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2021-04-05 The things I learned

“Every Wednesday morning I wake up with a sense of dread, remembering that on top of everything else I have to do that day I somehow have to run a game in the evening. Every Wednesday afternoon I seriously consider calling the session off. But every Wednesday night I sit down and log in and everything actually goes fine.” – Failing better: a GMing retrospective, by Joseph Manola

Last month, Joseph wrote about the campaigns he ran and what he learned from them, and at the time I thought to myself that someday I’d do the same. Well, I guess today is that day.

The format used in Joseph’s blog post is that he has four short paragraphs for each campaign: what it was, what worked, what didn’t, and lessons learned. We’ll see how well this goes!

I got Das Schwarze Auge from my mom and ran some modules for her and her friends when I must have been around twelve (1985). I ran three or four official adventures. The first edition rules were simple and characters were hard to kill: they started out with 20–30 hit points; there was an active defence roll (instead of using armour class); armour was damage reduction; magic used “astral” points; the game had no clerics. What worked: I remember we had plenty of players. I was a kid running game for three adults and older teenagers and as far as I remember, it worked. What didn’t: It didn’t last long. One of the adults wanted to stop playing, and then the campaign stopped. Lessons learned: simple rules enable kids to run games. I also remember the last adventure I ran, where the party discovers a gate to another world. When one of the players said that we should develop trade between the two worlds, something opened up in my brain. An open world! My first whiff of the sandbox.

I ran some adventures of my own devising in high school when I was fifteen and sixteen. We used Das Schwarze Auge at first, switched to AD&D 1st ed. and then to AD&D 2nd ed.; we still had no concept of a “campaign” – we stopped buying Das Schwarze Auge modules and we didn’t buy TSR modules, we just wrote our own and played them one after another (1988-1989). What worked: we played D&D, we played in English, and we played our own adventures. What didn’t: we didn’t know how to handle party conflict and when the thief tried to steal another player character’s gems, we didn’t know how to deal with that and that player left the group. Shame on us! We also discovered that one of us was a rules lawyer and a power gamer. Lessons learned: The upgrade treadmill is relentless. There’s always somebody who wants to upgrade to the next edition. In hind-sight we managed to deal with the hot mess of AD&D rules pretty well.

I ran a few sessions of a light variant of Mutant Chronicles game for fellow students at university (1995). What worked: we played in some maintenance tunnels, which was creepy and cool. What didn’t: no rules, no structure, no adventure; I don’t quite remember why it fell apart but it did. Lessons learned: a cool place to game does not make a campaign.

Kurobano and the Dragons. I ran a D&D 3.5 campaign after a long hiatus (2006–2008). It started out with me using M20, but we soon switched to D&D 3.5 even though I dreaded the size of the rule books. I successfully managed to integrate my own starting setup with Red Hand of Doom; later, I added more Paizo adventures. What worked: I learned the D&D 3.5 rules. What didn’t: I ended up disliking the battle map; I felt I was being forced to play a wargame week after week, against five other humans, and I wasn’t even good at it. So I had to add tougher opponents to counteract the lack of tactics on my end. Lessons learned: high level D&D is weird; some players loved it even though they were bad at keeping track of it: the multiple attacks, the buffs, it was a chore. All they wanted was to be super-heroes! The rules were failing us.

Golden Lanterns. I played in the Shackled City adventure path using D&D 3.5 with DM James (2007–2010). I started running this game for a few sessions and then I handed it over to James. It was my first Adventure Path and I loved the idea. What worked: James managed to make the fights work; and given the rare opportunities to play, he skipped a lot of filler material. What didn’t: Advancement was fixed. I felt that sometimes I got new abilities even though I hadn’t even used all the abilities I had previously gained. My paladin found a Holy Avenger in an armoury somewhere and that was weird. I guess James had decided that we needed it for balance. Lessons learned: Adventure Paths are great and terrible. They are great because they promise a story arc that takes you to fantastic heights. They are terrible because advancement, opposition, power levels, it all has to harmonise and the more freedom the game offers, the harder this is.

Hagfish Tavern. I ran the Rise of the Runelords adventure path using D&D 3.5 (2008–2011). Another Adventure Path. What worked: Again, the beginning was awesome. What didn’t: Again, the it started to fall apart towards the end. High level D&D is complicated because what works at lower levels doesn’t get abandoned at higher levels. Bless is still there. If you have three or four attacks like +16/+11/+6/+1 you still roll that last one because who knows, you might get lucky. Lessons learned: the next campaign I would run was going to be a sandbox for sure!

Krythos. I ran a small Burning Wheel campaign inspired by ancient Greece (2008). It was my first attempt at Burning Wheel. It turned out to be a short campaign of six or seven sessions, by my standards. What worked: It was my first online game using TeamSpeak. I was able to use Burning Wheel’s Bloody Versus (simple opposed rolls) and the Duel of Wits (social combat). What didn’t: The game didn’t “sing” for me. I think I’d need a lot more practice. Lessons learned: online gaming can work. All you need is voice chat. At the time we had no video, no dice roller, no virtual tabletop.

Sohn des Schwarzen Marlin. I played in this D&D 3.5 campaign set along the Dragon Coast in the Forgotten Realms with DM Peter (2008). It was a sort of nautical sandbox. I don’t remember us ever leaving that initial island, though. What worked: We didn’t have a cleric in the game and it worked. What didn’t: I don’t remember. The campaign ended after a handful of sessions; I don’t remember why, though. Lessons learned: An island hopping game with pirates might be interesting.

City of the Spider Queen. I played in this D&D 3.5 adventure set in the Forgotten Realms with DM James (2008–2009). It’s a long adventure; dare I say a short Adventure Path? We started at a higher level, if I remember correctly. Somewhere around level ten? What worked: I liked playing a cleric of Shaundakul; I liked creating a character with a strong bond to another character, a kind of tag team. I liked leafing through that Forgotten Realms setting book for D&D 3.5 in order to write up a backstory. What didn’t: I didn’t enjoy the high level fights. Lessons learned: Tag team characters from the get go are fun. Avoid high level D&D 3.5.

Grenzmarken. I played in a D&D 3.5 campaign with a homebrew setting by DM Peter (2008–2010). I played a dwarf wizard licking his toad familiar and doing other small disgusting things. This was a kind of West Marches game: almost every session was an excursion that ended back in town. By this time we had established a way to split the game between the session itself and writing on the wiki. Reports got longer. Things happened between sessions. What worked: sandbox exploration was great, with many monsters to defeat and small dungeons to clear. The wiki saw a lot more use. What didn’t: After a while it was a bit formulaic, travel to the destination, fight, fight, end boss, skip over the trip home because we were running out of time. As fights took longer, the non-fighting was relegated to the wiki. Lessons learned: I need my sandbox to be more interesting than monster fighting. The excursion structure needs some tweaking but it’s very promising.

The Alder King. I ran a D&D 3.5 campaign in Lenap of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy and later switched the game to the Solar System RPG (2008–2012). I used very slow advancement compared to the games I had seen with DM James since I didn’t actually want to reach those higher levels. I had decided to start the game with practically no high-level non-player characters, either. My thinking was: we’ll play the next campaign in the same setting and the surviving player characters of this campaign would be the high-level non-player characters of the next campaign. What worked: There were factions all over the place. Finding allies against Yarshag the lizardman and his giant wasp riding dragon-blood infused super-soldiers provided for a nice campaign arc. What didn’t: When the low-level henchmen formed a new party to play through the Caverns of Thracia, I didn’t enjoy myself as much. The dungeon and I did not quite agree. Lessons learned: my default implied D&D setting doesn’t work well with Greco-Roman sensibilities; I’m starting to suspect that by now I might not like playing through bought Adventure Paths, high level adventures, and big dungeons. Time to buy a lot less!

Die Reise nach Rhûn. I played in a heavily house-ruled Rolemaster campaign set in Middle Earth with GM Berni; we later switched to Legends of Middle Earth (2009–2010). What worked: Rolemaster was a weird in a good way. What didn’t: the campaign was short lived. We tried switching to a rules light system but that didn’t work, either. Lessons learned: both rules heavy and rules light cannot save a campaign; I think we should have talked less about the system and more about what we actually wanted from the game.

