05 January 2024

Of Urbanity in Troika!

 This was sparked by someone asking about Orbital Intelligence's crapland. which is about crappy suburbian.

I jokingly call it a crappy suburb of Troika! (the city) or of whatever sphere/city Prismot implies (or both are suburbs of Troika! (the city)).

19 September 2022

Metaphor

 From a Boruch, a poet, about her pottery teacher—form is finally about what's not in a piece...

If the rules are metaphors for the game, same poet this time talking about Dickins, "telling the truth but tell it slant," then—stretching the metaphor...
 
about metaphor, rules are an imperfect reflection of the game.


 

25 July 2022

Dot Dungeon

 

Dot Dungeon


".dungeon is a tabletop roleplaying game with mechanics inspired by social games like Werewolf and Munchkin where the real world (and you as a person) affect the game. The world of .dungeon is inspired by MMO's, both fictional (like .hack//sign) and real (Guild Wars 2) and is set in a mysterious game engine that is growing and feeding on itself, ever-changing."

.dungeon collection


.dungeon is a ttrpg that emulates MMOs in a heavily narrative way (note I used narrative not narrativist because forgisms are awful). One player players the World (GM), and the other players play Player Characters—but there are also PCs that aren't played by players which are distinct from NPCs—in a MMO that may or may not be on its final days, or other such narrative reason for the campaign to end. Aspects of it are very meta. It's acknowledged that you're either playing yourself playing a character or, if that makes you uncomfortable, that you're playing someone who a real person playing the game. The stats are meta skills and knowledge, and the classes while given game style names are ways for you the player to bring who you are directly mechanically into the play of the game. Shape-shifting into your pet. Making art of the events of the game.


But for all of that, it is still effectively a DnD—a dungeon crawlery kind of game—as most MMOs are. But, the group rather than individual characters, has one hit point total, or connection. When connection hits zero, the game ends, and there are several suggestions on narratively what that could mean, and the way connection is lost and restored is designed to slowly dwindle to zero. The campaign will end. The campaign IS a character. It is rather melancholy. I do in general like this. It helps alleviate the problem of a campaign dragging on forever.


The system is pretty simple. Stats are dice. When dice are rolled, it's simply a matter of rolling die vs die, and the difference is how much connection is lost from either side. Simple. But, this makes everything in combat. Almost every contest is an attrition of hit points. It makes sense since connection isn't hit-points, it's the connection the characters have to each other and the world, and it's slowly dwindling. Failing to pick lock? Frustrating. Getting sass instead of help from an NPC? Frustrating. Dying repeatedly to monsters? Frustrating. All these are things that will make people quit games, or put them down never to be picked up again. Loss of connection isn't necessarily negative since it's ok to finish a game, regardless of how "finished" it is.


BUT. It still bothers me that everything is "combat." And no, don't try some, "well in the conversion section is talks about jenga and clocks," malarkey. Clocks are just fancy hit-points. Jenga towers are also hit-points. SURE it is a bit reductive since even in other games pass/fail is one hit "kill." BUT in .dungeon it's all one pool for the players. This isn't a flaw, necessarily, even though I fundamentally have a problem with everything being resolved the same way with the same result, loss of connection.


And it's messy and vague. Fighting goblins reducing the connection of individual goblins kills that goblin, but deal damage to the players as a group. How do you adjudicate one character dying and needing to respawn, remember characters don't die permanently in MMOs. The simplest take would be, the character that failed dies and has to respawn, while the group loses connection, but this feels bad. Even in "hard" games like the souls series, common enemies don't necessarily one-shot characters, and in MMOs that definitely isn't a base assumption. Don't get me fully wrong here. I'm used to making my own rulings and I do leave stuff vague or out that is commonly spelled out. This though, is frustrating. I don't think it's good design. It leaves something out. Dying repeatedly in game is frustrating—hence of lost of connection—but the character death in video games comes from the mechanics of that game. Your character in Dark Souls or Legend of Zelda or any number of games, takes damage and dies. You've "lost"—spent really—the time it took to get there, the loading screen time, and then time to get back to where you were—you're losing connection with the game, it's community, your friends that play THAT game. .dungeon doesn't model that. I think it should. I think that for as much detail the book goes into on other topics, there could have been more under respawn.status than "some contests may result in a character needing to respawn..." Can I make my own decisions on how to determine whether or not contests will kill a character? Of course I can. But this puts a roadblock on me playing this game rather than cutting it up for parts.


