End Of An Era

So last week I sat with the two people who showed up to the (delayed) Delta Green session and we decided that the game wasn't doing it for anyone any more.

It was agreed that if we had more interested people it would still be a going concern, but with only two players the pacing was not as good as it might be, and the mix of player styles wasn't working with our established milieu. We had enjoyed it more when there was a crowd, with all the churning of ideas that brought.

And so, I reluctantly put the campaign to bed, with the players stipulating that if interest should pick up I should run it again, which was kind of them but we are done.

It had a very long run, more than eight years of (mostly) monthly play. I didn't count the sessions but I would be surprised if we hadn't convened the game more than 90 times.

This game brought me into contact with some of the best RP gamers with whom I have ever had the pleasure of playing. Their buy-in and keen participation drove me to the limits of my creativity when trying to devise suitably convoluted plots, schemes and double-crosses. It has been the most enjoyable of all the games I have run.

So I should thank those who made it so much fun, starting with the seven people who sat in the very first scenario, at a small convention called RetCon. I don't know all their names, so they'll all stay anonymous. I learned a lot from devising and running that one session.

Mark, Jay, Melanie, Kevin, Mike, Justin, Chris, Dan, John, Matt, Stephen, Daniel, thank you all.

I shall remember forever Kevin's radio kluge that saved the day, Melanie's cunning "Almanick deception ploy", Justin's tiny hand and later inadvertent bloody sacrifice, Jay's leadership and knowledge (along with his gobsmacked reaction when he found out about Melanie's perfidy and his loud refutation of personal cultism while his character stood naked in a field chanting a spell with a bunch of other naked , blood-soaked "non-cultists"), Mike's re-entry to the game after a short spell away, Chris's telephone pole climbing stunt and his mix tapes, Dan's close encounters with mythos stuff that somehow didn't kill him or drive him insane, Matt for his gleeful playing of insane characters ("The Frogs! Aargh!"), Stephen for his attempt to psychoanalyze someone going mad in a submarine via radio and his love of ridiculously large caliber guns, John for destroying the known universe for no good reason, and Daniel for his powers of deduction and the spaceship incident.

Thanks to all those who participated in single games whose names are too numerous to mention, too.

I hope everyone had fun. I know I did.

We took a vote and decided to switch to a monthly game of Space 1889:Red Sands, which can be played with fewer players owing to the ease of use of NPC "extras" in the Savage Worlds system.

What Am I Playing These Days (A Ransom Note Test Of My CSS Code)

So, let's inventory the regularly scheduled games I'm involved with, just for fits and wiggles.

Friday nights alternate. Last week I ran Gamma World, this week I'll be playing in someone else's Dungeons & Dragons game. I'm having more fun playing in the Dungeons & Dragons game than running the Gamma World one, but the Gamma World players are reportedly having a ball. I'll run the scanrios in the set until they are played out and then will happily drop Gamma World like a radioactive spud.

Saturday, being the first Saturday in the month, I will be running Delta Green, continuing a campaign set in the mid '90s using the D20 rules for Call of Cthulhu that has been chugging along claiming PC sanity and lives (and in one case the entire observable universe) for around five years on a once-a-month basis. This can be a lot of fun, but it is always a lot of work. I'm having difficulties with the current plot instalment but it should all smooth out and run better after a couple of hours of Investigator Effort.

Sunday evening will be the next installment in the Deadlands:Reloaded game I'm having so much fun with. This is another game in which I'm a player rather than the GM, and I haven't had quite so much fun in years.

Candidates being considered for the Friday slot when I'm done with Gamma World include Solomon Kane and Space 1889, both of which I've had a lot of fun with in the past, but that is way off in the future. I've probably got enough Gamma World stuff to take us into the summer.

So, What Am I Playing These Days?

I deep-sixed Necessary Evil as no-one was having any fun.

The players felt over-matched. This was mainly because they would plan and reconnoiter, then make a frontal assault against overwhelming odds. They apparently never learned that the bad guys had super-powers too. Oh well.

The GM, yours truly, hated it because of the huge number of misprints in the plot point campaign. I only run these things so I can avoid doing massive amounts of game preparation, so I need the plot point notes to be right.

And they weren't. Bad guys were shorted their powers and abilities routinely because the notes in the betsiary in the back of the book had been mis-transcribed into the notes in the plot point adventure.

So we dumped it for Gamma World

We decided to start playing through the boxed set scenarios after I got back from my vacation in Sunny Florida, and I used that time to get a full set of the extra cards printed up.

One of the sucky things about fourth edition D&D, and by extension Gamma World, is that Wizards of the Coast used it as an experiment to attempt to introduce the Collectible Card madness into the RPG world. I've always hated the "blind package" hobbies for the very reason the companies that use such marketing love it: the overspend factor. Buying cards in packs of eight guarantees that you will end up with multiples, and most of those will be unusable because the rules limit the number of duplicates you can have in a deck.

