Dead Simple One-Page RPG: a review that barely escapes being longer than the rules…..

In all honesty, I’m not a classic OSR guy –in fact, I never stopped playing  Oe since about 1975 ; I’m a living fossil.  What I am entirely enthusiastic about is the minimal rules component of RPG development that OSR has shined new light on. I think I found the OSR sites thru searching for microlited20 stuff.  I love the idea of minimal rules.  My son does, too, and getting kids interested is  about the best thing a rules set can do. 

So, what ones do I like ? my current favorite is the Dead-Simple one page FRP rules developed by the creators of FUBAR , itself a great set of  one page miniatures rules.  The author clearly cut his teeth designing an excellent one page future/ultra modern miniatures set, and did a marvelous job; unsurprisingly, the same general zeitgeist carried over to an honest to god FRPG.  I say unsurprisingly, because, as we all remember, D&D is the mutated offspring of lead pushing miniatures rules ; in all honesty , dead simple does tread the line between a skirmish game and an RPG, but, especially in the latest iteration, it is clearly on the RPG side (character focus, persistent game environment, experience system etc) .  It is a simple rules-lite classic RPG in the old school tradition– in one page.

 It has spells, combat and experience progression, items and a skill system all on one page.  Revisions have been aimed at making more room for progression/advancement, and making initial builds  They have done a marvelous job of catching all the necessary tropes for a D&D experience, in a very elegant set of rules.  And note:  the rules are concise, not compressed.  Compressed rules often assume a more than basic knowledge of the topic (RPG or miniatures); whereas concise requires clarity and ease of access.  The fit clearly in the latter case;

It comes in at least three variant versions, covering different genres: space Opera ,Oriental adventures, steam punk and reformation)…four, sir. Well, five including Busiris, which is the version set in a homegrown setting.   And six, a gonzoish goblin world version.  Really very portable.  Also available  are a series of one page supplements that allow one to expand the framework beyond the bog standard elf/dwarf/hobbit/human/fighter/mage/cleric and barbarian/ranger, which are a pretty good set of guides on being a DM in general.  The whole site is good stuff, and includes lots more than dead simple..  Check it out.

Again:

http://thegamesshed.wordpress.com/category/rpg-rules/fantasy-rpg-rules/

The Thief is not guilty, part 3

So, I wanted to post some reviews, and I noticed that a common theme was: "great, except for the idiosyncratic refusal to include the Thief class".  So, heres my final(ish) thoughts on that.

This belief in the neccessoity for exclusion of the thief is puzzling, and it seems to be part of the OSR zeitgeist; the reasons range from the thief not being in the original three books, through them being a self referential class that creates the challeneges it is supposed to deal with, through being responsible for the glut of skills and feats of later editions.  Support or rejection of this idea seems foundational to the whole bubbling stew of the OSR.  So, since the thief excluders are wrong,  guess which side I'm on?


I've discussed (ranted about) these arguments before, expressing my opinion that they are, indeed, quantifiable as the merest hooie*. To sum up:

1. the number of people who started D&D with only the original 3 book set and not greyhawk either at the same time or immediately thereafter is vanishingly small and as such, it doesn;t represent a change of direction with regard to D&D as an RPG.
2. Gary wrote Greyhawk (well, yes with others) and obviously included the thief intentionally in his campaign, and thus the gygaxian vision of D&D; QED for the purists, I think . 
3. Fighters and the attempt to de-vanilla-ize them via weapon proficiencies and skill based subclasses is, in my obviously self inflated opinion, the real cause of the skillsystems and sorcery style of play, not thieves.  Note that GG resisted weapon proficiencies for quite a while as a bad idea that would lead to skill systems.
3. Its soooooooo swords and sorcery. Plus, Bilbo.

So, anything new ?  Well, yes, and here is my core argument.  
The thief is what made D&D more than just a skirmish miniatures game. 