Kaylash. I ran a Mongoose Traveller game which was later switched to Diaspora using a randomly generated subsector (2009–2010). What worked: The random subsector creation inspired a campaign. What didn’t: The Traveller rules seemed to imply that trading was the way to play the game, a bit like the old Elite computer game, except that nobody actually cared about trading; when using Fate, the game shifted away from trade to fighting zombies in space. Lessons learned: again, switching rules does not save the game if you don’t talk about what you actually want from the game.

Lied vom Eis. I played in a few sessions of an Song of Ice and Fire RPG with GM Berni (2010-2011). We rotated GM duties a few times. We had one player via video call. What worked: the new game rules worked for us. What didn’t: we had created all sorts of characters that then had no in-game reason to actually adventure together; at the same time we did not think of running our house like a stable of characters with people picking the appropriate ones, depending on the adventure at hand. Lessons learned: do not create parties that are too far apart, conceptually. You can make it work if you run your game like a fast-paced movie but it takes a lot of energy. I also remember once telling those players that I had come to play, not for the small talk. In retrospective, perhaps I should have invested into that small talk. We stopped playing together.

Desert Raiders. I played in the Legacy of Fire Adventure Path using Pathfinder RPG with GM James (2010–2011). What worked: Pathfinder worked a bit better than D&D 3.5 for us. The campaign also didn’t go all the way to level 20. Once again, the lower levels were super cool. What didn’t: I had created a mounted archer and got to use a horse maybe once. Lessons learned: talk to players if you don’t know how to incorporate their character concepts into the campaign. Also, never let anybody borrow your RPG books because now I’m missing one of the books from this Adventure Path.

Burning Six. I played in a six session Burning Wheel campaign (2011). It was a short game set in an Italian Renaissance town, or something like it. What worked: It was Burning Wheel. What didn’t: again, I feel that the lure of the Tolkien-style troupe of everything and everybody foiled our plans. Instead of being laser focused on a thing, we all created characters and dropped them into a situation. I think I was playing an abbess, there was an elf, and others… Lessons learned: at the time, I felt that Burning Wheel simply wasn’t for me; these days, after hearing the Shoeless Peasant podcast by Sean Nittner and Judd Karlmann, I feel that perhaps we just thought we could play Burning Wheel like we play D&D: create a bunch of weird characters based on the rules and it’ll all work out. Not so. First, laser focus on the kind of game we want to play!

Durgan’s Flying Circus. I played in a HARP game with a homebrew setting by GM Stefan (2011–2012). It was short lived. What worked: It was HARP. As I think back, I now get the feeling that often we played campaigns because we wanted to try new rules and had no other plans beyond that.

Mondschein Saga. I played a handful of sessions in an OSRIC campaign set in the Forgotten Realms with DM Peter (2012). It was a sandbox and Peter was searching for rules that were simpler than D&D 3.5. Unfortunately, he picked OSRIC, i.e. AD&D 1st ed., and those rules aren’t actually very simple. The printed book is substantial. What worked: the island hopping sandbox was once again improved. What didn’t: OSRIC was not smooth sailing. The players didn’t like it. Lessons learned: OSRIC and AD&D are not rules light. The island hopping sandbox can still be made to work.

Ymir’s Call. I played in a Barbarians of LemuriaCrypts & ThingsAdventure Conqueror King campaign with DM Florian (2011–2013). It was a frost sandbox. We were people in some sort of polar region and there was trouble all around us. What worked: I loved it. There were many places to visit, people to talk to. What didn’t: The rules for Barbarians of Lemuria did not convince me. On the one hand, they were too simple, and on the other hand, spending that point to mow down dozens was too weird. Crypts & Things was better, but still very much on the simple side. Lessons learned: I really started to love the wilderness sandbox. Just make sure there’s plenty of stuff to do wherever players go. As for the rules, I started to realise that I liked something somewhere between Crypts and Things and Adventure Conqueror King.

Ritter von Salisbury. I ran the Great Pendragon Campaign for the years 485 to 510, when Arthur pulls the sword from the stone (2012–2014). What worked: we had a rough campaign outline and we loved it; the traits that sometimes make characters do things the players did not expect. What didn’t: character creating took a long time; the deadly battles were frustrating if your character bit the grass; the inability to actually influence the outcome of these battles took some getting used to; you could build infrastructure but they had no effect on the game; the winter phase felt like an integral and badly designed part of the game. We always wanted something important to happen in winter but the rules did not deliver. We should have just narrated it. Lessons learned: There’s a cool, simpler game with those traits hidden somewhere in those rules.

Karameikos. I played in a Labyrinth Lord game set in Mystara every second Monday evening (2012–2015). We played B10 Night’s Dark Terror and it was very cool. What worked: the siege of Sukiskyn was fantastic; fighting vampires felt good. What didn’t: I’m not sure how the campaign ended. We arrived at the hidden valley and then… I don’t know. Lessons learned: B/X D&D is the level of D&D I like. After some initial enthusiasm regarding the Mystara setting, I’m much less enthusiastic about the incredible emptiness. Large maps with many empty hexes simply don’t inspire me as much.

Berem and Beyond. I played in an Adventure Conqueror King campaign with DM Florian (2013–2015). It was another sandbox, except no longer up in the icy north. What worked: I liked the sandbox; there was also a second group playing in the same area and I remember at least once we came upon a little mausoleum that had already been plundered. What didn’t: I saw Florian improvising a lot, rolling up encounters, and I didn’t like it. It broke my immersion because I no longer felt we were exploring a “real” place. It was being made up as we moved through it. The ACKS upkeep and other economy rules did not interest me. It felt like homework. Lessons learned: ACKS is too involved for my taste. When I run a game, I make sure to use a screen in order to better maintain immersion. If the players stray of the prepared material, I want to maintain the illusion for as long as possible.

Montag in Zürich. Various people interested in one-shots got together and experimented with new systems (2009–2015). What worked: I never again played so many different games as back then. It was amazing. What didn’t: eventually things broke down as people no longer volunteered to run new games. Lessons learned: there are a gazillion games out there. Also, not many of them seem to be made for the kind of long campaigns I like (50+ sessions). What I totally learned was to present a game, hand out characters, and run a game in 2½h.

Fünf Winde. I ran a Labyrinth Lord game set in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy with a big dash of Planescape and Spelljammer on every second Tuesdays (2010–2017). What worked: plane hopping, B/X + house rules, building projects to spend gold and enrich the setting; references to the old player characters from the Alder King game. What didn’t: I had placed a few mega dungeons in the campaign setting but the players didn’t really want to go there; Planescape looks cool but if you’re actually looking for adventure material in the setting boxes, there is very little; the same is true for Spelljammer. Lessons learned: playing multiple campaigns in the same setting is a good idea; visible changes from one campaign to the next is great.

Wilderlande. I ran a Labyrinth Lord campaign set in a Points of Light campaign setting for my best friend and his three kids for two hours on a Friday evening every four weeks (2010–2018). What worked: one of the kids is my godchild and I managed to stay in touch for all these years. What didn’t work: I was unable to have the spark jump. As the older kids turned seventeen and eighteen, they showed up less and less. None of them wanted to pick up the referee mantle. Lessons learned: kids can play Labyrinth Lord; when they’re five and six, they might just sit there and draw pictures, making the occasional decision for their character, but as they grow older, they simply absorb the game. There’s no need for special games for children. Children don’t want toys made for children. Children want toys made for adults. They might ignore a lot of the rules, just like we did when we were kids, but that doesn’t prevent them from wanting the real deal.

Greyheim. I ran a Labyrinth Lord game around The Castle of the Mad Archmage (a megadungeon) on every second Wednesdays (2015–2018). It was a big dungeon, with a computer-generated wilderness map surrounding them. What worked: we played until we got down to level seven of the dungeon. We managed to invest the riches retrieved into infrastructure: a castle was being built soon after the campaign got going; we had a construction site, masons, carpenters, guards, a palisade, a quarry, and on and on. What didn’t: the wilderness map wasn’t populated with enough monsters, tribes, factions, and all that. We did have orcs and ogres and treants, and evil elves and necromancers, and whenever they were encountered, the game was great. I should have added a lot more at the beginning of the game.

