Monday, November 14, 2011

Death Sparkle Doom: Why? and First (Recent) Playtest

"Gee, I'm already trolling the busybodies by making a Grindhouse Edition with zombies putting hands up hoohas and putting out Carcosa which portrays evil sorcery as evil. Pushing much more in that direction is fun but we're going to get to a point of diminishing warblegarble returns if we keep pushing that way. How to achieve the same effect in another way?"

That 'effect' being important because as a 9 year old owning the AD&D books, the sense of everyonethinksD&DisevilSatanicI'mgoingtocommitsuicideforplayingit, and I can't let my mother see the insides of the books she's bought me because they have drawings of boobies, and I can't read the Monster Manual at night because some of these pictures are really scary! were as much a part of the base RPG experience for me as "There's this game where you can do ANYTHING and not argue about whether you missed or not!" and I have to pay it forward. ;)

... and after a couple years of publishing, and over a year of seeing TONS of what my peers are doing through my OSR-based retailing on the web and at cons, I have this idea that releases should be events, they should be presented as unique and special things, lest they get lost in the sea of releases, lest the ideas within get ignored once purchased because the whole thing appears so mundane and same-old.

I could point lots of fingers there (and have a bit), but instead of being an armchair internet critic, I get to show 'em how it's done, right?

(and then everyone else sits back and gets to complain that I make a big deal out of everything and oh my god how much cheaper would that have been if he hadn't done that!)

Anyway, my latest outrage technique was to go cute. Present an adventure in the manner of a children's book, nice thick pages, very very bright and colorful throughout. The cover will be influenced by the colors and atmosphere of My Little Pony and the Care Bears.

That will be the new face of fear!

But I need something to put into such a product, right? Flashy is awesome, but it's one thing to make something that gets attention, it's great to do something that makes people feel they need to have it because ohmygodhowawesomedoesthatlook!!!, but it needs to be unique and original and awesome to be worthy of a presentation that's unique and original and awesome. Or else it's all shit.

... I had just the thing in the archives! The adventure was originally run about five years ago or so. It was a little puzzle-based dungeon based on the chromatic dragon color scheme, where solving several different color-based puzzles opened up a passage to go up this mountain; the alternative was to fight their way up to the top. I forget why they were going up there. Was it the observatory where dwarfs had enslaved some hill giants?

I pulled this adventure out a few years ago in an attempt to get it into publishable form. Remember, before deciding I was going to be a publisher, I was just going to have other people publish my work. I was going to submit the adventure to Brave Halfling to publish, but in my "genius" I sent the module straight up its own ass as the five chromatic dragon color scheme was muddled by including ultraviolet and infrared light, microwaves, gamma rays, etc. It turned into a big glop of shit, so I abandoned it and wrote No Dignity in Death instead... and then ended up stipulating so many things concerning the presentation that it didn't make any sense for someone else to release it...

So this "color-based adventure," if it could be brought under control, seemed to fit the "colorful children's book presentation." But it needed something a little more... Tying it in to the whole Duvan'Ku thing and making it a Death x Doom release would give it that little kick. It's been well over two years since Death Frost Doom and over a year since Duvan'Ku got any publication mention (in Hammers of the God), and Death Ferox Doom is in developmental hell, so to speak (how to get rid of the overly Traditional D&D* elements without gutting all the key parts where they are currently included, how to make the social sections of the adventure come truly alive -- the "Here are the tribes!" sections I've written seem static and boring!, and how to present it all so that it's too cool for school are all issues I am struggling with), so I'm not draining the Death x Doom well dry.

So a few weeks of organizing, note taking, general dressing up, and integration of the Duvan'Ku "mythology" (including an explanation of why this place exists and how it would function by those that made it), I had a dungeon ready to play.

It's an "everything you touch messes you up and you have to touch a lot of stuff to beat the thing" type of affair.

The first play-through of the new dungeon concept wasn't a total success.

I mean, the three PCs that went through the thing were suitably messed up. I think the basic setup is good. They conquered the dungeon, but one of them is now 18" tall, another is 20' tall, and before he accidentally popped himself out of existence the third PC was made of mist and enveloped in a field of darkness.