We all know that it began as one -and that now it isn't just one.  A main difference between a skirmish wargame and the ur-RPG is this: Skirmish games  often are at the scale of the one figure = one man, but the player is still a disembodied commander moving pieces around, and all pieces are judged by their resource value in winning the game; an RPG changes the scale to one figure = you, and you alone. Playing a single fighter was still something that one could do in a skirmish game.  Fighters killed other units, Mages were artillery, and clerics were either recovery units or specialized anti -undead killers.
The thief was a big deal because as a class it had no useful place on the battlefield of a skirmish wargame, whatsover.

Really ?  Well, almost none of the thief skillset is useful in a skirmish -playing one is a waste of time.  Scouting is irrelevant on a real sand table, especially given the rules of that time period, and swiping was even less useful. Climbing and sneaking are options, but since one cannot do anything useful, so what ? Reading scrolls ?  Play an apprentice wizard. Possibly they could eliminate commanders and such, but that was really the role of assassins, a type specifically included in the original skirmish model of D&D.

Why then, amidst all the other detail of Greyhawk, most of which could simply be additions to a skirmish game is a useless unit specifically included ?

Because the thief had every utility in the dungeon game,  and the dungeon game created the role playing experience; and also, the thief in many ways defined the nature of the adventurer.  Remember, 1973.  Fantasy models are  not what they are today.  Heroes were sneaks as much as brawlers, often antiheroesm and in many ways, that is what made them a literary character, rather than the subject of a soldierly autobiography.  They solved puzzles, got into tight scrapes and conflicts by themselves; this I see as the real genesis of roleplaying.

So, given that, we see that the thief is the character of the dungeon crawl, and from there the Urban adventure or the indoor raid.  And those are the types of settings that set D&D apart from the skirmish game.  And thus...the father of the RPG, the causus bellum, the missing link -the neccessary part of the final result. 

No thieves =no role playing games. 

So, suck it up*, Grognardia and all you reactionary revisionists* ! Apologise to the thief right now ! Take him to lunch and make it your treat; you may as well, you'll be paying for it either way .





* I say this in the most loving caring  and compassionate manner possible..;)

A break from the cold war......

So, I've run up against the current limits of what I enjoy doing on this blog - and am into areas of the story that I haven't thought thru all that well.  So, I need to take a break fro the ponderous faux history writing, and see what happens.

The game development itself seems to have hit a plateau; one day a couple of weeks ago I realized somthing: unless this is just an Alt.history blog exercise, I need to figure out where the players can fit in.

The biggest problem with the setting so far is that there really only is room (thus far) for adventurers who are still part of the space forces -in the military, in other words, since the world I'm designing certainly doesn't have room or resources for private enterprise (or corporate enterprise) in space. Regan/Bush capitalism isn't going to flourish in the world of retrospace -both sides have tightly planned, militarized economies. And while a WWII or cold war game on earth has lots of room for espionage, clandestine ops, semi-private adventurers and maverick warbands, the space war requires serious resources and official cooperation from the governments or you can't get there; plus, up to the time of the first orbit war, things are pretty obvious, and the goals are pretty circumscribed.  Blast off in single-seat rockets, shoot down satellite or enemy interceptor.  Infiltrate the three-man saluyt station ?  Ummmm.  No ?  Especially as the entire orbital battlefield has, on both sides, maybe twelve soldiers in it at any one time ?

So, where the players ?  The problem is, a "you are in the army here are your orders" campaign, while easy to run, isn't (in my experience) the most popular amongst the players, who do matter, somewhat.

It looks like there will need to be a couple of breakpoints for the backstory that can generate different campaigns. 

Lets see what I come up with.  In the meantime, I think I'll do some shilling for my current faddish RPG infatuations (six level D&D, Engines and Empires, Busiris, Epees and Sorcery), or post  some stupid game rants. (thieves, idiot fans, get off of my lawn).

So.....1949.

So, I'm thinking on the whole retro-rockets red glare setting (cold war in space) .  The main difference (or POD as the alternate history hipsters call it) is this:  Stalin had access to something that he felt was a useful counter to the Allied A-bomb much sooner than the actual 1949 date that the Soviet A-Bomb arrived on the scene.  My assumption is that given an earlier counter, his actions 1946-1949 would largely be similar, or at least similarly motivated as his actual actions before his death in 1953.

So, this opens the question, what was his action plan for the USSR post WW-II ?

But first, a digression.

Well, in all truth, we have nothing but speculation about alternates.  Particularly so in this case, as Stalin played his cards very close to his chest, tended to have multiple plans that would be modified by real world changes, and never told anyone what he was doing.  And he lied. And used threat and intimidation.  And lied.  Plus, if you looked cross-eyed at him, you died.

That said, I'm not a historian, so I can take the luxury of making decisions about questionable issues with input from the game setting I want to describe rather than relying entirely upon documented facts.  So, while all the following is at least,  as I see it, possible, it is not necessarily likely.  In fact, the most likely possibility, insofar as we have no idea at all what the actual quantifiable probabilities involved were has to be exactly what happened in the real world.   Which, due to a lamentable lack of nuclear torch fighters duking it out among Jupiter's moons doesn't work for the setting I want.  So, I'll go with some other outcomes.

However, the "and then Nikoli Tesla/Albert Einstein/unnamed Genius/alien benefactors invented/introduced grav. drive in 1929/1939/1949" has been done before (did you notice ?) and tends to create a future Alt universe with what we think of as the future as envisioned by us, now.  Make sense ?  I suppose I'm interested in "what did the future look like in the 50/60's to those in the 50/60's", and how do we get there in a game ?

So, what defines that period for me ?
1. Cold war and global polarization
2. Inevitable apocalyptic conflict
3. Crap computers and the last generation of narrow access to information and communications.
4. Crew cuts, lantern chins: jocks and nerds, as opposed to slackers and geeks.
5. Less pesky information about the solar system.
6. BIG projects, engineering uber-alles. Skunk works.


More to come.

So, I know what it means......

.....when you mow your lawn and find a car, but what does it mean when you clean your library and find a computer ?

"Keyboards and Bathrobes" the RPG of online RPG criticism and playtest.

Hello and happy holidays.  For this post, we have an old post, somewhat updated, which prosaically expresses my feelings at a particular online playtest I participated in, and several years of involvement with gaming foums; presented, naturally, in the form of an RPG........
Note: if you think you recognize yourself in one of the character classes, you're wrong: it isn't aimed at you...but seek counseling and psychological help anyway.  ....

"Keyboards and Bathrobes"
the RPG of online RPG criticism and playtest.

Introduction.

This is a roleplaying-simulationist construct derived from intensive multi-generational analysis of current and past character simulation critique systems, (or tropes, if you will) developed after extensive playetest (sic) and editing in my tiny little mind; first pseudo published in 1974 as a self published fanzine amendment to the annex of "Ringmail: WRG campaign micro economics for pre-pattern welded armor skirmish games".
This is the 16th edition, and represents a final revision of the game, bringing it entirely in line with its original contents and concepts while also completely updating all mechanisms and mechanics for the 21st century.

Part I 

characters:

You MUST include the following tables or you are not playing the correct game:

Gaming age:
1. Young: too new to gaming to be polluted by the static hidebound conventions of yesterday
2. Young An FNG noob with a big mouth, hopeless affection for the new and shiny and a small to non-functional behavioral inhibition system....
3. Old: a grognard with immense experience and resources, who has great and enduring passion for games, but has seen flash gaming systems come and go, and half assed systems disappoint, rip off and generally discourage the more naive gaming public. .
4. Old: a grognard with fossilized brains, no social skills, neophobia, unmedicated obsessive compulsive disorder and a desire to see only the earliest systems pinned to a board and put under plastic for all time.
5. Just right: an incisive critic, with tremendous analytic abilities, able to accurately dissect gaming systems and suggest elegant corrections for any system, any time, any mechanic.
6. Just right: A bitter antisocial hermit renting space from Parents, who substitutes arguing online about gaming for actual gaming with other human beings, and who is an esteemed magical experts about subjects just from reading the name, or a quick google search.

Character archetemplate Motivational skill package system which isn't simply like D&D crosssed with Runequest and written up for an improv comedy act by a demented lemur. 

1. Bitter Victim:

the designer didn't use your version of character creation, combat and dice resolution systems, despite you repeatededly emailing it to him and every forum multiple hundred times, and knocking on his front door to deliver your ms that the skeptical toadies that insulate him from the real world have hidden from him.

Skill package: Amazing persistence, deep and extensive knowledge of nasty industry gossip.

Power: stupifying stun attack based on long and self involved stories of your unfair defeats.

2. Noble contrarian:

being hated and ignored is a small price to pay for being right; as is research and testing, social skills, politeness and bathing. All failures in these areas are actually you just "being honest , forthright, and Non-PC"....and needing a bath.

Skill package: Absolute immunity to criticism, or distraction attempts based on social skills training.

Power: Derail any discussion with verbose restatements of sophomoric political or philosphical fringe agendas.

3. Expert grand professor of all time space and dimension:

Why do those stupid idiots waste my time with their questions and demands for references ! My huge brain and questionable actual experience with the subject should be and is enough ! Social conventions of polite and rational discourse are just things that happen to other people, and are to be used as exploitable weak points in arguments...
Skill package:

all of em. Seriously. All world knowlege. Immune to any fact based attack.

Power: HyperLoquatious obfiscitory verbiage ; Nuclear sneer.

4. Argument Whore:

being hated, insulted and yelled at is better than being ignored. Especially when ....actually, always. Social maladroitness is in fact what makes me you an unique, and thus superior being. Being unable to be punched over the internet helps too. Otherwise as above, but with less references.
Skill package:

Absolute moral high ground. Truly painful sarcasm and biting personal attacks; immune from same (as with most venomous insects and vermin); cannot actually be punched.

Power. 100 dice froth attack, FGMP-15 level flame attacks
  
5. Attention Whore:

as above, but will also rely on sarcasm, fiction, stupid parodies and even stupider attempts at humor (often self referential), for gaining attention, and distraction from a sobbing self examination of an otherwise pathetic life.
Skill package:

Immune to suggestions that you are not funny; immune to topic constraints; Can spend any amount of attention and effort on somthing that may, just may get a laugh.

Power: stupifying time-wasting thread derailment.

6. Obsessive compulsive worrier:

My anxieties about life can only be calmed by focusing my attention down to a laser-like focus on minor highly technical details of a game, and ten burying the resulting artificial anxieties under a mountain of increasingly hysterical chapter-length posts.

Skill package:

This one. No, over here. THIS one. Look closer. CLOSER. The one that is KEY TO THE GAME! And...andIS IN DANGER OF BEING changed and ruined and broken FOREVER AND THE GAME WILL BE UNPLAYABLE AND RUIN ITS COMPANY FOREVER DAMMIT ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME ??????????
Power: yes.

Characteristics

A list of stats should be chosen, and then either

a. increased tenfold based on exceptional weirdest case analysis or
2. Reduced to one based on simplest possible mechanic analysis and and/or an idiosyncratic clustering method or
III. Decoupled entirely from task resolution in favor of guided player/GM imagery or
D. integrated into task resolution with such stunning, labyrinthine and byzantine complexity that real life task resolution is abstractly simulated for a specific set of circumstances.
xx. Ignored, or rather, abandoned as task resolution is perforce a simulationist trope with reactionary and obsolete gamingist elements (or tropes) , and antithetical to a interactive synergistic roleplaying resolution trope.
0. made exactly the same as in "Spawn of Fashan", only with cooler names....

Characteristic generation:
Roll some dice...it doesn't matter how many, or what type since the stat distributions of all attempts to operationalize characteristics are broken, anyway.