Mondschein Saga. I played in a D&D 5 game with DM Peter, with no regular dates (2018-2020). This was a reprise of the earlier campaigns. Peter had refined his concept: islands, factions, sandbox, links to the rest of the Forgotten Realms (e.g. a visit to Baldur’s Gate), no single safe haven but a variety of safe harbours, more dungeons, and a group that took to D&D 5. What worked: Peter’s sandbox gained even more depth; a less formulaic approach. Player Rafael taught me the value of well written session reports to show character development and I started taking to it. Some of my best writing for role-playing games happened (in German, translate using DeepL if you’re curious): Der Wert eines Zwerges (talking at the campfire), Caer Corwell auf dem Opferaltar (burning down a city), Der Feuerzirkel von Rottesheim (epilogue after the party lost the last fight at the end of the campaign). What didn’t: I still have no great love for D&D 5, but playing with just the Basic Rules for D&D 5 actually works. I like that! Lessons learned: as a player, writing vignettes on a campaign wiki is great (or posting them on whatever medium you use to share writings for your campaign).

Rasiermesserküste. I ran a Halberds and Helmets game using Razor Coast on every second Wednesday (2017–2020). I was looking for a nautical sand box, islands and pirates and all that. What worked: a nice campaign with cool ideas using were shark and cultists. What didn’t: the book tries to square the role-playing book circle, it has everything – events, maps, dungeons, characters, prep sheets, and on and on. It’s huge. It’s dense. It takes a lot of work, I think. Lessons learned: try to run the next game without using any books and without big plans that need to be prepped.

Die dampfenden Dschungel von Chult: I played in a D&D 5 game with DM Peter, with no regular dates (2020-2021), via Skype. Same deal as before: I used the Basic Rules for D&D 5. Instead of a fire wizard I played a rogue and it was great. What worked: the mix of sandbox, interesting locations with smaller dungeons, the ruins of Omu, the big final dungeon. What didn’t: if at all, the big dungeon at the end was a bit too long, but just barely so. It was still a great game. Lessons learned: the D&D 5 sandbox still works! Yay!

Die drei Wälder. I ran a few sessions of Just Halberds, with no regular dates (2020), for a bunch of kids, via Zoom. What worked: it was a play test for the Just Halberds rules. What didn’t: I wasn’t really able to get into a good 2d6 groove and eventually the game just petered out. Perhaps the kids lost interest; perhaps gaming remotely using Jitsi, Zoom, and friends, isn’t made for larger groups of players. Lessons learned: for future games, I’m going to try and limit the number of players to three.

Die Zeit der Waldbrände. I’m playing in a Humblewood campaign using D&D 5 with DM Lars (2020–now), via Jitsi. What worked: D&D with anthropomorphic animals works better than I expected! The game is still ongoing, so it’s too early to talk about the things that didn’t work or the lessons learned.

Der Fluch des Stradh: I am playing in a D&D 5 game with DM Mircea, with no regular dates (2021–now), via Zoom. I’m playing a fighter that picked the Skilled feat to pick rogue skills. So, a rogue without sneak attack, haha. I’ve started using the D&D 5 Player’s Handbook, at long last. I guess it works for me because I’m playing a fighter. What works: the mix of interesting locations with smaller dungeons everywhere. The game is still ongoing, so it’s too early to talk about the things that didn’t work or the lessons learned.

Tau Subsector. I’m running a Classic Traveller game, with no regular dates (2021–now), more or less weekly, via Jitsi. I used a ton of random tables to provide even more details for the generated subsector and now I’m hoping that one thing leads to another, with not too much prep required. The game is still ongoing, so it’s too early to talk about the things that didn’t work or the lessons learned.

Lessons learned, overall: Keeping the notes of the games you played in, is future pleasure – in a jar. Do it! Open it a decade later and enjoy the memories, like I did.

Comments on 2021-04-05 The things I learned

Very interesting and a good read!

My lessons from the last decade:

  • Campaign wikis are great for lore, player background stories and interactions with the world. I also think they work better for character development and many aspects of role playing, as most people are more comfortable and creative at writing between sessions than at speaking during a session.
  • D&D 5e rules work. They are the best version of the rules in my opinion. Easy to get into, quite well balanced and without any really serious flaws. I would prefer them to be a bit more gritty and less Marvel Super Heroes style. The exploration/survival aspect is also too trivial.
  • Sandboxes are great. I love creating and running them. But pure wilderness hexploration as in the Grenzmarken campaign is a bit bland and can feel meaningless soon. Who cares about how many arch demons from Hell your hero killed in a forsaken dungeon in the wilderness? Killing an arch duke in a city or just having the power to possibly do so, is much more interesting and also character defining. So social sandboxes with fame and factions are more interesting for everyone, I think.
  • Dungeons are still the heart of the game and what the D&D 5e rules are made for. The players are on the edge of their toes and fully engaged most of the time: Thinking about tactics, spell selections, resting points etc. Everyone can contribute. The problem with social encounters is that usually it is just 1 or 2 players that are really engaged or relevant and the rest is fiddling their thumbs. I am just experiencing this again as player in DM Mirceas campaign.
  • Now here’s a big conflict with the point about sandboxes: For the campaign to be interesting and meaningful, you need a social setting rife with conflict and interactions. But in actual play it seems to me that running dungeons still works best. It is also less demanding of the DM than running and improvising interesting social encounters. So this led to my current kind of preferred gaming style of running mostly dungeons and combat in actual play and running a social sandbox for character development and world exploration on the campaign wiki.
  • There’s a also a social aspect of relevance at the meta-level: A smaller party size (3 or 4 max) would certainly make it easier to have more social interactions and character development during a session like we had in the past. But I also came to the conclusion that having a bigger party size makes the game and campaign much more relevant for everyone at the meta level. Many of my sessions with just 3 players felt a bit meaningless or bland in retrospective. If you kill the BBEG with a critical hit with just 2 companions at the table it doesn’t feel the same as with 5, where there’s always a lot of cheering, high-fiving etc. going on. It’s a bit like watching sports now in empty stadiums compared to fully packed ones in the past. It’s kind of stupid, but it really seems that among humans, everything becomes much more meaningful and long lasting in memory if there are a lot of spectators/companions.

– Peter 2021-04-05 20:59 UTC


This is a great post! Thank you for it! Is it just where you were in life or something about B/X based games that led to them lasting so long?

– Oliver 2021-04-05 22:39 UTC

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2021-04-03 Episode 35

Halberds and Helmets Podcast Talking about giant beetles and how I used them: pack animals for the underworld, war elephants for goblins and the like, or car sized monsters in dungeon corridors.

Links:

  • 2016-10-13 Giant Beetle: “When I ran Castle of the Mad Archmage, we encountered several rooms full of giant bombardier beetles and we fought them all using everything we had. It was a hell hole of flaming oil, charred corpses and madness, because somehow one of the players had claimed that you might be able to find gems inside dead giant beetles.”
  • Burning Corridors: “Fight! A lot of flaming oil was used but they just kept on coming. One of them got Simed and bite off a leg of him and then they killed Tristan. But eventually we managed to kill all the beasts.”
  • Halberds and Helmets: my homebrew rules with links to the PDF files

A fearful human face in the foreground and a giant bug in the background, inspired by Starship Troopers

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2021-03-27 Blogosphere

Yeah, another list of links to blog posts I liked, inspired by the read through of @jmettraux’s End of Week Links 13. Like John, I get my links from the RPG Planet. Please join us, if you haven’t already.

Since I’m running a Traveller campaign, I was interested in some Traveller-related blog posts.

