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

Why Kids Are Sometimes A Good Idea

I've been running this Call of Cthulhu campaign for about a year now, extending the Keith Herber classic "Dark Carnival" (from the Chaosium publication "Curse of the Chthonians") to incorporate a saga of horror and venal goings-on involving the Wyatt family and the Corbitt family in a twisted conspiracy stretching back into the early 18th century, and it's been going well for the most part.

Last SaturdayI was looking to add Teh Awesum to my next session (which was due the next day) and I decided a nice bit of art with a given theme would do nicely, and I ordered said art from my extremely talented daughter, giving her just a few ideas and a motif that had to appear. She got right down to it and I, tired from all the management duties involved, went to bed early.

I had envisaged the art as being depicted on a monolith the players are looking for, but what she delivered up was so good I decided that it would be a wooden plaque hanging on a wall in a secret library.

It was a great hit with the players, and a great hit to the SAN scores of the PCs, driving one mad with the terrible insights it gave him into the chaos of the outer void etc etc etc.

A corespondent suggested I post it here, and I thought that was a great idea.

1D3/1D6 SAN loss for viewing the Gharne Panel.

In case you were wondering: Copyright on that image is held by the artist and all rights are reserved.

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).

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.↑