These cards are of two types: Alpha Mutations, which are mutant powers the player characters develop "because of all the radiation" such as tentacles, the ability to fly and so forth, and Omega Tech, which are devices that can be used once and maybe more often, but usually only once. Found treasures.

I played in a brief Gamma World campaign and ended up buying a few packs when I could get them at discount prices, but I would need a fairly complete deck if I were to run the game. One of the players was eager to use his own deck (players can optionally make up their own decks - WoC are not dumb and want everyone at the table to have a chance to hurl money at them) but the other interested guy had no cards and no money so I would be "fronting" him - which I was completely OK with.

So I ordered a set of the after-market cards as a print-on-demand deal from Drive Thru RPG.

The other sucky thing about Gamma World is that it is so far tuned for the "Encounter" experience it is not untrue to say it is just a board game for which no-one wanted to write proper board-game rules.

The setting as a post apocalyptic one, set after a disastrous "collision" of different parallel worlds. Players take the roles of mutated animals, robots and animated plants in this bizarre landscape and take on quests and adventures.

But after a couple of games it is woefully apparent that "off the grid" (out of combat) the mutations they pick up are mostly of no use whatsoever. The vast majority the card powers are things to use in combat situations. And any time a one is rolled, the powers switch out in a random mutational surge. It is impossible to approach this game with any sort of serious intent when this sort of manic Keystone Kops nonsense is going on. To say the game is "light hearted" is akin to saying "the current crop of presidential candidates is a tad uninspiring".

Not only that, the rulebook is deficient in anything not directly involved with combat. It is painfully obvious that this game was designed to sell cards rather than to be a gripping RPG experience per se.

But the players are seemingly enjoying themselves. I'm not, but I can stick it out for the few weeks it will take to get to the end of the thing.

.

So What Am I Playing These Days?

I'm GMing Delta Green once a month.

On the first Saturday of any given month I gather with a few people (currently down to 3 others, but there have been as many as 8 others at the table in bygone days)  and we play out a modern day, conspiracy-theory heavy cross between X-files and Cthulhu Now using the D20 version of Call of Cthulhu.

I picked D20 in part because I wanted an action/adventure feel for the campaign, but mostly because I was using the whole Delta Green thing to challenge my assumptions.

Call of Cthulhu GMs tend to be reactionary sticks-in-the-mud who cleave to the BRP or Nothing mantra. BRP, or Basic Role Playing, is the system from which Call of Cthulhu is adapted and it is a simple-to-use game engine that lends itself to quick uptake.

A character has less than twenty attributes to take care of, most of them derived from the core attributes generated by rolling dice in the familiar RPG manner, and a list of skills he/she selects to reflect competences in various disciplines. The list can be a tad arbitrary depending on the published version you are using, and GMs are encouraged to use it as a springboard rather than a finite limit on what can and cannot be achieved by a character.

BRP advancement involves identifying the skills used "successfully" by characters and allowing attempts to increase these skills at an adventure's end.

D20 is a rather more complex affair, adding (some would say "larding") to the richness of the player character build-outs with experience-earned "feats" that give characters special abilities above and beyond the skills the system also offers. D20 also has the hated "levels" that are a legacy of the D&D RPG that started the ball rolling and which drive the BRP or Nothing Brigade to apoplexy.

Advancement in D20 involves the use of "Experience Points" that are collected until one has enough to "level up". Once a player increases a character's level, that character gets more hit points, gains increases in various bonuses (to attacks and various "saving throws" that grant reprieve from pitfalls, mental attacks and poisons to name but three) more feats and points towards the purchase of more skills and so forth.

I picked D20 and Delta Green five years ago as a way to open my mind to two things I'd always turned away from without really thinking about it. I didn't care for the incredibly detailed background of Delta Green, never really found that end-of-the-millennium paranoia to my taste to be honest, and had the standard BRP or Nothing GM's stance on Call of Cthulhu.

But I had the books, and the D20 book had some rather good ideas in it. Moreover, it made the whole business of players being able to access the ancient and maddening books of magical lore much more like the original first edition of the game. Later editions had strived to make the business of reading a magic book and being seduced by the lure of power something that took so long no player would ever consider doing it. One book famously takes over a year to read!

I had long held that the model for this nonsense was "obviously" derived from the story The Dunwich Horror, but that story is really detailing the process of Magical Research rather than a straight reading.

The BRP way of dealing with books is also intended to be a "between sessions downtime" thing, something I hadn't realized until I read John Tynes' way of doing things, which is not only an in-game affair but is more evocative and just all-round better in every way than the stilted and rather pedestrian BRP loss of sanity between sessions method.

