Catching pokemon in a pen and paper game

Related to this and this. If I am using tamed monsters as a magic system, there has to be a way to catch them. Or not? I am very confused about how to do it. 

On one hand I have the analogic ways:

Getting into the wilderness (aka the tall grass)  until a monster pops up, then catching them with a pokeball equivalent. This works perfectly on the videogames, but I see how it can become tedious on a tabletop. Grinding a place to find one pokemon that one player happens to want makes all the other players who dont have anything to do at that place just stop and watch the show. If I do it too easy so the pokemon is catched fast, its almost the same as giving the player the monster straight. 

An even more analogic version of this is if the monsters are not catch with pokeballs, but convinced to follow a leader by actually roleplaying and discovering the monster's motivations or personality. This is great to have sometimes, but having it as the main point of the game for sorcerers and not for the rest of the classes might make them absorb a lot of game time that is not spent doing teamwork. It is also difficult, as it might seem easy to bond with a pikachu in game, but other monsters can be a challenge for the GM to roleplay in this manner.

A middle option is to make the player roll their pokeball or do their talk no jutsu once per downtime or so, allowing retrys once some time has passed.

The more boring option is just to give the players pokemon on level ups just as if they were magician spells. They can select from a random heap of them (whatever invocation scrolls are available on the local library, or whatever local pokemon are on the nearby grass), maybe adding any monster they met on their adventures to the list of possibles. This removes the need of doing all the work in character, though still the first options can be used for legendary or special pokemon. But something feels bad about taking from players the experience of catching their rattattas.

This opens the problem of that players catching their pokemon diegetically advance more than those spending their level ups on them. Its easy to fix, though, by making those diegetical ones "temporal" until the next level up, and then requiring the player to spend the level up "keeping" them just as if they were their downtime catch. This can apply from cosmic monsters who manifest as spells to a plain dog who is an animal companion. 

As an addendum, there is something I don't like about Naruto's summoning: Servant animals are supposed to be someplace when you just "teleport" them into battle or whatever. This is ridiculously easy to break by PCs in order, for example, to send real-time messages through them as they dispell the summoning; and you run into the risk of summoning a sleeping dog at night or summon a giant toad at the moment he was sitting on the toilet taking a shit,

 

 

 

 

 

rpg design tips I heard somewhere.

 

 

1. Have a setting, as to write the rules around it. Do not be as lame as to make a generic ruleset and then put a setting over it. 

2. Evoke the setting. Make it as tangible as possible through description, implied descriptions, tables, clichés. Tangible is better than sensible. 

3. Do not write optional rules; make the effort to choose the best option yourself, you are the designer. GMs do not like having to decide that shit. Players in general are not dumb and will homebrew their own rules eventually if they don't like the established ones.

4. Make it so the players have either a long or short term goal right at the start. A good long term goal will make the players decide a first step towards it. A good short term goal will unlock new goals by its pursue and/or its resolution.   

VS THE VAMPIRE LORDS (a one page rpg)

 

Something I sent to this game jam to make me write a little. The game is here. You can see many of the last year's entries condensed in that single page, Of course, it is not tested, its written in just a couple of nights as a test, but I'm actually very happy with it. Google's AI helped me with one of the last letters, can you guess which one? Answer in the comments! 

 

EDIT: If you don't want to go through the ItchIo process, just read the game below in text format, I'm gonna copy and paste it here.  Download it if you want it optimized for one page.

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VS THE VAMPIRE LORDS,  by alchemistnocturne.blogspot.com

Roll/Choose a Background: 

1-2-3: Vampire Hunter: When the order was disbanded and your leader was captured, he managed to give 
you a 12x12 square map: it marks the secret hideout of the Vampire Lord of the East. Many allies died making that map. You start with a sword, a javelin or a bow. 

4-5: Retrieved Child: Those bird.masked doctors gave you a catatonia-induced drug and told your parents you had died from the plague. The order rescued you on their way to the vampire's lair. 

6: Skeptical peasant: You are too smart to believe in vampires, but had to flee with the party when the king's men mistook you for a member during the raid. 

Distribute 1d4, 2d6, and 1d8 between these skills. When playing, a 6 is a full success, a 4 or a 5 you succeed partially or with complications.

Combat: on a 4 or a 5, deal 1 damage. On a 6, deal the weapon's damage (usually 2 to 3). Roll your combat die at the start to find your Maximum Hit Points. If you get 0 HP or less, you are wounded. When on negative HP, roll your combat dice + your current HP and try to reach 1, on a failure you pass 
out and will die if abandoned. 

Lore: Once per session, decide something that is true in the current place, or put something you want in the map, 1d6 squares away, On a 4-5 the square is randomized. 

