I Can Has Questions

Why do the current crop of RPG rulebook writers insist on hiding the essential information needed to get up to speed as quickly as possible behind pages and pages of waffle?

Used to be the character build process was the first thing in the rulebook and was laid out quickly and in a straightforward manner. But now you have to wade through almost the entire blasted book to find out the most important stuff - i.e. how to build a character for use in the game.

Not that I'm against having a rich character-build process or game world you understand, but it is much easier to understand the bits the author is trying to convey at the start by reference to an actual, you know, character. Writers: don't describe the blasted skill test mechanics to me until you've described how I build the skills.

Case in point: I want to run some players through Planet Mercenary RPG this Saturday and since no-one has any idea of what that entails I need to get up to speed quickly. I flip to the character build section (a good 1/3 of the way into the book) and my immediate question was "How many skill build points do I have?" It took me about 15 minutes to locate the section in which that info was yielded up. Shortly after, I was looking at the Starship build process (part of the initial group character build process). How many resource points do the players get? Another 15 minute search for something that should have been front and center, not buried in a small paragraph at the end. Seriously, are the editors autistic or something?

This isn't a problem restricted to Planet Mercenary RPG either. D&D 5e pulls the same nonsense. Dresden Files RPG did it in spades, requiring reading almost the entire rulebook to get a character built.

Savage Worlds on the other hand presents all the relevant info concisely and up front. GURPS also does the job right, if somewhat less concisely. So it isn't impossible or hard to do. Call of Cthulhu has a two-page spread that explains the whole process diagramatically. It really doesn't get any easier than that.

So game designers and editors: If you want people to play your games, why make it hard to glean how to do so from the rulebooks? If you are going to make people go hunting in YouTube for instructions on how to play, why bother writing a rulebook at all?

Thank You, Ralph.

A shout out to my friend Ralph, who has lived far away from me for Lo! these many years.

We vacationed in the Poconos this year on account of a hurricane wiping out our Florida plans (hence, no reports of an expensive visit to the local friendly game store this summer) and managed to swing by Ralph'n'Cate's place in Pennsylvania before departing for home. They have a beautiful house in a wonderful neighborhood, but that's a subject for a different blog.

What gets a mention here is that Ralph was extremely generous as we left for home, gifting me with two fine game products: the remade Horror on the Orient Express campaign for Call of Cthulhu ¹ and something I hadn't seen before: Gumshoe: Cthulhu Confidential , which is a special rewrite of the Trail of Cthulhu rules for one player and a GM.

These fine gifts shall not go unappreciated, and Cthulhu Confidential is scheduled for a detailed reading in a couple of weeks, after the Planet Mercenary RPG playtest.

So now I need to find a platform that will support Ralph and my long-distance gaming interests. I'm thinking Google hangouts.

1. which I'd seen but steered clear of on account of having the original and not believing Chaosium would ever deliver on the Kickstarter² ↑
2. And in fact they almost didn't but for the intervention of some "angels"↑

You Could Have Knocked Me Down With A Feather, But ...

Planet Mercenary RPG delivered.

About a year and a half late, but it delivered, and nice it is too.

The conceit is that players are NCOs and officers in a mercenary company in the far future, in the universe of the Schlock Mercenary webcomic. Notable mechanical goodies are that each player gets a gang of three NPC grunts to order about, a card-mediated "mayhem" mechanism that purports to put role-playing opportunities back into dice-fest combats and skill blitzes. Looks good on paper.

I Kicked in for a deluxe package containing the hardcover rulebook, a pdf copy of same, A distressed copy of The Seventy Maxims Of Maximally Effective Mercenaries¹ and a pdf of same, a GM screen depicting ships of the universe on the player side, some themed dice, the cards (of course), a dice bag, a challenge coin D2 flipper and some lapel pins. All very nice.

The delays in delivery were mainly caused by overthinking the artwork on the Maxims book and the rulebook as I understand it. This was unfortunate, especially as I would have kicked in without the "ultra realistic" artwork, gussied up from the webcomic. I rather like the webcomic art. No matter, though much of the momentum and expectation I'd built for the game in my pool of players has evaporated in the interim.

I'm taking it out for a test-drive next weekend, so I'll report in on the experience then. if it goes well I may try and convene a regularly occurring game of Planet Mercenary RPG.

I also Kicked into a separate project by the same team for three copies of their plastic "handbrain" things. These are basically frames that can hold a half sheet of legal pad paper created to look like the PDA "handbrains" used by everyone in the comic. They are intended as small gm shields or handout dressing. Once properly distressed and painted up they should look nice, and may be useful for handing out building plans, space station layouts or briefings. Who knows?

