Another Amazon Box Arrives In The Mail

This one contained the Basic Role Playing hardback (the so-called "Gold Book") and the pocket edition of A Song of Ice and Fire.

I normally buy my stuff locally, but I wasn't really jonesing for BRP badly enough to pay RRP and the deals on each of these were so good it was too good to pass up.

I've been using BRP, or one version of it, for about thirty years now in my Call of Cthulhu games. I used to keep a copy of Runequest with me for those times when the Call of Cthulhu version failed to deliver (typically in combat). Runequest was the original game from which BRP was derived.

I started a voyage of discovery about a year and a half ago in which I deliberately sampled many new game systems. GURPS, Savage Worlds, D20, these were the initial focus of my experiments.

Savage Worlds was a spectacular success. I have reservations about some aspects of the system, but the benefits it offers as far as easy adoption and rapid assimilation along with the obvious enjoyment of the players have made his a new favorite with me. I have become known as something of a Savage Worlds evangelist at my LFGS (Local Friendly Game Store).

GURPS was fascinating but scary. Characters take forever to build in this system, but the realism possible using it is incredible and the flexibility of the engine for powering the incredible number of settings is legendary. It seems that Steve Jackson Games is not in the business of Setting books any more - there's only one I'm aware of (Vorkosigan Saga) in a fourth edition, er, edition. In any event, the rulebooks are terrifying to me now. When I was thirty I would have lapped this stuff up. Now, I don't have the time or the mental agility for it.

D20, the old workhorse, has proved surprisingly flexible while at the same time proving that the GM must be aware at all times of the level-based abilities, even in a game where XP are sparse. D20 Call of Cthulhu has proved popular, but I think I may be close to breaking the game because of my earlier carelessness in adjudicating advancement awards. We'll see. I'm not scared of D20, but I think Savage Worlds offers much that D20 does at much less cost in brain cells.

But of late I found myself wondering what all the fuss was about with the Gold Book. The price was right for me to explore BRP in depth again. Who knows where that will lead? As I skimmed the book I found myself pondering different games I could run using BRP...

Maybe I'll do a port into BRP that I was intending to do as a Savage Worlds port.

In any event, I'll post my thoughts here as I browse.

A Song of Ice and Fire was purchased because I signed up for a game just to see what the fuss is all about. I'll let you know what I think after I've had a chance to digest it.

New Arrival

Bookhounds of London, a Trail of Cthulhu campaign book from Pelgrane Press.

Hardback, with the same production values that have made Trail of Cthulhu the most popular alternative to Call of Cthulhu for the world's Mythos Fix.

Priced at the extreme range of what I'll pay for a setting book these days, $35.

The idea in this one is right out of The Ninth Gate, with the players taking the part of less-than-squeaky-clean types who hunt up Mythos Tomes - to sell them for profit to the bad guys (and occasionally stop them using them)!

This is a nice idea from where I sit. Players often like to explore the ambiguity of their Call of Cthulhu characters, but the truth is that in all the published materials the players are essentially the Boy Scout types, the cavalry that will ride in and save the day if it is at all possible, with the shady characters firmly on the GM's side of the screen.

Not only that, players usually never get to play the really dirty swine on account of they are typically mad, dead or mad and then dead before their morals are truly irrevocably compromised.

I did manage to get some players to sacrifice to a Dark Young a few months ago, but they did it for the good of the community and the players were appalled when I casually pointed out that they were now, in point of fact, Cultists. Cultists were to be fought, killed, stamped out because they are the bad guys!

Bookhounds of London doesn't so much turn this idea around as discard it as irrelevant. There are no bad guys, just customers. Okay, some of the customers need to be dealt with but mostly because they represent a significant threat to the bottom line.

I'm trivializing the great idea at the core of this wonderful campaign, and I urge everyone to buy it, read it and judge for themselves.

There is much in the Trail of Cthulhu line for the trad Call of Cthulhu GM (with a little work) too, though I'd personally urge Call of Cthulhu GMs to look at the Trail of Cthulhu rules with their knee-jerk circuits offline. There was a time - a long time - when I would have sniffed at going "off the reservation", but I know better now.

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.