The Problems As I Saw Them (my players can chime in if they like):

  • The PCs destroyed the source of clues in the adventure. I actually had to fudge them not being completely destroyed as they should have been or the whole thing would have gone to shit right away. There needs to be a clue about the clues.
  • I'm getting really awful about the reward/XP thing in adventures**. "This structure protects a treasure!" OK, fine, there's a specific treasure to find at the end. But it's not a pile of gold or silver or anything. And playing shouldn't be a total binary "succeed/fail" proposition. The adventure needs more tangible rewards here and there.
  • Needs more urgency. A lot of the puzzles are tense enough, especially once the players get the pattern of what's going on. "If we touch that one there one of our items is going to go bad... and we have to touch it." But when the players are just guessing or working from wrong assumptions (say, because of destroying the clues...) it becomes a repetitious treadmill of "suffer an effect, then go check to see if it did what we want it to do." Presenting some other dangers so this isn't all being done quite at the PCs' leisure is in order, and the means to provide that is already in the adventure.
  • I used a master effects table for the various elements. So no matter if the players touched a colored energy field, got clawed by a guardian of a certain color, or decided to have fun with colored lotus powder, each color rolled on the same effects table. I think I need to separate that out so while, say, a violet energy field, a violet guardian, and violet lotus (PURPLE LOTUS III!!!!!) will be thematically linked as their effects go, the specific effects should be unique to whatever element is triggering it.

That concludes this edition of "what I wrote while waiting to download the revised Carcosa production PDF with changes made in light of the printing proofs."

* this one's hard to explain. It's just important for me, no matter the underlying system and procedures of play, to have my stuff feel different from traditional D&D. The classic TSR stuff has been done. It's continuing to be done and redone by numerous authors in our scene right now. More power to them, but I want something a bit different and distinct, "this is 2011!", not something that slides comfortably beside what was done in 1980 or a "what if?" experiment or whatever. That's one frustrating thing about the fly-by Weird Fantasy critics, yes, it's a retro-clone kind of thing, but if you embrace its assumptions, playing it leads to a different atmosphere and creative space, and dare I say a whole different game than say OSRIC or Labyrinth Lord if you run a campaign. It's not "a slightly different way to play the same old D&D." At least I don't think so. Or maybe my degree of differentiation is so slight that there effectively is no real difference. Whatever. I follow my muse, you follow yours.

** if LotFP gets a third edition someday, the level system is on the chopping block.

19 comments:

  1. Good on you, Jim - keep shaking it up. I think LoFP only has a longterm outlook if you develop your own path branching off from OD&D, which as you note has been done and is continually being redone.

    As for axing the level systems, I always thought levels clashed with the weird in general and horror in particular. How scary can things be if you've got buttloads of hit points? Old school Stormbringer was fantastic precisely because everything could kill you, so you had to think or roleplay a solution instead of slog through another fight. If you haven't a copy, pick one up (1st to 3rd edition before the neutering that was 4e or Elric!).

    ReplyDelete
  2. My issue with the level system isn't the power granted (there are a million ways around that), it's the rewards that have to always be present - piles of treasure when it comes to our games - to support the gaining of XP.

    Yet I don't like "story awards" or "here, have a few XP for participating" type arbitrary awards either.

    I'm more and more thinking Traveller got this part right back in the day. "That character you just made? That's it. Now go play!"

    ReplyDelete
  3. if LotFP gets a third edition someday, the level system is on the chopping block

    Hear, hear!

    ReplyDelete
  4. As one of the players in this play test I have to agree with providing clues about the clue givers.

    They looked like monsters and we correctly figured out a way to destroy them without them being able to fight back so we could explore the dungeon in peace. In the end the fudged version how we got the clues worked quite nicely and for me suited the weird theme.

    One of the troublesome aspects you didn't mention was the need for moonlight and the fact that you could "turn off" moon without even realizing it was the most annoying thing.

