Intersectional Advancement

Most rpgs work on this simple formula:

Do things on this small list of activities (X, Y, Z) and get points/level up/advance your character.

That list could be “fight monsters”, “get gold”, “solve the mystery”, “show up to play” etc. The list could be large or small, and you might even be able to personally customize the list as a player (as in Burning Wheel, The Shadow of Yesterday, or Riddle of Steel). What the list provides is alternate ways to get reward in the game, and, probably weights the list based on what actvities the game is mostly about. (like older D&D gave more points for getting gold, fighting monsters wasn’t worth crap.)

But, there’s an area of the reward/advancement school which is sadly under-explored. Intersectional advancement says “Do X AND Y in order to advance”. Instead of making it different options to the same end, it becomes requirements for advancement.

The best existing example is AD&D, where an optional rule made it so that you had to have experience points AND gold (to pay for training) in order to level up your character. Having one or the other didn’t cut it. Since D&D was built on dungeon crawling, fighting monsters and getting gold, it was really more of a subtle shift in focus of play.

But what if instead of gold, you needed X amount of points earned from pathos, roleplaying and story based goals?

D&D Comraderie Hack

Whenever a PC shows trust, loyalty, respect, friendship or sacrifice for another PC, the player gets 100 Comraderie Points. In order to level up, you have to make 1/2 your required XP normally, and 1/2 in Comraderie Points. If you make more than 1/2, in either category, those points are wasted and capped off until you level up.

D&D Dirty Deeds (ala Pirates of the Carribean) Hack

Whenever a PC shows trust, loyalty, respect, friendship or sacrifice for another PC, the player builds up 100 Drama Points which are held back by the GM. When you betray another PC, all those Drama Points are awarded to you. In order to level up, you have to make 1/2 your required XP normally, and 1/2 in Drama Points. If you make more than 1/2, in either category, those points are wasted and capped off until you level up.

You could pretty much do this for any thing you want in your game. You could have an investigative game where you have Clue Points, or whatever. Or a romance game with Love Points.

Basically, by forcing players to meet TWO requirements, you guarantee that it’s going to show up in play- the players can’t opt out of it (at least, if they want to engage the reward mechanics). While most people try to get their game “style” down based on harshly enforced social contract, maybe it’s better just to codify it and make it clear to folks from get what the game is about…

Retro hack: Spell Accents

(A game hack for D&D-ish games before 3.0)

Spell Accents 101

A Spell Accent is a variation on a normal spell which uses a different material component, one which is rare, expensive, or more difficult to acquire in order to produce a different, additional effect to a spell. This is a slight shift from some ideas toyed with in 3.X expansions- instead of simply adding metamagic feats or changing damage types, I’m thinking of completely extra effects.

In order to use a Spell Accent, you must know the Accent (having researched it or found it out some other way) and have the necessary material component. This component replaces whatever component the spell had before.

A memorized spell can be cast with or without the Accent- you don’t have to define it when you memorize it. This means if you have a spell memorized, and know several Accents for the spell and have the components available, you have a wider range of flexibility in what that spell can do.

Some examples:

Magic Missle

Accent Component: An animal horn
Magic Missle not only does damage, but also knocks the target back 1 foot for every point of damage inflicted.

Accent Component: The brain of a Mindflayer
Magic Missle dice increase to D10’s instead of D4’s. Target loses one memorized spell for each missle that hits, starting with the highest level spells first.

Accent Component: A crafted gauntlet of pure platinum
Magic missle dice increase to D6’s instead of D4’s. Target’s spell resistance is halved for the next 1D6 rounds.

Read Magic

Accent Component: A seashell worth 100 gp
“Read Magic” is cast in a new form, “Hear Magic” and you get a chance to make a roll to learn a spell as it’s being cast by simply hearing it.

Acid Arrow
Accent Component: Distilled essence of Gelatinous Cube
Acid Arrow also immobilizes the target each round it does damage unless the target is Huge or larger.

