line up like a coconut shy to be knocked over one at a time. As often as not, obstacles for fictional characters represent something they have to overcome inside themselves – that’s what makes them difficult, not the objective degree of “difficulty” they might pose in themselves.
When Raskolnikov callously murders the old woman pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment, he doesn’t make a to hit roll with his axe against her imaginary (and non-existent) dodge skill, endurance, or armour class; he is wrestling with a compulsion, an obsession within himself “that he has to know”. Is his murder a victory over that obsession, or a defeat at its hands? Well, that’s what the novel’s about… When Luke fights Darth Vader and the Emperor in Return of the Jedi, it’s hardly about his skill at all – he’s completely outclassed, doomed to fail. Instead, it’s about his relationship with his father – whether he can reach out and touch a perhaps still glowing ember of humanity in Vader’s carbonised soul. And, perhaps most importantly for this discussion, when Deckard “fights” Batty at the climax of Blade Runner, it’s nothing to do with combat prowess – but rather a process of gradual satori for both sides, as they confront their love of life, vitality, will to survive, and it overcomes the resentment and spite engendered by their thwarted lives; a self-sacrifice at the altar of life.
How on earth do we represent those themes in roleplaying games? Most RPGs busy themselves almost exclusively with the externalities of a character – a mechanistic fixation on his equipment, skills, quantifiable and measurable strength, IQ, etc. In other words, pretty much everything which great fiction deals with is handled by none of what roleplaying games do. It’s all left in a vague, consensual. improvisational zone – as people say, “that’s the roleplaying bit”.
But, of course, the flipside is, if you have a game which doesn’t deal with the physical activities handled by most RPG rules – ie, all of the examples above – then you don’t actually have a game at all. Imagine trying to run the Deckard-Batty building / rooftop scene in most RPGs. Could you do it? Roll 1d100 to keep clinging to the outside of the building? Make an Willpower roll to jam a six inch nail through your fist? It wouldn’t make sense.
So, that’s my starting point. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to attempt to brainstorm just what a RPG would look like that could successfully and satisfyingly model that Blade Runner climax, in a way that was exciting, fulfilling, and also a damn good crunchy game. Identifying this goal is what this post has been about – what do you think? Can you think of any classic, iconic scenes in movies, novels, or comic books, which you would *love* to be able to game through in a roleplaying game, but which RPGs in their current incarnation just won’t let you play?
The Virtual Self
That's me on the right...
In Mindjammer, it’s possible to remember not just your own memories, but those of other people – gestalts of memory engrams uploaded to the interstellar mindlinked internet known as the Mindscape. The more advanced artificial intelligences have their very personalities based on the compound stored memories – known as exomemories – of dead individuals. Imagine you can remember pretty much every memory that Napoleon, or Lincoln, or Hitler, ever had, but that you’re none of those people, but someone else, someone new – what kind of person does that make you? That theme is one of the most crucial of the Mindjammer setting, and one I never seem to get tired of exploring.
There’s a great article in today’s Guardian discussing this very topic – the instability and indeed variability of memory as a foundation of our own identities. Reading it today, my mind began to wander over a territory I still have to explore one day in much more detail: the memories and identities of roleplaying gamers. I’ve been a gamer for over 30 years, and some of my fondest “memories” are of events which never ever happened. I remember when I embarked upon an expedition to the Demonweb Pits and slew the evil goddess Lolth when I was about 12 years old; I remember when Tryfan Ironsword returned from the Hero Plane with God-Cleaver, the Unbreakable Sword, and thereby became the new son of Humakt, God of War, incarnate. And I remember the first time we encountered the insidious alien device known as the Uranawaltzer on the war-torn world of Amida, occupied by the nefarious Venu.
None of these things happened, of course. Or, rather, they happened as part of role-playing games, where I played the role of a fictional hero in a mutually created story. But, in some way, they are my memories, they’re part of what I remember of my life and they go some way to explaining who I am. I’m sure any role-player out there will understand what I mean.