Item: Produce any item from your backpack. On a 4-5 this skill depletes until next downtime. You can normally carry four objects in your inventory but ignore that limit when you use this skill. 

Attitude: Choose, roll or make up your own: 1.Bossy, 2.Angry, 3.Teasing 4.Devoted 5.Meek 6.Emo 7.Pick-me 8.Empathic. If you think your attitude is beneficial to any action (any), you can roll this instead of relying in the GMs fiat. 

When you level up, you can change your attitude. Also raise the die size of any attribute, and re-roll your combat die for HP. If the amount is higher, keep the new one.

ARMOR is mostly Roman-Inspired loricas that add 1 to 3 HP. Actually, when in doubt, imagine this game with late roman and post-roman V century aesthetics. 

BLOOD is what all vampires crave. Victims do not have to be drained to death, and some vampires feed on the same person many times, but the victim becomes mentally manipulated by the vampire, gets sick and eventually dies unless the vampire gives the victim its own blood (turning them into a vampire) or the vampire attacker is killed. 

CAESARS were the governors of the world before the plague. The last caesar is defamed as a madman who spread the plague, but only a few know that he actually tried to expel the Vampire Lords and set the foundation for the Guild of Vampire Hunters. Praying on the secret grave of the last caesar will make you level up at the end of a session.

DOG ROSE can be set on any door or coffin lid to prevent a Vampire from opening it. Garlic flowers and crosses are also strong repellants.

EMPIRICS is the official name for the bird-masked doctors who treat the sick and sicken the healthy. They work directly for vampire handlers.

FOUL demons also exist and manifest as disasters and plague. Vampires have probably a demonic origin.

GUARDSMEN are most often women, due to strong, able men being constantly purged. They are mostly loyal to the king they serve, but are oblivious to the vampire existence. Their classic weapon is the sword. Most peasants will eagerly report any plaguebearer behavior to them.

HETAIRAS are often pretty young girls who were raised and brainwashed by vampire handlers. They travel from town to town singing songs interlaced with vampiric propaganda. The male equivalents are Hetairoi and use to form boy bands.

INITIATIVE is simultaneous, everyone declares their actions and then they happen. When two or more people are involved in a melee against each other, only the biggest roll happens. In case of a tie, they both happen and those involved can attack each other again.

JOURNALS written in the ancient times are now only found in forgotten, ruined enclaves or in the hand of secretive owners, for vampires sought to find and destroy them all. Recovering an old journal will get you a level up.

KINGS are puppets for the vampire lords. They have promised that he will someday become a vampire too if they obey their commands. 

LOW LEVEL VAMPIRES do exist, and work for a Vampire Lord master in some way, such as lieutenants, assistants or brides. Their powers and combat prowess are limited. Killing a vampire or thwarting any vampire's plan will make you level up after a session.

MIRRORS are an effective way to detect vampires. Dogs are also detect them very easily, but the tax for having a dog increases every year.

NIGHTFALL is when vampires can freely act and use their powers. Sunlight weakens the vampires, who become letargic and defenseless, so they normally hurry up to their coffins or any other shelter before it. They cannot cross running water either, or a portal into an inhabited place without being invited first.

ONE square travelled takes one day.  GM can make up things on the way, but they can't be changed afterwards. Generally, the party must agree an action for the day and another for the night (march, search, rest, socialize, forage...) 1d6-2 lost HP are refillled by resting. 

PLAGUE never happened. It is being used for decades as a general method for control, like keeping peasants away from hot squares, attributing rebellions and resistance to alleged “plaguebearers” and justify the acts of the empirics.

QUEEN on the eastern castle is actually an obvious transvestite man. Vampire Lords forced the king to marry him as an act of submission. Anyone pointing at this fact has been accused of plaguebearer to date.

REVELATIONS about the plague, reading old books or defying the impending narrative openly will soon mark you as a plaguebearer and be captured for punishment or execution. Waking up an NPC to these revelations will, however, make you level up at the end of the session.

SHIELDS are commonplace and can be used after you have received an attack, Simply roll your combat die over the enemy's roll. On a tie, the attack hits and the shield breaks. 

THREE more lairs exist in the world, and simply finding their placement will earn you a level after that session.

UTENSILS that can be used as weapons deal 2 damage, while proper weapons do 3 but are banned to the 
commons under the accusation of being a bandit. Real bandits are extremelly rare, and felony murders are often a discrete way to dispose of a rebel.

VAMPIRE LORDS rule the world unopposed, only rivalled by each other. After centuries of being feared and persecuted, they finally convinced the world that they don't exist. Their powers include summoning storms, vermin, wolves and all kinds of ruin, assuming the shape of enormous dogs or mist, reading the minds of their thralls and controlling them mentally. They can also know things remotelly through bats and other informants. Once you have crossed a Lord, expect them to send constant trouble until you've deceived their radar. 