They ran a month late too, though that was because of manufacturing problems that pushed into the schedule for Gencon.

At least they honoured their promise to not hold the Planet Mercenary RPG release up until Gencon. I hate Kicking into a game that then delivers at Gencon first instead of to the early-bird supporters that got the game made.

1. An in-universe artifact made famous in the webcomic↑

All Good Things Must Come To An End

"So what happened with Beauregard Tucks and Co?" I hear you ask¹.

Surprisingly, he didn't get killed, at least, not for a good, long time. He survived the deaths of just about everyone else in the game, ending up in the final confrontation as the only PC to have witnessed the demise of The Earps.

Stone ² was killed twice (he didn't stay dead for reasons I won't spoil). The first time in mano-y-mano duel between Stone and a character played with gusto by Matt, using magic bullets it took a couple of PC lives to recover from their resting place, and the second in a bloody drawn-out slugfest ³ that ended up with two more PCs dead before Stone engaged, and the final death of Tucks when he decided that the epicness of the situation called for an all-out effort, shot at Stone, missed and was backshot to instant death by Stone's posse.

This behavior of Tucks' was so at odds with his usual "go invisible and fly over the enemy, blasting them with a shotgun and/or magic attacks for the quick kill" tactic that he had used so effectively in the past (while Matt's character was dealing with Stone's challenge, Tucks was dealing very effectively with the twenty or so henchmen trying to add their voice to things for example) that the others might have been forgiven for thinking that Tucks was simply trying to steal the show.

That wasn't what was going on.

First, Tucks was hamstrung by a dearth of magic resources to hand. He could have borrowed the resources needed from demonic forces, maybe, but with Stone out and about he thought that might be a foolish thing to try. Long explanation short, Tucks could not afford the resources to go invisible.

Second, Tucks had opted to cast a spell with a cheesy "get two moves for the price of one" effect, which I interpreted as "you only have three seconds instead of the usual six in which to think and act in each move". This was entirely subjective and I discussed it with no-one, but it seemed immersively right from my seat, and I refused to pause for long decisions and discussions with the other players as I made Tuck's moves. This probably didn't go over well with the other players but I had broadly hinted at what was going on and some of them were role playing their own parts well.

Third, Tucks was the only character in play by then who had seen the horrible deaths of the Earp family, and was carting Wyatt Earp's marshal's badge. That badge was magic and had save Tucks's hide several times, but I (as a player) honestly thought our party had over-reached and were doomed, and decided that Tucks, realizing how bad the situation was, would decide that the time was come for playing out the hand as dealt and living up to the totem he carried by trying his damn' best to take down that Son of a Gun Stone as quickly as possible, with a shade less thought for his own skin than had been the norm before, so that the others could have time enough to flee for their lives if they so chose.

In other words, an epic scene from an epic campaign required epic participation. Tucks was, after all, a Legendary character⁴ by this time.

Had Tucks had one more round and ten more magic points, perhaps he would have made different tactical choices. But you play the cards you are dealt, as Tucks might have said.

In the end Tucks managed to find the one weapon that could kill Stone, but flubbed the shot and was killed for his failure. Appropriately epic in my estimation. I'd have liked him to survive, but I was happy the way it went down.

Until he rose from the dead as a Harrowed character⁵ that is.

Should the opportunity to play Tucks arise again, he will be constantly fighting the same horror Jim Dandy ended up losing his battle to - permanent demonic absorption.

The other players were magnificent.

Matt - Died once, then got smart and survived until the end

James - Died several times, but always from chance critical hits while doing the right thing.

Sam - Died once but couldn't make many of the sessions, including the last one.

Ali - Missed many sessions, but her portrayal of Dr Honeydew as she slid ever deeper into madness was brilliant

Jeff - Died three times. Became Harrowed and lost the dominion battle once. A martyr to ambushes and multiple critical hits.

Craig - Our GM who threw us Lame GM Bones when required and did his very best to keep it unreal.

I haven't had so much fun in years. I looked forward to the games and dressed-up as Tucks faithfully each time to maintain the image. By the end I had the black hat, dress shirt, studs, Poker Hand Cuff-Links, a smart waistcoat, a monogram bolo tie and a fob watch. I've never done at-table cosplay before⁶, but it will become part of my RPG kit-out whenever opportunity knocks.