Classic Traveller skills are more like professions at The Viking Hat GM: «An inclusive rather than exclusive view means shorter skill lists in a game - you don’t need to list every trivial thing humans can do when you can handwave most of it as basic life skills - and also on the character sheet. You will see too a difference in play at the table. When every possible skill is listed, as the GM says, “And what do you do?” everyone looks down to their character sheet … RPGs are a social way to be creative with friends, and shorter skill lists and briefer character sheets encourage more creativity among players, and more socialising. They talk to each-other rather than looking at their character sheets. Play becomes more interesting.»

I can see it working both ways: either you use as few skills as possible, specially not for social interactions. But I know this is a controversial area. In my blog post Role Play, not Wish Fulfilment I argue that if you’re not a charming player, I think it’s OK for you not to play a charming character. In other words, just like a fearful player who wishes to play a courageous hero by cannot bring themselves to put their character into the front rank cannot be the thing they wish because they are not acting their part, a monosyllabic player who wishes to be a socialite cannot be the thing they wish because they cannot bring themselves to play the role. In this way, the role-playing I like is a bit like an acting skill: over the years, I hope you’ll get better at it. I hope I get better at it. Of course, the line is drawn arbitrarily. There’s no reason for the fantasy to be sexist and cruel, and that is a kind of wish fulfilment, of course. There’s no reason for the player of a fighter to be a good fighter, and that’s a kind of wish fulfilment. The reason I think I’m OK with it is that first of all, most of us are not good fighters, and second, if their descriptions of fighting is lame, we can at least roll dice and move on. But if we do this for all interactions as well, then we’re going to roll more and more dice until I just don’t enjoy the game anymore. So yeah, that line is going to be different for everybody. I’m just saying where my line is. And just because I favour this kind of play doesn’t mean I’m opposed to all other kinds of play. I really liked Sean Nittner’s and Judd Karlman’s Actual Play podcast (see 2021-01-19 Listening to Burning Wheel Actual Play) where they use Burning Wheel. There, the Duel of Wits is a way to resolve social conflict using dice, and it works in the context of a game where every roll ties into advancement, into your beliefs, your traits, and so on. Here, immersion is achieved not by forgetting the rules and just talking at the table but by using the rules to suffer setbacks and defeats (and triumphs, eventually) in areas your characters care about.

The Viking Hat GM has more, though: “But as with so many game systems, the author got it more-or-less right the first time. And so we play Classic Traveller. Classic Traveller, most especially Books 1-3, like AD&D1e, RuneQuest 1e and the like, is a good system because not despite the fact that it is incomplete. You fill in the blanks.” – CT: Books 1-3 - You fill in the blanks!

Together, these two posts reminded me of something I had recently posted myself: the skills these Traveller characters have are based on their past careers: Electronics, Mechanics, Computers, and a ton of weapon training, and some obscure things like driving tracked vehicles or acting as a forward observer for orbital artillery, and then they are dropped into a world of crooks, smugglers, narcs, and they are absolutely unprepared for a life of crime in a deadly world where well aimed shots can take you out.

This is underscored by yet another post I liked by The Viking GM, Conflict: Surprise & Initiative: “The unfortunate truth is that there really only three kinds of combats: Ambush! - all of you live, all of them die. Ambushed! - all of you die, all of them live. Stand-up fight - everyone dies.” What a summary!

That, in turn, led me via The Wandering Gamist’s Truer Combat as War and Chocolate Hammer's Boot Hill Campaign to Rutskarn’s Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice: “You want players to be prudent, ambitious, ruthless, calculating, paranoid. You want them to respect their enemies and balance alliances carefully. Above all you want the constant, thrilling tension wrought by a high-stakes duel of wits: a deadly game where a single misstep in a dark alley could end an entire dynasty.” Isn’t that what it’s all about? If the game is deadly, and combat is a mistake unless you’ve rigged the stakes to favour you as much as possible, then that’s what I like: I like to make the decision of when to fight, now the minutiae of how to fight. As far as I’m concerned, I’m happy if combat ends in two rounds. Yeah, picking up old threads from 2021-03-10 Blogosphere, again.

At the same time, the end effect of that ends up being that the players talk to everybody and prefer not to shoot, and after a while you realise: they’re not fighting because everything is dangerous, they’re not rolling dice for talking because there are no social skills in the game, so that’s it. It’s all talking.

And that in turn reminded me of some older blog posts at the Tales to Astound blog, like Casual and Improvisatory Nature of Early Traveller Play: “More talking than shooting – The session does feature some combat, but it occurs near the end when, after interacting with the natives for some time, the players finally realize that the natives are cannibals and see the PCs as a new source of protein. What the players don’t do is waltz into the caverns with FGMPs, battledress, and itchy trigger fingers ready to slag anything that moves. Even when the encounter with the natives slowly deteriorates, the players prefer to Jaw, jaw, jaw rather than War, war, war. The guns – and the dice – only come out when the players need to secure their retreat to the surface and then, rather than burn the caverns to the ground, they only use enough force to escape.”

There’s more in this follow-up post from the same blog, An Improvised Classic Traveller Convention Game. This time it’s not about the need to avoid combat in a lethal system but in how improvised a lot of the game is. I guess that’s the direction I want my own gaming to move towards: my goal is to “daydream” about the setting, write down some notes, names, some forces ready to clash as soon as the player characters appear, and that’s it. Almost no prep is also almost no wasted prep. 😁

That “Classic Traveller Out of the Box” blog post series is great. Just recently, one of my players sent me a link to An Approach to Refereeing and Throws in Original Traveller (Part I). «Keep in mind that I don’t think Classic Traveller has a Skill System. It has a Throw system (throw 2D6, equal or beat a number, add DMs from a variety of sources (skills, characteristics, and circumstances). Not everything Throw has a Skill DM. … Because it we have a system for Referee saying, “I don’t know what’s going to happen here. Roll these 2D6 and we’ll find out what happened.” All sorts of modifiers can come into play depending on what the roll is about. It is a universal system that looks like it has not system!» Note that the blog post also discusses the “Free Kriegsspiel” idea. We’ll come back to that in a moment.

Anyway, all that Traveller talk reminded me of old blog posts in Richard’s Dystopian Pokeverse, like The implicit game in original Traveller’s ship loan rules: “the entry level offer for a high-performing merchant captain is a shipyard loan on a new-built Free Trader: capital cost 36-37 MegaCr at 6.2% interest, working out to a monthly payment of 150,000 Cr – roughly equivalent to room and board for 500 average Imperial citizens or 6 mail contracts to different systems, meaning you’d need a 6-week month to break even as a mail carrier.” Which is how you end up with a ton of mercenary work, narcotics, weapon smuggling, and so on. The honest way of life doesn’t pay in Traveller.

All of this then had me ready to think about other games. @jmettraux had me covered, linking to Links for Designing PbtA TTRPGs (where “PbtA” means “Powered by the Apocalypse”, usually referring to rolling something like 2d6 with very high results meaning a success, medium results meaning a complication, and low results meaning bad stuff heapens, and “TTRPG” meaning “Table Top Role-Playing Games”), which in turn linked to Simple World, which is a PDF that looks like a game but is actually a document telling you how to customise the basic rules to create a “Powered by the Apocalypse” game. It’s a super cool procedure to customise a procedural game! 😁

And John also has a post about Hnefatafl, and Freies Kriegsspiel in real life, and a link to cave maps, and a link to How the Germans Defined Auftragstaktik: What Mission Command is - AND - is Not in the Small Wars Journal, and a follow-up for readers of French, Ensemble tout devient plus lent, at La voie de l’épée, on ordering people around.

The Simple World post also reminded me of a super basic B/X document without spells, monsters, or classes – just people, if I understand it correctly. A foundation for your own game, perhaps. Quintessential BX, David Perry, at Lithyscaphe.

More cool links… Wow, this post is long.

“It is about characters’ inner struggles, and interpersonal struggles, and societal struggles, and that is broadly encoded in the Karma mechanic, but not by genre. It is about problem-solving, but less so in the sense of logic puzzles and resource management, and more in how you confront these weird and inexplicable circumstances- it’s more a creative challenge. I guess it’s more of a life challenge, if again I may be so pretentious.” It sounds weird. 🤔 Tabletop RPGs as Performance Art, at Weird & Wonderful Worlds.

