Some FAQqy stuff for BAGS I left out, or possibly have been written since

Daring dudes doing stuff doingly !

 

What all this should look like.

The Century Goose destroys the KMS Death Sun with a lucky shot (tm)

 

 

The earlier post jumped right into character generation.  here are the two semi-mandatory "how to roleplay" and quickstart parts.

 

 

PseudoFAQ

How do I play this?  What do I do ? Where is My Butt?  I’ve used both hands and I can’t find it !!  

 Okay, here is the topline: You pretend to be a someone else having a bad day, otherwise called a HERO having an ADVENTURE. 

·        Since adults argue even more than five year olds playing cowboy (got ya !  Nuh UH!) we have numbers and rules to make decisions easy and (sorta) impartial. 

·        To do stuff you roll dice to see if what you want to do works, and how well.  The better you are at stuff, the more dice and higher numbers you generate –which is good, because harder stuff needs bigger results.

·        When you screw up, bad things can happen, like when you fail to jump a chasm (you fall to your doom), or fail to not be punched (you get ouched).  In which case, since no one here is very creative, usually this means you get hurt or lose cool stuff. Sometimes you die.  Again, we have numbers and rolls to determine when or if this happens (see: playing cowboys).

·        Players work together , dealing with a scenario designed and run by a referee.  Everyone says it isn’t player vs GM, but we all know the truth after our first game.

·        If you make a point of doing well, you can get better at what you do, or learn new things. Plus, you get to keep cool stuff, especially when the bad guys “don’t need it any more”.

·        Got all that ?

How do I know what to roll ?

Here is the quickstart version for those too excited to actually read the rulebook before play; nowadays, this is invariably described as the universal resolution mechanic, which, as far as I’m concerned, illustrates much that is wrong with RPG design these days (future rants on this topic will include the terms “engine”, edition versioning, rules “patches”, GNS (?) theory, “standard modifier”, “immersive fiction”, fiction as example”, "cultural models", "quickstart" and probably more….)

·        So, to do stuff, you roll some six-sided dice, add modifiers to each dice, and determine how many get a 7+. These are successes. Then add automatic successes for the final total.

·        The number of dice you roll is 1 + the career relevant to what you are doing.  Basically each career is rated from 0-5 indicating how long you have been doing that, or how good you are. 

If you have no relevant career, and you cannot whine beg and rationalize a way to use one that you do have, you roll only the one dice. Plus, you should be ashamed to call yourself a gamer.

·        The modifiers to each dice are whatever stat is relevant to the task.  Again, they are rated from 0-5, strictly indicating how good you are at that kind of task.  Note that having a stat at 0 = kinda screwed

·        Roll your career dice, add your stat to each one.  All rolls that get a 7+ are a success.

 

·        Harder things need more successes, extra successes mean you succeed elegantly.

 

·        Finally, if you have a relevant advantage, and an advantage is anything from a prop to an amazing physical ability, you get a free success.  Multiple advantages can give you multiple extra successes. Yay team !

 

So, easy tasks should either only require one success, or be a gimmie. A skilled task (one an unskilled character couldn’t be able to do) should require 2, 3 or 4. Note that with a six dice max roll, hitting a 4+ for successes pretty much requires having some free successes from advantages. Plus, there are mechanisms to burn GRIT to get better results. Read on. Or play. 

 

What next Pt 2: frp money

So, I gather that money systems in D&D is on a par with, say, near lightspeed rocks and jump torpedoes in Traveller: OOOO-VEERRRR discussed. Ooops. Well, if its any consolation, rest assured that I could be writing screeds about planetary atmospheres and empty hex jumps with jump torpedoes, so consider that I'm not doing that to be a win for now.

So, There's bunches of theories about how to organize faux-medieval money and economies: the ale standard, the lunch standard, the cow standard, the biblical standard, the standards of Diocletian, the wereguild standard, and more. And, obviously, they all disagree, 'cause the very meaning of money now is different now from what it was then, and often from what it was in the time we are trying to emulate relative to the time we have references for.

Throw in the fact that back then our fluid metal rates didn't exist, and that there was no use for silver and gold other than coins, bullion and jewlery, and so even the value of them doesn't mean what it used to, and there's no way for a hobbyist, even an obsessive one, to untangle it.

And, then, the whole slavery thing: a slaveholding society is going to mess crap up far more than one can imagine. See, there's this class of workers where most of the expense is up front (and cyclically very cheap) , and the daily wage is just for food for them. The point is, even the value of a days labor cannot be used to value items: what is the real value of a sword when made by slaves vs made by a (not enslaved) blacksmith. Hard to say.


So, why the droning about economics ? Becuase I'm building a rationale for doing it my way and ignoring unsightly contradictions, thats why.

Some few facts that seem to emerge from the morass can be used to gain a grasp on the subject for RPG purposes.

1. Silver < Gold, almost always.
2. Food < crafted goods, almost always.
3. Clothing is surprisingly expensive, actually: Hardware can be industrialized far more efficiently than clothing production.
4. prices change, but basically ratios give a clearer illusion of consistency.
5. A standard days pay should keep you from starving or eating your children. Slavery messes with this, seriously.