Now Let Me Refute the Silly (Follow Up On Boring Combat)

This is a follow up for my reddit post. After the 5e game I drove up to Blackhawk and hit the craps table just after midnight and as usual mulled over dice, probability and whether odds matter when it is your turn to roll the dice "to hit". Players would take odds on 6 and 8 and stack hundreds and hundreds of dollars down. Always dollar yo flinging onto the horn as the dealers listen to the traditional code words; adding pressure, take it down, the stick man in the middle moving their hands over that active middle section with the worst odds in the house and the gentleman to my left went on a tear, holding the dice till most people had tripled their money. I quietly played the Don't Pass and nodded as certain numbers, even very low odds numbers, come up again and again. Dice are what I like to refer to as a "closed system". No matter how low the odds on a 2 or a 3, in five hours you will see it hit again and again, sometimes in a row.

While the numbers "roll" on by, the only action which matters is your action. Your stake, how much it is, and if you lose are you "dead" or merely bleeding out some hit points and hoping to hang on for the tide to turn. The rules of craps never change, and unlike poker, there is nothing to "bluff". Just the tension of waiting for the dice to land your way. The chips, in their bright colors, lose a sense of cash and become weapons and resources to deploy, cast either wildly or prudently in a systematic approach. That never changes. What changes are the people coming to the table all with their different dress, attitudes, and states of inebriation. Stories get tossed casually like the dice bouncing across the felt. Tensions rise and fall with the weight of fate and the stick man tapping the table in front of a lucky winner announcing the large payouts to players down at the right time on the right number. 

The rules are simple, but every throw creates another quick story spelled out in shouts and groans with each pass. The game only has character or story for you in just the brief time around the table. While players might have a strategy, the play is really trying to be present when the dice are falling “your way”. In a closed system the same numbers come up again and again, albeit randomly. A seven is the most likely number to come up on any toss of two dice, but when the player shoots the come out, all are possible. Odds be damned. If the hard 4 hits it doesn’t matter right then and there a miraculous 1-36 chance paid off, or in my case wipes out my even-money bet I shepherded into position to get better “odds”. 

Then there is poker. There are the iron-bound rules of play. What beats what, and it never changes. Curiously, nowhere in the rules of poker are rules on bluffing. That you would be wise to do it, or that it isn’t legal, or that a “good” poker player knows how to call one. It is an organic method naturally occurring as players work the only part of the game totally in their control, that of getting the other players to think you got them all beat with your three of a kind. 

Is roleplaying games more like a game of craps where you figure the odds, where you count your modifiers and look to make the most advantageous play in the moment, or is it more like a game of poker where everyone is trying to get everyone else to buy into their bullshit? I think of ttrpg’s as a game of poker with some players trying to work it like a game of craps. To get a good hand and let that drive the hand and thereby guaranteeing a win. And you see it time and time again. Someone with the best hand lays it down and lets the other person rake in the pot. All because the winning player superseded the rules and got “buy-in” from the table. Not that they had the best hand, the highest roll, the right addition of modifiers.

5:30 rolls around and dawn is breaking over the mountains. My modest don’t pass method has seen my $200 grow into $360, back down to $100 and finally I walk away with $217. 

I play in a scheduled online game of Gamma World 1e, and it starts in two hours. I find an empty poker room and sit at the deserted bar with free coffee and fire up the laptop. I spill my colored die on the granite top and review my character sheet. I’m playing a Pure Strain Human, a character “class” in the game which comes with a sever handicap, no mutations. The other players, indeed, all the other players, are Humanoids of various stripes and the usual grab-bag of strange powers common in an OSR game like Gamma World. I chose this character type like I choose a game to run. There is a goal, and the goal is usually to investigate for myself how “broken” old-school games are claimed to be. The biggest being combat is boring, slow, characters are broke with little to no mechanics incentivizing play. So, I play the bare-ass, under-powered person with zero bells and whistle. I did roll decent stats. CHA 17, MS 15, three 13’s and a 14, but Gamma World 1e is really stingy on ability modifiers. I may only have a +2? on reaction rolls due to a 17 CHA. But in this discussion even this fact isn’t all that important. What is important, what strikes me as important is the group play. The Gamma Master runs it RAW except he uses ability checks for actions not covered in the simple rules and bolted on his own vehicle combat rules because, well, Road Warrior and shit. In Gamma World there are many different types of vehicles you will come across. I’ve personally destroyed a tank retrofitted for running on train tracks, a minivan, motorcycle, Toyota Tacoma and our current stolen RV with top mounted .50 cal, crazy sound system, armored plating, etc. Started with 100 HPs but is currently on the side of the road hanging on with 5 because, you know, Chaos Nazis. 

When my PSH ended up in the “Kill-Box” at Railtown the Gamma Master plopped down a mini-tactical gladiator game which had random tables, random pits of flaming oil and a brief rundown of the rules. I didn’t know what the optimum play was. I didn’t know much about the ground I would fight on, and I didn’t know where I was going to get a weapon when my humanoid opponent appeared before the blood-lusting crowd with a big hammer caked in the gore of previous opponents. I did know I liked this character, that if I could get through this, we stood a good chance of getting a job from the boss of Railtown, but the most important thing I had on my mind was my fellow players were in the stands looking on. At least I wouldn’t die alone. Not so much that I was going to lose, and the rest of the party safely looks on making wagers. No, I was sure when I was beaten bloody and down to my last few HPs they would jump to my aid and Railtown would have all our heads. And that is exactly what happened, except us getting killed. No, we got into the underground faction and were able to cut a deal. 

And today’s session, after too many combats against unique adversaries then we have any right to survive, we looked to complete the job, returning the brother of the underground leader, alive. It was his ride we had just butchered blasting through the mobile pack of goons. The GM runs a harsh, radioactive hell-scape and it has taken just as much fast talking as combat to get us this close to success. In this instance we received aid from a motorcycle riding NPC with a place to lie low for the night and make repairs, what we could, on the RV while gigantic shit-cows snuffed through sparse grass on the cracked pavement of a once large city. With Railtown only an hour away we put the hammer down, all 35 mph of our hammer. I turned the wheel over to another PC and hung in the rear of the RV looking out of the missing back end nervously fingering my vortex gun. Parrot oiled his AR-15 while Hughie tried to puzzle out the different colored grenades we had gathered in our journeys. There was nothing for it but the random encounter roll. 1 in 6, what are the chances? The 1 in 6 chance materialized as a two-headed dog the size of a rhino, but bigger. 