.dungon doesn't model PC advancement in a manner consistent with most of the source materials source material. Yes you the player of a game accumulate experiences independent of your avatar, but generally an avatar has mechanical means of advance, even if it's not a clear cut numerical manner like levels. Which granted, most MMOs have a Sisyphean relationship with levels and hazards. Higher levels mean more powerful foes which means in many respects the numbers didn't really get bigger. It's that meme of the dude fighting lobsters with a club and then fighting lobsters that are pallet swapped etc etc. Thing don't really change, so in one respect this kind of advancement way likely discarded or maybe not even considered by Batts. Instead character advancement is finding skills that can be improved. And there is no hard list of skills, something I like. I love it when a game says "yeah here are skills are, and this is what skills do, but I'm not making a huge list because the scope is too broad."


The way .dungeon is written and set up wants you to slot in modules from other games. Explicitly. Treating them like cartridges and the like. Because that is the setting, an MMO devoid of anything more than a generic fantasy allusion.


This is good though. It's a build your own setting premise. Yes I do know by now there are 3 zines with adventures and setting material, but the main premises are "here is some shit to play with that acknowledges some of the meta nature of playing a game, and how to reuse materials you already love or use any of the millions of adventures modules hanging out collecting dust.


But there is a flaw. Which character improvement being built around collecting and improvement skills, how do you gauge relative power when converting I6 Ravenloft? How powerful is Strahd?


Actually. I'm gonna convert him here.


Count Strahd von Zarovich, Vampire


FREQUENCY Rare

NUMBER APPEARING 1

ARMOR CLASS -1

MOVE 12"/18"

HIT DICE 10 (55 hit points)

% IN LAIR 90%

TREASURE TYPE F

NUMBER OF ATTACKS 1

DAMAGE/ATTACK 5-10 (1d6+4)

SPECIAL ATTACK Energy Drain

SPECIAL DEFENSES +1 or better weapon to hit


Additionally he's a vampire so all the other vampire specials apply to him.


I'm not going to detail the rest of this full page stat block because most of it doesn't require numbers specific to AD&D's system.


There isn't an example monster/obstacle block in .dungeon, so we'll do our best.


Connection_Rating 55 (which is slightly more than the starting CR of the whole group)

Difficulty.info Heroic/d12 (you could argue that difficulty would be relative to the characters or that Strahd is Legendary/d20 or even that he's Medium or Hard since Ravenloft is for levels 5-7 which is about 1/2 to almost max hit dice for AD&D and he's the big bad for the module)

do_something_cool.info Needs a magic weapon of some kind. There would be a bunch of the other things I'm not going to bother to type out.


That's just him, not the rest of the adventure or even just the castle. It could be that I'm approaching this from the wrong angle entirely. Maybe a module like this should be approached as a campaign finisher. Because I don't know else I can envision the attrition the group go through since connection rating can never be fully replenished. I just don't know.


Game Over isn't written to be a bad thing. It's there to let the campaign end. It's over. Talk about the good and bad times. Maybe lament the game ending before you could finish the last adventure before summer ended, the server died, or whatever.


It still feels like something is lacking in the spaces between connection rating, respawn, and obstacles use connection rating. I don't know. This is effectively just a surface level read. I don't have time to run this for anything longer than maybe one or two sessions. So I won't stare at this too much thinking about "fixes" to problems that may only appear from my ignorant perception.


Now lest this seem to be an unrelenting complaint or disparagement, there is a lot of things that I really like that haven't commented on.