It strikes me therefore that roleplaying games are very powerful tools. They can actually affect our memories, who we are. Maybe, almost 40 years after their invention, we’re only now beginning to realise their importance in the construction of our virtual selves. Especially as video roleplaying games become ever more realistic, and they too begin to create memories of things which never happened in the “real” world. Let me tell you of some of my adventures in Skyrim…
What do you think, folks? Has your sense of self been affected by being a gamer? Do you have memories from roleplaying games you treasure as if they’d happened to you yourself?
System Fatigue: Thoughts on D&D 5th Edition
This game needs more rules...
Now, admittedly, I’m not a “heavy user” of Dungeons and Dragons. I prefer more storytelling-oriented rules systems, like Fate, HeroQuest, etc; and for my more crunchy kick I tend to go with variants on the d100 system made famous by games like RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu. But I used to play a heck of a lot of D&D – right from when I first started RPGs back in 1980, right through till about 10 years ago. So what’s changed?
One of the key plus points for an RPG rules set for me is its stability. That is, once I’ve learned the rules, I can reasonably rely on them remaining the same for an extended period of time, so that I can just pick up a game and play with relatively little prep. Now that I’m no longer fifteen years old, I don’t have weeks on end to spend meticulously prepping for gaming sessions: I like to pick up a game, quickly read the scenario, and play.
Obviously, in addition to being stable, this also means the rules set of a good RPG for me also has to be relatively simple. There are some great games out there whose setting I love and whose game play I like, but which I don’t play because I have to spend a month re-reading the rules before I can play a game again.
Finally, for me, a game system has to be reasonably elegant. This is a tricky one. For me, that means it doesn’t just focus on smashing up monsters or spaceships or whatever; it has to be able to model social interactions, heroic exploits, godlike or superhuman powers, whatever. In other words: to do a whole lot more than a simple tabletop skirmish game could. Don’t get me wrong: I *like* tabletop skirmish games, but I don’t use their rules for roleplaying.
Many people say 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons fell down on the “elegant” score: it was basically a very combat-heavy ruleset focussed almost entirely on skirmishing, with not much scope for roleplaying per se. In my humble opinion there’s some truth in that, but personally I was impressed with the “Skill Challenges” rules in D&D 4e – an attempt to codify “playing against the story” into the rules, and which kind of worked. I’ve been able to use a lot of the theory of Skill Challenges when writing and playing the Hazards and Challenges rules in Legends of Anglerre and the upcoming Starblazer 2nd edition, and the “story obstacle” structure of scenario writing in HeroQuest 2. 4th ed D&D may have been combat heavy, but it was innovative in non-combat areas, too.
For me, the first 4th ed D&D books lost out on the simplicity score: I found myself studying the 4th ed Players Handbook trying to fathom the rules, and to be honest rapidly gave up and went back to my usual games – I couldn’t see any good reason to persevere – there was nothing in the 4th ed PHB that made me sit up and say “Wow – I really want to play this game!”.
However, D&D Essentials – that worked for me. I played the Red Box thoroughly, and bought the Essentials books, and found them well-written, well-targeted, and accessible. The rules there were presented much more simply, and were memorable.
But – and here, for me, is the crux of the entire Dungeons and Dragons problem, these days – I always had this niggling feeling that my time investment in learning the 4th edition rules was going to be a ultimately a waste, as sooner or later Wizards were going to release a new edition, and render all my attempts to learn the 4th edition rules a bit of a joke. I love roleplaying games, and I’m passionately loyal to systems I like and which I think play well. But, most of all, I play for the long term: if I learn a rules set, I want to know that it’s going to be either a.) pretty quick and easy to learn, or b.) something I’m going to be able to play for a decade or more, in the case of a relatively complex RPG.
Now, if I was *only* playing 4th edition D&D, then there probably wouldn’t have been a problem. But I don’t: I play several other games regularly, including Starblazer Adventures, Legends of Anglerre, HeroQuest 2, Unknown Armies, Call of Cthulhu, and even Exalted (I say “even” as in my book that’s a complex game requiring quite a time investment). D&D 4th ed shares my brainspace, and has to stack up against those other games.