We were looking okay on HPs, but the RV, it has a ripped open back and the .50 cal was on the side of the road at mile marker eat shit and die. Micro-missiles spent, the only thing we had going for us was the creature was too big for both its heads to fit inside the RV at once and maybe one of the grenades was high explosive? Just to cut to the chase, the mutant Cerberus had a little over 100 HPs. What I think naysayers of old-school combat call HP “bloat”. I had 22 and the rest of the crew was hanging in the same ballpark. In Gamma World 1e creatures do a shit-ton of damage and we could dish out maybe 8d6, 12d6 if we all hit at the same time. Okay, lets get to the point of this boring combat, a combat procedure just like B/X, the most broken and boring part of any old-school game since OD&D. Not knowing what the bag o grenades held we decided to hurl the whole bag out the back at the rapidly approaching beast. Parrot emptied the clip and the bag which fell at the creatures feet, blew, and we racked up 54 points of damage. The creature lunged one head into the van and I got to feel 12 points of damage from my Vortex gun. My full HP load is 67 but it never lasts long. There are sharp encounters which would cost me 2d6, 2d8 damage rolls, harsh radiation which makes a PSH melt like wax in the hot sun. The vortex cannon is a 4d6 short range weapon and Parrot had one more clip. It was hard to keep track of all the action. And in the background the GM adjudicated the homemade vehicle combat rules. There isn’t shit for modifiers. There is an initiative and to-hit roll and a homemade rule on making ability checks like saving throws. But there was much dialogue. We were all galvanized in the rear of the bus with nine months of bi-weekly play about to go up in flames. We used every trick in the book to get this far, including selling the GM on our bullshit. Unlike poker there really isn’t anything to bluff and we always have a losing hand. What we have is our minds, physical presence, witty banter, crazy ideas and it comes to a sales job on the GM. Enthusiasm, buy-in and, more misses than hits. But the degree of success matters. The rules of Gamma World are just as binary as D&D. But there is nothing barring us from using the one thing we have, what we do as we spoke out of our mouths. The GM is not some totalizer counting modifiers, sure we have useful mutations, but like magic spells they run out or can cause harm to the user.  

We have a free-flowing dialogue which puts the GM in the position of having to adjudicate results with no rules to tell him how. He uses ability checks, from 1x thru 5x your attribute or less on a D100. How hard or how easy a chance to succeed is the GMs call. What is absent is a dialogue of mechanic as ability, as character. If the player is scared, the character is scared. If the player is panicking the character is panicking, if the player is excited, the character is excited. Sure, we all have to tell the GM what we do. Most of the time the GM reacts in a manner appropriate for the genre and the NPC before us. We are a group of strangers at the table keeping each other amused, telling stories, putting our money down and crossing our fingers when dice need to be rolled. A 20 is just as likely as a 1, a 5 on d100 is just as likely as a 99. No matter how much we like our chances it can come up snake eyes and the bet is lost. We only have the comfort of our camaraderie and the ideas it sparks due to the interesting environment around us. I’ve had enough sessions with these folks (two are from Germany out of 5-6 players, so English isn’t even their first language) that my successes and failures are shared with these mutants, as I them. It is great when you roll the natural 1 or the natural 20. Unlike hitting a hard six where only the person winning can feel any joy (the feeling of group exuberance and shared conflict are pretty artificial at the craps table), I depend on my fellow players actions to carry me along as much as they are relying on me to do the same. Not because of the power a character brings to the table because of their “build” or their +6 Investigation, but by the power of our ideas and imaginations. Either way the dice come up we are experiencing a new story and a new expression of each other’s intelligence and effort. We don’t try to be interesting by quickly calculating modifiers and pumping Aspects. We talk about what and how we are going to do things, do them, and realize the result fast. I have shit to calculate, I’m a to hit roll and a saving throw when the GM decides why. Doesn’t matter if I have a fuck ton of plusses in my favor, a 1 is as likely as a 20 in that moment. I only have what has led me to that decision point like the one before that and the one before that. It is a feature not a bug the game leaves so much out because old school play is about the experience you have, not technical mastery of game mechanics. 

That is why when Hughie was chomped in the maw of the still slavering and still very much alive rhino hell hound to be dragged away and devoured, I said he wasn’t going alone. The GM wasn’t sure what I meant at first, I had just rolled my to hit roll for the vortex cannon (it was a miss, not even close). 

“He’s not going alone, either I grab him and pull him back or I’m going with him.”

“Okay, give me a 3x Strength check.” 

 I make it, just barely so both me and the monster have a hold of Hughi. We are in this incredible free-fall trying to influence what happens next. I sure as shit don’t know. I’m resigned that next turn I’m going out the back with Hughie to our “good” death. I’m so intent on saving my companion, so excited to have the chance to try and save my companion I can’t think of anything else. But the driver does. The driver isn’t engaged per say, they are busy keeping the RV on the road. And they have room to try and do something interesting. Quite simple really. There was no roll except for damage. She jams on the brakes. With one head in and one head out the maddened beast (it passed two moral checks so it was in it to win it) was cut deep by the jagged aluminum can we called our ride while Hughie and I slid hard to the front. The damage roll was good this time. Parrot had the sense to empty the remaining rounds of the AR into the head of the impaled creature. The RV rolled to a stop. 

What is the point of all this rambling? Why not? I’m going to use the reddit thread to pile all my crazy nonsense on why B/X combat is only as boring or interesting as I am. And peruse the insistence to the contrary which flies in the face of my experience. When I was 14 my D&D game would have bored the older me to tears. I was just as frustrated as anyone else as a kid waited my turn until I announced my armor class or my to hit roll or my damage roll or whether I was out of HPs. I wasn’t a very interesting player because I guess I didn’t know what that looked like. Hence my wide experience with numerous ttrpg’s from back in the day. I thought I found it in Chaosiums Stormbringer, but I always wondered why there was a roll to hit and the defender had a chance to parry. Wouldn’t it make more sense to make this into one roll somehow. Because the back and forth with multiple rolls built on game mechanics and skill potential would eventually even out. Just like my 4 hours at the craps table. I have more options than one can calculate at the table with any one bet. But in the end the dice are a closed system which can only give you limited results, quantified, and managed per the manual.

I was dead certain as a kid, as now when I got back into gaming there must be something I’m walking right past. I believed what the writers told me about how amazing a campaign, a series of adventures in a game world would be. I mean, when you read the introduction of any game out there you know the author is talking about is really cool and they did it.

I may be mistaken, but the climactic moment of the fight with Cerebos did not adhere to strict combat turn sequence but I highly approve of the choices the GM made allowing the PCs to take heroic actions which saved lives and killed the beast.

The action I took to either save Hughie or suffer the same fate is him overrode my desire to see my PC survive to fight another day. This "everyone or no one" stance was born out of our group play making, taking risks like this, raises the level of excitement and achieves a level of immersion much higher than most games where the GM takes refuge in the turn sequence and game mechanics to avoid dealing with unpredictable "what if" events and stepping up imaginatively. If that makes any sense.