Grymlorde quotes from Scientific American Supplement No. 586, 1887: “Torches consist of a bundle of loosely twisted threads which has been immersed in a mixture formed of two parts, by weight, of beeswax, eight of resin, and one of tallow. In warm, dry weather, these torches when lighted last for two hours when at rest, and for an hour and a quarter on a march. A good light is obtained by spacing them 20 or 30 yards apart.” – Torches through the editions & Real World

A blog post about reviews. I didn’t read it all, it was very wordy, but I found the comments very interesting: What's Broken: Reviews. As for myself, I stopped doing reviews when I realized that they were always hopelessly out of date as I wanted to run all the adventures before reviewing them. And people convinced me that talking about the things we don’t like is a waste of time. Life is short. Talk about the things you love. Do we need “a review culture to guide consumers”? Maybe not. But then again, I’m on the record with claiming that we also don’t need much of a market… For the controversial take, see 2020-02-14 Unprofessional.

Anyway, back to links…

«Everything can speak and understand Common. That’s Everything with a capital “E”, in the sense that everything a person could interact with (vegetable, animal, and mineral) can talk. Anything can have a discussion. … Caves of Qud, which allows you to attempt to talk and trade with most things, plants and pond fish included. They make poor traders and conversationalists. Still, being able to say: “Live and drink, aquafriend.” is a pretty significant bit of worldbuilding.» Everything Can Listen, But Nothing Wants to Talk, Goodberry Monthly.

“The game is well written and has a lot of charm. It has the level of complexity I was looking for. It is a great game to play with children and I think my children would also be able to play it on their own.” Playing Das Schwarze Auge after 37 Years, by Herr Zinnling. It’s what I started with! 😀

As an interesting tidbit circling back to social skills and my example with the fearful player and the courageous character: Das Schwarze Auge has a Courage attribute which might force your character to charge or accept a challenge even though the player might not want to. A bit like those traits in King Arthur Pendragon: knights have multiple traits that come in opposing pairs such as just vs. arbitrary and usually whenever you increase one, the other decreases; these traits sometimes get used to determine what the character does in spite of what the player might wish.

Comments on 2021-03-27 Blogosphere

I think the best example of Classic Traveller’s “do it yourself” nature is the conspicuous absence of laser pistols. There are even laser carbines which are, if I’m not misremembering, just a worse version of the laser rifle, barely cheaper and at the the same tech level - as if to say “You want a laser pistol? Have useless stats for a laser carbine instead! Let’s see if you can put two and two together and repurpose them.” Because in my experience, once you’ve hacked the rules once, it becomes easy to do it again and again - which I think is the whole point of CT.

– Malcolm 2021-03-28 08:08 UTC


Haha, yes! I guess Marc Miller thought: how is poking holes into people using lasers different from poking holes into people using metal slugs?

“While technology will certainly progress in the centuries that come, it will also remain a fact that one of the surest ways to injure or kill an adversary is to subject him or her to a large dose of kinetic energy; the simplest way to deliver that energy to someone is with bullet impact.” (The Traveller Book, p. 48)

I guess the only benefit would be lack of recoil.

“Virtually all weapons have recoil (except laser carbines and laser rifles) and in a zero·G environment this recoil can disorient or render helpless individuals not trained to compensate for it.” (ibid)

Then again, I don’t remember a single zero G scene in all of Star Wars… 😀

– Alex 2021-03-28 09:29 UTC


Thanks for these lists. I really love these curated and commented links! 😍

There is so much interesting content floating around waiting to be found.

– Ludos Curator 2021-03-31 08:16 UTC


Thanks! More at Seed of Worlds.

– Alex 2021-03-31 12:31 UTC

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2021-03-18 Hekadungeon using Text Mapper

The Gridmapper algorithm for Text Mapper to generate small dungeons was based on the blog post The Nine Forms of the Five Room Dungeon, by Matthew J. Neagley, which I then extended to 7-room dungeons, and then I added the combination of the two, which led to 10 (5+5), 12 (5+7), and 14 (7+7) room dungeons. It worked surprisingly well, see 2019-10-09 Ten random dungeons generated, and 2019-08-23 Gridmapper inside Text Mapper. It definitely worked better than the failed Megadungeon project I was working on a long time ago. Reload it a few times until you more than just one level and then click on the last image to open it in Gridmapper.

A few days ago I started wondering whether I could scale that up… and it turns out that I can!

Here’s an example with 200 rooms. It definitely needs fewer entrances – and the latest version of Text Mapper does that, of course. See 200 rooms.

Dungeon map with 200 rooms

Comments on 2021-03-18 Hekadungeon using Text Mapper

This is really great! I like the shape of these dungeons better than the random results I tend to get out of e.g. donjon.sh. And editing the results in Gridmapper is fantastic!

I’m confused about one thing – does this ever generate multi-level dungeons? You seem to imply so in your post, but I haven’t seen it do so.

acodispo 2021-03-22 20:33 UTC


Sadly it does not. I keep thinking about it, though…

– Alex 2021-03-22 20:54 UTC


Right now the problem is that text mapper doesn’t have a Z axis. Maybe it should. Then we could generate an overworld and an underworld that lines up.

– Alex 2021-03-23 07:51 UTC


The more I think about it the better I like it. But how to show this? It would probably have to be a new “page” and that’s not how SVG works. Just appending the second map below the first one might work, though. Hm.

– Alex 2021-03-23 08:45 UTC


For what it’s worth: when I was checking to see if it would do multiple levels, I assumed that I would see the 2nd level below the first on the page, as you suggest. This is probably intuitive! And I think it would work for the way Hex Describe uses these dungeon maps?

Me, I think I’m always going to open the maps in Gridmapper, edit to my liking, and then export in the format I need whether for online play, web display, or printing. I can stitch together multiple levels if I need to create multi-level dungeons.

I wish I knew more about how to work with SVG in this way. I’ve been making an attempt to add “modal GM notes” to Gridmapper and don’t quite have the chops for it! 😀

acodispo 2021-03-24 14:51 UTC


You mean, like those notes for cells in spreadsheet software, one corner is red or something, and if you hover over it, whatever you wrote there pops up?

– Alex 2021-03-24 20:05 UTC


That’s an idea I hadn’t thought of for UI! I was thinking of expanding Gridmapper’s labels. Specifically the behavior where when you type ' while the cursor is on an existing label, the label’s text pops up for editing.

So the GM note behavior would be similar to that, but:

  1. The content of the GM note isn’t displayed on the map, there’s a stand-in symbol. Perhaps +.
  2. When you type e.g. + while the cursor is over a + on the map, that note’s content is placed into an editing box. If there is no existing note, then a new one is created (just like a label).
  3. The editing area for notes is a larger textarea. (I was considering simply using the existing export/import box for this.)

The idea is that I like to put as much data about dungeon contents onto the map itself as possible (so I don’t have to reference a separate room key during play), but using labels can be a bit cumbersome depending on the amount of content. Being able to store longer notes that don’t get displayed on the map would help with this.

I’m fiddling with it off and on but haven’t made much progress! 😀

acodispo 2021-03-25 14:23 UTC

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2021-03-13 Portraits for modern games

I’ve been thinking about face generators a lot. I still think about the Face Generator web app a lot. But I also think about This Person Does Not Exist a lot. Those images are generated by an algorithm that has been trained by another one. The first algorithm is given the task of deciding whether a face we give it is a real face or not. Since we know the answer, we can train it. The second algorithm is given the task of creating a face. We obviously know that they’re all fake, so we mix these into the faces for the first algorithm. The goal of the second algorithm is to fool the first. This is a generative adversarial network (GAN) setup. It’s fascinating because it allows us to train a face generator without having to actually make any decisions since we simply train the first one on real faces.

The software exists. The person running This Person Does Not Exist links to three of them. One of them is called Lightweight GAN. It looks fascinating.

The problem is getting the faces. It seems to me that all such collections are ethically flawed. None of the people gave their consent: these are faces scrubbed from social networks, or mugshots, or whatever else. It makes me very uncomfortable.