1. When I put those words into your mouth, dear reader↑
2. the personification of Death in Deadlands:Reloaded↑
3. in every sense of the word↑
4. A game term for the experience level the character had earned that also carries repercussions in-game↑
5. I suspect a cheesy GM finesse used as some sort of comedic come-uppance here, but them's the breaks.↑
6. A lie: I wore a robe to A Song Of Ice and Fire once↑

Savage New Acquisitions

As people may of may not know I am greatly invested in the Savage Worlds game engine, which I fell in love with after one game of Deadlands:Reloaded, a game that gave me more enjoyment as a player than any other I've played in for over 20 years.

Characters are built using points to buy "die types" for basic attributes like strength and agility, skills like fighting or swimming and edges like Quick Draw and Charismatic. Points are strictly limited and in short supply, so the opportunity to get more by taking on hindrances like Short Sighted or Mean is a welcome feature of the game. This gives Savage Worlds a similar character build to GURPS without the need for a degree in tax accountancy or a spreadsheet program (and, of course, without the richness that system provides).

It has its problems like any RPG rules engine does, most notably when it comes to the magic system, that many feel lacks the "oomph" of a proper High Fantasy setting.

There is some justification for this. The spell lists are deliberately foreshortened compared to other systems, and presented in a generic format intended to be padded out with "trappings" to give individual iterations of a given generic spell special feel and side-effects. One can, for example, easily imagine the difference in feel between an area-effect spell with an electrical trapping (call it "ball lightning") and one with a nuclear trapping (call it "ridiculously broken").

The spells are also of less over-the-topness than other systems, which means that problems can arise when it comes to player expectations. My gaming friend Will grumbles that a Deadlands:Reloaded Mad Scientist cannot make an ornithopter that would fly for more than a minute or so, and he's right unless the GM imports a certain "edge" from the Slipstream setting (or invents one of his/her own to do the job).

There is also the problem that in combats the game tends to be one of invincible players right up to the point the mulligan points ("Bennies") run out, at which point it can very easily become TPK time.

The GM must be aware of and cater for these shortcomings in the system.

What makes that worthwhile is the sheer number of settings that this engine has been pointed at. Deadlands was perhaps the first and remains the flagship setting, but one can also game in the Space 1889 steampunk setting, the Rippers gothic horror setting, pirate settings both with and without high fantasy elements, 1930s Saturday Space Serial settings, any number of fantasy settings. The list goes on.

Most recently, Pinnacle Entertainment have released a Lankhmar sourcebook and a book of adventures for that setting. Lankhmar is, of course, the city in which Fafhard and The Grey Mouser met and had so many adventures in the short stories and (one I think) novel by Fritz Leiber. I loved the books and so could not resist picking up these offerings in the hope that one day I can get the apathetic youth I'm surrounded with to play in that urban setting.

The books are lavish affairs, as so many of the Savage World books are. At least, they look like they should be lavish affairs. This represents one of the first times I've bought electronic only, having realized my house can hold no more books

And anyway, I usually do most of the referencing of my game books while on my interminable commute, which means reading e-versions on my laptop. I often need to synthesize an adventure from two or more books, and the lack of space while traveling makes using paper books impractical even before the extra weight they represent is considered.

Besides which, I have a tendency to start regarding the books as a treasure to be kept from the hands of others, who will handle the glossy-paper with grease smeared hands without a thought. I realize this is a problem, a minor obsession, but I can't do anything about it. I often make up player manuals with copied pages in greaseproof plastic sleeves for the players if they need such a beast. The players can paw that without triggering my "book anxiety".

I also took the chance to obtain electronic copies of The Path of Kane and The Savage Foes of Solomon Kane, adjuncts to the excellent Solomon Kane RPG (also based on Savage Worlds) that provide adventures and NPCs to star in them and which I already owned in hardback. The chance to run Solly Kane has come up and the price was right. I've been looking for these books for some time in an affordable e-package. I bought an e-copy of the rulebook years ago. Now I'm champing at the bit to get a Solly Kane game up and running.

I also chose to obtain a copy of the second edition of the One Ring rulebook.

One Ring is set in the time between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, mostly in Rhovanion. It aims to provide a different sort of game experience to D&D and its fantasy clones, concentrating on roleplaying and highlighting the difficulties of going from A to B over long distances in the wilderness. It is, in other words, what Wilderness Adventures should have been in White Box D&D.

I've agonized in the past over how to represent the epic levels of privation expeditions int The Wild should have without the need for soul-destroying shopping lists and endless Constitution tests. Well, the people at Cubicle 7 have engineered that into One Ring very neatly, taking a cue from old school wargames by using the concept of attrition and melding it all very nicely into an RPG that to me has a very "Tolkienesque" feel to the whole approach of adventuring. No "kick in the door and steal the treasure" game this.

