Lineup for Coulee Con 2019

Regular readers of my blog looking for all my interesting thoughts are redirected to the Rolemaster Blog, to which I’ve been contributing quite a bit lately. Folks directed here from Coulee Con, seeking more information for my game offerings this year, might be interested in the following. Here is my lineup in order of offering:

Eirik the Red’s Saga

Over the course of a few years of game time, play out some select scenarios inspired by Iceland’s Eirik the Red’s Saga.

System: Swords & Wizardry, some Rolemaster, house rules

The Green Wight

The High King of the White City neglected a sacred trust. Now brave adventurers must contend with powerful, uncanny forces to rescue their king from the Green Wight of the Green Wood. Inspired by the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

System: Swords & Wizardry, some Rolemaster, house rules

Gore in the Golden Hall

Every night a terrible troll wreaks carnage in the Golden Hall. Inspired by the Old English poem Beowulf.

System: Swords & Wizardry, some Rolemaster, house rules

Coulee Caverns

This is an old school dungeon crawl using Swords & Wizardry, a quick-playing articulation of the Original Game. Every year, for a few days only, the Mayor of the River Crossings opens up the Coulee Caverns to brave or foolish adventurers. Roll up a character, descend the gangway of molten rock called Remy’s Run, and try to survive to explore again next year.

If this is your first time exploring old school play, the following might be of use to you. It contains an old school primer as well as more background information regarding the game environment.

In Coulee Caverns, the Coulee Caverns are just level one. There are six levels total (though not all might be available). None of them are balanced (meaning, it is not intended that first-level characters should be capable of surviving every physical conflict), but Wandering Monsters are keyed to corresponding levels of difficulty. Gamers are free to explore any of these levels, though not all might be available.

1 The Coulee Caverns. A labyrinthine cave system. Strange stuff therein.

2 The Hicks House. A manor-house and grounds that got magically transported and locked underground.

3 The World’s Largest Six-Pack. Dwarves don’t typically brew anything precisely called “Dwarven Ale,” but these dwarves did: “Dwarven Ale,” fermented in six giant vats.

4 Temple of Guadala. This holy place currently is under siege by the Powers of Darkness.

5 The Silent City. A vast region of tombs.

6 Dungeon of the Demogorgon. Exactly what it says.

I intend to run this annually for the foreseeable future. The same character can and should be used for future sessions (unless it dies, of course, in which case the gamer is free to make a new one).

Old School Primer

1 Gold is xp, and that’s how you level up! But you don’t “cash in” on it until you get home. As soon as you gather a fair amount of treasure, get out of the dungeon and home! Come back to the dungeon on the next in-game “day.” (This also helps you recharge spells.)

2 You’re not supposed to win every conflict through violent force. Some of them you can’t. If you ever seem outmatched, run away!

3 Player Skill (not character skill) is what wins this game (and sometimes plain old luck). Your characters don’t have skills; you are the characters’ skills. There are few obstacles that can be overcome by using dice. Use your imaginations. Use your equipment and the items you find in the dungeon in creative ways. Use the environment to your tactical advantage.

4 Don’t get attached to your character. (Giving your character a silly name will help.) Your character will die! (If it doesn’t, thank the gods of the dice.) If your character expires, laugh and roll up or choose a new one. Jump back into the game.

Backstory

For millennia the city-state called The Crossings prospered, drawing to her walls all manner of folk, including Elves and Dwarves, on the banks of the Great River.

But the Dwarves, digging too deep (as they will) uncovered a Gate to the infernal realms, there through admitting the Demogorgon to the material plane.

The resulting war lasted one thousand years, the culmination of which saw reality twisted and ashen slag thrust up through a massive gorge. Up this Demogorgon’s armies marched.

The folk on the surface rallied. Ramparts were built against the demonic hordes. When Demogorgon himself ascended, the Paladin Lord Remy the Reverent met the fiend in single combat. The devil was cast into the Pit, but Remy followed thereafter.

For one hundred years the Order of the Reverent have kept vigil over the Gorge. Except for some rumblings now and then, it would seem their lord has vanquished the foe. Though others in The Crossings — madmen and heretics — would claim otherwise — that, instead, Demogorgon waits, will rise again in the fullness of time.

Meanwhile local adventurers petition for an opportunity to explore the Abyss. In the reality warp, portions of the Crossings were reorganized and locked underground along the walls of the Chasm. The Remites have explored the upper areas and reported at least five specific upper levels.

At last Mayor Kubo has agreed to open to a limited number of adventurers, on the date of August 18, the Gates of the Rampart. The stipulation is a ten percent tax on any wealth these foolishly brave folk might find. Good luck, you spelunkers marked for death!

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The Old School Revival Toolbox Versus the “Unified” Mechanic of Rolemaster (and Other Systems)

Also, Against the Darkmaster: The Classic Game of Fantasy Adventure… A New/Old Game for the New Year

If I have any long time regular readers (or if readers, for whatever reason, choose to view my old entries), those people will remember how, in a fit of nostalgia, I started running 1987’s Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP) for my bi-weekly home group about this time last year. That game very quickly became the “full” Rolemaster rules from circa 1987, then a paring down to “Original” Dungeons & Dragons as articulated in Matt Finch’s Swords & Wizardry–with the parts of RM I still liked ported in. I spent the remainder of last year very much making the game my own, and a very good game it is (if I say so myself!).

As an active member of the OSR (Old School Revival) community during that time, I encountered a dragon’s hoard of resources for making gaming the best it can be. Most iterations of Dungeons & Dragons offer various tools for DM/GM/Referee rulings and narrative/mechanical resolutions, as well as leaving open the possibility for many “mini-games” of the Ref’s own devising. The main tools (and my own interpretation and categorization of them) are as follows:

Ability scores – OSR characters are defined through six raw attributes. These numbers most often are calculated through rolls of 3d6 (sometimes 4d6, drop the lowest). Depending on the type of game, sometimes the player can arrange the resulting values across their six abilities, sometimes the gamer must abide by the order rolled, corresponding to the list of abilities.