    Otherwise, it was good adventure.

    ReplyDelete
  5. "** if LotFP gets a third edition someday, the level system is on the chopping block."

    Oh, bloody hell! You'll have half your fan-base saying "It doesn't feel like D&D anymore," the other half saying "Good! We were tired of those sacred cows," and then some third party that's been putting out LotFP modules will "make LotFP v. 2.5 and call it 'Strange Fantasy' or something" and there'll be an edition war and...

    ReplyDelete
  6. In early editions of Gamma World, your level ("rank") is just a measure of social prestige. I saw a version of the sample characters from 4e Champions after they had gained a vast amount of experience points. Almost all of them were spent on contacts and favors rather than getting more powerful. Zak S's gigacrawler game has a nifty get-better-at-what-you-do skill thing.

    ReplyDelete
  7. While you're at it, 3rd edition LotFP should shift to a copper standard as well.

    ReplyDelete
  8. "It's just important for me, no matter the underlying system and procedures of play, to have my stuff feel different from traditional D&D. The classic TSR stuff has been done. It's continuing to be done and redone by numerous authors in our scene right now. More power to them, but I want something a bit different and distinct..."

    I strongly agree.

    "if LotFP gets a third edition someday, the level system is on the chopping block."

    Perhaps that would be hasty? At a stroke you'd lose a lot of compatibility with the grand old game, and a useful shorthand: "He's a 7th-level magic-user" says a lot.

    I thoroughly agree about the lameness of having to have scads of treasure littered around in order to enable PCs to gain levels. So instead put the entire experience system on the chopping block: CHOP. Gone. Don't even mention experience points in the game.

    Instead, adopt a style kind of like the order in which REH wrote his 21 Conan stories. He didn't start Conan as a youth, then gradually have him get older and more experienced. Hell, the very first Conan story was about King Conan. They weren't written "in order" at all. They were all over the place.

    Do the same with PCs: "OK, I have an adventure for 6th-level characters. Everybody adjust your hp and stuff to make your character 6th-level." Then the next game: "OK, this adventure is for 3rd-level PCs. Make the changes." Etc.

    PC level by referee fiat. And let the players have some say: "Hey, what about an 8th-level adventure? Put that in your thinking cap so we can do one of those pretty soon." Etc.

    For those groups which want to start at 1st level, no problem: The first adventure would be for 1st-level characters. When that adventure was finished, the characters all magically become 2nd-level and go on to the 2nd-level adventure. Etc. This avoids the old problem of "I'm 3 xp away from 2nd-level. I go look for some stray dog to kill."

    You also might consider ignoring all character levels above 10th (as DDC RPG is doing), which would all you to drop all spells above 5th level. Continue to shift out old stand-by spells for inventive new spells such as Summon. Those high-level spells for the most part really don't have any analogs in the old weird tales, anyway.

    In short, I'd keep levels while ditching xp and high-level stuff.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Ditching gold for XP and levels? My head just exploded.

    I'll be back after picking up the pieces.

    ReplyDelete
  10. if LotFP gets a third edition someday, the level system is on the chopping block.

    I don't think I could get on board for that.

    Beside, why do you need a new edition anyway? So far I've found exactly one dubious rule call you've made and I was just pouring over the rules again yesterday.

    ReplyDelete
  11. A- Any "third edition" is YEARS away. The Grindhouse Edition is IT for a long damn time. How I feel about matters will likely change 34893248934 times before that ever, if it ever, happens. But the thought experiment of "If you get rid of character advancement altogether, how does the system work?" is interesting.

    The only things you're likely to notice with coming adventures are the same things people always notice in my releases... they aren't keyed to a tight level spread as most adventures are (but will be on the lower end of the scale), and treasure and rewards aren't going to be in big piles of XP-ready cash.

    Frankly I don't release fast enough to allow people to make a campaign out of on their own so I don't think it's a problem if my adventures tend to be high-strangeness, low-XP (but rich in other sorts of rewards) affairs.