A few games saw players being lured in and coming, inevitably, to bad ends for the best reasons and doing so from the most altruistic drives. It was wonderful, and the sense of wonder was back in the game. I was happy.

I also liked having the possibility of mass combat with modern weapons actually be manageable. I wanted to be able to model 50 debased inhabitants of Innsmouth chasing panicked investigators armed with Glocks through the streets at dead of night with the fog rolling in off the ocean.

BRP GMs scream another old mantra "If you are using combat you are doing something wrong" but that is an overly broad interpretation of the game's reality and contradicted by the content in the published scenarios and campaigns, just about all of which feature combat prominently.

There is a school of thought that the reason people don't fight in Call of Cthulhu is tha the combat system doesn't work very well. It is derived from a rather persnickety combat system intended to model hand-to-hand combat with edged weapons and shields, and really doesn't port well into a "scared academic with a pistol" scenario, let alone the "four ex-marines with advanced tactical training and mac-10s" scenario.

D20's combat system addresses those concerns by providing a robust combat system that can be played out on a grid (BRP Call of Cthulhu didn't even specify the speed character could move, making a mockery of the old joke about Call of Cthulhu player characters having higher "flee" rates than shooting skills - everyone moved at the speed of plot.)

It turned out that just about all the concerns BRP GMs were using as places to stand and dig in their levers were non-issues.

The hit points thing ("The PCs end-up being God-Like") is simply not true. The D20 rules have and always have had something called a Massive Damage rule, which is a level of damage inflicted at which a character must take a Fortitude Save - Difficulty Check 15 - which if failed is instant death. The monsters have the same rule, but the damage threshold is 50.

This means that you would have to inflict 50 points of damage in a single attack to stand any chance of killing a powerful thing from hell, but it would only have to cause ten points of damage to you - and almost forgone conclusion and one that had people dropping like flies until they learned to keep their distance from the nasties. Just like they do in BRP.

As for the levels, well, the players tend to be irretrievably mad or so fragile they'll go mad at the drop of a tentacle long before they become "Godlike". There are only so many things man was not meant to know you can look at before you are about as stable as a three legged cow.

And the game has become fun again. If you check out the forums you'll find them depressingly full of people claiming that their players "don't get" Call of Cthulhu and that they can't seem to scare up a game these days. The evidence is right there in front of these GMs - no-one enjoys the rather sterile experience of Call of Cthulhu as it has become. I also couldn't scare up a trad Call of Cthulhu game, but people were eagerly waiting each month for the Delta Green game. I had players who fell into the lure of Eldritch Power with predictable results. I had players gleefully treading the path to madness. All having fun doing so.

And that game has generated more deep immersion "buy in" than any other I've run. The sheer effort the players drove me to at times to provide them with challenging and interesting mysteries was exhausting. I've throttled back a bit, running some published scenarios rather than home-brewing them, because I couldn't sustain the mental effort any longer.

All from a setting and rules-set I had initially thought worthless.

Going The Extra Mile

So I have a player who may be relocating out of state in a few months, so I asked him if there was anything he'd like especially to do in-game and he immediately said "I wanna go back to Bonshonce".

Bonshonce was a scenario I ran about four years ago, for what was then six guys and a girl, three of the guys first-time RPG-ers. I wrote it myself, and it featured The Deep Ones, an aquatic race that has a special place in the Cthulhu Mythos and in the history of my BRP Call of Cthulhu games. They are nasty, capable of inter-breeding with humans to produce hybrid offspring. The canonical story is "The Innsmouth Horror" and it is a scorcher.

The basic story line of the game scenario, set in 1987, was that there was a degenerate community, a place I chose to call "Bonshonce" deep in the Louisiana bayous that had "an arrangement" with the Deep Ones going back into the early part of the 20th century, but the breeding lines had become too corrupted and so the Deep Ones needed fresh blood. The humans of Bonshonce (actually, hybrids) came up with a scheme to kidnap girls from around the country, but one of their victims was the relative of a Senator and so the team were detailed to find out what happened (they being FBI officers in "real life"). The players followed the clues of this "mundane" kidnapping case into a hellish situation that cost the lives of two of the player characters' lives almost as soon as they arrived in Bonshonce. It got bloody. It got seriously weird and it got very creepy.

Everyone had a ball and this adventure set the pace for what came after. I soon found myself spending hours writing plot arcs and manufacturing hand-outs to be used as clues to whatever the mystery of the day was. We play once a month and one scenario took the best part of a year to conclude, and required a portable white-board so the players could untangle the web of clues and lies and monstrously suggestive hints.

And I burned out.

When a major campaign plot point was reached I switched to running only published scenarios, and we lost a many players to real life, some of whom were replaced by new gamers.

When I was asked to take the team back to Bonshonce it actually tied into something I'd been mulling off and on for, well, years. I'd hinted and outright stated any time anyone asked that the Navy had taken over at Bonshonce. Well, in my head, a super-secret department of the Navy had cordoned off Bonshonce and established a number of facilities in order to secure the area, study the hybrids and look for Deep Ones.