And yet... And yet! It’s fascinating. With a little post-processing on the command-line, you can get great portraits for your campaign wiki.

True, I wonder about the colour mix, for example. But the fascination is there, for sure.

Montage of faces

This is my Makefile:

face: bw.png
	display bw.png

bw.png: source.jpg
	convert $< -resize 300x300 -monochrome -quality 9 $@

clean:
	rm *.jpg

# get image from the service
source.jpg:
	curl https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/image -o $@

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2021-03-13 Corporate Names

I am using the names from my Traveller generator for mega corporation names. It generates names like these: Ultimate Nuclear, Atassi Development, Coko Processes, Space Fission, Human Production, Universal Banking, Universal Organisation & Oil, You Legal, Lulu Fission & Manufacturing, and Chankoowashtay Production & Nuclear.

I based these on my idea of “Standard Oil”, replacing the adjective with lots of bullshit words like “Universal” or “Ultimate”, and the object with lots of generic industries, often inspired by the service industry like “Nuclear”, “Development”, “Processes”, “Banking”, and so on. Sometimes I pick two, like “Production & Nuclear”.

Sometimes I also use names, assuming them to be founders, like “Atassi”, “Coko”, “Lulu”, or “Chankoowashtay”.

The blandness of such names is also “inspired” by the Swiss mega banks: Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (Swiss credit institute), Schweizerischer Bankverein (Swiss banking association), Union de Banques Suisses (Union of Swiss banks), Credit Suisse (Swiss credit).

Peter remarked on the blandness, and I thought to myself that it’s working: these corporate names are supposed to be super bland. Recently I was leafing through the magazine Swissquote, issued by a bank of the same name (fantastic name…), subtitled “finance and technology unpacked”. It actually had a few pages of interesting company portraits, all of whom are working in genetic testing, mRNA vaccines, sequencing, and so on. Let’s look at some coroporate names…

Union Bancaire Privée (more banks), BioNTech (bio and tech, this is great), Moderna (as opposed to old fashioned, I’m sure), Swissmedic (oh no…), CureVac (nomen est omen), Johnson & Johnson (two human names, a pattern I should also include), AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline (two interesting names, made more interesting by smashing short words together, like wannabe Germans), Pfizer (ist that just a human name?), Exact Sciences (as opposed to sloppy), GenOWay (Gene away!), Crispr Therapeutics, Bayer, Illumina, Twist Bioscience, Cellectis (OK, this one is weird), Veracy, Natera, Calyxt (sometimes it starts to feel like a bad day in Hogwarts), Editas, Tintellia, Sangamo Therapeutics (clearly “Therapeutics” needs to be added to the list of fields).

All right… I don’t think I’ll go for a pseudo-latin name generator to produce pharmaceutical names, but fields of science, pharmaceutical words, that should work.

Comments on 2021-03-13 Corporate Names

fwiw, GlaxoSmithKline at least is the result of a few companies being bought/merging together (It was “Glaxo something” and “Smith Kline Beecham” I think), so maybe there’s another pattern for you.

Derik 2021-03-13 17:29 UTC


Yeah, thinking of The Hewlett-Packard Company, same principle, I’d say. And then there’s adidas... Adolf And Rudolf create “GeDa - Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik” (Dassler brothers shoe factory), later Adolf Dassler creates Adidas, i.e. a few letters from his first name, and a few letters from his last name. I’m not sure how well such smashing together works in practice. Right now I’ve added “last name & last name”.

– Alex 2021-03-13 17:44 UTC

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2021-03-10 Blogosphere

Thinking about excellent blog links again...


A super cool post on how to run combat, OSR style, by James Young: How To Run Combat. After reading it, my main take away is that my monsters should try to wrestle players a lot more!


A post by Delta: Running Mass Fights in Classic D&D He says, “it’s pretty common to encounter bands of malicious bandits, brigands, or humanoids numbering in the hundreds.” How do you deal with them? Evasion, ranged combat (how to deal with a rain of arrows), killing leaders, and so on.


“Every Wednesday morning I wake up with a sense of dread, remembering that on top of everything else I have to do that day I somehow have to run a game in the evening. Every Wednesday afternoon I seriously consider calling the session off. But every Wednesday night I sit down and log in and everything actually goes fine.” Failing better: a GMing retrospective, a super interesting retrospective by Joseph Manola. Makes me want to go through my own games and think about the things I learned.


Sandra Snan writing about verbal components in The Old Verbal Components reminds me of my unfinished dream of adding Sumerian spell names (serving as verbal components) for all the spells in my book. I failed at that. Perhaps one day there’s “fantasy Deepl for some lost language and D&D like spells”. Or some other way to translate English spells to some dead language. My favourite blog post on this still is Elf & Magic-User Sumerian Spell Names / Command Words for Labyrinth Lord by Samwise7RPG.


How not to be a game designer by Craig Maloney. A topic that’s been important to me for a long time: “I’ve done most of my designs when I let these self-inflicted restrictions go. I’ve lowered my expectations to please only one customer: me. Sure, this is not a great way to build a business but it has the added benefit of not having to do market research (I know the target market: me). Once I pulled back from the notion of building a business and making game design a full-time career (yes, this is a notion that I’ve flirted with and realized that I’m 20+ years too late to effectively do this) more possibilities became apparent to me.”


“I wrote up a little “hello world” brawl in Traveller5”, by Wanderer Bill, in Getting to know Traveller 5.


“When players feel like they can die, … then the game is tense and exciting. … one of the biggest obstacles to tension, especially at higher levels, is Hit Points. … If a Level 10 Fighter is attacked by a swarm of Goblins armed with d6 knives, he has nothing to worry about, as he has 60 HP.” Why you should cap Hit Points, by Yami Bakura. My unpopular opinion on the topic: add save or die attacks and level drain to the game. Or more generally: try to aim for combat that is just two rounds long. If it takes longer, the previous rounds were probably boring. It’s the last round that makes all the difference. Now, capping hit points and/or levels is an option, certainly. In my Halberds and Helmets game, I cap at character level 10 simply because all my recent campaigns have ended before getting there. But I also add save or die and level drain, for added excitement. This is how low hit points are not the sole source of terror at the table.


“… it makes those low modifiers very significant, especially when it comes to opposed rolls … I’m using opposed rolls for grappling in unarmed combat and giving a +1 modifier for being large sized. … This would have resulted in each group having at least one unarmed boccord specialist in it, i.e. a half-giant professional wrestler. That game sounds amazing, but it’s not the game I’m trying to design.” Ben L. is writing about skills in A Simple 2d6 Skill System, but all I can think of is every party bringing a half-giant professional wrestler to the table. What a wonderful tie-in to my interest in wrestling based on James Young’s post, above. But it also ties in with my interest in Traveller and in 2d6 systems in general, and my attempt at designing one, Just Halberds.


A long discussion of the changes made from AD&D 1st ed to AD&D 2nd ed in A Historical Look at the OSR — Part III. I also liked the previous parts of the series. As for my own AD&D experience… At the the time we simply decided that 2nd was obviously better than 1st and so we switched. We were 15 or 16 years old, living in Switzerland, not reading any fanzines, no Dungeon or Dragon magazines, no Usenet, and we bought no adventures. All I do remember is that the rules were confusing and we never used them all, and yet we thought them the best.


“I believe that the skeleton of Classic Traveller can bear the muscle of just about any genre or setting you’d like to tackle.” says Forrest Aguirre in The Simplest RPG System Out of This World, which I found via Via John Mettraux’s end-of-week links, Eow Links 9. And that led to me to read Stargazer’s interview with Marc Miller from 2017. And then there’s the Classic Traveller Out of The Box blog series, of course. But I’m running out of time and need to prepare breakfast…


Aside:

As I’m sitting here, generating random characters for Traveller, I get a distinct Dogs in the Vineyard feeling: the characters are singularly unequipped for the actual tasks they are up again. Perhaps that is the secret sauce of many RPGs. You get characters suited for combat in one form or another, and you put them in a world were armed conflict is for losers, and then you watch them struggle with their lack of social skills, escalating to violence when it’s uncalled for.