WARS are programmed periodically between kingdoms as a way to purge strong men. In order to dispose of all of them (even the victors) vampires have pushed poisonous weapons into fashion. Some Vampire Lords like to witness battles with their vampiric vassals in disguise, so they can feast on the dying after the carnage.

XYPHOS are legendary two-handed sabers, forged in the times of the Caesars. On a roll of 6 or more, you can make a second attack.

YIELDING destroys the spirit progressivelly. Sometimes, the vampire law has practical benefits, other times,laws such as prima nocte exist to assert dominance and make people defend the new regime through the sunk cost fallacy.

ZEPHYRUS wind strangely blowing in the cold months means you're gonna receive a sign shortly, if you say “tell me, good Zephyrus”, or so the oldest amongst you heard as a kid. 

A 26 episodes campaign

Trigun, Gungrave and the enormous Evangelion. The always mentioned here: Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. From more obscure animes such as Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Gokudo the Adventurer or Utena, to modern classics such as Kill la Kill, they all have something in common: they manage to take a crew of characters through an adventure, sometimes meaning multiple arcs, in 22-26 episodes. (We can add Hellsing and Katanagatari if we split their 40 min episodes into 20 minute ones, through this might be cheating). If you are willing to sink time into watching something good anime, jump into any of those named without investigating further. Trust me.

Dropping more names in the comments is always welcome. There was a golden age during the turn of the century for 26 episode animes (let me refer to an old table to generate your own)

Recently I am trying to come up with different, "out of the box" ways to generate gameplay (as opposed to create "dungeons" procedurally or "missions" manually), and the idea of emulating an anime campaign structure... makes sense. Or does it?

The secret of blue water

 

These are some notes:

 * The campaign is played through 26 sessions, no more and no less. These are coincidentally half the weeks in a year (52) so if you play once per week, you will take half a year to complete a campaign to be remembered for ages. 6 months is a great time for a campaign to span without starting to lose focus or energy, more if you like to rotate games or GMs.

* Some episodes/sessions will be "Character Arc" episodes, those are specially dedicated to develop a given character or his/her past. Ex: Cowboy Bebop 05: Ballad of The Fallen Angels

* Some others are episodic, when there is a situation to be resolved that spans during one or maybe more episodes (depending on the players). These also serve to introduce key details of the setting into the story. Ex: Vash the Stampede dedicating one episode for each Gung Ho Gun. 

* Some are filler because the animators had to make the series last 26 episodes, but this doesn't have to mean boring in play. They can be fun to emulate too. Ex: the island episodes in Nadia.

* Some can be weird, and not fit into the tone at all, or a priori. Ex: the zombies and the baseball episodes at Samurai Champloo

* This liberates the GM when making things happen, and when they don't go as expected. But of course, without procedures and generators there is no game:

* For 4 players, each rolls 2 d20+4: this generates 2 episodes from the 5th to the 24th that are meant to be their "character arc" episodes. These can be rolled in the open or in secret by the GM, both have their points. Duplicates should be re-rolled so nobody has to share their character arc days. Starting at episode 5, this means that GMs have at least 4 days to understand the character and the player, and to think about what is a good challenge for them to be overcomed. 

* Each place on the world has a fitting (d12+ current episode number) table of "happenings". The first 12 ones are more easygoing: pastoral themes, small bosses, more slice of life (this might also form weird or filler episodes sometimes, unless the PCs do something strange). Beyond 13th onwards, there are more serious enemies, disasters, portents.... These should be rolled the previous session by the GM, so he can prepare the next week session accordingly to where the PCs are and cross the results with the PCs previous actions. A "place in the world" normally means a city or a wilderness area, maybe from a rooster of 15 different ones. But depending on your worldbuilding it can mean a new semester in high school or a new planet, or just play with 1 or 2 zones.

* What about this: the characters can't die in random episodes. A fallen PC is just down for the rest of the episode (this means be removed from play unless helped somehow), unless it's one of their Character Arc, or in the final two, in which this rule has no effect. Of course, all kinds of epic last words are permitted if the situation allows it. If a character dies, the player can keep on in the game playing an NPC but without rolling for character arc.

* This means that the GM can throw any kind of enemy to the players: they will just survive the big boss appearing at anytime to make a display of power, yet players will try to survive just to play that whole evening, unless the episode is reaching the end (climax and end of the IRL meeting)

* The exact resolution rules are not important, any can work, depending on what the show is about.

* However, mechanics that are activated by making the players make up the past of their characters are a very good way to help the GM develop a better character arc for the PC.