Researching and Learning Accents

First a player and the DM negotiate either what kind of Accent a given material component can do (”I’ve got Minotaur Horns! That’s got to be good for something…”) or the other way around (”I need my fireball to burn ghosts, what do you think I’ll need to make it happen?”). Obviously, players or the DM may have both in mind. Negotiation is basically figuring out an effect and a component that feels balanced and fair. This discussion is all meta- it takes no actual time in the fiction.

Once agreed upon, the wizard must research the Accent, which can only be for spell she already knows. This process takes 3 days/spell level. If the material component is already available, the research takes 2 days/spell level. The research can be put down and picked up again later with no penalty. The research automatically succeeds when the required time is put in. There is no limit to how many Spell Accents you can learn. (Up to 3 Accents can be put on a single page of a spellbook).

Components and Effects

What kind of components and effects make sense to put together? First, an Accent component must be more difficult to obtain than the spell’s normal material components. All material components can be broken down as such:

Time consuming

The component must be prepared in some fashion that takes time. This doesn’t have to be at time of casting, but it certainly can make it a hassle to get a lot of it. “Paint intricate sigils into the staff, then let it sit for a week.” “Sew together parts from 10 different corpses”, “Write a 100 page contract in Infernal languages”, etc.

Rare

The component is just hard to find or acquire due to rarity. “The fur of an albino wolf”, “A stone shaped like a hand.” “Phosphorescent moss from a mile below ground surface”, etc.

Expensive

The component costs a LOT to make or acquire. “A figurine of pure platinum”, “Chainmail made of silver”, “A gem studded crown”, etc.

Strange

The component requires weird, specific requirements or might be something abstract. “The howl of a dying wolf.” “The dirt of a fresh grave, taken under a full moon”, “The heart of a Fallen Paladin” etc.

Basically, these four factors tie into a general sort of resource management. Basically, useful but not overly powerful effects might just use common items (like the animal horn example above), while rare and powerful effects would require strange and difficult components (such as the mind flayer brain example).

Using Accents in your game

Isn’t this sort of a half assed spell research idea? Not quite. Because Accents work on existing spells, players can now take ho-hum spells they outgrew a while back and find ways to make them powerful and useful no matter what level they’re at.

As the PCs fight nastier and weirder monsters, the wizards are basically collecting more and more material components to fuel their spells. And of course, the rare and weird stuff is what is going to make spells -that- much more powerful. As a player, you should be looking for any kind of weird monster bit or object that might be a useful Accent component (”Oooh! The River Styx! I need the water!”).

Because Accents are component based, as a DM you can limit the access to how much it appears in your game. It’s also a great way to tweak spells that are less useful and give them potential to be more useful. In terms of the fiction, it also is another great way to spawn big quests and missions to find the right materials.

Addendum:

As a DM, realize that Accents are basically like charged magic items. The core question you have to ask yourself, is how often you want the players to have access to these?

The materials might be available anywhere, only at town or between adventures, only in certain areas (”Darkwood Forest”), only in certain areas with effort (”An eye of a beholder, unopened at the time of death”), or something you have to do an entire quest for (”The heart of a dragon”), or, perhaps something unique (”The Crown of Oberon”). The big thing to watch out for, is if it is a powerful effect, that the players might have a way to farm it outside of the effort (”We’ll just raise Griffons ourselves, cut off their talons then cast Heal to restore them!”)…

As players, you ‘ll want to pick several Accents so a single memorized spell has a lot of options, but also try to see if a single type of material component can be used for different kinds of Accents for different spells, so you’re carrying less stuff.

Falling Star- A Burning Wheel Campaign idea

Ok, I hacked out a quick pdf of some ideas I’ve been floating for about a week or so- Falling Star.

I wanted to play a game where there’s a cultural clash, where the player characters are negotiating between who they are, what their people want them to be, and what they become, a pretty common identity struggle for many people.

Pretty much the meat of the play is between the Sagara and the Ibal- this uncomfortable shifting line between colonizer and colonized peoples. The Kizo are the “orcs” of the setting- fanatical crusaders who exist to apply pressure and break up the power balance between the Sagara and the Ibal.

Thematically, the Sagarans are modeled after a lot of indigenous people, like the Khmu, Mien, or Hmong, though it’s just as easy to draw parallels with a lot of folks. For contrast, the Ibal just want your stuff, while the Kizo want your soul and identity.