So, 4th ed came out in – when? 2008? I bought the 3 core books, and did nothing with them for a year or two – too complex, too much time required. Then I got into Essentials with the Red Box in 2010, and I’ve played it maybe ten times. I bought the new Gamma World, which I thought was a great match with the 4th edition rules, and played it loads. I’ve recently been toying with getting the Neverwinter campaign books and giving them a whirl.
But today put my 4th edition purchase plans on hold, probably indefinitely. Today – 5th edition D&D is announced. In prospect: another couple of years getting used to a whole new rules set, again with the nagging feeling that once I’ve learned the rules, the carpet will be pulled out from under my feet and we’ll be onto the 6th edition (then the 7th, then the 8th, every few years or so). And the same niggling suspicion that the only reason we’re being given yet another edition is to force fans to re-purchase everything they’ve already got, only in new format. And the D&D core don’t come cheap…
I bought almost everything published for D&D and AD&D back in the day. I bought less for 2nd edition, less still for 3rd edition, and maybe 10 titles total for 4th edition. I’ll probably buy the core books for 5th edition, mostly out of interest – just because I’d like to read the latest rules for the grand-daddy of all RPGs. But the publication pattern D&D is falling into is less and less the way I want to “consume” my RPGs. I have so many DMGs and PHBs the mind boggles, and although they’re quaint artefacts, they’re all out of date and useless as games. Why would I want to continue doing that?
I must of course say a word about Pathfinder. Although I’ve found the Pathfinder core book to be a complex read, and as a result haven’t played it yet (although I played tons of D&D 3e), I’ve found the Golarion setting and scenarios to be superb quality, and easy to grasp. As a result, I’ll shortly be buying the Pathfinder beginners’ box set to finally play my updated “Halls of Tizun Thane” scenario as an old school D&D monster bash fest. Why? Because Pathfinder is showing commitment to the stability of its rules set; it may be incrementally tweaking and improving those rules, but with Paizo I have the faith that, even if they do one day produce a Pathfinder 2nd edition, it’ll be essentially the same game as Pathfinder 1st ed, and I won’t have an entirely new learning curve to climb. I’m happy to give Paizo my money, as I trust them as a long-term investment for my D&D-style adventuring. They’re using a ruleset that’s now 13 years old, and still plays well. Hell, I still play d100 – and that’s 35 years old, so Pathfinder’s got a way to go yet before I’ll consider it “old”!
So, those are my thoughts on yet another edition of D&D. Naturally I’ll be watching with interest, but doubtless reserving judgment for now. I wonder how many other people will be doing the same?
Inklings at Christmas
As yet another Christmas comes around, I find myself once again keenly aware of my Northern European identity. While many of the trappings of our modern Christmas may have been invented and commercialised in the 19th century, the roots of Yuletide are of course far older and, here in Northern Europe at least, closely tied to that period of cold and lethal darkness through which we all hunker down by the fire and wait for the sun to return.
There’s little daylight now. Even then most of it is grey, lifeless, the trees like blasted remnants of their summer selves. Even the air smells dead, sterilised by frost and cold. Yet here, by the fire, a little spark of life lives on – embers in the hearth, preserved fruits and baking in the stove, a great evergreen tree brought still living into the house and decorated and praised as a symbol of life’s power to survive the midwinter.
I love the accoutrements of this season – the signs of continuing life, survival, and the hope of returning life to come. The birth of Jesus is a perfect addition to the medley of other religious symbols swarming together into this midwinter hotchpotch – the gift-giving, slaughtered meats, and cheerful feasts of Saturnalia, the mulled wines and beers of our Germanian and Scandinavian forebears raised by the hearth over the “hallowed nights” of the Solstice, the Yule log brought out again to kindle the fire.