System does matter, any one game system doesn't work for every genre. Universal systems must be customized (and usually are) to accommodate genre tropes. Smart, clever people get this. The argument the game is what the rules say it is is so much rubbish.

Having new games come out at a steady clip. It is nice to have choices on what game system to play with. The dirty little secret of this though is, creating a ttrpg is easy. Easy in the sense that once the initial paradigm was fallen upon by a small group of people it was easily duplicated by average people because the idea of a roleplaying game is simple. What is not simple is developing technique, evaluating its value and looking for what can be done better at a personal level.

Basically, don't play with people who cannot take criticism and have no interest in pursuing a never-ending demand the game places on you to transcend the rules, to be better.

There is nothing to it. Ttrpgs are not board games, they are elastic expressions of experimental play. All the different games I've played in over the last nine years have only supported my attitude that there isn't really bad or broken games, or that one ttrpg is better than others. There is only good choices and bad choices made by participants. That personal and group roleplay can be evaluated qualitatively and critiqued for improved results, expression, and experience. You don’t need to keep playing the same system. Using the same system for everything is stupid, especially with the amount of choices a gamer has today. But the decision of whether a game is good or not for "the game" can only be made after the user ruthlessly analyses and assess whether they play good or not. Hence my statement  “If the game or combat is boring it is the fault of the players, not that of the game system.

Let Us Talk About Combat

It is a routine thread on gaming boards. Combat in (insert any game under the sun here) is boring, slow, too long, etc. The one I bemoan is Champions so I get it. But not when it comes to the pile-on heap of shade thrown at B/X and OD&D. You know, the OSR, that OSR.

If your combat in OSR games is boring you to tears it is because you are boring. Do something interesting! We are all going to have our “sweet spot” for the amount of rules we like to have in combat. For me, these days, it is DC Heroes for my homebrew supers campaign. I want a quick resolution mechanic for combat which doesn’t have a ton of modifiers to calculate. And B/X D&D sure doesn’t have many modifiers.

Sometimes I wonder, why have a list of combat modifiers in the rules at all? Why can’t your number just be the number? Why delay orgasm? Without a long list of modifiers, it gives GM’s an PCs an opportunity to decide on a modifier quickly and roll for resolution. The only thing in the way of such loose application of combat modifiers is us. I can see the worry-beads knotting through tangled fingers as I say this. But, but what about blah, blah, blah. Beads furiously fondled. Even I can’t get that level of acceptance from my players, and I think I’ve done a very good job at earning trust with any group I’ve run since getting back into gaming.

If you describe your combat action by announcing your “to hit” result followed by a damage total and nothing else you are going to have a boring combat because, well, you are being boring. There is nothing stopping you from declaring “I run at the orc with sword tightly gripped in my blood-soaked hand, screaming my death chant, and at the last minute before our blades meet I’m going to make like I’m sliding into second base and cleave his feet from his legs” then now things have gotten interesting. Now the to-hit roll and damage total are indicators of success on the just described action. And detail breeds detail. This means a GM must describe the combat zone in enough detail to make it sticky, to give PCs something to play off.

The group initiative roll helps in this case. When it is the PCs initiative, they can act in coordination with each other, off each other or whatever. This is where an interesting combat environment helps. The more details one has the more creative things one can devise. Roleplay this shit! The PCs should be shouting at each other, encouraging each other in their own special way. All the things you see in any action movie is up for grabs. Swinging from chandeliers, desperately trying to refuse the flank, calling for more ammo, striking the match to the fuse and running away screaming “It’s going to blow!” while the orcs look at you puzzled.

Instead of saying you stab with your spear why not say I am going to skewer the monster’s sword arm to the tree with a savage, two-handed thrust? If you hit and do damage the GM now has something to describe; the scream of the beast as it struggles to pull the weapon free, blood flows like sap down the bark. Come on people, get invested in your game, your struggle, your PCs life!

 

A combat is only going to be as interesting as you are. Combat rules can either be a barrier or an aid in this regard. That is probably the hardest part of this whole exercise. Finding the level of combat “crunch” the game group is most satisfied with. Fortunately, we live in an age of abundance and there surely is a system for whatever genre you are playing which will accomplish this. For me it has been found in many early rpg games. DC Heroes for supers, BRP for black powder and the age of sail and modern man-on-the-street settings, USR Sword & Sorcery when I want to get my Conan on Classic Traveller for my sci-fi itch (though I have tamed FGU’s SO and wish to play it). Each gives me just enough rules or built-in flexibility to drop rules while being exceedingly suitable for the particular genre. If there is one common thread through these systems is they allow me and my players, maybe require it, the freedom to narrate action, success and failure in highly descriptive and fast moving ways.

Circling Back to Online Campaign Manager

 In an earlier post I talked about my use of an online campaign manager for my games. At the time I was running a fantasy game and a supers game. I also set up three others for my solo roleplaying. My reason for liking them was a permanent record available as long as I have an internet connection.

For the fantasy game the campaign was coming to a conclusion so my entries were more of a way to clean out some three ring binders and touch the history one more time before shelving. The supers game I need to have a place for stats and rules I needed to access quick because I was using Champions and there are to many rules for me to effectively adjudicate and maintain interesting banter. The solo stuff is perfect for the online campaign manager. I play at these so seldomly it saves space on my shelves and if I pick one up in three months all the details of what was going on are at my fingertips. Once again I can play these games on the road.

My current game, my only game I am running, is a continuation of my supers campaign but with the DC Heroes rules. Specifically the Blood of Heroes Special Edition rule book. 

As this has been going on I have been using three ring binders less and less. Has nothing to do with the use of a campaign manager though. I believe I have just settled into my "minimalist" approach to world building and game notes. 

I love these compact, hardbound notebooks for all my brainstorming and upcoming adventure building. The one in this photo has the Rom'Myr fantasy campaign from the time the PCs arrived in Zeu Orb to the finish and the Champions campaign which has now morphed into a MEGS campaign. The other book is a blank drawing pad. I have soft cover and hard cover books of these drawing pads and here I put down my drawings of the games action when inspired to do so. And this is all I'm using except having a hard copy of a games rulebook nearby. I'm not even writing things up on my computer anymore. My file folders for games are now just a repository for pictures I scanned, pics from the internet and character sheets so I can print out a villain's profile I need before a game. I sometimes write a session report, but I would rather draw some pictures of the action then write down the action. Besides I record all my game sessions so I have an audio record which is the best session report you are ever going to get. 

When I got back into gaming in 2012 I started with my USR Sword & Sorcery campaign and I have three to four thick three ring binders of the whole damn affair. Same for my second campaign Clockwork and Cthulhu. My shift to a minimalist approach began when I stumbled on means to record game sessions. And it has steadily refined into a not-time-consuming means of game prep and organization behind the scenes of my other overt attempts at taming the beast which is DM'ing. 