Naturally, I can't get anyone interested in playing.

The game originally came as a player manual, a GM manual, a couple of maps (one for the players, much like the one that came in the back of The Lord of the Rings, and an identical one with a hex grid and a key for the GM to calculate actual distances) and some dice in a slipcase. The second edition, tidied up a little and somewhat re-arranged, now comes in a single book. If your taste runs to a less adrenaline-powered RPG you might like this game too.

You can download these and many, many other titles from DriveThroughRPG.com, my e-seller of choice these days. Paper copies can be had through your LFGS for the asking.

Resources:

One Ring RPG A system for playing epic adventures in The Wild
The Savage Worlds of Solomon Kane The core rulebook (does not require the purchase of Savage Worlds)
The Path of Kane Adventures for Solomon Kane
The Savage Foes of Solomon Kane Major foes for your SK game, and adventures in which to showcase them.
Lankhmar sourcebook for Savage Worlds (requires the Savage Worlds core rulebook to play
Savage Tales of the Thieves GuildFourteen adventures for Lankhmar-based campaigns

Buy-In And The Reluctant GM

I'm on record with my opinion that one need not be an expert on a given setting in order to run a roleplaying game in that setting.

This came up most recently in my gaming circle with respect to The Discworld RPG. A GURPS GM was pontificating on games that might be floated and I suggested Discworld (a GURPS-based game) only to be told that while he loved the setting he didn't feel he could do it justice. He also felt that the players would be highly challenged trying to duplicate Terry Pratchett's humour style.

I reacted strongly (and badly) to this, opining in no uncertain terms that if we were to wait while someone became an expert on what was - when examined in depth - a body of work that had changed with almost every book added to the series and was still changing, well, we'd all be lying in a pine box under six feet or so of soil.

The clear implication was that the idea would be to somehow duplicate Pratchett's style when running the game, but at what point would the game take place? Pratchett's style was not the same in the opening three books as it was by Moving Pictures (something like the tenth in the series) which in turn was not the same as Making Money (well into the twenties or possibly tweaking the thirties - I dunno, I just read 'em I don't count 'em). I felt (and still feel) that this evasion was a never-resolving one, and would result in no game, ever.

I also felt that announcing that should a game run, the players would also need to be experts in the Pratchett style was a monstrously unfair precondition and more to the point not germane. The story we would unfold would be ours, not Rincewind's or Vimes's or ... well, you get
the picture.

And this is the key point I feel that many people miss. The point in playing any setting, be it Middle Earth, Gormenghast, The Disc, Barrayar or the deck of a Federation Star Ship, is not to recapitulate someone else's story in some sort of bizarre tribute RPG, but to have new and therefore unknown and exciting adventures of one's own, be they over the sights of a phaser or whispered campaigns of intrigue in the Court of Elric. Who on earth would want to play that other sort of game?

Note that I don't say the GM must have no "buy-in". I've attempted to run games in which my personal resonance was low, my prior experience not voluminous, or to put it another way, in which my buy-in was zero. They were all-but universally a bad time for all (a notable exception being Space 1889 that turned out to be unexpectedly riveting while prepping for my first game and is now a favourite), at least until I was able to reconcile the parts I found a turn-off with my personal vision of what the game could be. The trick to doing that is to warn everyone what's going on and to stay in touch with the core values of whatever it is you are tweaking. If you don't, you end up in a classic Bait-and-Switch which the players will never forgive you for.

Which is why I cannot for the life of me work out why I volunteered to run All Flesh Must Be Eaten, a game of the Zombie Apocalypse. I like watching zombie movies as much as anyone, but I don't live and breath the milieu and I really think that might be what is required to make this game shine.

However, I've been running Lovecraftian Gothic Horror RPGs since they were invented and have a good feel for how to pace a scenario for the time slot we have (four hours) so I have dredged my rather superficial knowledge of the movies for tropes and think I have a rather neat scenario along with a twist I don't think the players will see coming, and I'm throwing myself into the rulebook so I know how the game should flow.

The only thing I'm not doing is making excuses because I'm not word perfect on the body of Zombie movies out there.

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).

The Call of Cthulhu: Problems Posed By Tomes In The Game

Disclaimer: Ever since Sandy Petersen left Chaosium, the rules for the Call of Cthulhu have been undergoing a shift towards a "more realistic" way to present the game. I have many observations, reservations and - let's be honest - plain old fashioned whinges and whines about that. This post is certainly coloured by my feelings and I make no attempt to be neutral in my tone. I care about this stuff. All comments refer to the Basic Role Playing (BRP) rulesset unless otherwise indicated.