* Some idea for running NPC interactions: Each NPC has some traits on them (like generous, coward, ambitious, greedy, lustful, rich, nostalgic, sad, etc). Some are easy to detect, and some are kept hidden by the GM (and the NPC). The GM should roleplay the NPC's responses taking into account all its traits (both the secret and the exposed ones), and using a reaction roll only when something is uncertain. A table for traits is something I must surely work on. Some random mooks do not have to be particular traits, maybe they can share a common one. But the GM can add traits to anyone at any moment as the spot is put over a given NPC.

* It is advisable that PCs have also at least one strong trait that distinguishes them from the others, with some form of mechanical advantage if the trait is disadvantageous. For example, Thieves Can Do It Too, by Johnstone Metzger, gives +1 dice to a related roll if a trait is positive, or +1 dice to a future, unrelated roll if the PC's trait puts him at disadvantage at any point.

* The emphasis for the GM is in to build charismatic NPCs that can be talked with, and some lore to be exposed the next week. Then, after the 26 episodes have gone through, gather the players and reflect if the whole adventure could have been a true, top 10 anime of all time.

 

 

breaking from OSR

With one of the fighters reaching level 5, Our Trow Fortress campaign has reached the end of the season. Yes, we made it as in tv shows, so I could take a rest and another player could start GMing his Shadowrun campaign. Which means that I am playing again, as opposed to running games! So fucking liberating!

I am playing an elf samurai who is missing all combat rolls for now. After a month of play and our first serious loot, I got myself big breast implants with LED nipples (im playing as a sort of transgender guy) and I roleplay as the classic gay elf from elf parodies. Pic related, its him, the crossed eye is a bionic eye we all have. Not sure if its really on the starting package by the book or is a gift of our GM.

I find interesting the contrast on how much I stress over the "fairness" and "efficiency" of a given system or mechanic when I am a GM, and how little I care as a player. Honestly I am just thrilled just to interact with things but I dont know yet how combat really works (I pretend to, but really i am trusting that whatever the GM says is ok)

On the other hand, I think I am not running (BX) D&D anymore soon, nor my d6-based clone. But I am instead making my own fantasy game, out of that framebox. I think that me and my players must grow outside it. There are many reasons for this, and I will only cite some; leaving my upcoming posts to hint the directions I am pointing towards.

- XP for gold and monsters stopped making sense when the players decided to embark on altruistic missions from an NPC they pledged loyalty to. I could understand them and the game was actually better because of this decision, but sometimes I had to artificially create XP to compensate their efforts. See my last entry to see how I plan to do it, more or less (though I have refined it by now, more on this soon)

- Tracking things like food and water by units doesn't bring anything productive to the game, and I want to move away from the resource management chores. I am sure that I will find a good abstraction to portray the fact that you need food and water to survive. On the opposite side, I am a little dissapointed on how D&D abstracts many survival checks in the wilderness, that for me are very important to focus on, such as getting lost, hunting, foraging, etc. I'd rather make the scope of the game smaller, so a 30 mile travel lasted one session or three, but I feel its important to feel the texture of the forest, the road, the sea, and without forgetting that cities should feel places to explore and not just inventory refillements. 

- Theoretically, the procedural generation of D&D makes an open world, but in practice players search for the videogamey path: grind level 1 monsters and level 1 loot, then gradually increase in dungeon levels maintaining an expected point of risk reward. This might be broken sometimes by chance, yes; but I don't want to run a fantasy game like this anymore. Though I still want "leveling up" and monsters of all sizes, I want the approach to the game to be different, very far from the "grinding" cycle. I think I want to emphasize how it feels to actually live on a magical medieval land. I don't know. I'm still exploring my own wants on this, but hints of them are scattered through this blog since it's beginning.

But this is not to say that I dislike the game or thing is bad. Not at all, and it isn't. Actually, what i want is to take everything I love from D&D and try to apply to my new chimera, that is nothing like it.

(Idea sketch) defensive/offensive combat maneuvers

Some idea I had for combat rules for a given game.

Armor numbers being something like: 

Light armor: 3
Better armor. 4
Best armor: 5

Then you have a panoplia of weapons with one assigned dice each, for example:

Greatsword: d10
Sword:d8
Dagger:d6

etc.

If you get your weapon and hit greater than the armor, you deal a hit (scratch a heart away, roll for damage or whatever you like to do afterwards)
But after you have rolled "to hit", you can choose to convert that result in your armor score this turn, then roll for attack again.
This can be used for both defensive and offensive maneuvers, and represent the parrying potential of certain weapons, while also adding some "choice" into combat.

Example:

Your PC, armed with Light Armor and a Sword, fights an enemy who has Best armor and a Greatsword.
You know that the greatsword will easily hit an armor of 3 with a d10
You attack first, and roll the sword's d8, and get a 6 (which is over the enemy's armor score)
You can choose between dealing a hit OR adopt a parrying style, converting the 6 into your armor score for the round and trying your luck rolling "to hit" again.