And that makes me think of life in general, where we are often unable to affect the changes we want in the people we talk to. And I guess then one wonders: would violence solve this problem? And of course it doesn’t (for most of us, luckily). I tell others interested martial arts this all the time: who cares about “efficient” or “street” fighting. No! Run away, if you can, always! Even if you “win” you’ll go to jail and face endless time in court and who wants that if you can just run away?

And so we get to the RPG trope where violence actually does work, most of the time, because players and referees and designers usually wish that it would. Anyway, that’s what I’m suspecting, when I look at my classic D&D or classic Traveller characters, haha. How singularly unprepared they are, and how this is a strange mirror showing us the world we live in, in a way.


“Humans are very contemptuous of orcs. They are brutes, never shying away from any cruelty. And they are warmongers, always divided against each other, always plunging headlong into another meaningless war of succession. This is very similar to how myconids view humans.” Myconids, by Arnold K. Love it!


Here’s more about wrestling and grappling: “A grappling attempt, … If you succeed, your opponent may spend their round trying to escape … or trying to hurt you… or, if they’re holding a dagger, they can attempt, as you were attempting, a killing blow … Killing Blow: Another contested grappling roll. If you succeed, your opponent must save vs. death or be killed instantly. If they make their save vs. death, you merely do the usual 1d4 dagger damage.” Making Daggers A Deadly Option, by Graphite Prime. I my game, I just use 1d6 for all weapons. But now I keep thinking about wrestling. King Arthur’s Pendragon also had it!

Then again, D&D 3.5 also had it, and we always made fun of the rules, even as we used them. They were too complicated, compared to the ones we had for simple attacks. That is an important consideration. Don’t add back all the complications the designers of your game didn’t add to regular attacks. Grappling should involve the same amount of decisions, look-ups, dice rolls, and fear as regular attacks, I think.


😭 “The vast majority, 93%, of survey respondents were male. The most commonly self-reported ethnicity was white (90%), with Latino at a distant second (2%). As the survey was online, respondents could have been answering the questions from anywhere in the world. The majority of them were from within the United States (73%), with Western European residents second (14%), followed by residents in North America outside of the United States (5.5%), …” Motivations of Hobby Game Players, by CarrieLynn Reinhard and Brant Guillory (2018).


“Next in my series of capsule reviews of weird non-fiction books from my library that would be useful in running RPGs: A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels and Other Subversive Spirits: A bestiary of fairies, demons, and other mystical creatures from around the world.” Weird Books for Gamers VII: A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels and Other Subversive Spirits, by Polyhedral Nonsense. I have that book! 😁


“At a minimum, the basics should address the subsector map, interstellar government, and local technological levels. As needed, the referee may add more basics to the campaign, … local organizations of importance, world and local laws, history, and other foundations. With the basics available, it is possible to set any mundane adventure without further preparation. The only problem is that such adventures will be mundane; there is no real spirit of excitement behind them.” A fair warning. This is from The Traveller Book (1981), p. 125.


And that’s it. Older recommendations: 2021-02-06 Blogosphere

Comments on 2021-03-10 Blogosphere

Regarding “Motivations of Hobby Game Players”, by CarrieLynn. Perhaps the numbers have little to do with attempts to recruit other groups and more to do with there being something about the mundane white middle class America that makes folks wish they were somewhere else doing something more adventurous. I suspect Comic Book and Sci Fi fandom has similar numbers for similar reasons. I think the Punk scene in the 70s came out of similar social angst.

Ruprecht 2021-03-10 14:04 UTC


I don’t know how one would determine the root causes of the gender and race imbalance. Here in Switzerland, I can’t say much about race. I simply have no idea.

As for gender... I’ve been wondering whether boys playing with toys is something our culture fosters: knives, hammers, chisels, soldering irons, and later playing cards, dice, board games, computer games, and finally role-playing games. Perhaps because girls used to have less freedom, culturally bound for the kitchen and household chores; perhaps because boys used to be considered more suited for vice like gambling; perhaps because women in general are expected to perform the emotional labour of maintaining family relations, dealing with social fallout, raising the kids, placating the old, and networking with neighbours; perhaps men grow up emotionally stunted in small ways that make them appreciate make-believe social life a little more. That’s certainly a pattern I can see in my own life. But no matter what the underlying reasons, I think if the numbers are true, it definitely is a reason for regret. I wish it weren’t so.

I can’t say whether the numbers are a reflection of truth because I have no idea about self-selection (a survey in English, online... that alone will skew results) but I do know that women are rare in my own gaming groups. And once again, that could be because of something I’m doing, personally, or it could be something the locals here are doing, socially, but either way, I find it to be a cause for regret. I wish it weren’t so.

I really think we don’t really know what the causes are and assume that they are similar to all the causes for gender imbalance elsewhere. Sexism in a thousand different ways both big and small resulting in a culture that skews things in regretful ways. Patriarchy, a curse on all our houses.

– Alex 2021-03-10 14:40 UTC


Eow Links 11, by John Mettraux, has more recommended reading for you.

– Alex 2021-03-13


And I’m finding more people doing it! I love this! ♥

Shiny TTRPG links collection #8, by Xaosseed.

– Alex 2021-03-15 10:19 UTC

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2021-03-04 Classic Traveller is a Go!

We played our first session of the new Classic Travller campaign in the Tau Subsector. We’re using The Traveller Book (1982) for rules. Maybe @wandererbill will occasionally provide us with ideas based on the Traveller 5 books he recently bough. 😄

All in all it went well. We used my provider’s Jitsi instance. I used the Jitsi Meet app on the tablet. We rolled our own dice. There was not a lot of dice to roll.

We ran into the question of tech levels: @pfh’s character has Medic-1 and Electronic-2 skills, we’re on a tech level 5 world, and the price list for the Merical Kit and the Electronic Tool Set says it’s a tech level 7 thing. We decided it makes sense that the skills the character learned are still relevant for a tech level 5 world, and that the kits and tool sets are simply appropriate for the level. Treating a superficial wound just takes longer than on a tech level 7 world with a tech level 7 kit.

Comments on 2021-03-04 Classic Traveller is a Go!

Another interesting question was about technology developing. It seems to me that compared to our days, technology has achieved a sort of steady state. The tech available is not limited by research unless you’re at the very top. All the tech is already known, it’s only a question of whether your system can afford it. If the system is poor, or goes to war and impoverishes, the tech level goes down.

People still “know” about it, like people these days in remote areas of the world “know” about high high tech places like CERN, or public transportation that runs on time. Except that it’s far, far away.

– Alex 2021-03-05 07:51 UTC


There was a supplement for the second edition of Traveller, MegaTraveller, that used that model of technology in Traveller to great effect. The idea is that after the Imperium collapses, interstellar trade becomes much riskier and more expensive - so thousands of worlds suddenly can’t afford or simply aren’t able to buy the replacement parts for their higher-tech devices, and experience tech fallbacks and a general dark age.

By the way, how did you recruit people for your game?

– Malcolm 2021-03-05 08:47 UTC


I wonder about that Traveller background. Looks like many Science Fiction settings imply a past and glorious empire, a golden age, followed by a collapse. A very Platonic point of view, haha.

Personally, I think it would also work if small groups of settlers arrive, and the colony grows, but they don’t have the means to maintain their tech level. Like people these days preferring a simpler life in the outback somewhere, happy to know that dentists and hospitals still exist if they need them, but otherwise happy to do subsistence farming and hunting. Maybe? I don’t actually know anybody who does that.

As for recruiting: B. sent me an email saying he was interested if I ever started a game; P. was looking for a game on Mastodon; I asked L. whether he was interested since we had talked about 2d6 games multiple times; and finally I sent F. an email because I knew he was playing in a Traveller game already and I had played with him before. Looks like I simply leveraged my existing network.

– Alex 2021-03-05 09:56 UTC

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2021-03-03 Animal encounters for Classic Traveller

The animal encounter tables for Traveller are hard to translate into random tables for Hex Describe, but not impossible. It’s not yet 100% there, but I feel we’re close.