One of the great strengths of Western civilisation is its eclecticism. Shameless, effortless, and somehow startlingly innocent. Despite the best efforts of propagandists and ideologues, we happily rip off, plagiarise, assimilate and regurgitate any bits of our constituent cultures – and those we come into contact with – and add them to our huge incongruous jumble. Christmas makes no logical sense. Christ was probably born in spring, when the lambs are in the field, not winter; we sit and sing songs of Zoroastrian priests, desert villages, and a Roman census two thousand years old, then bung it together with Scandinavian myths, Celtic legends, and twee Victorian commercialism.
But on an emotional level, it makes all the sense in the world, and after thousands of years is still the dominant event in our cultural calendar.
So raise a tankard of steaming ale by the fir tree by the hearth, and join me in chants to pagan kings, Zarathustra, and the birth of the King of the Jews – for Santa and the Wild Hunt ride tonight!
Merry Christmas, and Good Yule!
Asymmetric Gaming: Musings on HeroQuest 2nd edition (part 2)
Over the past few months I’ve been reading, playing, and thinking a lot about the 2nd edition of the HeroQuest roleplaying game, published by Moon Design. Several weeks ago I posted about my first impressions of the game; today I wanted to talk a bit further about the radically asymmetrical nature of the HeroQuest 2nd edition rules.
In most roleplaying games, you play your character using the same rules as the “opposition” – the bad guys and monsters you encounter in play. Perhaps you have a few advantages – more flexibility, greater power – but fundamentally there’s a symmetrical relationship between the rules which define what you can do, and what the bad guys can do. It’s an assumption from roleplaying’s early days in the world of miniatures gaming, and one which is so widely held it’s rarely even acknowledged.
HeroQuest 2 is a storytelling roleplaying game. The thing you’re opposing (or at least interacting with) in a HeroQuest 2 game isn’t so much an array of opponents, but rather the story itself. When your character fights the dragon, rescues the prince or princess from the evil sorcerer, or destroys the space station in your tiny starfighter, in HeroQuest none of those opponents are defined using the “stat blocks” you’d find in other games. Rather, the difficulty of achieving those individual goals (fight the dragon, rescue the prince, destroy the space station) is defined. Moreover, that difficulty isn’t defined by how objectively hard each of those goals might be to achieve (starfighter against space station? no chance!), but instead by how difficult it should be in terms of the story. If the story, by its genre, dramatic structure, or structural necessity, suggests that a hero with a stray arrow should, right now, have a decent chance to kill the dragon which has terrorised the land for decades, then that’s what the difficulty of that task will be, regardless of how formidable the dragon might “objectively” be.
Now, like many RPG game masters, I’ve often enjoyed meticulously detailing the foes my players would face. Creating that dragon in gorgeous technicolor, with its strengths, weaknesses, and powers defined in pretty much the exact same terms as the player characters – in universal, objective, “game reality” terms, it has X hit points, does Y damage, and has a Z probability of turning the PCs into puree.
It’s initially a great shock not to be able to do that in HeroQuest 2. How the hell am I meant to differentiate between one bad guy and another without statistics? How can I even describe what the bad guy does, says, or thinks, without an exhaustive list of his skills, attributes, and powers, all carefully laid out in game mechanics terms, ready to be compared like-for-like with the PCs?
The answer is quite subtle. You still describe your bad guy – certainly in as much detail as you need to be comfortable with. If it’s some mystical bad guy in a black environment suit with uncanny powers who once fell into a volcano, then you can probably improvise most of what he can do; but if it’s a Mistress Race priestess of Kyger Litor with a bevy of powers gained on Underworld heroquests, then you might want to note some pointers down – probably in some detail – to work from when riffing your descriptions.
HeroQuest 2 really helps you do this. Even for PCs, there are no fixed skill names, attributes, etc; you get to come up with those yourself when creating your character. You invent abilities like “Initiate of the Storm God”, “Lethal Magic Blade”, “Blood-curdling War Cry”, etc, to your heart’s content, and the rules provide numerical scores for these so you can utilise them in play.