My own translation to Rolemaster is as follows: players roll 3d6 and arrange as one likes. One number (usually the lowest value) can be turned into a 15 but this value must be assigned to a prime attribute (an ability most important for the specific kind of character as defined by “Class” or “Profession”).

Note: Why wouldn’t a player choose to translate a 15 to a prime attribute? For two reasons. The player might have rolled ridiculously high values (unlikely), or the gamer might want to play a magic type. In my Rolemaster version of OD&D, characters get a “bonus spell” with a prime attribute of 16 or more.

In the OSR community, Ability scores can be used for task resolution, usually through the player attempting to roll under the most relevant ability score with a d20 or a collection of d6s based on “difficulty.” The latest versions of D&D translated these Attributes to modifiers that are added to a single d20 roll that attempts to beat a Difficulty Number/Value/Class. Often, Skill values (see below) might be added to this roll.

In my game, I found myself not using Attributes at all (outside of the determination of derived abilities such as picking locks and opening doors). Instead most task resolution relied on common sense in terms of the fiction. If ever an outcome was uncertain, I used a Skill roll (see below).

Skill rolls–Well, since I’ve had cause to mention them twice, let’s just get to it. The derived and class abilities in old school games usually rely on a d6 roll (Check for Secret Doors) or a percentage (Disarm Traps). Most of the d6 rolls are successful on a roll of 1 or 2. Consequently, I used the same probability and die roll whenever a task resolution was in doubt (a 1 being an unqualified success, a 2 perhaps causing a complication). A particularly proficient character might succeed on a roll of 1-3.

This had some consonance with my translation from Rolemaster. In MERP, a frequent Background Option is 5 Ranks in a Secondary Skill. Without factoring the additional bonus that an Attribute might award the character in a Skill attempt, 5 Ranks roughly equals a 25% chance of succeeding at the Skill attempt. Similarly, the probability of a roll of 1-2 on a d6 is 33.3%.

Saving throws–In the mini-games of some published adventure modules I have seen this used as a method for Skill resolution, but I began to think of d6 Skill rolls or Ability checks as something to be used every time the character willfully attempts something, whereas a Saving throw should be used exclusively when a character reacts to something. Saving throws most often are used to survive poison one just ate, to dodge the dart suddenly springing out of the wall or to resist the mind control being attempted by the sorcerer. To further distinguish Saves from Skill rolls, a Save might be employed to prevent drowning when a character unexpectedly falls into the river while dressed in armor, whereas a Skill roll or an Ability check might be used after a character determines to attempt swimming over a fast-moving channel.

This is my game–or what had been my game–in a nutshell. Other features of Rolemaster that I retained were, of course, the gory Critical Hit Tables. A roll of a natural 20, as in most home ruled D&D games, was a critical hit. A second roll of d20 would determine the severity of the critical according to Rolemaster (severity A-E). Fighter-type characters might enjoy bonuses to this second roll, whereas other Classes and weapon types might have limitations.

I know that Rolemaster initially was developed as modular options for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, so I was surprised I couldn’t translate the spell system to my satisfaction. I think this is because many of the low level spells on the Rolemaster spell lists are fairly mundane. This is exacerbated because other aspects of D&D seem predicated on a fairly specific “spell economy” and tactical balance of magic. In other words, it seemed essential that my characters (and monsters) have early access to such powerful spells such as Sleep and Cure Light Wounds. Also, for being a modular rules set, Spell Law spells are surprisingly keyed to Arms Law effects–things like “Remove Stun” and many of the healing spells specific to breaks and bleeding conditions, situations unlikely to occur in my game now that the frequency of critical hits had been reduced.

To review, this game worked very well. In fact, I think this is now “my” D&D, the homebrew I expect to run any time I offer D&D at home or at conventions. When I first undertook this translation, various people on the Rolemaster forums and on this blog asked me what “problems” I was attempting to solve. The “solution,” presented here, perhaps reveals the source of my dissatisfaction, but I’ll try to be more specific with some general observations and my final “trigger” experience.

With MERP as written, two things chronically slowed down my gameplay: the mental calculation required to factor in a character’s Defensive Bonus during combat (which I admit is entirely a “personal problem”) and Weapon Stats, which I’m afraid were in many cases ignored, thereby leaving the narrative “veracity” often in doubt. Rolemaster provided an apparent remedy to this last struggle. It has a combat chart for every specific weapon. This negates the need to keep calculations in mind (+10 against Chain armor, -5 Plate, etc.). This created a new problem, though: a booklet of combat charts. No matter how well-tabbed my binder was, minutes of gameplay were lost because of page-flipping. Finally, the overall system began to bog me down. Six units of currency? Why? Treasure troves of 10,000 brass pieces? A short sword that was 15% lighter than others? Were we really supposed to be tracking Encumbrance with that much granularity?

Finally, combat conditions: 4 hits of Bleeding per round, now you’re at -10 to Activity, now add another-15, Stunned 4 rounds… Stun. My PCs randomly encountered a Wyvern. Somehow they kept landing blows to “stun-lock” the monster: stunned 4 rounds, stunned 6 rounds, ad infinitum.

It became clear to me that, were I to continue to enjoy gaming in a Middle-earth, I was going to have to adjust the system. Rather than hack Rolemaster itself, I delved deeper, back to even Rolemaster’s origins.

Already I have said that I am satisfied with the result. Many have described the d20 system as the lingua franca of the gaming community. For my gamers, my version of D&D felt comfy and familiar and sometimes surprising with local color.

Well, this was true for two of three of my gamers. The first two gamers are seasoned; they understand the language. The third is new, and suddenly the terms were bewildering to him: “Wait, I want to roll low this time? I don’t get it. Which one is the d20 again?” When we had been playing MERP, even if he didn’t understand all of the modifiers that contributed to a result, at least he knew that he would be rolling d100 and that he wanted to roll high.

I began to understand that the OSR toolbox was a great resource for me, the Referee, that it was grokable for my legacy gamers, but that it might be arcane for new players. The point is that every game mechanic tends to operate in terms of probabilities, so I understand the tendency (now) to find one (or two) vehicle(s) for expressing those probabilities and stick to it (or those).

There is, however, an argument for using a variety of methods for resolving probabilities. The first is that all of those polyhedral dice are simply cool. I have them, so I want to roll them. The second is that systems can be designed to make all those surfaces a necessity. Systems that require dice pools (such as the Genesys system) are particularly convincing.

But all these tools, I recognized, weren’t exactly necessary for old school D&D. At about the same time, I began to desire a change. Perhaps something more simulationist. Perhaps something that incentivized a specific narrative genre. Perhaps something heroic.

The Rolemaster Blog had alerted me to an upcoming game (with a playtest) that I had looked at with interest but, happy with my D&D homebrew, hadn’t fully explored. With new understanding, I approached it again… and was charmed. The designers appeared to have had an experience with MERP that was similar to my own. When the designers learned that their beloved game hadn’t aged in quite the way that they had, they tinkered with it until they were satisfied.

I’m not sure yet if I’m satisfied with what they have done (the designers probably aren’t, either), but I don’t have to be. This is a new product, exhibiting much of what I had been wishing for, into which I can write my own content. Moreover, it might be that my own ideas or preferences will have some influence on the final product, since now I’ll be interacting with the playtest. But it doesn’t matter. Every GM at every table makes the game his or her own anyway.

In conclusion, my quest for the Holy Grail of Gaming carries on. It will end, almost certainly, with me writing my own. Just how much I will use from an established system remains to be seen, and it also is certain that this Holy Grail will proliferate, depending on what, specifically, I’m seeking to emulate at the time. For now, though, Against the Darkmaster has a lot for me to like.

Crafting the Coulee Caverns

The very first session of the Coulee Caverns. Pictured: top left – me; bottom left – Curt Parr; bottom right – Karen Bovenmyer; top right – Michael Holcomb; photo by Karen Bovenmyer

My original submissions for my local Coulee Con naturally were for Rolemaster, the system I had been running for my home game. After some careful thinking, however, I decided that this all-games-are-welcome-appealing-broadly-to-families con would benefit more from an old school D&D adventure built specifically for this event. Hence the Coulee Caverns were conceived. In my main promotion I was certain to capitalize on the popularity of Stranger Things by claiming that this was the edition that the kids in the Netflix series were playing. (They probably were more accurately using AD&D1e, however.)

Then I conceived of the dungeon, and, over a series of three promotional pieces published on Facebook, I made sure that prospective players knew what they were in for. Natives of the local region would be likely to recognize “Easter eggs” in the dungeon levels. The city of The Crossings, for example, is La Crosse (the location of Coulee Con) in plain English. Six massive towers of La Crosse’s City Brewery are referred to as “the world’s largest six-pack.” A shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe lies nearby. Etc.

In Coulee Caverns, the Coulee Caverns are just level one. There are six levels total (though not all might be available). None of them are balanced (meaning, it is not intended that first-level characters should be capable of surviving every physical conflict), but Wandering Monsters are keyed to corresponding levels of difficulty. Gamers are free to explore any of these levels, though not all might be available.

1 The Coulee Caverns. A labyrinthine cave system. Strange stuff therein.

2 The Hicks House. A manor-house and grounds that got magically transported and locked underground.

3 The World’s Largest Six-Pack. Dwarves don’t typically brew anything precisely called “Dwarven Ale,” but these dwarves did: “Dwarven Ale,” fermented in six giant vats.

4 Temple of Guadala. This holy place currently is under siege by the Powers of Darkness.

5 The Silent City. A vast region of tombs.

6 Dungeon of the Demogorgon. Exactly what it says.

Gamers can participate in any or all events this year or in years following (I intend to run this annually for the foreseeable future). The same character can and should be used for every session (unless it dies, of course, in which case the gamer is free to make or choose a new one).

Old School Primer

1 Gold is xp, and that’s how you level up! But you don’t “cash in” on it until you get home. As soon as you gather a fair amount of treasure, get out of the dungeon and home! Come back to the dungeon on the next in-game “day.” (This also helps you recharge spells.)

2 You’re not supposed to win every conflict through violent force. Some of them you can’t. If you ever seem outmatched, run away!

3 Player Skill (not character skill) is what wins this game (and sometimes plain old luck). Your characters don’t have skills; you are the characters’ skills. There are few obstacles that can be overcome by using dice. Use your imaginations. Use your equipment and the items you find in the dungeon in creative ways. Use the environment to your tactical advantage.

4 Don’t get attached to your character. (Giving your character a silly name will help.) Your character will die! (If it doesn’t, thank the gods of the dice.) If your character expires, laugh and roll up or choose a new one. Jump back into the game.

Backstory

For millennia the city-state called The Crossings prospered, drawing to her walls all manner of folk, including Elves and Dwarves, on the banks of the Great River.

But the Dwarves, digging too deep (as they will) uncovered a Gate to the infernal realms, there through admitting the Demogorgon to the material plane.

The resulting war lasted one thousand years, the culmination of which saw reality twisted and ashen slag thrust up through a massive gorge. Up this Demogorgon’s armies marched.

The folk on the surface rallied. Ramparts were built against the demonic hordes. When Demogorgon himself ascended, the Paladin Lord Remy the Reverent met the fiend in single combat. The devil was cast into the Pit, but Remy followed thereafter.

For one hundred years the Order of the Reverent have kept vigil over the Gorge. Except for some rumblings now and then, it would seem their lord has vanquished the foe. Though others in The Crossings — madmen and heretics — would claim otherwise — that, instead, Demogorgon waits, will rise again in the fullness of time.

Meanwhile local adventurers petition for an opportunity to explore the Abyss. In the reality warp, portions of the Crossings were reorganized and locked underground along the walls of the Chasm. The Remites have explored the upper areas and reported at least five specific upper levels.

At last Mayor Kubaut has agreed to open to a limited number of adventurers, on the date of August 24, the Gates of the Rampart. The stipulation is a ten percent tax on any wealth these foolishly brave folk might find. Good luck, you spelunkers marked for death!

In ways this next part is an extensive and unsolicited advertisement for some of Kent David Kelly’s products. Though I have owned most of them in PDF for a while now and have used a number of them, it wasn’t until recently that I really looked at Dungeon Design Guide III, and it transformed my process. In a nutshell, Kelly identifies six types of Dungeon: the Cavern System, the Manor-house, the Temple, the Tomb, the Stronghold, and (of course) the Dungeon. You can see how these map onto my dungeon levels already described.

In previous design guides Kelly wrote about these concepts, but in DDGIII specifically he responds to reader requests to make a massive table that, with a d1000 roll, generates a type of room (depending on the adventure location in mind) from Apartments to Ziggurat. The owner of this manual can use the table however she likes, but I used it to generate about 30 rooms for each of the six types of locations. I wrote these rooms and some descriptions on large index cards and then grouped the cards into “areas” that made the most sense. Then I drew the maps.

Kelly publishes another table that is essential for my newfound process. This is the Chaotic Descriptor Table found in his Adventure Generator. Add the result of this d1000 roll to your room and… well, allow your imagination to do the rest.

Before striking on these tools and this system I had read lots of dungeon building advice (including Kelly’s and Matt Finch’s) and had attempted devising other design systems. Finch has advised that half of all dungeon rooms should be “empty.” Others claim that no dungeon location should be just an empty room. Using the system described here settled this for me: the room could very well be empty, but at least it has or once had an understandable purpose (it’s a Meeting Hall, for example), and now it is Jade (the room no longer need be necessarily “empty,” depending on whether the imagination lines the walls with jade, or tables and chairs of jade, or even a jade figurine along a wall or on a table).

This system also intuitively provides the other elements of a good dungeon adventure in a ratio approximate to what tends to be recommended (the other half of the rooms). Plenty of the descriptors will suggest unusual features, NPCs, tricks, traps, monsters or treasure.

The events went well. I met some new people, gamed again with friends I had met the previous year, and all around I am looking forward to next year (and expect I’ll have some repeat players at my tables). This con grows in attendance and offerings year after year. I hope to see the Coulee Caverns experience likewise grow.

Skills Systems and a Creative Crisis

About a year ago I posted on the I.C.E. forums about what a “skill-less” Rolemaster might look like. Was it an idle topic? Not for me! But it puzzled the community. If I remember it right (and I suppose this can be confirmed on the forum) one person said that Rolemaster is skills. Another person asked me what problem I was trying to solve. I thought these were worthwhile responses, so I let the matter drop, even though I already had created something that I considered calling a skill-less Rolemaster. But I played MERP. I added RM2 to it. I kept playing.

But after the nostalgic exuberance began to fade away, I recognized that something wasn’t quite right. I wasn’t pleased as a GM. More and more I began to approach my game night with trepidation. Preparation was anxiety-laden. GMing began to feel more and more like “work.” It reminded me, in fact, of my time running Pathfinder and, after that, the limitations I had begun to find with the Yggdrasill system.

And then I started running Swords & Wizardry for a crowd on Discord and I remembered why once I had been pursuing a skill-less system. The skills (and weapon charts) in Rolemaster that looked beautiful from a design standpoint were strangling me as a GM. The pace of my games annoyed me — though I learned it didn’t necessarily annoy my friends. In Swords & Wizardry I made fast rulings — “Okay, roll 4d6 under your Dexterity. No good? Okay” — whereas in Rolemaster I puzzled from one chart to the next — “You got an 89? On Armor Type 19? That’s… 4 hits. Okay, I’ll deduct 4 from this meat sack of a Wyvern.” At the end of this latter session I tossed away my dice and said, “I’m sorry, friends, but I’m done.” I was ready for a sabbatical. I even had arranged for another member of the group to run something in the interim.

But they wanted to keep playing. They understood my frustration. They perhaps even felt some of it themselves. But they were immersed in the story. They were engrossed in Middle-earth. They were invested in their characters. They wanted to keep developing them. And then I remembered.

“Well,” I said, taking Swords & Wizardry down from the shelf. “We could convert these characters over to D&D.”

Except not entirely to just D&D. I have read a number of testimonials from old school gamers who started with AD&D. They added Arms Law & Claw Law. Then they added Spell Law. And then they started playing Rolemaster and never went back to that “simpler” system from which Rolemaster had evolved. But I looked again at Rolemaster’s origin as modular options for AD&D and I started pulling out the things I didn’t like. Then I took what remained and plugged it back into an old school d20 chassis. How does it run? Well, I’ll be happy to give reports after a few sessions.

The wonderful thesis of Matt Finch’s Swords & Wizardry is that anything not covered in the core rules (which are reduced to elemental compounds) is for the game group to work out on its own. This, in fact, is the attitude of the entire OSR — that the original rules is a template to be stretched and pulled and modified and compounded to result in startling new simulations and emulations. Similarly, Rolemaster designer Coleman Charlton, often in the face of surprising RM edition wars, emphatically states that RM is and always has been a gamer’s toolkit for groups to modify or nullify however they see fit.

So I present now, for interested readers with an understanding of both Original D&D and Rolemaster, my own old school revival of modular D&D/RM2. Well, you might notice some home innovations as well. This has yet to be taken out for a spin, but I’m looking forward to it!

MERP Modifications for Swords & Wizardry

Attributes

Roll 3d6 6x. Lowest value may become 15 but must be applied to a Prime Attribute.

Magic

Power Points based on Int, Wis or Cha. 13-15 1, 16-17 2, 18-19 3, 20+ 4.

PCs enjoy chance to learn spell lists according to Race. Magic-users 5 ranks/lvl. Druids 5. Clerics 3. Rangers 1.

Modifiers to spell preparation – 4 rds 0, 3 rds +1, 2 rds +2, 1 rd +3, 0 rds +4.

Base Casting – Casters 3d6 under Attribute. Secondary 4d6. Others 5d6.

Combat Casting – Casters roll on Fighters table. Secondary on Cleric table. Others on Thief.

Combat

Fighters, Rangers and Paladins enjoy +1 to attacks from the back.

Critical hits. On a natural 20, a second roll is made for the degree of the critical. 1-4 A, 5-8 B, 9-12 C, 13-16 D, 17-20 E. Fighters (and subclasses) add attribute and item bonuses to this roll. Fighters may increase or decrease critical roll by level + attribute + item.

Damage/Death/Healing

0 hp = unconscious, -Con = death. Heal 1 hp/hr resting, 1 per 3 hrs not resting.

Foraging

Determine “level of effect.” Roll 4d6 – lvl under Wisdom +2/effect level. Other factors (location, climate, etc.) might apply.

XP

Each session worth an average of 200 xp each player. Creature points divided. Hp lost. Travel points. Idea points. Spell points (spell lvl x 10). Critical (A – 10, B – 20, C – 30, D – 40, E – 50). Expenses (detailed below).

Assassin – poisons or assassination preparations

Cleric – charity

Druid – nature preservation

Fighter – training

Magic-user – research

Monk – charity

Paladin – charity

Ranger – value of herbs foraged (effect lvl x 10)

Thief – gold “liberated” or stolen (including from lairs)

Hobbits – gold spent on food, drink and smoke

Gold and Equipment a Swords & Wizardry economy

Gamist Narrativist Simulationist Theory and “Cost” in My MERP/RM Game

Last session, my players told me, marked session 10 in the MERP campaign. This is an important number now that I have implemented house rules for xp. Each player receives 1,000 xp per session played, so, for all players who have participated in every session, any new characters that must be generated due to character death begin at level two.

I will organize this post around some thoughts inspired by Ken over at the Rolemaster Blog, who has posted another fascinating entry in his series deconstructing and criticizing the RM system and game design in general. His topic this time was “Cost.” What he means, I think, by Cost in gaming is how much time and energy is subsumed in resolving and tracking game mechanics. Ken spent his time analyzing RM character generation and combat charts. The cost of character generation, at my table, doesn’t figure much. The characters already are generated, most of them built by me, and they are MERP characters, easier to generate than true RM characters. And I have an obvious algorithm (maximize, if possible, one or more favored Weapon Skills of the culture; maximize Body Development; in all other cases put at least one rank into a skill to avoid the -25 penalty). The cost of the charts and roll resolutions were more present in my mind, however, particularly when I heard one player mention, “And now Gabe is over there playing his own private game while we wait to see what happened.” What he was referring to, of course, was how I was consulting a weapon chart, taking into consideration the attacker’s Offensive Bonus, situational modifiers, and the defender’s Defensive Bonus, finding my entry, something like “12AP,” in which case flipping to another chart and asking for another roll from the player, perhaps trying to keep in mind how much Bleeding or rounds of Stun might be going on, etc. My players don’t really mind this high Cost to my game environment: half of the group are old skoolers and dedicated gamers, period, and the other half are newbs who, at this point in their enculturation, kind of appreciate most of the “debt” being lifted from them, waiting patiently or chatting with other players while the GM figures things out. If action might appear slow from an individual player’s perspective, the GM’s head is a welter of activity, inhabited by an evolving tactical environment in which heroes and antagonists square off, one against the other, both parties often unaware of other possibilities emerging from corners or just “off screen.”

So it seems to me that, depending on the player role at the table, the Cost varies in terms of burden of responsibility and perception. Cost can be increased, of course, depending on the level of experience of the player (not character, though that could mean something too — higher level characters often are higher maintenance). As I mentioned, Ken, for now, focused on Cost in terms of character generation and combat resolution. But it occurred to me, last session, that Cost is interesting to apply to all three prongs of GNS theory. Cost might be Gamist in terms of range of choices to the player, how long it takes to explain and retain the weights and implications of these choices. Cost might be Narrativist, usually in regards to the GM, in how many story strands and environmental details (which may or may not translate into mechanical costs) the GM has to maintain, track and prepare for. Cost might be Simulationist, that which Ken focused on, in terms of how much time and energy it takes to mechanically resolve the Gamist and Narrativist choices made by players and GM. Last session, I had occasion to reflect on all three of these aspects.

To begin with the Gamist considerations, at this time, in my own game, there isn’t much. As I said, the characters are made, so, for the most part, players are consigned to a narrative choice, as I have explained sufficiently, or to the rolling of a d100. Their bonuses are predetermined; environmental and situational modifiers often result from narrative choices, and some real Gamist choices originate from resource management. This last session, largely because a character finally was able to identify some of them, a player started making use of his potions to (mostly) good effect.

Something new was revealed to me, however. My players began to shake their heads and wonder at all the misses they were making on some unarmored Weak Orcs. At the same time, these Orcs were doing consistent damage on some of their own armored characters. It occurred to me that the players didn’t have the combat charts. An essential element of the game is how armor and weapons interact with one another. For example, because a character is more agile without armor, it’s more difficult to land a blow on an unarmored character rather than an armored one. And some weapons are better suited than others to this attempt. The players should be made cognizant of these choices. Therefore, next session I’m going to have a few extra copies of the most relevant weapon attack tables. Players can even look up their own results, if they want. I think this will benefit the game.

Narrativist considerations are deceptively a non-issue in determinations of Cost. Players simply make their choices (though sometimes they need to be hurried along if they start micro-strategizing in the midst of combat, or if they fall into analysis paralysis). I find the most potential for cost, in the Narrativist regard, in the GM’s camp, however. Last session my players, as usual, went a much different path than I had expected. So instead of paging through combat charts I found myself paging through old maps and locales. What was going on at the alchemist’s cave? What would the PCs find? I had had a few ideas — they might even have been written down somewhere — but that was sessions ago! Sometimes Narrativist choices result in Simulationist choices. I love to consult the weather tables (which I forgot to do last session). PCs get xp for miles traveled. Instead of calculating it, I ballparked it.

The lesson I have been learning most clearly as this campaign progresses, however, is that, simply put, the more choices the GM offers his players the more narrative work, or Cost, it is for the GM. It seems like the very best advice a GM can heed when starting a sandbox campaign is to make just three hexes of adventure locations. And maybe stop there. As old skoolers have learned from generations of megadungeons, the location is always changing and repopulating anyway, always worth a second or third or fourth visit. Also, sandbox design encourages emergent storytelling. Two sessions ago, my PCs released a Shadow into the world. Their intention is track it down and end it. So the Shadow had to be somewhere, and an adventure location was required. But it wasn’t used — at least not yet. My PCs’ choices resulted in them going back to some other locations, and the story careened down a much different route than otherwise expected. What I’m saying is that, after three initial adventure locations as choices, the GM best uses her time designing new ones as the narrative demands them, not because he simply has some more on hand and has a new, cool idea.

To reduce Cost on the GM’s narrative end, I have been trying to fit all necessary information into a single map on a single page. In the margins I try to consolidate all Monster and NPC stats and Treasure descriptions. I use colored pencils, as much as possible, to give me visual cues of what rooms contain and possible light sources.

After an adventure, it should become necessary to update these maps and descriptions. I will try to keep them current and organized in a binder. Perhaps I’ll take some time this week redoing a lot of this work, streamlining and cleaning it.

Simulationism has the highest Cost, of course, and here choices in efficiency often have a detrimental result on realism and my own enjoyment of the game. Again and again I consider new Gamist elements or simplifications. Again and again I reject them in favor of just progressing on with the rules we have and moving one step closer towards that elusive chimera, System Mastery. The problem with introducing an innovation for a questionable need is that a new rule, no matter how ingenious, is an just one more thing to keep cognizant of, a potential for yet one more error. Sharing combat charts should help. Personal study and fine-tuning of my screen and binder should have similar benefit.

Anyway, I again have reaped benefit from Ken’s new Rolemaster series. I expect to improve my game with these thoughts. I look forward to more analysis of RM game design.

Simulation, Emulation, and an “Appendix N” for Rolemaster

Naturally, I frequent the Rolemaster Blog. And it has become quite interesting lately with a new contributor’s system analysis of Rolemaster’s central feature. In the midst of this discussion, the term “simulationist” has come up a number of times as a description of the type of game that Rolemaster is.

For some time, I had been using this term to describe Rolemaster simply because I knew the meaning of the word; I meant it to mean that the Rolemaster rules seeks to “simulate,” as accurately as possible, the “real world.” Now, there are two reasons to put “real world” in quotations. The first is because Rolemaster — and most simulationist roleplaying games — are fantasy roleplaying games. Fantasy is not real (as if you needed to be told). The second reason is because, in my reading of simulationism in roleplaying games, I find simulationist used as a synonym for “emulationist.”

This is yet another word that I had been employing in conversations about roleplaying games, but I wasn’t applying the term to Rolemaster. Instead, I would say, for example, “Many argue that Rolemaster, being a derivative of D&D, isn’t very good at emulating Tolkien. Some people say The One Ring does this exponentially better.” But I believe that Rolemaster is simulationist because I see, in its aims, an attempt to simulate what one particular weapon would do against a specific type of armor. It seeks to move away from damage as articulated as only abstract hit points and brings breaking bones, bleeding arteries, stunned bodies, nerveless arms, organ and limb loss, and even instant death through its critical hit tables. Through this it seeks to emulate the “real world.” So, the other reason for quoting “real” is because of the postmodernist conceit that there is little agreement in what comprises the “real.”

It so happens that just recently — I’m not sure why now, perhaps the changing seasons? — my reading has moved away from Gygaxian Appendix N stuff into nonfiction, though the texts still bear on my gaming, particularly on Rolemaster’s Middle-earth. I just finished The Worst Journey in the World — dubbed adventure writing — and this certainly is why specific references to dogsleds and “finnekso” are in my current play-by-post campaign. I’m reading Weapons through the Ages, studying Old Norse, and recently opened up what essentially amounts to a botanical textbook called Flora of Middle-Earth. All of these have corollaries in Peter Fenlon’s original reading list in Rolemaster, even the MERP reading list.

Gygax’s Appendix N is composed entirely of fantasy and science fiction that D&D is designed to emulate. The Rolemaster recommended reading list, in comparison, is almost entirely nonfiction, and thus the two lists demonstrate my own developing distinction of a simulationist versus emulationist in game systems.

Many online discussions appear to designate simulationist roleplaying games as older rules sets whose popularity was greatest during the 80s and 90s. Today, now (to generalize), the vogue appears to be “rules lite” and emulationist games that evoke specific source material or intellectual properties — though, naturally, this emulationist project began in the 80s and 90s. A personal favorite game of mine is West End Games’s Star Wars Roleplaying Game, an emulationist game that is, in my opinion, superior to the current Fantasy Flight version. And the d6 system that West End uses for the property is “lighter” than Fantasy Flight’s, and this contributes to a fast pace more conducive to the frenetic action of Star Wars movies. The major criticism I’ve heard for these rules is that Jedi characters are overpowered or “broken” after long advancement. But this, in my view, contributes all the more to the emulation — have you seen how powerful Jedi are in the movies? Moreover, this system might have been the first to formalize emulation by giving the GM direct advice about the kinds of stories and narratives that are essential features for (in this case) a Star Wars adventure. According to WEG, the Star Wars adventure formula is as follows: every adventure must contain at least one episode solved with combat, one involving ship-to-ship combat, one involving a chase, and one requiring interaction with NPCs.

Early in the history of rpgs, a genre that began to be emulated was the superhero milieu. But, as I discovered one commenter detailing on the forums, does a specific rules set seek to allow a player to be Spider-man as if he is in the “real world” or Spider-man as if he is in a comic book? In short, the observation posits that various genres contain different tonal and narrative “rules” that might not be present in “reality.”

To bring these musings back to Rolemaster, I imagine that The One Ring plays out as if one is in Tolkien’s epics, whereas MERP plays as if one is in the world as visioned through Tolkien’s epics. For this reason many have criticized MERP as an emulation of Tolkien’s world. And it certainly doesn’t give advice to the GM about how to tell stories as Tolkien does!

Nonetheless, might Rolemaster also contain an emulationist aspect, perhaps one that is buried? The answer here is difficult because RM is derived directly from D&D. So one would expect its pedigree to be similar to the one evolved from Appendix N. But I don’t think so. I already have pointed to notable differences in RM’s recommended reading, and I find even more differences in RM’s Creatures & Treasures versus D&D’s Monster Manuals. Many Appendix N readers find direct analogs from Appendix N to D&D monsters. What’s curious is that, between RM and D&D, even the same name of a monster does not necessitate a similar character.

A first evidence of this can be found on the ICE boards. One gamer was puzzled by a description of the Goblin in RM’s Creatures & Treasures: “Goblins possess greenish, yellow skin and tender, toeless feet. To protect these sensitive appendages from hurt (and, perhaps, to hide their lack of toes … ), Goblins wear clumsy, stone clogs. When particularly enraged, they attempt to denude a scapegoat of his clogs and stamp with laughter upon the exposed limbs.” As has been pointed out on the forum, the antecedent for this description does not come from a Monster Manual but from George MacDonald’s fairy tale classic The Princess and the Goblin. Is MacDonald included in Gygax’s Appendix N? It appears not.

Another obvious monster to look at is the Troll. The D&D troll, with its regenerative properties that can be halted only by acid or fire, clearly is drawn from Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions. The RM trolls, naturally, are derived from Tolkien, who himself derived them from Norse Mythology. Most notable with RM trolls is their relationship to sunlight: Stone Trolls, in daylight, are turned to stone.

Gnomes also are interesting. For a long time in manuscript forms, Tolkien’s Elves were named Gnomes rather than Elves. This probably is because of the name’s association with wisdom (see the adjective “gnomic” or even the Oxford Dictionary entry for “gnome”). How do RM’s Gnomes compare to D&D’s? Well, for starters, they are not short. They also seem more regal, not the tricksters and tinkerers of D&D: “Bald, wizened men who usually live in shallow caves, long-lived Gnomes gather knowledge and lore as a hobby. Ancient tomes and rare scrolls litter their crowded libraries, precious chambers that usually fall to ruin with a Gnome’s death.” It’s clear that RM has fastened on the association with “wisdom.” But it’s not so clear how much, at the writing of C&T, the contributors knew about Tolkien’s early use of the appellation.

These are examples that have come to me randomly, as I have returned to the game of my youth and expanded my game options with C&T. I’m sure that I will encounter many more curiosities as I continue with my preferred game. And I want to share one last one, mostly because of how linguistically interesting it is: the Gnoll.

Because I finally began playing D&D at 3e I now know what a Gnoll is: those hyena-like humanoids of fields and plains. But I had heard this term as a designation of a kind of being well before 3e, and in my own mind had made of it something quite different: a short, green skinned, perhaps warty humanoid that lives in a hill. This last idea was probably suggested by the Gnoll’s close association with the word knoll, which of course is a type of hill. I also might have had in mind the cutified Norwegian trolls of the mounds, the “hill-folk,” the “underground people,” shortish beings with cow tails who herd reindeer. These are the ideas and associations that composed a picture, for me, independent of the Monster Manual. I would be interested in where the contributor for Gnoll in C&T got his or her ideas, for these Gnolls likewise are not hyena-men, but “small, wrinkled men with grey skin and little hair.” They live in caverns and grottos and typically wear “sober, earth-toned clothing.” I think that my young imagination and C&T is more in agreement about this fellow than D&D’s Monster Manual, but what is the “real” or literary antecedent for the being? I can’t find one. There isn’t even an entry in the Oxford Dictionary.

I think that I have begun to reveal something interesting about Rolemaster. It’s rules system quite clearly is derived from D&D with an aim towards more “real world” simulationism, but in terms of literary inspiration (and therefore emulation) it is almost entirely on a parallel track of imaginative storytelling. I would love to understand exactly what the original designers of RM might have had in mind, because at this point I’m willing to predict an alternative “Appendix N” for Rolemaster, one that might not share most of its literary influences. It might look something like this:

Alexander, Lloyd; The Book of Three and others

Arabian Nights 

Beowulf

Eddison, E.R.; The Worm Ouroboros, The Mezentian Gate Trilogy

Dunsany; Complete Works

The Faerie Queene

Hodgson, William Hope; Complete Works

Homer

Le Guin, Ursula; A Wizard of Earthsea and others

L’engle, Madeline; A Wrinkle in Time and others

Lewis, C.S.; Complete Works

Lindsay, David; A Voyage to Arcturus

MacDonald, George; Complete Fantasies

Morris, William; Complete Fantasies

Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained

Peake, Mervyn; The Gormenghast Trilogy

Tolkien; Complete Works

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Stewart, Mary; The Crystal Cave and others

White, T.H.; The Once and Future King

Interestingly, the only books in common between this and Appendix N appear to be Lord Dunsany and Tolkien. The works on this list also seem to be more “English” in nationality. The writers also seem to be more often “theistically minded.” What do you think should be included in this “Appendix RM”? Did I miss anything obvious?

A Local Con and an Ongoing Campaign

My games are submitted for Coulee Con, an annual gaming convention in my area.

A month ago I had been telling folks that I was going to be running Monolith’s Conan board game, all day, every day. This was because time constraints made most offerings—even rpg offerings—smaller, tactical scenarios, and Monolith Conan is 100% this kind of experience anyway. I also was going to run it because I just really like the game, and, since I privilege long rpg campaigns in my Monday night home game, I never get a chance to play it.

But when it came right down to submitting events, I realized that I feel more comfortable offering what grows directly out of what has been occupying me creatively lately, and so here is what I submitted to TableTop:

Middle-Earth Role Playing: Shadows Under Amon Muina
Long before The One Ring, there was Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP). This adventure, using Iron Crown Enterprises’s original 1986 game, is based on Tolkien’s aborted sequel “The New Shadow” and involves PCs investigating a Fourth Age secret cult within the suburbs of Minas Tirith.

Rolemaster: Grendel’s Lair
Play out the first part of the epic Old English poem Beowulf using Iron Crown Enterprises’s Rolemaster system. This scenario was offered last Coulee Con but with a different rpg system.

Rolemaster: The Green Wight
Explore the Green Howe for a deadly date with the Green Wight! This scenario uses Iron Crown Enterprises’s Rolemaster system to reimagine and retell the ultimate events of the epic Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

(If you wish to see any of these adventures in detail, please visit my Middle-Earth Role Playing/Rolemaster page on this site. Home gamers, this does not mean you!)

A lot of Rolemaster there, yep. I think, if things continue along these lines, I might have to join the Order of the Iron Crown.

The “Rolemaster” I’m offering is sort of an interesting experiment for con play, too. I have devised my own character sheets for both MERP and RM2 that use the NPC tables for quick generation of the only stats that should matter for con play. I will allow players to customize their characters, however, by using Background Points to increase adventuring skills, buy Secondary Skills, or roll on item tables. I’m also innovating an additional resource that allows players to reroll one or more of the percentile dice by spending Power Points (a resource usually reserved solely for spell-casting). If this “con rule” works out, I might consider offering it at home.

The Weeping Lady Barcorodon

Last session was a “beard party,” as a gamer who wasn’t able to attend called it. This meant that the only ones present were myself and two other gamers, those of us who have sizable enough beards.

For being just a party of two, these two gamers did quite well. They were rolling fantastically and so quite easily dispatching a number of Walking Dead, mostly by allowing them out of their niches (the poor things had been scratching and pushing at their cupboard doors for some time) and hacking at them or burning them as they tried to get out.

This session was the first “evolution” to the full RM2 attack and critical tables, and since I had them all “cut out” (the previous owner had done a lot of that cutting for me), put into plastic and affixed with easily identifiable tabs in a binder, it went pretty smoothly. I think the one thing I forgot was that critical effects are supposed to be one step lower on Walking Dead, and I’m still forgetting to consult all relevant weapon stats while rolling on the attack tables. I heard someone on a podcast recently refer to what, back in the day, he and his friends began to call “Volo’s Law.” As many know, Volo is an unreliable researcher, a fictional character developed for one of D&D’s properties — Forgotten Realms, I think. Whenever this player’s group realized, belatedly, that they had forgotten something in the game, they simply said, “Oh, well, that’s Volo’s Law,” which was to mean that sometimes things just don’t go the way they are “supposed to,” an accurate enough reflection of reality itself, I believe, and so I’m using this sentiment also to shrug away seeming inconsistencies in my simulationist game, as well.

This last session got most interesting when the players encountered the statue of the Weeping Lady of Barcorodon. Now, I had no idea this was her name until the Hobbit Scout character, with the Lore Secondary Skill that he uses a lot, rolled really quite well on a Static Maneuver. I allowed that he hadn’t come across anything in Dunadan records, but he did remember, from somewhere in his subconscious, a Shire song called “The Ballad of Berry Salt-Tears.” In the midst of the adventure I was able to improv the basic sketch of the folk tale, and I since then I have written the ballad itself.

The Ballad of Berry Salt-Tears
A Shire Song

Berry Salt-tears wept beside
The ocean’s splashing strand.
Her lover, sailing on, had gone
From out the warded land.

For many years he had been lost
In Ulmo’s crashing seas,
Not one long night in all that time
Had Berry’s weeping ceased.

Her tears fell from the ocean’s edge
Into the churning waves,
And, mingled with Uinen’s blood,
Flowed through abyssal caves.

Until it reached yon lover’s soul
Where long he had abode
In mansions built of glowing coral
Where deepest waters flowed.

And so his soul was called across
The fathoms to his love,
And from the surf he told his tale
To where she wept above.

He had been wrecked at stormy sea
So many years ago;
Two porpoises his lifeless corse
Bore fathoms deep below.

To Ulmo’s land beneath the sea
Where elves eternal dwell,
And given form of watery mien
Maintain a ceaseless revel.

And Berry Salt-tear too may go
And live beneath the sea
If love for him she had enough,
Her home to ever flee.

But Berry Salt-tear balked a beat
At that uncanny offer,
And in that time the moon broke free
From wispy gray cloud cover.

No more within the sucking tide
Against the sea-spray rocks
Did suitor float with loving gaze
And seafoam streaming locks.

And Berry Salt-tear rose from where
She’d wept for her lost man,
And ever since that day, they say,
She never cried again.

Whence this Barcorodon/Berry Salt-tears? Well, it’s origin, much like the statue of Kardakion (feet on the backs of two porpoises, at the entrance to the crypt) comes from the box text of the adventure Crypts of Kardak from Creation’s Edge Games (though the box text statue is two twining snakes and nothing at all like I devised), this one, much more directly, comes from a description of what the adventure calls the “Weeping Maiden.” Again, as with some of the dungeon elements that I described last post, there is magical light and non-natural “explanations” for things, so I happily reskinned the statue here. There was supernal light, though mine came from the shallow basin in her hands into which the statue wept. The adventure descibes the tears falling into a basin at her feet. And the tears themselves? I made them natural cave-flow formations that dripped down from the ceiling, becoming one with her hair and trailing down around her shoulders. There was some magic here — undoubtedly MERP’s “Channeling” magic — but only in the tears that collected in the basin. The rest formed more rock flows, like candle wax, that dripped down over the sides of this shallow glowing bowl.

The session was a success. The Hobbit Scout had much more difficulty with a Crypt Rat than either he or the Dunadan Ranger had had with the Walking Dead. He was reduced below 0 hp but brought back with a Ring of Healing. They are ready to recommence exploring the Crypt next session, hopefully with some new recruits (other gamers).

I also have struck on a great idea for campaign xp. Every session, PCs gain 1,000 xp in addition to the regular calculated xp per the tables in MERP and in RM. Should these characters die, new characters can be created with xp equal to 1,000 per session in which the gamer has participated. All other xp, specific to those particular deceased characters, are lost though.