The point of all this is I don't use an online campaign manager. I take that back, I have a MeWe group for the game but this is just to post when the next game is and a quick way for anyone to get a hold of anyone else. I look at this as a continuous refining of an artistic process. I love to put pen to paper, to sketch, write and think. Compact size of notebook restrains going on and on with text. I hesitate to put anything down which isn't immediately relevant. A good way to stay in the meditative state of "the action is where the players are!"

I have come to the conclusion I have no use for online campaign managers, go figure.

Online Campaign Managers

 I have found myself crawling into an online campaign manager and am surprised how it has captured me completely, enthusiastically as the new way to chronicle my campaigns. If you would have asked me would I use a digital record for campaigns let alone think it could be used in session I would have said no. I would wax on how the physical journals with homespun maps and weird characters was all part of the creative process, blah, blah, blah. The fall was swift and rapid. I was looking for a way out of my three ring binders, that is for sure. But my quest had only progressed as far as trying different types of notebooks and drawing pads. Part of the quick commitment came from my noodling with Roll20. I hated it. I could not see how it was going to help me run the game I want to. So, when I started banging away on my new kanka account writing up session notes from the latest run I went fuuuuuuck. I am going to throw out a bunch of old thinking.

Specifically, being unwilling to see the benefit of online tools for my online games. Because I was not getting any with virtual tabletops. What I like about the campaign organizer, the campaign wiki I think it is called, I don’t have to search through a three-ring binder to find shit. Cause it piles up and the binder gets thick and becomes horribly inefficient in session. This is the virtual note board of interlocking world-building pieces and I’ve so far found a spot for everything. Cutting and pasting in stats and details from PDF content makes these things at my fingertips. Only redundant task I have found slightly wearisome is attaching pictures to entries, but I can not do it because the return on investment, the visual payoff is high.

So, I get all the things in the wiki set for the current session coming up and take a look. Start at the Dashboard and drill down into the data I am going to want in game. I like how it works. I see myself running a session from its screen. I think it is going to give me a bit more focus on the situation at hand and roleplay more before a calling of the die.

Oh, and now my game is on the cloud. I can pop in and tinker on the game wherever I am. So my favorite materials, maps and images are all at my beck and call when inspiration strikes!

 

Slaughter a Sacred Cow for Santa

 On this Thanksgiving eve I feel a bit reflective, philosophical and wish to hold court and slaughter some sacred cows for the fires of Tar-Aweil.

Classic Traveller’s adventure modules. I will spill this beast’s blood first. They are uninspired piles of  space dung. It is said H Beam Piper’s stories were a touchstone of inspiration for the original Traveller game and it is apparent in the official adventures. I have read H Beam Piper. It is awful. Not only do the Classic Traveller

adventures present as limp lines of text it ushered in the “official” Traveller Universe, the Third Imperium. Official settings appear to be inevitable with any successful roleplaying game and I have no interest in moaning the soul-killing beast official settings can be for cool games. Not now. I will probably get up into that though at some point before the holidays are over.

But for Traveller it was tepid adventures laid into a tepid game universe. The Pirates of Drinax have been hired by the King to…. Aaagh! Snoozefest. Science Fiction is wild. It is really fucked up shit smashing through the technical power of humanity as it marches through the stars, it is the unrelenting incomprehensibility of the cosmos which make a science fiction adventure good. The first few published adventures for the game quickly buried the genius of the tight game kit for referees and players for years to come. Just for the record, I love Classic Traveller rules. I dream of building and running a Dune-like campaign universe to sketch my roleplaying ambitions on and I would do it with Classic Traveller.

I know this probably comes across like I’m picking on the slow kid in school but let us now turn to the Palladium Setting books. System dreadful and convoluted but great setting books. Yin-Sloth, Western Empire, Timiro. A paragraph here and there around a made-up name a great setting book this does not make. The maps in these books shows what the creator thinks of fans and players, not much. Your campaign notebook has better maps then Palladium setting books.

The one for the north has this bad ass illo on the cover. Coyle witch doctor and undead crawling out of a frozen forest pond. Metal as shit. Take my word for. Just tear off the cover and throw the rest away. So the total amount of ink I find reviewing the Palladium canon is depressing in its sucky-ness.

Gurps source books are great! No they are not. They are a dagger into the heart of good fun and inspired adventure in many a naïve new roleplaying heart. Did you want to play a game in the Rome Imperium because you wanted to know the names of how they measured wheat. Or what they called their houses. No, you want to stick a short sword in a barbarian’s neck, race chariots recklessly and burn down cities! Many, many ttrpg setting books have sickened a dreamy mind dry. Inspiration, not accuracy is what players and referees need. Take for example B4 The Lost City by Tom Moldvy. There is a pretty complete adventure and sketched out city for a setting. Not much. All in thirty-two pages? Since I’ve played that module in high school I didn’t see a full-on setting book worth a shit until Yoon-Suin! You see, the value of a setting book is guiding one into genre-fidelity when spit-balling the moon, not in “accuracy”. 

My advice is steer clear of Gurps and Palladium setting books. Take what fires you up about an adventure setting. It is not in the setting details. There must be a sophisticated layering of useful bits which end up imparting flavor. Not facts. 

Got Dune?

How would you do Dune?  

This is a regular on game boards. What game system would you use, what type of adventures would you run, where do the characters fit into the universe and their relative importance. Sometimes the talk turns to specifics, all system orientated, what would depict the psionic powers best, Sardukar, Fremen, Sandworms and spaceships. There are paragraphs written on how intrigue and interstellar politics are best adjudicated, what system will help you get it right. I fuss and fret over these things to when my mind drifts to Dune, the Moby Dick, of my gaming ambitions. When I see the same question (which interests me) being trucked out again and again, and the answers are all predictable I tell myself I and everyone else is looking at this ambitious goal, to game a Dune-inspired game worthy of the name fucking wrong! Okay, I will only include myself in this category. I am not here to bruise feelings. Unless you are a player in my game…

I start building a campaign world generally from this bas-ackward approach. Okay I want to do “this” and I should use “this” to pull it off. My latest approach to campaign and world building goes something like this, “What do you have that makes doing this worth it? How are you going to nail ‘It’?” When I consciously make these pivots, I have yielded impressive fruit. It more or less gets me to read the source material and reengage the artistic talent of the prose which first electrified me when I was a wee one reading comic books and Lovecraft and Howard and Moorcock. I started a Sword & Sorcery campaign years ago built on just reading the Conan novels and a generic minimalist system. I just kept breathing in that black lotus until my soul was dark and pitiless. Really, it is just paying attention to what and why a certain adventure was just awesome. You learn the pace of the campaign world from the source material, not the game mechanics. The language to, basic stuff. I’ve repeated this approach with the three other campaigns which have gotten significant milage here online since 2012 and it has always been successful. Like a sci-fi campaign. I always wanted to run one, but I haven’t done so because I don’t have a good, a great idea. I can’t answer that question in the affirmative, “What do you have that makes doing this worth it?” so I don’t move forward. Then one day I read an adventure module (doesn’t matter what genre, this occasion it was a fantasy adventure) and shouted eureka! I had a reason. I had a great opening adventure and it made all my spacey opera horror sci-fi dreams fall into place like instantly.