The new scenario is set in '97 and the Hook is that the Navy project has been off the radar for years and in fact seems to have gone silent. Extreme compartmentalization, paranoid or simply self-serving information hoarding by those in charge, sudden and drastic changes in budget and an unfortunate death have prevented anyone who would have noticed from being aware of the issue. I had used a major character from the original game, now a high-up in the secret Delta Green conspiracy, as the NPC "feed" who gets the player characters involved.

Can't say much more as the player characters are only now finding out what's what.

I invested about four hours in producing the initial batch of paper-trail clues (partial logs, diaries and so forth), and about the same time in figuring out who was there and what they were doing and where they are in 1997¹.

One set of logs were from a burned-out site, with the log itself badly burned with only a few partial pages surviving. These give a fragmented narrative of the Navy project from one point of view and give an insight into the truly nasty person who wrote the log. I printed the pages on my laser using a distinctive script font, stained the pages with highly diluted sepia ink and then burned away the edges of the paper almost up to the text. This gave a very good illusion of a salvaged text block from a larger page.

I also made a bottle of pills from an old plastic vitamin bottle, a fake label and some salvaged BBs from my Airsoft tommy gun (for rattle), and added an Airsoft .22 automatic labeled "rusty"² which would reinforce a written clue from the log.

Long story short, one of the old group saw the game description and wanted "in", and I naturally welcomed him. We had a ball the first game session which took place mostly in Washington DC, Michigan and Florida.

The second session had the player characters moving into Louisiana and finding Bonshonce, or what was left of it, planning the mission in detail and approaching the town by Zodiac boat after a short recce of the Cannery. The team had to wade through head-tall grass and weeds to approach some sort of encampment in what had been the waterfront/main street part of town, and were more than a little put out when one of them saw a sign with "MINEFIELD" written on it. There followed a nice tense walk to the fence, a short debate and then they climbed the electric fence (long defunct).

The camp was a mess, large parts of it burned out with signs of multiple explosions having ripped through the staff quarters and laboratory building and signs of freed captives and assassinated captives in what was obviously some sort of detention dormitory. All good stuff that allowed the players to reconstruct a picture of what went down, with enough wiggle room for misconceptions and alternate explanations. In the last half hour of play they found the burned log and I gave them the burned, stained pages.

And there was my payoff for all that work. The look of sheer joy on everyone's faces at the look, feel and smell of the clues, obviously salvaged from a fire. And then they began reading and their buy-in increased tenfold. The players had their characters bed down for the night in an armored car they found in the motor pool and we closed the session. I felt it had gone well, and everyone was smiling and talking about how they would start the next session.

And the next day, as I was settling in for my bi-weekly Pathfinder game³ I got the nicest bit of feedback over the 'net from one of the players saying how much he'd enjoyed the game, which probably made my face light up the same way theirs had after finding the log pages.

Players like this group are rare in the gaming world. They work well together, play off each other well and have so much willing buy-in that they encourage me to outdo myself each session, upping my game. I like to think this in turn ups their game, a synergy that ramps up the energy and immersion for all concerned. Either way I've already invested about ten hours in yet more immersion-enhancing stuff, from paper clues to learning how to use Blender so I can model parts of the coming experience in 3D. Hope they get as much fun from this session as they did the last.

I'll keep you posted.

1. I'm sorry about the tense changes but it is easier to think about this stuff as if '97 is the current year↑
2. I didn't have time to distress it for real↑
3. I play this one, someone else runs it↑

Rediscovering The Joy Of Home Brewed Adventures

For just about three and a half years I've been running a Delta Green game once a month, using the D20 Call of Cthulhu rules and the dual system sourcebook.

It all started as a one-off game run at RetCon 1. The players were all younger than me and were eager for more so I began crafting adventures kindasorta X-Files-y in nature set in the mid to late 80s, an era which we called "Delta Green: The Cowboy Years".

The players responded with outstanding role-playing and general enthusiasm for what we were doing, and I felt moved to outdo myself with each new adventure, culminating in a months-long story arc that had so many plot elements I designed a portable whiteboard so the players could do the Police Procedural thing with dry erase markers to sort it all out.

I recommend this, by the way. It is a great way to get the players all on the same page by their own efforts, and the GM can see where they might be about to make a colossal mistake and gently guide them back onto the path - or not, as the mood suggests. I'll do a mini instructable later on how to go about it.

Anyway.

The players began dropping out, with real-world concerns taking priority for some and general burnout doing for the rest. The core player set went from seven down to three, then back to four and is currently at five.