The same idea can be used aggresivelly: Lets say that you rolled a 1 instead. You can choose to keep that first roll as your armor (lowering your armor to a score of 1) but you would get to roll again and maybe take your enemy's last hit.

Certain weapons can be worked out so they have different damage dice on the first roll than in the second, to illustrate they are more defensive or offensive in nature. For example, a spear can have a d10 on the first attack, capable of defending up to 10 ac, but have a secondary attack of d6.
Great axes can be done in reverse: a first attack of 1d6 and a second of 1d12. The first one will probably get you exposed in order to deal the big, bad second attack.

As always, unarmed combat is difficult to model, as anything worse than a d6 will never go through best armor unless the enemy chooses to adopt a worse ac for some reason. One possible way to do it is to have unarmed combat go like (First attack d4/Second attack d6)

Shields can be done by adding an extra d6 to the first attack roll, choosing the best of the two. In this way, it provides help both in the defensive mode and the offensive mode. The shield die cannot be used to deal damage, only to be put as armor... unless the master decides otherwise. I must make the numbers so the combination of sword and shield doesnt deal both better defense and attack than a greatsword, which would render it useless.

On Rules-lite or Rules light

 

stephanie grunwald - drive by night

After reading both Prince and Noisms take on rules-lite games, I wanted to write my own article on the subject. To make it clearer, I won't adress their points in here, I already did on their comments, suffice to say that while I enjoyed their reading, my point of view is tangential. 

I have collected tons of One-Page rpgs, starting back in 2012. I don't like all of them, of course, but as a design fanatic, I often like how they have resolved a certain mechanic (like alignment in Jung Guns), or how they have evoked a certain feeeling with a paragraph or a layout (Raygun Gothic, Travel Journal of Short Tales). It is true that they are often highly unplayable.

As Prince attests, many of them fall back on D&D to cover their gaps. Many more are innocent attempts at fixing D&D forever or just novel ideas that sound awesome in the author's head but have no sense on the page, and much less on the table (I love those. I have made a bunch of those too). Others (more and more everytime) are just made to look nice, with little care of the actual rules, probably because their author doesn't even think on playing it.

As I see it, the problem with rules-light games is not about they having little space or little rules. The problem is that they usually cut off the wrong rules. 

As I pointed out on previous articles, the core rules of a game are those that create and push the game's biorhythm, as opposed to its conflict resolution rules. 

The core rules of D&D are XP for gold, the dungeon generation rules that create rooms with gold alongside rooms with monsters, monsters and gold, dangers and traps, and the "level up" boon-unlocking dynamic for characters and dungeons. You play to level up, and adventure happens in the process. Using a d20 to hit or 2d6 vs an adjusted TN can have interesting effects, but won't change the game's nature in the slightest bit. 

Most published games, even rules-heavy ones, don't even have core rules. They just have conflict resolution rules. And that is frustrating because that is not gameable. They have lore bricks instead, and you must make a mission-based game with whatever you can assemble from it. Rules-light games often go the same road, working on innovative, clean or personal resolution rules (usually chargen+combat+equipment) and vague or absent procedures to conduct the game.

No, Maze Rats tables may be a great oracle, but are not a game procedure. It does have rough guidelines, though, on how do dungeons, cities and wildernesses look, and at least mentions the use of wandering monsters. But having XP per session + extra XP for abstractly overcoming a difficult challenge, the game can or cannot feature dungeons or loot of any kind. In fact the game can be about anything. Which seems liberating yet also kind of aimless: players must set their own drives, in a world they don't really know yet. But I am sure it works in the end.

Knave doesn't even have that. I think it was maybe conceived as an alternate chargen/combat/spells for D&D and was considered a full game by some at some point. In any case, OSR-related games have an advantage: the more a game gets closer to the OSR purity, the better it can use its resources: falling back on D&D to fill the gaps or using published modules. I think Searchers of the Unknown was built for the latter in mind too. 

But it would be unfair to accuse rules-light games of this sin, when big games do commit it constantly. Lamentations of the Flame Princess, for example, is written in two big tomes (player guide and referee guide) and somehow forgets to fit any setting, a bestiary, procedures for generating monsters, dungeons, adventure sites or adventure of any kind. It offers some advice on the tone the author wants to convey, but the advice feels short and falls on a void. 

World of Dungeons: Turbo Breakers, being three pages long, achieves to include useful gameable setting elements (the rifts, a countdown to the Cloud of Woe, an archmage called Kai Shira Kai, a Bestiary and a guide to create monsters, etc). 