I enjoy the dichotomy of Non-player Characters and Non-player Player Characters. NPCs being the general AI driven NPCs in games, shopkeepers and the like, and Non-player PCs being characters that fictionally are controlled by other players, just players that aren't real. Those characters are the random people you meet PUGing or run into grinding in the wilderness in MMOs, or the helpful summons in a souls game.


The most interesting thing is modeling the group's relationship with this Non-player PCs with a dungeon, at the end of which that character goes their separate way. Kind of a microcosm of the eventual end of the game.


Also the oracle section is kind of cool. It's intended for solo play, but I also think maybe this system isn't super suitable for solo play. It does in a way demonstrate a tension between playing a game solo and with a group, since one of the draws to playing an MMO with a group is the group, but if the group breaks up the people slowly lose interest in the game. While when you're playing a game solo, barring servers dying or other external factors, continued interest in a game only has to contend with one player's desire to play it.


Overall, I like that Batts is playing with this concept. It's kind of a parallel to My Body Is A Cage since both are about two sides of people, the Real vs the Unreal, Waking vs Dreaming, Life vs Game, but saying both are Real.


Would I do Playing as Players who Play Characters in an MMO the same way? No. I feel there is an void where the PC Avatar is. It lacks mechanical weight to me. But Batts's inspiration isn't just MMOs but also fiction inspired by MMOs. The characters in-game avatars are just as or equally important to the overall character as any real world qualities. The stories rarely engage with the mechanics of the fictional game in much depth. I'll admit I'm not as deep of a fan of this genre as I am other genres like real robot mecha or magical girl, and I feel the way I've treated and will treat interpretations of them to ttrpgs is similar to how Batts did the same with .dungeon.


And I think I'll end it on that note.


You can buy .dungeon in print here Nerves .dungeon collection and digital here itch.io and here Drivethru Affiliate Link I don't get any money if you buy direct from Batts which is the way I recommend. They get more money and you get a book.

22 July 2022

Robotech

 

>...the Robotech RPG took an anime series about love and music and humanity with an interstellar war as a backdrop, and made a sci-fi military game with giant robots.

—Ewen Cluney, Yaruki Zero, pg 54


the foundational idea of the "rules elide" thing is that one way a text can communicate that a topic is Boring is by making a rule. its boring to describe the specific techniques of lock-picking, and making sure we understand how different kinds of locks work (pin and tumbler or combination or whatever), so we have this rule that lets us skip it

now sometimes the elision is different

like a text might decide that lock-picking is Boring, but shouldn't be for whatever reason. in that case it might provide systems that it views as interesting in themselves, and say "here, play with this, since lock-picking is boring"

—Jared Sinclair, Everywhere


I agree with this generally, ignoring the minor inaccuracy that Robotech isn't much of an interstellar series beyond the invading forces in each season of the kit-bashed show being extra-solar invaders. It's about interstellar war only in as much as the invading forces are interstellar foes encroaching on Earth.


I did even do a couple of games that did approach Macross from the angle of system that focuses on the non-military themes, since Macross has those themes and only the first season of Robotech has any real focus on music.


However, honestly while Ewen sees Palladium Robotech's system focusing the military aspects as a detriment, I see it as a strength. To echo Jared Sinclair, rules elide. Elision is omission of something, coming from language, it's the source of contractions in common speech, such as the previous "it is," and in poetry, such as "when'er they came." In this usage it's a linguistic lubricant. How does this relate to rules and specifically why Palladium Books' Robotech ttrpgs is actually good for emulating and portraying the events in the inspirational material? Rules remove the direct agency of the players, instead they give it up either a distant figure, the Designer or Writer, or to uncaring Chance, which will also be referring to the distant Designer as the interpreter. This merely a statement with no prejudice.