I can use it to generate the following, for example:

There’s joint called Green Heron. If you recently arrived with a ship, travel clerk Amarachi Konkwo is looking for help: “I’ve been contacted by Law Ju bent on visiting 「nearby backwater system」. They have the necessary credits, but I don’t have a ship and crew to spare. Would you be willing to take them off me?” The rich tourist is Law Ju, eager to get going, 635897, Streetwise-1. The mission mainly consists of getting there and back, and keeping Law Ju safe. At one point, there’s an animal encounter: typical crater chaser, 12 kg, H: 5/6, jack armour, W: 7, as pike, A: if more, F: 9, S: 3, “Ji Dog”.

And you can create entire encounter tables, too. Here’s one such use:

The Indigo Hyena is on a xenobiology survey mission, here. Ship captain Gerald Clift would appreciate any help in finding, capturing and describing any of the following local fauna.

Desert animal encounter table.

  • grazers (9), 12 kg, H: 12/10, no armour, W: 5, hooves and teeth, A: 5, F: 2, S: 2, “Desert Sheep”
  • siren, 6 kg, H: 3/6, battle armour, W: 11, as broadsword, A: if surprise, F: 7, S: 0, “Kevadim Siren”
  • grazers (7), 200 kg, H: 14/7, no armour, W: 17, horns, A: 6, F: 2, S: 4, “Thugatahew Deer”
  • gatherer, 1 kg, H: 5/0, jack armour, W: 1, thrasher, A: 9, F: 8, S: 1, “Wuxiyin Hamster”
  • grazers (18), 50 kg, H: 16/6, jack armour, W: 5, hooves, A: 7, F: 4, S: 2, “Spotted Antelope”
  • grazers (3), 1 kg, H: 1/0, no armour, W: 1, horns and teeth, A: 6, F: 1, S: 2, “Wruf Moose”

Let’s talk about the things that still don’t work quite as I want them.

In terms of tables, the system of random tables does not take planetary size into account. The planetary size ought to affect animal size. I have a pretty good idea of how this needs to be implemented, but I still need to do it.

The animal names are not always cool. As an example, in the list above, there is a small grazer, a mere 1 kg of weight, that is given the name “moose”. That’s weird because the moose suggests a big animal. Right now, the Earth-equivalent names ignore animal size.

I am also missing Earth-equivalent names (or other cool base names) for many of the types. These are the types I have tables for. It’s not easy, unfortunately.

  • grazer
  • gatherer
  • hunter
  • eater
  • pouncer
  • chaser
  • trapper
  • siren
  • killer
  • hijacker
  • intimidator
  • carrion-eater
  • reducer

There’s also the problem of generating cool adjectives or prefixes. I think I’m doing some part of it (“desert” sheep, “spotted” antelope, or fantasy names using the same Elite-like name generator I’m using for system names), but there’s more that could be done, I think.

I also don’t pick appropriate tables given a system, so I’m not yet ready to generate an encounter table. For example, right now the tables would happily generate an animal encounter table for a vacuum world. I guess that means those animals live inside the structures? Perhaps… Or you could get “hill” or “forest” animals on a water world.

Ah, and that brings me to the last part: the tables I use don’t generate fliers, or swimmers, and therefore all the water biomes are currently not served. These are the terrains I know how to handle:

  • clear
  • plain
  • hill
  • badland
  • mountain
  • forest
  • jungle
  • river
  • swamp
  • marsh
  • desert
  • shore
  • ruin
  • cave
  • crater

It’s a start, but it’s not finished, yet. I just need to focus on some actual adventure writing before spending any more time on this.

Anyway, check it out: a few animal encounter tables.

Comments on 2021-03-03 Animal encounters for Classic Traveller

While your tinkering has a way to go, as you say, I still find it helpful when my brain refuses to come up with ideas and I have a game to run in 2 days or 2 hrs time. It gives me something to hack, which I think for many is much easier than starting from scratch. The world building tools in Traveller are pretty good, but sometimes I don’t have the time to roll the dice: or I do, but using one of your example outputs does the trick and gets me so much further. Thanks.

– Alistair 2021-03-24 03:21 UTC


Thanks for the encouraging words!

– Alex 2021-03-24 07:39 UTC

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2021-02-27 Cohesion

I was recently talking with @wandererbill and mentioned some techniques I find useful to keep a party together, in-game, or socially, out-of-game.

In order to avoid players checking out of a scene because their characters aren’t there, I always allow suggestions and comments. I think it’s important to maintain space and time of the imaginary world, otherwise it all collapses into a dream where people come and go, where the past is malleable and cause and consequence are not ordered. That is to say, if your character isn’t there, you can’t do anything. But at the table, the players are still there, so if one player is doing all the talking because their character is doing something on their own and there’s a moment of indecision, everybody should feel free to comment and suggest. We’re all watching this scene like a TV series. Of course we can all comment.

Furthermore, as the referee I can influence the granularity of everything. If something would make for a cool adventure it might take the party an entire session to achieve it, and yet it can turn into a simple two sentence answer or possibly a roll when it’s a solo-event. I try to make sure that the solo-investigation takes just one roll, a few sentences, and the scene never turns into a fight, so to say. It doesn’t always work, but this is the goal. This automatically prunes solo-time. To push it even further, I switch into narrator mode, summarizing the solo-events instead of playing them out, denying the scene from taking time at the table. This is fast-forwarding, but not quite skipping. I want to encourage these characters to return to the party, report back, and then let’s all do something, together.

If this cannot be avoided, perhaps because we made characters that have no cause to adventure together (why?), then I can always switch into a movie director stance, go around the table, point at players, “now you!” and after a bit when the exchange happened and a die was maybe cast, “as we wait for that, we cut to…” and soon enough “in the mean time…” – and I do this aggressively, in small time slots. This results in a somewhat military style of pointing at people to let them know that now is their turn, while simultaneously waving at others to hold their thoughts, or maybe cutting talkative players off when they’re running too long. It’s weird, but when there’s a lot of players, or when there’s no party play to return to, it works well enough. We’ve made these kinds of mistakes in games where there are characters that are well suited for fighting and others that are not, with their players trying to solve problems by fighting, and players do not. This happened to me when I ran a one-shot of A Song of Ice and Fire. It worked for a session, but it was exhausting and I don’t want to claim that it’s a good solution. It was simple a short term solution that worked, for me. Next time, however, make sure players create characters that will adventure together.

If the problem is that players focus on their characters mechanically, and the only time the characters interact mechanically is during combat, then the game still lacks cohesion, socially. One thing I’ve tried to do is a move from Lady Blackbird. When there is a lull in-game, like a camp fire, a watch, a long walk, you ask one or two of the characters a question about their past. How did you meet? Why did you leave home? Do you have family back home? Just to get a few sentences. Sometimes I preface it by “please tell us a little something, to entertain us here at the table…” In a game with bennies, inspiration, refreshments, or short rests, you could make these sorts of reveals part of the condition to get the reward, if your players need this kind of push. I personally wouldn’t tie it to a mechanical reward, which is why I ask to be entertained as a person sitting at the same table. And the beauty of that is: anybody can ask for it. You don’t have to be the referee to make this move.

Generally speaking, when a game is a lot about rolling dice, it’s particularly important to give time and space to the words around the dice rolling. In the D&D 5E games I’m in, for example, there’s a lot of fighting, which means that I treasure the words said during a fight, or after a fight. Is it encouragement? Orders? Relief? As a person at the same table, I try to make sure such words are never cut off. As a referee, there is no cutting to the next scene while the players are still commenting in-character to each other.

A certain level of jokes or memes might be necessary if the players lack cohesion, each apparently only talking to the referee. Jokes are a way to bond as people at the table. Eventually I’m hoping this also translates to the characters interacting, of course. But it’s a start.

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You probably want to contact me via one of the means listed on the Contact page. This is probably the wrong place to do it. 😄

– Alex Schroeder 2020-05-22 12:19 UTC

Referrers: osr the roots of the rpg hobby Charm Person I'm in need of a few random generators