Worse was my own burnout. I pulled out all the stops for that aforementioned scenario, crafting clues that pushed my photoshoping skills (nonexistent at first) to the limit as I created photographs of locations and crime scene elements (I was proud of several of those), age-worn signposts, plans of extensive abandoned army bases etc. A five hour session could eat several days of clue manufacturing and plot tweaking.

By the time it all ended we made an agreement: The player characters would become major NPC movers in the newly reformed and reorganized Delta Green and we would for the foreseeable future be playing published scenarios.

A couple more players dropped out and a couple of new ones joined. My load went down to about a half of what it had been. I was surprised it took so long to prep for published scenarios but they turned out to be full of holes and mis-steps that needed patching before play.

One player announced he was probably going to be moving out of New York in a few months, and expressed a desire to return to a location I had used for the first adventure he and the others had experienced - I had said that when the original team had left there was a continuing story evolving there that would require a revisit by a Delta Green team at some point.

So I started writing the scenario I had had buzzing around in my head for a couple of years.

And two of the drop-out players immediately asked if they could rejoin the game (of course they were welcome) and we were off.

And once again I find myself madly building clue trails of memos and logs and newspaper articles and Azathoth-knows what else when I should be doing other productive stuff.

Example: The scenario calls for a submerged modular laboratory/base. I sketched out the first draft using Flash, my preferred drawing tool. There has been no tool to equal Flash in terms of usefulness and intuitive interface in my opinion.

But I found myself wondering if I couldn't do a bit better than a simple plan. You see, I can picture what it is supposed to look like, would look like if it were in, say, a first person computer game.

So I downloaded Blender, a 3D workbench and rendering tool that is truly amazing in what it promises, and have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get to grips with its "unique" interface. Nothing works the way a seasoned GUI user would expect and a lifetime of mouse habits have to be unlearned. Thank Shub-Niggurath for YouTube, where people, some of them articulate, can be found showing us all how to do various simple things you should be able to figure out yourself were it not for the godsawful Blender user interface.

It's not the tool designers' fault really. They have to cram so much into so little real estate. But some of them don't do themselves or us any favors either. It's as though the ability to code the amazing capabilities of the program comes at the cost of knowing how to communicate how to use their code to the world.

Anyway. You really have to look at Blender to see it for yourself. It is a gobsmacking achievement.

After three days cursing and fumbling I finally have a single module that renders the way I want in greyscale. I spent most of my trip in this morning trying to understand how to put a rusty metal skin on the basic cylindrical core of the thing.

Why am I doing this?

It started out as the idea of making a 3D picture of the entire shebang, but I'm thinking I might try and make a short movie of a swim-past. The movie part looks like it works much the same as Flash does.

I hope I can get it all done before they visit the place and abandon it, but it will be good practice anyway.

And the payoff will be the satisfaction of the players as they once again try and make sense of my deliberately obscure scenario.

It's a Deja Vu Reboot All Over Again Once More

Okay, time to do some game talk.

It's been a while and I've done quite a bit of gaming in the year and a half I've been gone from here.

I started running Masks of Nyarlathotep a newly reprinted campaign for Call of Cthulhu that my wife bought for me for Christmas, but the campaign has stuttered a bit this time through, with players dropping out before I can kill their characters or drive them mad. Oh well. The advantage of running the game in a Game Store is that there is always an audience, and that audience has recently been knocking on my door asking if they can join in. Naturally I say "Hell yes!" I'll be starting a thread for this game and the observations that arise from it from now on.

The monthly Delta Green campaign sessions are as popular as ever, over-subscribed now with eight players sometimes at a sitting. I enjoy running for this group very much. Their buy-in is atypically fervent and they are a total joy to GM. This game will soon be kicking into higher gear and I will be threading this game in it's own subject too. I have a lot of thinking to do when it comes to D20 Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green.

The recent (read: end of last year) launch of the Savage Worlds Space 1889 setting and my love affair with all things Savage Worlds has resulted in my convening not one but two separate parallel campaigns, each being an iteration of the Red Sands campaign from the eponymous setting book. I'll be threading these games both together and individually for pontification purposes.

I've also begun playing Solomon Kane, another Savage Worlds-derived game setting (though in this case one that is self-contained and that requires no additional purchase of a Savage Worlds rulebook). It looks to be a very interesting way of presenting a nuts-and-bolts action-adventure/horror game and I love the rulebook.

My attendance at this year's RetCon was a success, with all four of my games subscribed to the right level. I ran a Realms of Cthulhu scenario set mostly in the Peruvian Rainforest, A Deadlands:Reloaded game set in Great North Woods, A Space 1889 scenario set in the Martian desert at the juncture of the English and German fields of influence and a Call of Cthulhu session late on Saturday night which was a shortened version of A Cracked and Crooked Manse. It was a great success and greatly simplified by the decision to this year go with an all-Savage Worlds program (with the exception of the Call of Cthulhu session).