Into the Odd: One page version, on a single page, allows you to run a dungeon without any preparation, filled with monsters, social encounters and traps; and teaches you to make a similar one by altering the tables therein. If you put simple advancement rules (maybe +1 to an attribute if you roll over it, and +1 to hp for each dungeon completed) and you have enough depth to make a long campaign using that rules alone. 

And as a word of advice: for people who has already read some Lovecraft enough to be familiar with the setting, will find the same or more useful stuff in the 4-page Cthulhu Dark and its companions than in the classic Chaosium tomes, all ripe with an astounding amount of nothing. You will still have to come up with an adventure yourself, but at least you will save time and effort.

So yes, rules light doesnt have to mean depth-light. I actually think they are a good paradigm for designers to learn and test things: the shorter a game is to write, the faster you can test it and re-shape it as needed. Minimalism has no inherent value on itself, but there is a limit on how complex you can make a ruleset without it becoming unwieldy. As I like to see it: the more minimal your rules are in one aspect, the more you can complicate the game in another. For example, getting some minimal rules for combat allows me to make extensive and fussy rules for handling horses without overloading players with information. This way you can add simplicity and complexity to things depending on how you want to portray them on the game you have in mind. 

Recently I put down the advancement rules for Monks and Mummies, one of my many chimeras. I found out that it was actually the hardest part of the game to come up with, and possibly the most important. Now that I know what the game is about, I think I can put the rest together """easily""". The rest of the game is sort of falling into place by itself. And thinking about this ruleslite things this days I have realized that it might not fit in one page, but I can see all the concept fitting on four or five. Let's see. 

The cool parts of Blades in the Dark [review?] and more on Fire Elixir

I could post the logo of the game but I feels this one explains better the mood of the game. This is a mood blog after all.

I respect John Harper a lot as a designer. It's not that I love everything he makes, but I do find that he is among the rare people who knows what he wants to achieve in a game, dares to go beyond certain assumed borders, and aims to make it make sense through all of it. I just read Blades in the Dark because I believed it could help me finishing the other half of this rules. Turned out it was a great idea.

This is going to be a long post. 

You might remember that previously in this blog I divided game rules into two: Core Rules (those that deal with guiding the game pace correcly, creating game loops and generating content) and Resolution Rules (those that arbiter how well the PCs perform); from which the former are the ones that really carry the game and the latter, while they can be good or bad, are lesser in importance.

Well, BITD resolution is nothing new: Some sort of the classic "roll Xd6, highest result determines outcome, partial successes abound", with a freaking amount of Attributes and Skills (called "actions") and Moves. Too much for my taste. 

On the other hand, and this is one of Harper's strengths, the game's Core Rules look very very fine. That alone makes this game very valuable: apart from OSR games, its very hard to find games that have Core Rules at all. And if in D&D those rules are:

You must level up > XP is taken from treasure mostly > there is this dungeon stocking procedures that generate both monsters and treasure, get in the dungeon > level up so you can get into deeper dungeons;

in Blades in the Dark we find another consistent game-driven loop:

make heist/achieve turf  > get (or lose) REPutation > increase band's tier, alongside a lot of debris and side-effects which generate more possible heists, or alternativelly expand your gang into more districts to get rep, resources and powerups. 

I had attempted to do the "Gang Character Sheet" before in my games, as in making a sheet for the gang itself with its own stats and stuff, but never really found a way to use it that made sense. I think that this is also the second big success for this game. Your gang sheet decides which cohorts (NPC armies) you can use and how powerful are they; how likely you are to get hold or produce certain resources, influence or fight other gangs, how many Vice Dens you have and how much Coin they apport, which communal skills does the gang bestow on its members (for example, I liked that a gang of assassins can develop a feat so their members increase their Insight or Prowess beyond human scope, so it explains how to do ninja related stuff, etc)

I think that the game would benefit a lot from cutting off the character creation options (which tend a little towards the "snowflake" PC) in favor of making them faceless pawns with one or two distinctive traits and putting them under the mantle of their gang's benefits (which, starting at Tier 0 would be very small). The bulk of the advancement should go to the gang, while giving the characters little advancement its OK: This is first and foremost good for the game: You are more disposed to put your character in risk if your investments are really more on the gang itself than in the PC. It is also good for the fiction, as the gang life is dangerous and PCs getting plot armor works better on epic types of fiction, but not so much in the noir. 

