John Harper nails risk-taking in RPGs

Over on John Harper's grounded and yet pulse-pounding blog, The Mighty Atom, he posted a great reply to one of his commenters.  It captures really eloquently an aspect of RPG design that is dear to my heart: providing incentive for players to attempt dangerous things that really feel risky, without killing those characters left, right and center.

If you like talking about story-telling games

And other stuff that ranges all the way to a full-on nerdfest, head over to the friendly story-games site. That's it.

Where are the Ability Check rules?

I have recently acquired some pristine 2nd Ed AD&D hardbacks (they really are lovely). One thing I've noticed is that it mentions in both the Players Handbook and the Dungeon Master Guide that you can use ability checks like a Saving Throw as appropriate. However, I can't find a single place in either book where it describes how to perform such a check. Presumably it's a case of rolling a d20 and getting lower than the ability in question. The slightly odd thing about that though is that this is mentioned under the Saving Throw rules, and Saving Throws are roll high. Don't you just hate it when an important rule is left out?!

Thoughts on the In A Wicked Age RPG

I first ran this a year or two ago for a small group of friends.  The players all liked it - I wasn't so sure.

The other day I got a chance to try to again.  It suited perfectly the fact that I had no time to prepare.  It was satisfactorily story-rich, allowing us to weave an interesting (to us) tale of a boy, a ring, magic and a prophecy, all played out in modern-day London.  However, there were a couple of things that didn't ring true for me:

1.  Because characters and Particular Strengths are created by the group, everything in the story is transparent.  I don't like this because it means I can't hold back surprises for the players, and my group enjoy them.  (In this session I fudged it and kept some Particular Strengths secret until I wanted them to explode into an appropriate scene.)
2.  The dice mechanics are hard and unintuitive.  For example, remembering what round we were in during a conflict was tricky - I'm sure we got it wrong at times - as was working out who was answering who in challenges involving three or four characters.
3.  Negotiating the outcome of a conflict just didn't appeal to us.  I don't quite understand what sort of group does get off on this - it just held up the game in a way that seemed jarring to us.

I love the Oracles, the quick-play possibilities and the idea behind the escalating rolls in a conflict.  But the things I've outlined above make me think I probably won't play it again.

Here's something I wrote a while back.

Roleplaying games have gone all narrative these days.  It’s hard to move (in RPG circles) without bumping into one story-focussed rule system or other.  I’ve played both types and this is an attempt to marshal my thoughts and opinions on them.  Somewhere, I feel, there’s a game that’s just perfect for my style of GM’ing but I think I’m going to have to write it myself.   Realm Guard (a hack of the Mouse Guard RPG) has really been ringing a lot of bells for me recently.  I like the way I don’t have to do much prep for a game, partly because I’m pretty comfortable with the Midde-earth setting and also because the twists inherent in the game rules make for fun emergent gameplay.  I also like that the conflicts give everyone playing room for juicy narration while not tossing out the reassuring crunch of plenty of dice-rolling.

So, I’ve been really enthused about the hobby by the very existence of Realm Guard.  But an interesting and rather surprising result of playing this game is that I feel I’ve arrived in a place where I have a clear view of my favourite parts of both story-based and more traditional RPGs. 

This is where I’ve arrived:

1.     Realm Guard has taught me that assisted storytelling has its place but that the assistance is mostly for me as the GM.  There’s no actual need for players to feel the pressure to narrate or tell a story.  Often it feels positively awkward to have to narrate every roll.

2.     Players want to roll dice.  Dicing to see if you succeed or fail spectacularly is fundamentally exciting.

3.     Chaosium’s Basic Role-Playing system (BRP) was really a very good crunchy system, and still is.

I’m now thinking there ought to be room for a game system that assists (rather than requires) storytelling, lets the game hang on a single die roll when it matters and has a good deal of crunch.

So, if we were to build a Frankenstein’s Monster of a system, taking the best parts from several other games and sewing them together, what might it look like?  Something like this maybe…

·      When a character fails at something they can actually, succeed but with a condition, based on the severity of the failure.

·      When a character fails at something they can actually succeed, but the GM introduces a twist.

·      Players have characters that look different to each other in numerical terms.  Less of that fluffy trait stuff.  An ability either applies or it doesn’t!

·      Players can choose how much to risk in certain situations, based on how much they want something to happen.

15 games in 15 minutes

I'm late to the game here (about a year!) but I just noticed this was doing the rounds of RPG blogs. So here are the 15 RPGs that influenced me most, put together in 15 minutes no less!

• Fighting Fantasy 
• Elfquest
• AD&D
• Runequest (3rd)
• Hawkmoon (1st, BRP)
• Judge Dredd (1st)
• Call of Cthulhu
• TMNT
• Conan (TSR)
• Skyrealms of Jorune
• GURPS
• Talislanta
• Baldur's Gate II
• Dying Earth
• My Life With Master

And they're roughly in the order I encountered them I think.

Realm Guard RPG

Realm Guard is a hack of the Mouse Guard RPG, changing the setting to Middle-earth and the player-characters to Rangers of the North. So far I've run two sessions and I'm loving it. It allows emergent story and assisted story-telling with relatively little prep from me. I normally see prep as a bit of a drag and leave it until the last minute; with these rules and setting I've been much more disposed to sitting down and thinking ahead. It's got me rifling through some of the more obtuse Tolkien writings too. All good.

Next session this Friday with a bit of luck.

Well, here's my work-in-progress for my Two Games One Name challenge entry:

City of Refuge

It's pretty vague in a lot of areas at the moment, but what I have here seems like an exciting foundation to me.

It uses the constraint "out-of-game interaction is punished by the game".

Two Games, One Name

My first post in ages. Strangely enough, my last one was a couple of years back and then I had an annoying cough (which I had forgotten all about). How queer then that today, when I come to write here again after so long, I also have an annoying cough I can't seem to shift. Odd, check! Not very interesting, check!

As of today, it looks like I'm going to be submitting an entry into the Two Games One Name challenge over at Story Games. Dave Cleaver has very kindly asked if I would like to take over his theme (he's not got much purchase on it yet by the looks). I've accepted.

I've found myself drawn back to that site this week, after skulking around it now and then over the last few years. It's so much more my kind of place than The Forge.

So my game title is City of Refuge.