Edit:

Naturally, less than a week later, I come across Bruce Cordell’s brilliant When the Sky Falls, which goes over what would happen in your D&D game if a meteorite hits… It’s also a free PDF download, so check it out!

Edit pt. 2:

Also, naturally, my copy of The Blossoms are Falling arrived a week after I wrote this, so I didn’t know about the awesome rules for dealing with spirits as a Circles test.  I’ll probably digest that, play with it some, then revise this setting idea later.

Deep D&D Gamehacking pt. 2

A long post, for crunchier issues…

Magic Items

1.  Any character can possess up to 3 permanent magic items and 3 charge-based magic items.

2.  Magic items are attuned to a person- anyone else using them gets no magical benefit- your +5 sword in the hands of another is just a sword, a magic potion is just some fizzy soda, etc.  It takes an hour to attune to an item, once attuned, no one else can attune to it.  If you choose something new after your 3, the one you drop from your list either becomes non-magical or disappears.

3.  If a character dies, the items either lose their charge or disappear completely.  (Raise dead? Items return to normal/come back, another reason for necromancy!).

Why?

Magic items are the biggest loophole in D&D.  By stumbling across the correct items,  you can instantly pump up your character’s abilities, add new spells, break the upper ceiling of spells you can cast per day (”Look ma, I’ve got 50 healing spells in a stick!”), destroy the need to ever memorize a particular spell, or ever have to use a particular set of skills (”My boots give me +10 to Stealth, why bother putting points there, right?”).

Magic items are instant effectiveness, mostly transferable, and they carry over the gap of character death.  Eventually, they become a form of cure-all for so many problems like Batman’s utility belt.

So what’s up with all those limitations?  Well, first when you have to limit how many permanent items you can carry, you can’t be super awesome everywhere with stealthy boots, bracers of armor, magic rings, cloaks, hats, necklaces, weapons, etc.  You get three things, which focuses players on making choices between maximizing their strengths or covering their weaknesses.

Attunement stops some pretty slippery cop-outs players can pull.  “Hey, throw the boots of jumping back across the chasm.  Thanks man!” etc.  It also stops the whole problem of bad guys’ magic items existing mostly as loot for the PCs.

Versimilitude- “But realistically…”

Realistically, magic items work however you choose to define them in your game world.  In mine, they’re magical concepts pulled from the aether and given form.  You can have 3 permanent and 3 temporary items because that’s the laws of magic, and when you die they disappear because your soul is what anchors them to you.

For you and your game, maybe you want want to pump up that number, or come up with a different reason for it to work the way it does, but basically the limitations are based in gamist concerns and years of watching magic items wreck havok on challenges.  There’s a reason so many editions of D&D have a section warning DMs against giving out magic items and advice on how to remove them from play.  Fuck that mess.  You shouldn’t have to play 10 years to try to develop it through some kind of zen luck.

Awesome Tokens

Awesome tokens are a reward that makes characters more effective immediately, without messing with the XP system.   Awesome tokens come in three colors:

White (spend before you roll)

Spend to roll 2D20s for any kind of D20 roll your character makes and take the higher roll.

Blue

Spend instead of rolling to automatically succeed at any single D20 roll your character makes.  The success is as if you’ve rolled -just- enough to succeed.  Alternately, spend the token to force anyone to reroll a die roll (friend, foe, yourself, D20, damage roll, whatever).

Red

Spend to automatically change any roll to the maximum or minimum possible.  If you maximize an attack roll, it’s an automatic critical, and it’s confirmed.

 How do you get these?

The DM can reward you a white token for:

- Good dialogue, neat color, add to the game world in an interesting way

- Playing according to your alignment in a solid way

A white token can be transformed into a blue token whenever the DM wants to reward you for:

- Showing comraderie and friendship amongst the party

- Alignment angst- your hero either questions their alignment stances or stands strong in the face of real turmoil

A blue token can be transformed into a red token whenever the DM wants to reward you for:

- Heroism, undertaking great risks for the good of others

- Glory, doing things which are great and will be remembered

Why?