You can probably see how the “bad guy” side of the equation comes together. On the one hand, the HeroQuest game system provides you with a numerical difficulty (or “resistance”) for a given thing you’re trying to do, a number which is based on the dramatic necessity of the scene you’re playing; on the other, you have a bunch of descriptive phrases defining your bad guy. It’s then simply a matter of judgement to pair them up: if the “resistance” at this point in the story is high, select one of the bad guy’s more powerful abilities; if the resistance is low, select an ability that’s not so powerful, or maybe even a weakness. Then, describe the PC’s interaction with that.
When I first got my head round that, I was floored. It’s so untraditional the whole concept takes some getting used to. Everything your PCs come up against is simply a “story resistance” in rules mechanical terms. This means all the finer points of the rules which are used to describe individuals – characters, etc – are basically used for PCs only.
Think about that for a moment. How much damage a weapon does, how you use “Hero Points”, how you take damage or heal from wounds, how you use magic to improve your abilities, etc: none of these rules apply to the opposition. In the most basic terms, it’s like describing the entire stat block of a D20 bad guy as “Demogorgon, DC45″ – except that the DC45 might vary from DC10 to DC100, depending on the requirements of the story you’re playing.
This simple fact is probably one of the biggest hurdles for traditional RPGers learning how to play HeroQuest 2: it certainly was for me. Trad RPGs have a tendency to portray conflicts in rigid, binary terms: one individual versus another (or a group of ‘em), where you have to come up against that individual and prevail. And that man-vs-man conflict gets the lion’s share of the game mechanics; other tasks – picking someone’s pocket, debating someone about the best tactic to use, trying to win the love of the Leopard Empress – are either simply talked through without any mechanics (the ur-traditional approach), or perhaps subjected to some simple mechanics, but which almost never approach that of the man-vs-man combat mechanics in sophistication.
In HeroQuest, you’re freed from that binary. Anything can be a contest, and that massively changes how your games play out. In a recent session, my PCs had to rescue an unconscious shaman about to be sacrificed by a bunch of werewolves on the night of the full moon. The traditional approach would be a military confrontation: go in there, battle, get the shaman, get out. Damage would be given and taken, and likely the foes would be slain.
In our HeroQuest game, the “combat” part was just one of many facets of the encounter, rather than its main focus. There were magical distractions, attempts to lure away guardian wolves, war cries intimidating the lesser werewolves, and the occasional clash of arms, until one of the PCs raised a magical wind to fling himself across the battlefield to the unconscious shaman, grab hold of him, then use another wind to blast them both far away to safety.
In the end: mission accomplished. How many foes dead? Some, it didn’t really matter: the close detail of wounds and hit points was less important than the overall description of the scene and its outcome. With many games, that decree of narrative freedom is unimaginable; in fact, in most it would require a heckuva lot of arbitrary judgement calls and arm-waving. In HeroQuest 2, the outcomes of the contests you play through are strictly controlled in rules terms; you have leeway on how you describe the outcomes, but the objective level of victory you achieve is very precisely defined by the rules. Your character can die, but it won’t be at the GM’s whim: the rules will clearly indicate when and how that happens.
In my early experiments with HeroQuest – back in the days of HeroWars, over a decade ago – my biggest problem was trying to shoehorn this increasingly revolutionary ruleset into the traditional tropes and encounter structures mandated by more traditional RPGs. Where were the hit points? How much damage does my armour absorb? How much gold can I carry?
Twelve years on, the HeroQuest 2nd edition rules have pretty much freed themselves from their traditional legacy, to provide untrammelled access to a new way of running roleplaying games. The temptation to try and “fix” the HeroQuest 2 rules so they play more like traditional RPGs is immense: it’s only with great self-discipline I’ve been restricting myself to only playing the Rules-As-Written – and trying to learn the hidden lessons which lie therein.
So far – I think – I’m managing. At least till my next revelation…! 