So the Dune situation is how do you duplicate the awesome presence the planet has in everything. For a Dune-esque game you need to create a massiveness, a galactic presence which must eclipse the entirety of cosmic civilization. In the source material the planet is irrefutable and overpowering. Its importance has hardened the universe into the few space-faring civilizations which can cope with this and exist. 

However one approaches creation of the campaign world reflection on how the one important planet turns the entire cosmos into fits has to be nailed down. Characters are always reflected in their relationship to the dominating planet in a Dune campaign. The effects, the literary devices used by the source material are well known and discussed ably all over the internet. The roleplayer’s task when they pick up the Dune Gauntlet is how to impart that massiveness into a gameable expression. And that is why I would use Classic Traveller cause I find a campaign of this "flavor" would take much thought to come up with something worth playing. A simple system for sci-adventure will be my enabler more than a detailed system, even one designed to be Dune! I don’t trust any commercial game designers to take this shit serious enough to get it right. I have made, and this is probably unnecessary and
misguided, a Dune-inspired campaign the elusive unicorn of my gaming ambitions. I wait for the day when the idea gels and I scream "I got it!" and start scribbling some notes. I mean, you gotta come up with something cooler than psychotic-narcotic spice which allows you to fold space and well, you get the picture. Tall order. Another place where I don't think a system is going to save you. It is going to take a lot of passion and vision from everyone at the table to not be lame. I’ll tell you when I figure it out.

 

Can there be too many charts? No!

 My latest call-in on the Vanishing Tower Podcast posed two questions. For those specific questions you can hear them at the front of the blog recording. Here are my answers, which I putting up.

The description of the game session watched was a less than optimal use of tables in a Dungeons & Dragons Game. The reasons why it is a poor use of a table are apparent, numerous and generally understood. So, I won’t dwell on that here. I have used a campsite set of charts in the OSR game I run. It was stuff from Wormskin zine. The PCs were deciding whether to travel in the wrong direction and take refuge at a village for the night or continue and hope for a suitable camp site in rough, rainy terrain. All for 50 men. They chose to move on and look for a suitable campsite. I rolled on a chart for this from the zine and told them what they found for use later. 

Notice I am not rolling to determine whether they have found a spot to camp. I’m rolling for what kind of campsite did they find. Finding the camp site and firewood is a forgone conclusion. I have decent charts which provide something I can use for descriptions and random encounters. If it does not, I shouldn’t be using it. And the roll, most importantly, will inform me if an interesting encounter happens in the night or is it dawn and time to get moving. I hope the tactile details I provided were enjoyable enough they pin the location for later use, but that is just icing on the cake if it occurs. We all did just add something to the campaign world, a camp site, all because the players made a choice and acted on the choice and details of possible results has been anticipated by the DM. So, whether on a table or from a block of text the information I'm throwing out there is in concourse with the game. It has a reason for being and is not wasting the player’s time.

As For the follow up question, no, there cannot be too many charts. Here is my thinking on this, the game designer included the tables and charts they believe should be used with the game. If I’m having trouble and frustrations with the amount of charts I need to reference, and I’ve given a good faith try in learning/running the system, then it isn’t a good fit for me as a DM. There is nothing inherently wrong with the game, I tried RoleMaster back in the day, but it was a backward fit for what I do at the table. But there were many other players who used it and enjoyed the game. They were able to use the tables in a learned way to make their play create what they were after.

Charts and tables, just like the rules, should fade in the background as everyone roleplays. As a DM I would rather be fluid and concise in the moment and not have to look back at anything. Charts, rules, previous history. This is a broad generalization of my goals at the table. But those three functions I have just mentioned are guiding principles, the charts are easy and fun to use, I rarely need to refer to the rulebook because use has got me using the game mechanics well, and previous history does not need to be looked up because everything has been so exciting everyone knows what important “stuff” to do right now!

Jiro Yoshihara and The Gutai Manifesto

Jiro Yoshihara and their The Gutai Manifesto (1956) is the closest description I have for ttrpg’s as art. It soars really high in conceptual thought, but I pulled some ideas from the essay to hang my loose argument for ttrpg as a serious medium.

Particularly “The two artists grapple with the material in a way which is completely appropriate to it and which they have discovered tie to their talents. This even gives the impression that they serve the material. Differentiation and integration create mysterious effects.”

I do not pretend to know much about Gutai, but Yoshihara’s descriptive language touches on my most abstract thoughts on role playing. Specifically, differentiation and integration, but I feel it expresses my feelings for what I do at the game table.

Here is it explained,

As integration and differentiation are just the inverse of each other, the integration may provide the original function if derivative is known. It is also described as the fundamental theorem of calculus. Differentials is all about differences and divisions, whereas integration is all about addition and averaging.

See, the definition, or its use in real language did not help me understand any better so I will have to apply my own definition and use. But it is done much better further on by Yoshihara.

“In those days we thought, and indeed still do think today,  that the most important merits of abstract art lie in the fact that it has opened up the possibility to create a new, subjective shape of space one which really deserves the name creation.”

The interaction of a shared subjective space with each other resulting in a shared creation is an additional step which broadens performative art into a higher degree of intimacy. Intimacy in the most mutually supported play as evidenced by the group. So I guess this is where I end up. I need to think about this more…   

Is the Cleric spell Protection from Evil too powerful?

This question, one of many from Mark, regular gamer and commentator on all things Vanishing Tower (VTP), is definitely an issue I put in the undecided box. And is a spell, much like Read Magic, which I struggle with cap-stoning with a definite and unequivocal opinion. The tendency for myself and players is towards specificity. The nebulous definition of “Evil” in a variety of fantasy relevant context is rendered more apprehensible with hard walls. Hard and fast definitions. “Elves are good, Orcs are evil.” Black is back and white is just alright with me, just alriiiight, oh yeaaah. 

But my game world, my fantasy campaigns tend to begin with the question, or nature, of evil relatively unanswered. Outside of societal norms defining moral and its opposite, evil, the nature of a roleplaying game is to have these big questions answered in play. And so is why everyone wants to know the answer to these type of questions before play, or when they come up.