More things I love: On my homebrews I always like to implement quantum elements: That is: when you leave things undecided in a quantum state, and you decide during the game what has happened in the past. For example, I like that new PC Wizards can decide the spells they learn during the game, so they dont pick void options, and until then its a "nameless level 1 spell". When they choose magic missile, the fiction decides it was always a magic missile, and they keep that spell from now on. Or the (now classic for me) quantum pocket: You have an ability to produce an object that you were always carrying, but you decide it at that very moment. Normally that object must pertain to a family of objects (a doctor can produce a specific medicine, or a commoner can produce anything that can be bought in a small shop). BITD takes this towards the extreme edge, and i LOVE IT:

PCs are thrown into the score, with no preparation beyond their initial approach to the mission. They have a given load number: up from there, they can produce as much items as they want during the heist, but each time they do it, the item is now tracked. But there is more: the flashback mechanism allows you to do your heist preparation completelly in retrospective: Basically when you find some obstacle (let's say you find a guarding dog while sneaking through the garden) you spend some strain (one of the game's economy points) to say how did you prepare against it (maybe you spend a fucking month befriending that dog so it wouldn't attack you?) and if the outcome is uncertain you roll to see how well you did your preparation (on a bad roll, the dog was just pretending to be your friend so he could fuck you up tonight, dude. Who cons the conman?)

Those are, of course, mere simplifications of a more complex ruleset. Too complex for my tastes, actually. The game is an authentic leviathan of 300+ pages in small letter, and to my rules light mind, it could be surely be purged from half of it. Its not about the page count, but I think that it has a lot of layers of metacurrencies running around (reputation, coin, trauma, clocks, strain, tiers, skills, actions, moves, approaches, etc). Really, this might seem like heresy, but as I was reading I was like: "nah, I will ignore strain altogether. Spending strain to flashback? nahh just allow 1 flashback per character and maybe some more if they get a critical or have a relevant skill". But I don't want to say the game is bad for that. It's just part of my personality to modify and simplify according to my taste. I am a practical man. And I love that the game is as it is, because that means I can use it to work out my own version.

Have you heard of this gang of shadows?

To finish up, I'd like to talk a little about the setting. Doskvol is a victorian mix of Venice, London and Prague, where the sun is dim and there are evil ghosts all around. The city is protected from the horrors that lurk outside by a electrical barrier that runs on leviathan oil (leviathans themselves are horrors that must be fished like whales by crazy ppl) and everybody accepts the existance of ghosts around in their everyday life. I'm not sure if I could use a setting like that, I am so fucking bad at victorian stuff. I just don't get the mood. But an obsession is again growing on me: Could this setting be ported into some more familiar to me, like the A-HISTORICAL ROMAN EMPIRE? 

Check further entries.

Why OSR

The best thing for me about Old D&D and its clones (and what brings them over any other games) is, in my opinion, how they are the only rpgs that care about procedural game generation. That is: you have a looping mechanic that keeps the game forward, by the chemical reaction of the PC's advancement rules (XP for gold) and the dungeon stocking chart (or hexcrawl generation chart). As long as you have this, there is a game going on. 

This allows the GM to wholeheartedly assume the role of a "referee", instead of burdening him with the tasks of being an Omniscient God, a plot writer, a world builder, a wise mathematical balancer and fun enforcer. I'd say even more: He is allowed to be all these things whenever he wants (you can build a dungeon manually, or even build a complex, dungeon-less adventure) but you are not forced to. If the players go on an unexpected way, or if you don't feel creative at any moment, you can just fall back on the pure game: let them do it! it is built for that. In a sense, (old) D&D is the only rpg that provides you the game rules AND the game.

This is something that all the 90s books that came after failed to understand. Games like L5R or Vampire give you only the game rules. Then they give you a 300 page lore brick, from which the GM must make the game himself, having to rely on "mission" based sessions to play. Well, this is not something impossible to do: I'm sure there were and will be many successful campaigns with that! but it lacks the mechanical structure to support the game on itself and the point of playing it becomes abstracted or null once the GM pulls the foot 1 gram from the gas pedal. In a sense they are exponentially much more "GM demanding", specially if you are not heavily invested into their worlds. (This, of course, is something that capitalism fixed quickly by selling you modules and splatbooks). 

This doesn't even make them better suited for story-based games. Actually I think D&D is still better at it: you dont have the pressure to control everything, which in turn opens the possibility of a sandbox and freedom of choice for the players. This makes any plots you actually want to use a nice story to be explored and played with, instead of a fragile railroad that must be protected against the player's actions. And, underneath all of it, you feel that you are in a fair fight against the odds, with no helding hands by the GM. This is, for me, what makes the OSR distinct and OD&D the king of rpgs.