II Experience:

True critiquists (as opposed to simple critics) will find and explicate adequate design commentary regardless of textual content or active assimilation of text ; and , as should be obvious, this applies regardless of previous experience which will guide or, more precisely misguide the active forward looking critiqueist; indeed, one can argue that any attempt to internalize text, let alone operationalize or enstantiate rules structure will hopelessly pollute the necessarily intrusive scalpel of spontaneous commentary in the service of comforting the reader, and so is to be eschewed as a bourgiose affectation and is to be avoided. 

Primary experience level, if such a concept is deemed necessary due to the unsophisticated nature of the players, is determined by the post counts at websites.

Additionally, the total number of responses to a post may be counted if the initial post uses the works “broken , incompetent, stupid,  or fraudulent”. Followup posts with actual obscenities or threats count double; however, exclude all “can’t we just get along” style posts, or actual factual answers to the original post from the count, unless that poster then goes on to later make a threat or quits the site forever. Additional bonuses include being threatened with absolute banning by the admins in an “other topics” or “forum maintainance” thread; causing a thread to be locked or deleted  counts the total number of posts in that thread as a bonus. Provoking similar threats from the owner of the board, company or author of the product under critique allows a bonus equal to the number of words in the specific post, with insults and obscenities counting double. Getting the owner or author  to quit the site is considered a win, and scores experience equal to the post count of the forum in question.

Double the points from websites, blogs and forums one is permabanned from; however simply “leaving forever” loudly and with great finality counts reduce the final score by one-half, unless one almost immediately returns and ignores having “quit forever”.

  

III. Campaigns

 

As all written campaigns deprotagonize and disempower the player, whereas randomized crawlist models make reduntant the gamemaster,  it is advised to avoid a campaign structure entirely, whilst eschewing simpleminded table sandboxery altogether. Similarly, as the actual enstantiation of the rollplaying metaphor hopelessly collapses the value of the Xperience(sic), and enforces aand, indeed makes mandatory, the tyranny of limits, fun and rules, all actual play should also be avoided in all situations.  

The end.

wow, that was fast.

The week went by soooooooo quickly, with sooooo much work (real work, for pay and all). Not only did I get nothing posted for the week, I got about 30% more followers; at this rate of growth, if I never post anything again , I should have everyone on the internet following my blog by Easter.

Next post, possibly later today: a bold new direction in roleplaying, Bricks and Basilisks ! A genre changing and paradigm shifting system reaching out of the box and creating new synergies in object directed roleplaying, or, as it will soon be known everywhere, BUILDPLAYING.*


Or, I'll be eaten by crawdads. One or the other.

* Its just possible I've been sitting in the marketing cube farm for a bit too long.

Blather

So, my post on TLAPD yesterday, got me moved back towards posting after a very relaxing vacation (real, not from blogging) and the not so relaxing run up to it at work. So what is where ?

Well, I found that when I posted on forums that I frequent, two things happen,. Three really. First is that I don't post stuff here. Second is that I get much more conversation and feedback from the forums. Third, and this is important, about 50% of it is with people I don't actually want to talk to. So, my assumption that forums give me more feedback is less true than I initially thought, once one factors in the fact that a big chunk of it is stoooopid.


Sigh.

Well, I have made progress on the second Beta, and the first has muiltiple hundred down loads, which is way cooler than I ever imagined. I ran down one of my usual alleys and decided to rewrite the magic system, got about 50% thru it, and decided that that wasn't what was needed, assuming that my goal is in fact to ever get it out there. So, I'm hoping to have the Beta 2.0 out by the end of this week, warts and all; and whuile there are some , there are less now than before.

That said I have other projects I've started on, both traveller related and not, and while I want to get them up here, i think I need to put this project to bed for a while after this week. A confession: one of the main reasons I put this blog up was to make myself produce, and, actually its worked. Unlike any other RPG player or GM I'm a wannabe designer -I know thats an astounding revalation, but hey. So, it seems that the first step is doing somthing that has an existance outside of my own head, and this is that.

Final realization: despite its success, this is a damn tedious blog unless one is interested in the nuts and bolts of my system as it builds -which not to many people are, and who could blame them ? Still the fact that the actual rules are moving is whats important, not that my design process be transparent.