    B- Death Sparkle Doom, guys. I think this, the Monolith, and Dancing Queen in Yellow (all, knock on wood, to at least be completely ready on the writing end, not sure about art and layout, by the end of Q1 2012) will put me on "the next level" as far as what people think of my adventure writing.

    Whether that's a level up or down, well, that'll be up to you...

    ReplyDelete
  12. I don't think I could get on board for that.

    My thoughts exactly. If I need a non-level based weird fantasy roleplaying game, I already have Cthulhu Dark Ages and a litany of other Chaosium stuff. The advantage of LotFP is that it's based off of D&D.

    ReplyDelete
  13. The first adventure would be for 1st-level characters. When that adventure was finished, the characters all magically become 2nd-level and go on to the 2nd-level adventure.

    This strikes me as the most sensible way to do things, but then I've never been that besotted with D&D's way of doing things.

    It's also more or less how Dragonlance Fifth Age did things, and that's one of the great underrated fantasy systems in my likely blasphemous opinion.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Death Rainbow Doom?

    Maybe have it come with a coloring book...or BE a coloring book...

    Just had an another TPK with Death Frost Doom, by the way...and this time, they couldn't even blame it on accidentally acquired insanity or huffing purple lotus dust.

    ReplyDelete
  15. "I'm getting really awful about the reward/XP thing in adventures**. 'This structure protects a treasure!' OK, fine, there's a specific treasure to find at the end. But it's not a pile of gold or silver or anything. And playing shouldn't be a total binary 'succeed/fail' proposition. The adventure needs more tangible rewards here and there."

    This problem is a direct result of awarding XP only for "Defeating Enemies" and "Recovering Treasure". Those rules mean that, for an adventure to be 'rewarding' in terms of XP, it has to include either lots of enemies that can be defeated or lots of treasure or both. The solution? Change "Defeating Enemies" to this:

    When a class-based die roll is made for a character under stress, that character gains experience points equal to the die roll.

    A class-based die roll is any die roll that's either dependent upon or affected by the character's class. At a minimum, it includes saving throws, to-hit rolls, skill rolls, and spell-effect rolls.

    Characters are considered to be under stress whenever they're in a situation that they think could easily go horribly wrong. So practicing in controlled conditions doesn't earn XP.

    Using this rule, a character could earn enough XP to gain a level just by doing lots of things that require saving throws.

    ReplyDelete
  16. "When a class-based die roll is made for a character under stress, that character gains experience points equal to the die roll."

    This seems like it would really screw over magic-users and clerics because their big abilities (spells) don't require them to roll dice the way a fighter swinging a sword or a thief rolling to move silently does.

    ReplyDelete
  17. "This seems like it would really screw over magic-users and clerics because their big abilities (spells) don't require them to roll dice the way a fighter swinging a sword or a thief rolling to move silently does."

    Not at all. The to-hit rolls of all classes are class-based. So all classes would get XP for making to-hit rolls. And there are die rolls to determine the effects of many spells -- and all those rolls are class-based because they wouldn't be made if the character wasn't of the requisite spell-casting class. So spell-casters would get XP for casting many spells. For example, when Clerics cast Cure Light Wounds, they would get an XP award equal to the number of hit points they heal.

    ReplyDelete
  18. "Those rules mean that, for an adventure to be 'rewarding' in terms of XP, it has to include either lots of enemies that can be defeated or lots of treasure or both"

    And seeing that as a problem comes from thinking that all reward is in terms of XP or other mechanical stand-ins for xp. Most of the reward in playing a role-playing game is in succeeding at the character's goals, which may or may not include mechanical achievements.

    ReplyDelete
  19. "And seeing that as a problem comes from thinking that all reward is in terms of XP or other mechanical stand-ins for xp. Most of the reward in playing a role-playing game is in succeeding at the character's goals, which may or may not include mechanical achievements."

    That's true, but it doesn't address the problem at hand -- providing incentives for players of characters in modules intended for general use. Those can't be tailored to the goals of any specific characters or they'll lose their generic modular utility. They need generic incentives like treasure and XP instead.

    ReplyDelete