I'm not saying that it is the only way, though. I am sure that mission-based games could be systematized too. The core could look like a mission generator that would... (just brainstorming);

a) generate quests appropiate for the PCs and tone of the game; maybe even let them choose between various missions; each one with some definite "end state", whether succesful or not.
b) generate as many details of the whole quest as possible, prioritizing the spots that the game wants to show or test. Some games might allow or even encourage player's input on what is going to appear
c) a mechanic that determines how does your character and/or the world change after the quest is done or failed. This can take the shape of leveling up, something more or something else (game-world progress based on character actions is something that is rarely coded in rules, and I make this note for myself in order to explore this in the future)

DnD 5e and many allegedly OSR hacks such as Knave, Maze Rats, etc also fall in the second type of games. The case of Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition is specially painful as the game is 300+ pages long and manages to cover neither mechanics for the game loop nor a setting, beyond the implied on the monster manual. Its just rules and rules and rules but no real structure behind it. (I frankly cannot understand how people manages to play it without handwaving 90% of it). 

I have loved, still love and even made some ultra light rpgs (I use to collect all PDFs I can find); but after this revelation I realized that most of them make no attempt to provide gameplay beyond Character Creation + Combat + Skill checks. Which again, can be good and can work with a GM wanting to do all the rest, but now I feel as a designer that focusing the same amount of rules in mechanically enabling a specific biorhythm is much more interesting. You can change or adapt the resolution system of any game and make it work much the same (for example, the 2d6 hacks of D&D or using point buy vs random generation) and while the chances of success/defeat could vary, the nature of the campaign would not. 

This is why I think the term CORE RULES suits better my idea (the rules that enable the intended biorhythm and create game) than the idea of conflict resolution rules: A core is something deep that cannot be changed without changing the whole thing in the process. 

To close this post, I will run over some games (no particular order or reason) and see which of their mechanics are centered on bringing the game forward, which in my opinion is their most important rule:

Everyone Is John uses the other players actions as the current player's obstacles, so the game is actually generated by your friends. The core rules are those that focus on switching the control of John. Conga Mummies is a boardgame version of this approach.

Ghost Lines has got a very nice mission based generator that activates once the PCs get side jobs. The actual ghosts are generated collectivelly by asking questions to the players. It also features an astonishing collection of missions, ghosts, employeers, city events, implied setting, etc for a game so small, Definitely an inspiration to have as reference. Check out this fan-made variation using chtulhu dark's resolution system to further prove my point that the core rules of a game are not related to action checks, but for content generation. Some other games like Lasers and Feelings also uses a random mission maker but doesnt really create a solid framework beyond an oracular prompt.

Lady Blackbird, by the same author as above, uses a really cool way of unlocking character abilities: You all play named, premade characters; and advance in power by advancing your personal plot towards certain points, so it makes gamist fucks like me to advance the plot whether you like it or not, making also things change for the world and everybody.

Ryuutama has a clunky and weirdly complex unique way of handling most things (stamina, travel, magic), with the GM ability to influence the outcomes of the party in the shape of a ryuujin (dragon spirit guide more or less) being a really, really cool and original thing. But none of them answer once the pcs ask: "What now?". The game has prepared for that with another sub-section: The collective city and world builder guide, and the adventure writing guide (basically guidelines on how to write an "episode" of which the PCs will be part). 

Apocalypse World and its derivatives use the list of fronts, which trigger sometimes on failed moves, and a set of principles which act as a subjective proxy for "genre fairness" (evidently we are all human and might interpret principles differently). While this can certainly work, it becomes much more streamlined and concise on small PBTA games such as Sagas of the Icelanders than in more generic like Dungeon World, as the moves they invoke on a failure tend to be more specific and carry more narrative weight. Check World of Apocalypse for an actual flowchart of the game pace.

Into the Odd (full edition) has a similar approach to B/X, but with advancement being earned each mission (the game defines a mission as "going out and returning with something worth showing"). Curiously, the One page edition of ITO has a very cool dungeon and random encounter generators that can completely map your first quest; and might serve as a base to build new generators for the next ones.

And, making a callback to a recent entry, Pokethulu might pull you in for the very sake of catching new pokethulhus, (much like the original game, that is what I call faithful adapting), so as long as a monster exists and the PCs want to catch it, you only have to put it somewhere on the map, then put more trouble on the way. Still, in my opinion its a game that would really benefit of having random encounter tables, proper hexcrawl rules adapted to pokemon travelling speeds and capabilities (like flight, swim, run, dimension bending or others, really, this could be awesome) and little more power granularity between monsters. But maybe I will take care of it someday. I guess that their creators never thought that somebody would ever take so seriuously what they believed to be a joke game!

Basically we can conclude that there are (at least) four ways from which game content can be brought to the table: 

1.Procedural generation

2. Taken straight from a book (such as monster manuals, using a pre-written adventure or following Pendragon's campaign straight)

3. Created communally by the table or 

4. Leave it to be created by the GM, this last one being the most used by commercial and indie rpgs alike, with more or less "guidance" from the book.

This methods of course can be mixed in different proportions for different games. I invite you to think how does your game (or a game you like) does it and post it, so we expand this list in the comments