Well what does the system of Robotech elide? Let's examine what the specific themes of the inspirational material, the franksteinian cartoon, Robotech. This series portrays the events of three successive interstellar invaders of the solar system, in the later two installments an invasion of Earth proper, with which the Earth forces, our protagonists, use transforming mecha developed from a crashed Robotech Space Fortress powered by the semi-mystical mysterious Protoculture, or Robotechnology for short. There is romance, drama, robot fights, and something of a defeat of the alien forces by overcoming some kind of inter-species differences through music (ostensibly since New Generation the third season just has Yellow Dancer do random shows as a cover for some of the actions. I don't even remember what actual music related thing is going in my the Masters Saga. Like seriously music inst that important to Robotech. Unlike Macross, which where the first season comes from.) and love or something. Look thematically the 3 seasons are mostly linked through giant robots fighting space aliens and a meta-plot about how the Zentradi are the creations of the Robotech Masters and the Invid are pissed at the RM and come to the Earth for their magic space weed. Which is cool.


Digressions aside, Macross Saga in part shows the Zentradi there is more to life than war thanks to the singing of Minmay. The ultimate turn in New Generation is because of two Invid Simulagents falling in love with humans and the Regess also realizing some shit about humanity; music isn't relevant. So back to the distillation of Robotech in Ewen's quote. Love? Not only are the multiple instances of romantic love, there is the love of friends and comrades, so check. Music? That exists diegetically, so check. Humanity? Not just that humans are the focus of the series, but there is seeing and bringing out the "humanity" of the antagonists until they cease to be antagonists, both the Zentradi and the Robotech Masters integrated with earth humanity, because they are also humans but humans who had fundamental aspects of humanity stunted for militaristic and imperialistic means. So, check. Sci-fi? Space aliens and giant robots with a clear technological bent, so check. Military? Seasons one and two not only are the heroic mecha materiel but most of the protagonists are members of their military, and in the third season the leader and two of the other members of our heroic party are military or former military and all the mecha are materiel. So, check. The existence of the military and robotechnology inform the setting of Robotech. Everything exists in relation to it.


Protagonists are either military or civilians whose relationships become informed by the actions of the military. The antagonists are militarized invaders. The frame of the Robotech rpg heavily systematizes combat, so all other parts of the rules are subsidiary to them. Love and humanity are disruptive forces to the settings backdrop of sci-fi military, which is one of the points. They circumvent the status quo of the setting. The Zentradi are defeated because some teenager with aspirations of pop-idoldom touches something within their hearts, leading a large portion of them to defect to the RDF, aiding them in annihilating the rest of the genocidal hostile Zentradi forces. Love touches Musica's heart and that leads her to defect causing all manner of cascading problems for the Robotech Masters, just as love touches the heart of the clone of Zor. Depending on how you view the changes of the canon between the end of the New Generation and The Shadow Chronicles over the final events of the Battle at Reflex Point, Marlene/Ariel's love for Scott Bernard might be a tipping point in the Invid Regess saving Earth before taking all the Invid and Protoculture off into the cosmos all weird space spirit like, and there is a few times where Sera's blossoming love for Lancer halts her assaults on the heroes.


Love and humanity exist outside of the framework of the system within the pages of the ttrpgs, just as they exist outside of the military. Not only would deep mechanisms for those things cheapen them just within the setting, but they cheapen those concepts in general.


So, what are the rules eliding in Robotech? Does the omission of the mechanisms for matters of the heart elide those concepts? Or does the mechanisms of combat elide combat? Combat is elided because we know have a bunch of numbers and systems to model a simplified version of reality since tracking the individual paths of bullets deviated by the prior bullets, heart beat, wind-speed, rotation of the earth, variations in powder load and bullet weight, buildup of powder residue... would be unrelenting tedium. And then you add in the minutia of just one interpretation of just one style of armed and unarmed combat. A system is already eliding a large portion of the human experience when it mechanizes it to numbers or words that matter to having a character interact through the rules. How much more do you want to elide things?


Without placing a value judgment on a desire to mechanize how love and music ultimately influences and sways the invading inhuman aliens, some of whom are more human that initially thought, why would you want to elide those things? Is it because showing just how love is doing its thing is complicated and boring but shouldn't be, so you want to have a cool bunch of things to play with? Giant robots are unrealistic and hard to model because they aren't real, but they are cool, so we elide that with robot rules. Real combat is a gross, messy and complicated, but it's 'cool', so we elide it with rules. Feelings are gross, messy and complicated, so some people want to elide it with rules so it is easier to handle and to push some of the difficulties off to a Distance Designer and to the Fickle Goddess Chance. I am certain any argument against mechanizing love could be equally and sincerely applied to combat, such that it's messy and complicated and the stakes are somewhat higher than a broken heart or hurt feelings.