This lets you apply some simulationist ideas to your game without necessarily overriding or ignoring the larger gamist aspect of it.  You’re giving players rewards for adding color, for talking awesome dwarven lines, for playing the party as a party, for not playing black and white alignment, for being heroes and undertaking dangerous things.  But they still have to fight monsters and overcome challenges and get xp to level up.

You’ll notice this is the bastard child of Mike Sugarbaker’s “Fuck You I’m Awesome” tokens idea and Burning Wheel’s Artha rules (both in reward and the execution of multiple types of reward).

You’ll also notice that the tokens work like a funnel- you need white tokens to get blue tokens, blue tokens to get red tokens- you can’t just skip up and get red tokens straight out the bat.  It also sets up some interesting decisions- do you spend that token now because you could use it, or do you hold on hoping to upgrade it?

Initially I had this set up with the idea of trying to find some way to get full Narrativist leanings to work under a Gamist game, but the way D&D sets up characters with a super narrow range of competence doesn’t lend itself well to players being able to make a full range of choices nor a good system for building scenes and choices.  Though you could spend tokens to open up your range of actions (”I auto-succeed a Move Silently check!”) it’s not really a solid reward system if it requires you to spend your resource to get the same resource.

You’ll also notice that the Tokens are pretty set on messing with dice.  That’s because I wanted them to be useful for both mage types and fighter types- getting an auto-critical is just as useful as getting maximum damage on a 12d6 fireball.

What about challenge?  Doesn’t this all make it a lot easier for players?

Certainly, provided they’re working with the system and gaming it to get the tokens along the way.  On the other hand, it means I can pull out monsters I would normally avoid.  It basically lets me go straight to the “Sweet Spot” of challenge that has been spoken about by the WOTC designers, the lower-mid-level challenges and up.  I don’t have to sit there and coddle the eggshells of heroes with rats and goblins.

In total

So, should everyone play with these rules?  By no means.  These are rules I would use, for the kind of game I would want.  But look at how much thought I had to put into them to get there, and then, I’d have to play with them to make sure they gelled correctly (the armor rules, for example, might break some things).

You notice that some of the rules deal with things I feel are longer term issues in D&D  throughout its various editions (alignment destroys parties, magic items wreck challenge), some are about color and heroic fantasy, and some are just personal pet peeves of play.

People change rules all the time, but do you really think about why and what it’s supposed to do?

If so, you’re a designer.  Welcome to the club.

Some thoughts on D&D gamehacks

Thinking about it a bit more, I realize I have a lot of things setup to prevent character death.

This isn’t about “precious characters” as much as it is about precious gametime.

Think of it this way- time spent -not- playing is not fun.  Time you spend unconcious losing hitpoints, time you spend building a new character, time you spend trying to figure out how to best use this new character in conjunction with the other charcters, etc.

If you get knocked out of a fight and it takes another 15- 20 minutes to finish, you’ve been punished enough- hence my pulp death rules- character death is still possible, just less likely and less of waste of time- you don’t spend the nest 5 rounds hoping someone heals you before you bleed out.

See, in previous editions, character building was pretty quick (not to mention, you probably were rolling with a war band, so lose a character? Just take another of out 20 odd people in the dungeon).  Here, character building doesn’t even necessarily speed up as you gain expertise, because the more you know, the further ahead you think with your build.

It’s not so much that characters die, it’s that they die so easily and usually spark a TPK which, pretty much means a game reset- all the prep the players did is now wasted, the GM can toss away any plot based encounters or has to retool them, etc.  Early on in play, at low levels, players might not even know enough to figure out what they did wrong, making it a high learning curve early in.  15 minutes of tactics to 45 minutes of character building is a poor ratio (even if you’re expert and pop a character together in 10-20 minutes, that’s still a bad ratio).

In comparison, videogames usually take just seconds before you’re back in play, usually with the opportunity to try the same challenge from different angles, to develop tactics.   Even boardgames don’t have as much downtime/setup between play to play.

Though I understand the joy of building in D&D is like building mechs in Armored Core or decks in Magic the Gathering, at the same point, the foundation of play is play…  Right now character death actually hurts play more than it helps