So my answer is the bullshit one, it depends. What is the right call at the moment? Everything in a roleplaying game is case and or context dependent. Some one has to decide what is or isn’t evil in the game world and that job ultimately ends in the DM’s lap. My best efforts have come to a couple of “best practices” I’ve adopted for myself. Have the player define what their god considers good and evil. Accept it and incorporate their ideas into the pantheon developing. And when I say accept it I don’t mean make it all true. Just be super-mindful of it and you can be prepared for when you have something they believe their spell would protect them, and it doesn’t! If they really start to push on it sucking ask them if they have considered their god may not be correct in all things? Maybe their god is fucking with them? Maybe their god lied about this subject? It makes sense to attack, or frame, the PfE spell with less specificity on the front end because it preserves the fascinating feature of emergent play.

A Caller Questions the Conversion Guides; previous post addendum.

One of my players poised a question on the podcast recently on some of the wherefore and why's of my 1e ADnD adventures fascination, specifically what was the genesis behind the DM Guild's 5th edition conversion guides, and perhaps what new found appreciation I may have uncovered. You can listen to the episode here - What is up with the 5e Conversion Guides?

Using 1e ADnD modules in your own game world...

I did not intentionally start the new campaign of Rom’Myr so as to stuff as many 1e AD&D modules as I have into it, but once I reviewed S4 I wanted to try. The Rom’Myr campaign is a homebrewed Dying Earth setting offering the trappings and tropes of an original Vancian city, and the colorful denizens to be found therein. I started with Jack’s own stories of his fabled dying earth. My cardinal rule of source and inspiration of a genre is to reread the original material. By and large a ttrpg setting is devoid of the magic and juice the original creator transfused into their work. Carcosa would be an exception here, but the author and setting writer are one in the same. An organic kernel of fucked-upness which birthed a nation. So, I was quite convinced when reading S4 it was utterly the most Vancian module Gygax wrote. I needed a sharp range of mountains to hem-in the sword and sandle city of Valla’Tair, the campaigns home starting point. S4 is on my shelf so I was eager to make it “work”. The nuanced harmony with Vance’s stories S4 has made hacking the module a simple process. Many, many things of the original module were left intact.

Remember in high school when the DnD adventure recently purchased was going to be the adventure to be played that weekend? That is how I remember it all. The only elements of a traditional DnD campaign would be using the same character for each adventure, giving the character survived the previous one. Rather unsatisfying considering the true potential of the medium. Hence the idea was born, and gauntlet thrown down. I became determined to weave as many classic DnD adventure modules into the campaign as I could! Not in any slap-on, haphazard methods of old, but only when the module “fit”. I was betting the best use of this material was exactly how the authors said to use it; make it your own! Now this does require re-skinning the mod. Changing names, replacing monsters with your own, tossing out material that doesn’t work for you, this will need to be done to slot correctly into your game. But if you have chosen wisely then the work is brisk and intuitive.

Here are the AD&D modules (among many, many other sources) used so far:

S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth

T1 Village of Hommlet

X2 Castle Amber

C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tomoachan

B3 Palace of the Silver Princess

WG4 The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun

The early DnD modules, or at least the ones I have used, are masterful tools which willingly support whatever the DM is attempting to build with their players. I subscribe to the notion that other people’s ideas are intrinsic to a successful campaign world (also known as a “living world”). These different (they don’t always need to be good, I learn from bad) ideas and adventures help link my best ideas together. There wasn’t any connection by players of the classic modules they are battling through.  This is because the players were pursuing their goals, their advisories, the consequences of their actions. Enough slight-of-hand achieved so Tsojcanth is the Yonni’Hor mountains and the mysteries lying within. Tomoachan is the lower catacombs and sewers hiding the Cult of Sleep. Castle Amber and Hommlet is the home of the eccentric Ansulex family and their strange studies, werewolves in thrall to the Archbishop are stalking rebels and radicals, and the whimsical Palace of the Silver Prince is lost to the macabre house of the vampiric Knight of Gore. I don’t think I would have thought of a martial order of ghouls if it wasn’t for using B3. That dinner party was the shit!

I know Gygax and others tied their unique creations, eventually, to an official setting. Just like coming up with unique traps and challenges weekly is hard work, having all the answers to the player’s questions is unrealistic. Having some fleshed-out pantheon provided, or collection of kingdoms presented, saves time creating buildings, towns, and secret labs. There is only so much time in the day. But I’ll say you have to have your own unique campaign world to give a good game a chance. You must have horizons you are passionate to reveal. A DM is on the right track world building when prewritten adventures are easily adapted to situations at hand. One, they are good. They are good spaces to move around in, there are ample examples of what threats can be encountered there, major NPCs to make your own supervillains out of. I’ve hung the best, weirdest stuff I can on these old modules and I’ll tell you, it isn’t nothing they haven’t seen or can’t help make better.

Less games but More thoughts (Champions)

 Summer season 2020 is running like most summers since gaming has returned to my weekly schedule, big gaps between games. I get it, me, and everyone else in the gaming group does what summer begs us to do, get outside with friends and family! Vacations! Fuck yeah! Going on one tomorrow. All three of the games I’m involved with are getting hit with month long gaps. So, I got some time for a blog post before the holiday disconnect and I’m going to drivel on about the Champions United campaign. Eight sessions down and the superhero effort is, is, ummm, fun! I haven’t read comics on a regular basis since ’94. I like The Max and Savage Dragon and Marvel and Batman. Pretty standard fare, nothing exotic. I think it was the regular Magic tournaments held at my college comic shop that stopped me from visiting regularly. But like much of the “modern” genre in ttrpg’s I feel I run a rough game of supers. Specifically handling fantastic powers and fast combat procedurally while keeping the emergent relationships forming fresh and forceful.

 My belief rules are for the players and not the DM collide with Champions combat procedure. Injecting unpredictable and additional action during combat dialog is a refereeing technique I favor. Champions thick combat options are getting deliberated during the game sessions. It is almost unavoidable. The more rules in a game the more players will implement them to control the pace of the game, to exert control over their game world. With a DM which wants to push the action with a chaotic fight scene they will constantly have the PCs throwing roadblocks in the form of rules or debating a rule to try and wrest that control back. I want to dialogue and describe some actions the villainous villain is taking and we got to then start counting inches.

It’s a good game. Champions United is running with only two PCs and we have already survived (in style) with an initial PC backing out after three sessions, but the story unfolding is sticky with plot hooks, cool NPCs. The Capitol City Universe of 2020 has interesting things going on all at the hands of interesting heroes. First person, in character interaction is going really well to. Kind of essential in a supers game.

We play bi-weekly and only have a two-hour session. The reason why I get anxious about running an efficient combat encounter with Champions. I want a superhero game session to have investigation, interrogation, and an important combat. Not in any particular order, but as an outline to keep the action moving forward. If these three types of encounters are present the session will have an exciting pace and the settings surprising. The only conclusion so far I have drawn is Champions requires everyone at the table to resolve actions with the simplest application of the rules. Which means instinctively knowing when to follow strict procedure and when to disregard possible “code” exceptions buried in the rules. But this only works with a level of trust the players have to give the DM which I rarely see. How deep do you go with combat modifiers to find out if you need a roll less than 8, 11, 15 to hit? Could players be on board with reducing the amount of combat modifiers they can apply at any one time? Is it more important I have the PC roll the dice to hit fast and only use a big-picture conception of modifiers (I’m thinking like when you have a scale of 1 to 5 and you quickly reduce modifiers to an “appropriate” number). The only other way I can see combat avoiding lengthy rules discussion is everyone is responsible for knowing how their powers work in most situations. Velocity, Move Through damage, how to knock a person prone, these all need to be rote by the player using these abilities. Not so much that everybody is getting every rule right all the time, but everyone is comfortable with the logic of the game mechanics and can quickly decide how the 11 or less to hit should be adjusted.

I’m satisfied I can run Champions. I haven’t found any other supers game which solve these particular challenges in any noticeable way. 11 or less to hit on 3d6 with modifiers is a pretty simple method of adjudication. Contested attribute rolls where highest BOD count wins is fucking simple to. It must just be the eye-glazing effect of all the other considerations you can make which trip up players. At some point isn’t too many combat options unhelpful?

I’m not down on Champions, I’m trying to give an honest appraisal. For players to design their original superhero, for all these different designs being able to work with each other coherently Champions is really, really good. I think I could come to appreciate the DC Heroes resolution and effects charts and live with their character creation process. But I can get a Champions game going and not a DC Heroes game.

Yeah, this is the dynamic I’m working against. There has to be rules for all the powers and their effects. The more rules you have you end up slowing down game pace. Where is the sweet spot? As I search this out through continued play my final conclusion, for now, is to keep flapping my villain’s gums and have them performing extraordinary fucked-up shit. It is one of the ways I have found works to engage the PCs with the characters and not the character sheet.

Here is the list of systems researched and played with. Marvel FASERIP, DC Heroes/Blood of Heroes, Supergame, Icons, Mutant and Masterminds, Villains and Vigilantes, Cowls and Crusaders?, the Hero Instant. They are all different systems so it is a chore to get a comprehensive look on how one game may be an improvement over the other. My yardstick for improvement is a reduction in times I have to turn to the rule book during play. And I haven’t found any of these other games do this. I’ll keep playing Champions because like DnD, if I want to play a game of supers I can play with a system I want and have an empty table or use Champions and have a black and blue campaign world with real, original characters.

How I Run A Game (and other things I never tell my players)

Ha hah... 

No, I'm thinking on this topic right now. Look to put these thoughts into this blog post. Stay tuned... 

The first thing about running a game is I must love it. I need to love the genre the game is to be played in. I believe the first session the DM needs their enthusiasm for the setting to be palpable and relatable to the group of new adventurers. Maybe I need to rename this post, How I Start a Game? Point being players are going to start whacking at the game world to get orientated. The best tool for this is the same tool as the pulp writers of the 20’s used in their stories, media res. In action. Players like to ask a lot of questions during the first session which tread towards the mundane. “Do I have enough of and the right gear, can I hang around the tavern and collect rumors, who’s running things in town? This kind activity. They are using mundane actions and routines to safely pull initial facts out of the DM’s world. Armed with facts the PCs feel they can now exert control over the game environment and ready to jump at the first thing of interest that pops up

I try and drop all that shit. A problem up front takes attention away from equipment lists and on adventure occurring now, in the moment. Granted, the PCs will go right to the character sheet when play first begins and they are facing conflict hot and frothing. This is all for the good. Players should be using their valuable time to infest their imaginary friend with genre-appropriate goals and ambitions. My prep before the first session is voluminous, and then gets whittled down to an opening scene I think is cool. If I have certain events or encounters which will happen, I put those in a simple list I can refer to so as not to forget dropping cool stuff down on the scene. The voluminous nature of the prep comes from my inherent enthusiasm for the genre to be played. It is also a good method to get any predictable, not cool, people and places axed out of the scene immediately. On prep, you can always do more. I do not think lots of prep is an indication of anything but enthusiasm for the game. Just make sure you come back to the central conceit; the action is where the PCs are and what does this action all needs to facilitate interesting roleplaying? I’m not trying to remember all this world data, I’m trying to get comfortable moving around in it and I know what the interesting NPCs are up to.

Getting into the action right away cuts off wasted time dithering about looking for an exit into fun world. It offers plots afoot which must at least be recognized. The PCs need to have an investment in this initial encounter too, if you want them to develop their own relationship and reaction to the opening scene. It can be as simple as “Here is what you are doing, and this is happening.” Or more involved. That does not hurt one way or another either. Enthusiasm for the genre by everyone at the table self-directs the PCs into daring feats of heroism without the need for extensive backstory. Giving the PCs a job to do at the start at least gives them something to walk away from and say “No way!”

Okay, first session is done and the PCs have some trouble they either want to run towards or run from. Now I am thinking pacing. What is the flow of events, outside of the player’s actions, which will impact what they are doing now? Is something a straight up confrontation and resolution? Then the pace is straight up confrontation right now. Is the encounter dropping a bit of information on their current ambitions? The importance they assign the information will inform pace. Just to back track a sec, what is the pace of the opening session, or what do I do? Pretty hot. And this is created by having NPCs worth interacting with. And you can’t have NPCs worth interacting with unless you know what they want, what motivates the NPC. My important NPCs get a lot of thought. I want to confound expectations while still securely moored in the tropes of the genre. Keep the best stuff in and throw out everything that gave you an eye roll during your genre-relevant reading. Confounded expectations are created by having characters which interest them, or are needed, and find the one or more things the PCs and the NPCs won’t see eye to eye on. Make sure it comes up. 

In between sessions I’m writing a lot, and much of it goes straight into the waste basket. I imagine screen writing for a television show is very similar. The best version of the playable information is in the last revision of the session’s material right before you go on air. Rewriting the connections and possibilities of NPC reactions is standard with the way I run a game.

I probe players with advanced knowledge or refined tastes on certain topics hoping to polarize some of their character’s views early on. What is their importance in relation to the topic/guild/practice? Why does a god care about them, and what are you supposed to do to honor these gods?

Retaliation. Retaliation by those the PCs have come across. I never give up an opportunity on forgotten hounds of hell to catch back up. This makes the world more personal to everyone, I think.