Palladium Robotech is good at giving people the space to tell stories of love and heroism against the backdrop of interstellar war with giant robots because of the emphasis the rules place on all matters except romance and love and music. This is because the love and heroism in the medium exists framed by warfare. These fill in the gaps, making their own rules. Ignoring the rules those in power want to govern by. If system matters, the archaic and sometimes stifling nature of reality within the medium is paralleled by the arguably archaic and sometimes stifling rules in Robotech. There are no rules for love there. For what are the rules for love, let alone love between enemies of different worlds and species. What is the mechanism of love. What is the mechanism of music, particularly as it pertains the bordering on supernatural effects it has in the medium? Or humanity. Or romance. They are intangibles. Ephemeral. You can't see or touch these things.

Robots and guns and ships and space are tangible. You can see and touch these things, just like you can see the rules that govern them in the text.

19 July 2022

Does System Matter?

 Does System Matter?

This is one of those overdone and contentious topics. Prone to heavy discourse and bad faiths reads. One in which words get put into opposing mouths for the purpose of shutting them out and factional signaling. Honestly, I don't know anyone who's ever in actual seriousness said "system doesn't matter," but this is just setting the stage for the rest of this post.

So does system matter?

The short answer is both a yes; however, the short answer is also no.

So system matters. What does that mean? What is a system? To ease confusion, I define a system as the actual rules of a game, which is generally shorthanded to Game.

So for me, system is what most of y'all call game. For me, game actually means the flavor trappings draped on a system or system of system. If that makes sense. An example is Rune Quest and Call of Cthulhu have the same system, generally called Basic Roleplaying, but the are different games. There are minor differences in subsystems, but the bulk of their differences are in the trappings. Change the title, change the art, use a different baked in setting, and they are different games. This is true of King Arthur Pendragon, Elric!, Ringworld, Superworld and several other games from Chaosium. System matters so much though that one of it not the main difference CoC has from the rest is the Sanity subsystem. It's so meaningful that it's bled into other games attempting to do Horror. It's one of the commonly recommended game when someone asks for horror games, the other being Dread. 

 How does pointing out that all those games have the same system but are different games support "system matters"? In one way, it doesn't. There are the rules, with minor changes, either in a core system—Ringworld has a bit of a divergence on how skills advance and Pendragon uses d20 vs d100 and uses multiple d6s for damage vs variable dice sizes—or addition of subsystems—there are three different magic systems, psychic powers, mutations, superpowers, demon summoning, magic item creation, Traits, Passions, Sanity, and various combat options across all these Basic Roleplaying system games. And if system didn't matter none of these games would even exist as they are since Runequest is at its core a hack of Dungeons and Dragons. They mostly have the same stats and for most of the games the damage dice used for weapons are either identical to those in DnD or pretty damn close. Steve Perrin, Ray Turney, Steve Henderson, and Warren James collectively saw what they considered flaws in DnD's system and set out to do their own thing. 

 

If system didn't matter ttrpgs wouldn't even exist, they'd be a subset of wargames or something. This also extends to other games that are clones or derivatives of a base game, like Troika! and Advanced Fighting Fantasy, changes to initiative, character generation and skills make both games as system slightly different, therefore system matters since one favors random chance vs the other is more rigid with a fixed skill list and point buy character creation.

What the fuck?

I'm arguing System Matters but talking about a bunch of games with the same core system? Well yeah. They are descended from some changes from Dungeons and Dragons. They have different subsystems or changes to subsystems. Just look at how influential those changes have been to the perception off them.

If system didn't matter, people wouldn't stick with what system they are comfortable with. System matters from a comfort and familiarity stance. System matters because comfortable systems get modified. This is why telling people not to play DnD because X, