Some Barbaric Game

The Big Game is today and being played in Arlington, Texas no less, the town where I went through my Holmes D&D initiation rites (and a ton of other less-savory adolescent ones). 

In honor of our annual gala Superbowl/Anti-Superbowl soiree and the recent riff on things Planet Mongo over at Ix, I offer you the following video:

The Half-Ogre: a Classic D&D/LL Racial-Class

Half-Ogre

Requirements: STR 14, CON 14, CHR <9

Prime Requisite: STR

Hit Dice: 1d10

Maximum Level: 9

Half-ogres are the ungainly and unlikely products of miscegenation between undiscriminating humans and beastly, terrifying ogres.

Although quite short in respect to their ogre parent, they stand tall amongst the race of men; often reaching seven and a half feet in height. Because of their great size, they tend to be stronger and more durable then their pure-human cousins and are able to thus carry weight at one encumbrance category less than their human counterparts. For example, a half-ogre carrying 81-160 lbs. can schlep all that gear at the 60'/turn movement rate of other characters carrying 61-80 lbs.

Half-ogres have rather swarthy and dull skin tones only made worse by poor skin care. A few human-raised exceptions will have sufficiently learned enough about alternately washing their faces in cold and warm water with a clean, exfoliating towelette to have raised their maximum Charisma score to 9. Their hair is across the board hopeless, however, and will invariably be lank, greasy, and dark.

If the character is raised by ogre kinfolk he will speak ogre, orc, and troll, but only with a pronounced lisp.

Half-ogres can see quite well in the dark with dark vision up to 60'.

Half-ogres fight and save as fighters of the same level. They can use any weapon or armor, but are inordinately fond of two-handed weapons--especially those with sharp, fangy bits.

Half-Ogre Level Progression

Experience	Level	Hit Dice (1d10)
0	1	1
2,300	2	2
4,600	3	3
9,200	4	4
18,400	5	5
36,800	6	6
73,600	7	7
147,200	8	8
294,400	9	9

Judges Guild Art Recycling

Judges Guild products have a great deal of street cred in classic play circles and deservedly so. But for all the strengths of their better works, great cover and interior art was not one of them. In fact, it's pretty much safe to say that their artwork ranged from the mediocre to the outright terrible.

Weirdly some of the worst art would not stay dead, but would be hauled out years later and retouched for other products. Flipping through the pages of the First Fantasy Campaign (1977) and the Portals of Twilight (1981) , one of the three-part Portals inter-planetary sandbox series (of which I will be posting about later), I found the following inexplicable example.

First Fantasy Campaign

Portals of Twilight

Strange. I guess the idea of a good time in both Blackmoor and the tidally-locked planet of Twilight is a good hanging and a lady dancing on a table at the local inn. 

Blackmoor vs. Birthright, Round Two

In round one we watched Birthright fail to land any solid blows despite a flurry of footwork. Now let's see what that old champ from the 70s, the First Fantasy Campaign, has in store for us.

At first glance FFC doesn't look like much of a contender. The organization of the 92-page booklet is all over the map. Transitions are abrupt from section to section, and it reads more like the jumble of a GM's campaign notebook and working rules guidelines than a straightforward presentation of the history of the Blackmoor campaign. One certainly doesn't walk away with thinking “here's a complete system I can use right out of the box in my world.”

That unassuming surface hides some strong muscles though. Dave Arneson's much-talked ability to put on a helluva show really shines through in nearly every section.

More relevantly to this post are the (too brief) windows into how he handles domain-level play--or more accurately the kind of open-ended, ruler-level wargame campaign that spawned our hobby in the first place. Here a close reader sees a great deal of parallels to his contemporary Tin God, Tony Bath.

Neither man seems to have started his campaign with a single, unified system of rules. Both seem to have not only have grown their rules as loose guidelines over years of play, but to have also made big conceptual leaps at different stages (Arneson's largest one, of course, creating the foundation of D&D).

The beauty of that organic-growing evolution is that you see an accumulation of increasingly immersive details to each worldgame over time. Looking back through their respective books is like seeing snapshots of points in a development arc. As each layer of detail was added, subsystems were tacked on to handle this or that situation that grew out of the devious ingenuity of the players.

The best example of this in FFC is in the rules on internal investments, the meat of Arneson's guidelines for the civilian side of a player's options. What's telling about this whole section is that there is nary a single system tying them all together, instead each and every activity has it's unique elements.

Let's let Dave do some talking here. Take the following three excerpts from activities--that are utterly dull in most systems--to give you an idea:

FARMING: For every 20 GP invested one more family (five persons) will move into your area during the first twelve months of each of the years. These parties must travel in from the edge of the board, they are unarmed except for clubs (one [fighter] per group). You will roll at random for the months of APRIL, MAY, JUNE, JULY, AUGUST, and SEPTEMBER to see when these groups of five enter the board. Roll for each group of five separately...Then roll the four sided die for which week of the month, and the six sided die (no travel on SUNDAY) for which day...You can establish an escort service to bring in as many as you wish, at whatever time you wish during the months. However, you must then supply them with food while they wait, and when they travel, which will require additional money (not part of the investment) and wagons to carry the food for settlers and soldiers...

TOURISM: For every 100 GP invested in advertising one Tourist will visit your area, stay at your Inn, spend his money there, and become a non-player character. If he leaves the area safely he will return next year with a friend. The third year, three will come adding an additional person per year, up until the 10th year when they will come with their families and settle (50 people) as farmers or fishermen...

HUNTING, ARMORIES and ANIMAL BREEDING...Hunting will require the individual to go out in the square and have chances at encounters. A return of 10-60% of the investment is gained after each year and with 100 men conducting 12 hunting trips (not all right after each other but at least a week in between) during the year. The return is after deducting the cost of protection and weapons for the men (but not food or pay for them).

Quirky? Yes. A little cumbersome? Yes too. Inelegant? Definitely.

Yet unlike the bland abstraction of Birthright and similar systems in which what you do becomes a gamey (if rules elegant) way of spending points and ratcheting up this or that level, this kind of approach ladles on a whole lot more “face”.

In your mind's eye you can readily imagine the farmer/settlers nervously making their way across your campaign map to your stronghold or the mysterious traveler to your local tavern who gets taken in by the countryside.

Again compare having religion as an abstract “holding” level, as it is in Birthright, to this:

RELIGION: Most pertinent manifestation is the construction of impressive buildings and the equipping of same with riches like candle stick holders, statues, etc. It will also require the shipping of 10% to 60% (six sided die) of the contributions off the board each year. Wagons and protections must come out of the other 40% or wheedled out of the players. Normally 10% is given by all to the dominant religion in an area... Destruction of such convoys will require the sending of 10-60% of what is left, immediately to appease off the board patriarchs, in a new convoy. This is repeated until one of the convoys makes it, or the church is busted. Should the players give up on the convoys all law characters in the area go down two levels and PALADINS will go down three, while CLERICS will be reduced four levels. Destroyed religious establishments must be immediately rebuilt by LAW forces.

To my evil DM mind all these pieces positively drip with things to riff of when I get to the tabletop. It's also an approach that grows behind the open-ended play and tailors itself to the specific give-and-take of a campaign. Rather than weighing play down, this kind of granularity opens up more and more possibilities.

By decision, I declare FFC the winner.

[Editor's Note: The nifty map above lives on Havard's excellent Blackmoor site, a must-visit for anyone interested in that OG campaign.]

Blackmoor vs. Birthright: Domain-Play Cage Fight, Round One

One thing that pops out at when you survey the wildly-diverse range of approaches to domain-level rules in fantasy rpgs is that they roughly split into two camps: the abstract and the granular.

Equally clear is that the divide isn't just a navel-gazing matter for rules nerds—maybe it is, but allow me this dignity-preserving conceit—but one that creates two radically-different play experiences. Just to turn up the debate level a notch, I will say straight up that the more granular camp kicks the tar out of the more abstract when it comes to producing a satisfying game.

Let's lock two stand-out examples from each pole in a cage and see who staggers out. In one corner wearing the colors of the abstract we have Birthright, the younger, sleeker almost-champion of second edition AD&D. In the other corner we have the First Fantasy Campaign, the old, occasionally mumbly heavyweight straight out of Blackmoor.

As we jibber-jabbered about last December, Birthright had many strengths. Running a realm—the vital foot and fist work of such a game—as projected by its rules was, however, not one of them. By most accounts domain management was strangely flat and board game-like. 

(Bad boxing allusions end here, dear reader.)

Straight out of the gate on it's chapter on domain rule the tilt toward heavy abstraction is front and center. Take this (my emphasis added):

“Most provinces measure about 1,000-1,500 square miles—about 30-40 miles square, although the exact dimensions of a province aren't important. The vital characteristic of a province is its level, this is an overall measure of its prosperity and importance.”

It goes on to lay out the fact that there are seven levels and throw out some terse details including highly-variable ranges for populations for each.

Next up is a page and a half describing how all political, legal, cultural, religious, and economic institutions thorough out your realm are abstracted into four types of “holdings” each conveniently corresponding to the four main class archetypes: Law (government, fighters), Guilds (economy, thieves), Sources (magic mojo, mages), and Temple (religion, clerics). Again each are mostly just assigned an arbitrary level and poof we are done with the fabric of society.

There are some tidbit details found in them such as the notion that a guild (2) in a province (4) controls 50% of the province's economy. (In passing I have a hard time swallowing the notion that One-Armed Yuri the Master Thief controls half of all the farms, mines, craft work, etc. of an entire province, but whatever.)

The rest of your domain inventory is a grab-bag category called “assets”: armies, courts, fortifications, ley lines, lieutenants, roads, trade routes, the treasury, and loyalty. Armies and lieutenants are the only ones that have some kind of unique to themselves distinctions, the others again have arbitrary levels.

How these elements are put into motion is again highly abstracted. Game play at this level is over rigid, three-month “domain turns”. A ruler of a holding has a certain number of “regency points”, action points for the turn whose correspondence to anything other than that creepy eugenics bloodline connection to the land you rule business is never explained.

The reagent then spends these points selecting actions from a 25-point menu; many of which just add or modify the various levels of the above-mentioned elements. The entire sum of economic activity in your realms for that season is determined with one dice rolled indexed to the level of the province.

As a computer or board game sounds fine, fun even. As a tabletop game, not so much. From the perspectives of both the players and the GM it has so little “face” and conjures up little to inspire the kind of riffing that give tabletop role playing the edge over just about any other game.

Don't you want to know what that “face” really looks like? How do my people make a living? (And how many live exactly here in what amount of territory, for that matter?) Are they harvesting great timbers for ship-building, spinning yak hair, mining glowing ore, toiling away on vast plantations, scraping magical resins, or what? What exact temples and guilds exist here and how do their many respective hierarchies interact with each other? Etc. etc.

These are the details that don't just add color or depth to a setting they add hundreds of little hooks for play.

The BR approach instead is a little akin to me telling you that we are going to take all the little bits that make up your character hand wave them away and just use only your level. We will then take your character through a one-day “dungeon turn” where you can spend a few “adventure points” to buy a handful of actions. After you do this, I cross-reference your level (with a modifier or two) to a chart and then throw a die to determine the outcome of your dungeon turn. Woo hoo!

Next up. let's see how FFC fares after swatting away BR's jabs this round.

Theatrical aside: the counter-posing here is perhaps  for effect a bit hyperbolic. All rules abstract some arenas of play in order to favor others. For sure there are fun and crunchy elements to BR and abstract ones in FFC. Many old school systems like the ones found in the 1^st ed. DMG and the BECMI Companion set sit somewhere in the middle.

To further muddy the waters there are some rather stark differences in the granular camp between rules that use detail to add player options and verisimilitude (FFC again) and those that use detail, detail, and more detail to create semi-simulations (Chivalry & Sorcery and Harn).

But alas I was trying to tease out a point here and the latter distinction is a cage match for another day.

The Emperor's New Clothes

For an ungodly period of time I have been futzing around behind the scenes with Blogger's new template designer. Hours of good posts--sadly my saved drafts now exceed the total number of actual posts--have taken back seat to this minor obsession. (Domain Game players: don't ask.)

What you see is the Hill Cantons new look as proposed by my favorite tailor. Isn't it marvelous?

Seriously though, all feedback on the new duds is greatly appreciated--especially in regards to improving readability (my main concern).