There were some failures to aviate.

Notably, my friend of many years decided that he no longer wished to play Call of Cthulhu since he did forensic paperwork for a living and was not keen on doing it in an RPG for relaxation, and an attempt to start the D20 Conan campaign Trial of Blood fell flat. That was sad because I was hoping the milieu would appeal to my friend so we could game together again, but it was a total non-starter.

Then there was the Paranoia game I tooled up to run only to find that no-one who had said they wanted to play was actually prepared to turn up. Fiasco! drew no players at all in three weeks of advertizing the session.

And a Dresden Files RPG campaign I was hosting every other Friday, and for which I was taking vacation time to be able to do so, eventually resulted in an evening where I and one other were the only people to show up after a dozen sessions.

Lessons learned:

Dresden Files has taught me to be absolutely without compunction when it comes to giving away a players seat if they haven't RSVP'd for the game (all the store's available slots are booked using Meetups). My campaigns sometimes feature a floating cast list these days but I don't get messed around by losers.

Paranoia taught me that people talk a lot on the web but often don't follow through, even if you know them personally. Don't spend money on rulebooks unless you have at least three "I'll be there's".

Conan taught me that sometimes it is just that the right mix of people isn't there and motivated to play. Two of those who did show interest found they didn't like my style and rather than say so simply faded from sight.

But all this has also shown me that the facts of life are that there are four to eight times as many people who want to play a given game than are willing to sit the other side of the screen and run the bugger. The GM in my neck of the woods who is willing to bide their time will end up beating them off with a stick when word gets around (and if he is any good).

My problem now is time. I don't have enough, otherwise I'd be playing in at least two more games (One Ring and Eclipse Phase) and running even more, like Deadlands:Reloaded, and Slipstream, and Sundered Skies, and The Laundry, and Amber, and Traveller, and Dresden Files - which I dislike the complexity of but feel there's a great game in there struggling to get out - and that doesn't even mention the board games

More on Massive Damage in Modern D20 Games

A brief note after a long hiatus to say that I've been running Conan with the Massive Damage rules switched on and the world hasn't come to an end yet.

No game of D&D that I've played in has been run with the Massive Damage rules in effect, and when I've asked why I've been given a variety of reasons which boil down to "the game will be far too deadly with Massive Damage". I should mention that the D&D Massive Damage Threshold is 50 points (if I'm not mistaken).

The Massive Damage threshold for Conan is 20 points, so one would have thought that if a D20 game could be made ultra player-unfriendly by Massive Damage, Conan would be the one to show that, but you know what? The monsters are the ones having the hard time of it. So much so I'm having to gently tweak them to make them a challenge. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong.

I'm now contemplating going "off the reservation" and running a Delta Green game under the D20 Call of Cthulhu rules (as opposed to the more usual and generally more well-thought-of in the Call of Cthulhu community Basic Role Playing rules aka BRP). One of the first things I checked up on was the Massive Damage Threshold for the game.

Call of Cthulhu uses a variant of the D20 rules that differs in detail in many places from D&D, even more so than Conan does, and one of those changes is that there's a different Massive Damage Threshold for the human players than for the non-player Mythos Monstrosities.

A player has to Fort save vs 15 after 10(!) points of damage are dealt in a single attack. A monster does so after an attack deals 50 points(!!).

It would seem, on the face of it, to be a recipe for player death on a grand scale, but then again, that's pretty much in the Call of Cthulhu mold, so I'm leaving it in as written for the time being.

This should sort out the men from the shoggoths.

Massive Damage In D20 Modern Games

The "gun to head" issue raised in the previous post's comments by Dunx is an interesting one and highlights a basic problem D20, a system designed (mainly) to run heroic characters through RPGs with little acknowledgement of "reality"¹, unsuited without some work to the obvious consequences of specially located damage - the headsman's axe, the bullet to the head and so on.

The D20 system enables characters to be larger than life, just as Fafhrd, Conan or Strider were, and to cheat death within the confines of a rigid, arithmetically constrained game system in the same way they would on the printed page. I salute the authors for managing to get that far, and sympathise with the problems arising from "one size fits all" thinking in the customers and gamers, while fully understanding the wish for as flexible a gaming system as possible so the player doesn't need to learn new ones every five minutes.

I enjoy playing D20-based games.

I also see the point in the reluctance of the DMs and players to adopt a one-size-fits-all "Death Damage" roll that is applied across the board. I suggested a framework for modifying that rule yesterday and I still want comments and suggestions, for and against. But my suggestion would not work well for modern weapons which can wound but also kill as a matter of luck (in the hands of the average person) or for specific cases such as a headsman's axe. For these situations I see a possible solution of a different type, that still adheres to the D20 system closely - the critical hit.