One of the puzzling things about the attempt to reface Call of Cthulhu with a more "realisitic" stucco over the years has been the matter of the Mythos Tome in the game.

A lot has changed since the Petersen days. The books now take unfeasibly long times to read - I seriously doubt that any Keeper¹ uses the suggested times as written in the latest version of the rules², where a copy of Al Azif - aka The Necronomicon - can take sixty-summat weeks to digest. It simply isn't feasible for players to become conversant with such volumes within a campaign structure, where they always have better things to do with their time.

Which raises problems when success hinges on the learning and deployment of a spell from such a book (which it often does in published scenarios). The hapless Keeper is faced with having to come up with a jury-rigged kluge just to make the game "work". This is unsatisfying to me. Of all the things that need fixing in the game, decent, workable rules for how to put these books to use in the game need to be worked out.

Part of the problem is an overly slavish dedication to the Lovecraft canon, or rather, certain select pieces from it. I don't know for a fact that this is the case, but I have surmised over more than three decades experience with the game the following: The game structure is largely drawn whole from the novella "The Call of Cthulhu", The campaign template from "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and the rules for reading tomes from "The Dunwich Horror". The problem as I see it is that "The Dunwich Horror" concerns a wizard searching for the means to craft a spell, a very specific spell, from hints inside the book. He already has a debased copy of the book itself and spends a lot of time correcting it from the copy in the Miskatonic University Library. From this one rather specialised case, which is in fact more a classic example of D&D style Magical Research than an attempt to read and understand the book per se, the general rules for reading tomes seem to be drawn, and drawn so as to make the books an unattainable resource in fact, if not in spirit.

The arguments for why this should be so include the abtrusness of the material, the insanity of the author and the ancient idioms in which they are couched - all good points. But they make the tomes unplayable. If the point is that players should not have first-hand knowledge of these things but should rely on NPC intermediaries to supply tome-contained information, then why include them as player-attainable assets in the game at all³?

It is telling that no sooner does one read and absorb the Tome Times (my term) than there is a sidebar in the rulebook desperately suggesting ways to override them in specific cases. Rules that have to be overridden to become playable should never have seen the typesetting machine in the first place in my opinion.

In this search for "realism" one aspect of the whole business has remained, puzzlingly, rather abstract and unrealistic, and that is the Sanity Loss mechanic with respect to Tome reading. You read the book, taking a year or so to do so with no adverse effects or incremental benefits, and then, when it's all over, you take a sudden kick in the SAN nodes and receive a Cthulhu Mythos skill powerup. You'd think that if the editorial staff at Chaosium were going to tackle the issue of "realism" in The Call Of Cthulhu, this would be one of the places to start, but no. For some reason, this odd little mechanism has been left unchanged since the first edition.

Now it has to be said that none of my players have ever worried about this, and truth to say neither did I until I read the Tome reading rules in the D20 version of the rules, in which there is an attempt to at least represent the months-long research as an incremental process. Indeed, the BRP Keeper is well advised to take a long, hard look at the D20 rules even if he/she/it is never intending to run a game under that system, just for the fresh ideas that the authors bring to the business of presenting the game to the players.

How to "fix" all this, if indeed it really needs fixing at all, is something for another time after a lot of careful thought.

Probably the reason that players (and I) have not worried about the issue before is that reading a Tome is akin to attempting to use a one-off experience-boosting magic item in D&D, something you do for the obvious benefit and then get on with the real business at hand - whatever the campaign is calling for you to do. The rules seem to suggest that Tome Reading should be an adventure in and of itself, which isn't a bad idea per se, but the BRP rules have never suggested guidelines for doing that. In fact, they only talk of the ways that reading a Tome can be fitted into other in-game activities, which seems to be conveying the message that Tome reading is not all that important other than as background scenery.

I don't know what I'm going to do about this, or even if I'm going to do anything. I ran from first edition rules and everyone had a blast without sweating these sorts of details. It's true that the perception of how the game should be played has changed. It used to be an action/adventure game with Lovecraftian overtones. The emphasis was on the search for truth, and the almost inevitable trip into madness usually marked the end of a PCs career. Now the emphasis is on the deep immersion playing of insane characters fighting a doomed battle against unbeatable forces. The madness is seen to be the point now.

But I think I need to think it out again.

1. Call of Cthulhu speak for "DM"↑
2. 6th edition↑
3. Not an idle question. The D20 rules for Call of Cthulhu state outright that the Great Old Ones should never be met by players.↑