And that is basically what I do to run a game. Think about it constantly so when game time comes around, I have a better chance of interesting things to say and maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to keep my nose out of the rule book.

Critical Hits & Dramatic Fumbles: A View

I love critical hits and dramatic fumbles in my rpg's. As a Game Master (DM) I enjoy the on-cue, flash card style prompt to the fighting dialogue these charts tend to provide, and as a player I enjoy the thrill of knowing any fight could be your last by a well-placed blow and the opportunity to totally nail my advisory with that devastating called shot I'm attempting to make. I also want, as Player or DM, the sheer swingy-ness of "crit" tables because it bakes exciting role-playing opportunities into the results. 

But they are horribly unfair to Players. Even if the Players enjoy the tables they will never escape the ultimate, grim conclusion of death at the hands of a crit table. All things being equal, there is only 1 PC and an endless amount of NPC's. After a while a long-lived hero dying at the hands of a rando critical from the town guard will grate on everybody's senses of dramatic play. Brand new adventurer, no problem, take that axe to the stomach and bleed out like a, a... hero! But the PC which has achieved great success at great cost, a meaningless death annoys me. 

Another inescapable fact was the more PCs engaged in mortal combat the more they cement the inevitable. The act of a fighter fighting becomes a sub-optimal play. 

My first stop on the train of reflection and thought was to appreciate the original parameters of the first critical hit and dramatic fumble mechanism in a rpg. A natural 1 is always a miss, and a natural 20 is always a hit. No bonus to damage, no increased penalties beyond the miss, kind of captures all the back and forth thinking I have on crits in a simple solution. But damn it, I love random, descriptive killer hits during combat when luck has prevailed in favor of the PCs! I have, in the past, modified tables in all sorts of ways to minimize the chance of an inappropriate crit coming up in the course of regular play. Qualifying the critical was an obvious choice for me, but in the end I came back to the facts of a closed system; just delaying the inevitable. A lucky shot which blows apart years of quality play. 

So my current solution is Critical Hits are only for Players. Only the PCs get those extra rolls on a critical hit table when the score that magic number. No NPC gets anything more than just a hit, no matter what combination of rare results they pile up. Same for Dramatic Fumbles, NPCs only. The dramatic fumble always makes an exciting turn in the events of a combat, and quick players will grab onto additional environmental "things" and make something interesting out of the action. And I don't think this is tilting things in the PCs favor all that much. The PC is always exposed to death during a game session. Eventually it will come when all is reduced to a single role. In a closed system with endless amounts of time the unwanted event will come about no matter how small a chance, and come often! So the PCs are going up a steep climb anyways. Why not make it vivid and colorful along the way?

What OSR Means to Me

I have had a hard time finding a definition which works for me and my sensibilities. I get the logic behind Old School Rules and Old School Renaissance as terms and definitions, but it feels hidebound, locked in to a Dungeons & Dragons starting point, and maybe, on a bet, someone will define OSR as the early games which developed the hobby or a certain period of time ending in like December 30th, 1979. Like the way comic books are broken up into particular ages. These definitions are too limiting. They don't capture the essentials of the art or reduce the art to entertainment only. That the form of play should emulate the gospel, RAW.

I approach my role-play gaming the same way I immerse myself in any of my art projects. You will hear me talk about ttrpg's as an art, or refer to an artist's approach, alot. Let us clear up one thing right away; I have no schooling, training, track record or anything else to point to that my artistic education and experience is valid. I'm a dilettante, whatever catches my interest I dive in, deep. Obsessively until I burn out. So I have a valid process which rests on exploration, getting lost, and scaring myself. My artist process is basically an exploration of fear. Or working through fear to find the undiscovered country on the other side. So this puts me in conflict with rules. My thought currently on ttrpg game rules is that they are for the players, not the GM. Therefore I guide my efforts by an Old School Rational. A rational is flexible, looking for only a "truth" of a thing. Another way I put it is "Fantasy is the playground of the inappropriate." This popped into my mind during the current discussion on imaginary content disproportionally insulting people of color. I consider these positions rubbish and a lack of developed artistic and honest thought. 

So what is this Old School Rational then? The GM must have the freedom to explore and depict regardless of rules and players must accept the rules as a tool to force them to "not make shit up". I mean you can make shit up, we do it media res, but rules work for a player like choosing the size of canvas works for an artist. Every choice in an artistic project is a restriction of focus. Merely by choosing what rules to run a game begins the process of choosing canvas size. So the here and now can be experienced in its truest sense (as much as possible for puny humans). That which is cut away leaves only the essence of something, or should be the goal. Put another way, for the GM the choice of canvas size cuts away all that is possible and begins a reduction to a "what am I doing?" place. What will develop. This is counter-intuitive to me, but I believe each choice leads to the next choice, and the next. The more I reduce the closer I get to an answer.

My Old School Rational is rules don't matter, the intent of everyone at the table matters. My OSR is most of everything in the game is undescribed, does not exist yet and the participants need to start slicing away at everything to get to something. Not so much to describe surroundings to play in, but bring new things into being in which to own. The sum total of our experience My OSR is players challenged to expand their ideas on a rapidly shrinking iceberg to find a means to not drown. The GM is challenged to be drowned in the endless possibilities of "what if, what about" at the moment and land on the right response. Or make that response "right", and then pull something new out of that, again and again in response to the player's challenge of thinking in new ways to overcome abstract problems with no obvious way to solve. To reduce, comprehend, make useful knowledge and cultivate a juicy experience of fear. First impressions, initial reactions to visual and oral art, capturing what that means to you, how it informs your interpretation and belief and make your next choice as this new being. These experiences happen in an instance, but sometimes these experiences give you something to chew on for years. 

That is my OSR. And my definition is as meandering as a willful stream and as urgent as the violent waterfall coming up. 

Just so there is no misunderstanding, this is a post of subject matter I invite discussion on and there are no rules. You are going to have to take chances around here. I don't yet know which way is the right way to discuss the art of ttrpg's, but this is my opening cut.

PS: Just came across the band Tyranny of Imagination. That is another useful term for me in the artistic language I try to use when describing ttrpg's effect on me.

What is Everyone's Blood Type ???

It could happen. You may need this information. For my own games, I can see future blood-transfusions being attempted and the aforementioned question arising. For a more "realistic" bit I googled the overall percentage of blood types world wide. This simple bit of information has been turned into a specialized table. So the next time your game's players are trying to save someone's life with a timely transfusion, why not make it more iffy, more fraught with peril than the situation already has become?

Rank   Blood Type     World Pop.%  1d100  Flat % 1d4

1          O Positive       38.67               01-39               1

2          A Positive       27.42               40-69               2

3          B Positive        22.02               70-90               3

4          AB Positive     5.88                 91-00               4