Briefly, when a weapon or class of weapons poses a real danger of killing outright in one attack - a handgun in a D20 modern setting suggests itself as the most obvious example of this - one could up the lethality of the weapon without changing the standard damage dealt by tweaking the critical hit roll needed and the damage multiplier gained.

Consider: A .32 revolver might be said to pack 1D10 + 2 (a figure I pulled out of the air for the purposes of illustration since I do not have access to a D20 modern sourcebook). Clearly people should be able to be killed or seriously wounded by a single shot, but also should be able to escape relatively unharmed for the purposes of PC heroism. One way to achieve this would be to set the Critical Hit roll needed to a relatively low number for this weapon, say 15, and let the damage multiplier be very high, maybe x4 or x5. How this would work in just about any D20-based ruleset would be that someone would shoot the gun at someone else. The shooter makes an attack roll, adding in all sorts of character-level based and circumstantial attack bonuses and/or penalties for the final score. If this score would be 15 or better (in our example) a "threat" is declared and a second attack roll made at the base chance to hit (all special circumstantial bonuses stripped off). If a hit is made under those conditions, a critical hit has been scored and the damage inflicted is multiplied up by the given amount. this means that we would deal 4D10+2 or 5D10+2 depending on what we had picked for the multiplier when we designed the weapon table. Note that death is still not guaranteed, but is much more likely. When combined with a massive damage effects rule such as I suggested yesterday, this becomes a powerful disincentive to place oneself in the path of such a weapon.

Once again, this is simply a starting point for wondering aloud how D20 might be tweaked without breaking it, not some sort of tablet from the mount. I welcome comments and suggestions.

1. And who wants that? we get that 24/7 any day we aren't gaming. The whole point is the escapism the RPG provides↑

Cross Classing in D20 Games - At What Cost?

During a game of "Conan" recently an interesting debate arose concerning Cross-Classing.

Cross-classing is the D20 mechanism by which (mostly) players earn levels in more than one character class, giving them the benefits of each at the levels they have earned. This allows, for example, a Fighter to also dabble in Druidic matters, or a Cleric to become (for whatever reason) particulalry sensitive to the ways of the Ranger.

The altruistic reason for allowing this is so that the rather artificial boundaries set by the D20/D&D "class" mechanic are blurred into a more "natural" model. The real reason is so players get buff in skills and natural abilities they otherwise would stand no chance of having at all.

It also buggers up the designed-in "nerfing" that each character class has to impose some limits on how players can behave in the game. Players, naturally, desire their characters to be renaissence men, women and werecreatures, able to turn their hands/paws to anything their little hearts desire without any hindering considerations of character background. Character classes are (partly) designed to build in reasonable limitations to character abliities (in the general sense rather than the specific D20 sense of that word). A Fighter cannot cast spells because he/she has been too busy learning to fight to pick up the knack, or has no latent ability with The Art. Cross-class that Fighter by giving him/her a level or two of Sorcerer and we have the beginings of a DM headache. Go to the cross-classing lengths some people do and that escalates into a migrane.

Which is not to say it shouldn't orta be. Cross classing makes otherwise boring character classes fun again. Of course, it does spread the perception that some classes, such as "Fighter" exsist solely to be used as a springboard for cross classing, which makes seeing a vanilla Fighter in D&D a rare thing. But with a bit of thought and a firm DM hand to keep it from getting stupidly daft, cross-classing is a bedrock part of D20 that I for one wouldn't want to see gone from the game.

The debate on Sunday arose in part because Conan encourages players to cross class. D&D has built in penalties for cross classing, but Conan removes those penalties and replaces them with benefits accrued from choosing a so-called racial "favoured class". Cross-classing incurs no penalties a-la D&D, and is much cheaper for the player in terms of Experience Point (XP) cost.

What the debate centered on (and it became quite heated I can tell you) was the XP cost that should be incurred for the new class levels.

D20 family rules that allow for cross classing usually (I don't know of one that diverges from this model, but I'm not widely read in D20-based rulesets) have it that your next character level costs whatever it costs to go to the "next level".

I'll explain that.

If you are, say, a 5th level Barbarian, and you've earned enough XP to ascend to 6th level barbarian but instead elect to "buy" a level of Thief, it costs 15,000 Experience Points (XP) according to the D20 escalation of XP costs per level. If you had bought that level of Thief for your inital character build at first level, it would have cost you 0 XP. If you had bought it for your third level it would have cost 3,000 XP. These costs are laid out in the Conan rulebook on page 40 (I think) and the D&D 3.5 Player Manual on page 9 (I think). In short, you pay the cost of the aggregate level you have achieved, but you buy the lowest "next level" you are entitled to.

One of the players felt this was monstrously unfair. He was buying a "first level", it should cost what a "first level costs" (that would be 0 XP of course, but he was under the impression it was 1000 to be fair). The DM was undecided on the matter. I felt, and still do, that it is a no-brainer. If you apply the cheaper costs, you invite hyper-characters skilled in everything under the sun, because although the maximum a player can gain is one level, the rewards at the character's other class suggested challenge rating (which is what the DM uses to set the reward levels) virtually guarrantee levels of XP remuneration that exceed the "Levelling Cost" for those low levels by many times. The rule is that a player may gain one level and retain enough XP to carry him/her to within one point of the next level. all other XP are lost. So far, so what? A player will end up earning 12 zillion XP and only being able to use 1000 of them. What's the big deal?

Consider the high-level player character who now goes out and about slaughtering otherwise puny enemies so he/she can level up in cheaper cross classes. The high levels of destruction the player can command far exceed anything an appropriate challenge for a low level character can bring to bear, making for a meaningless dice-fest.

Consider also the high-level Sorcerer who earns a bajillion XP, then asks Ron Innocent, unsuspecting DM if he may "burn some XP" as wishes for better stats, then buys a cheap low level in a cross class. The minmax potential is considerable.

I don't believe the D20 rule on this is in any way "broken". A level costs what a level costs. It is an abstraction anyway, and the extra class features that spring into being when a cross class is taken more than make up for any perceived "overcharging". But far more importantly, the "costs what it costs" version is easy to keep track of and reduces the anti-cheataccidental slip of the pen bookkeeping the DM must do to keep the game on track.

I would be interested in hearing what others think though.

Massive Damage - The D20 Rule Never Applied

One of the most often repeated critisisms of the D20 gaming system in general and the D&D game that spawned it in particular is the way players become indestructible godlike beings, requiring an ever-escalating pantheon of uber-nasties to properly challenge them (to generate the much-desired experience points (XP's) which in turn earn players more levels making them harder to kill necessitating a cast of "harder" monsters worth more XP etc etc etc).

What is almost never acknowledged in these casual conversations is that the D20 rules I've seen alway have a "Massive Damage" clause in them - that DM's never use - that attempt to stop runaway damage-proofing.

The Massive Damage clause basically says that if a character, NPC or monster sffers a blow that deals X amount of hit points (HP), he, she or it is taken to -10 hit opints and declared dead (there are game mechanics that can mean this is subtly different from just-plain-dead which are irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion). For example: the Conan D20 rules system puts this value at 20 HP lost in a single blow.

Now the argument for using this rule is fairly straightforward: It makes any game character killable no matter how many HP they have in the bank. Players cannot rely on the fact that they have reached 22nd level to save them from that pipsqueak 5th level fighter.

The argument against is also self-evident: it is monstrously unfair that the game system basis it's progression on levels and the attendant HP's, acknowledges that these are a powerful incentive to seek or avoid combat by giving different character classes different dice for the purpose - a barbarian might get d12 per level but a priest d6 - and rates the challenge each monster poses in hit dice (not, you should note, hit points) should seek to "level the playing field" in this way, setting a 22nd level barbarian general up for a death at the hands of a relative neophyte, especially if that barbarian general is a player with months of invested play-time in the character and campaign.

I sit squarely in the middle of this debate. On the one hand I, as a DM, do not want to have to deal with arcade game style escalation in HP with all the bookwork to tweak challenges accordingly, but as a player I see no earthly justification - outside of the godlike being issue - in setting an arbitrary "20 points and you're dead" level of damage.

My instincts here are that some sort of massive damage limitation is desirable, if only to promote less "Doom" - style gaming (while at the same time acknowledging the fun to be had doing that sort of game) and encourage a more "realistic" play style, but that it should be somehow scaled appropriately. This is how the issue is dealt with in BRP-sourced games like Call of Cthulhu.

I'm thinking that something of the following type might fit the bill and not annoy too many people to the point they won't play:

• When a character or monster takes 50% of its current remaining Hit Points in a single blow, it must make a Fortitude save. Saving will cause the character to be unaffected (other than the physical damage of course). Failing the save will cause it to become Staggered. The Save must be made each round or the character will remain staggered (able only to make move or standard actions)
• When a character takes 75% of its current HP in one blow it must make a Fortitude save. Making the save will result in the character becoming staggered until a second Fortitude save is made (in a subsequent round). Failuer to save will cause the character to be stunned until a subsequent Fortitude save can be made. Stunned players may not take actions but are not entirely helpless.
• If a character loses more than 75% of its HP in one blow it must make a Fortitude save. Success means the character is stunned until a subsequent Fortitude save can be made. Failure means the character is knocked unconscious, and is Helpless.
• Additional Fortitude saves may be made, one in each subsequent round, to work the character's state "up the ladder": Normal---Staggered---Stunned---KO'd
• This rule does not override the other effects of the received damage. Dead is still dead.

This is just a first cut at a vague idea. I welcome comments for, against and sideways (provided we always move the debate in an on-topic direction).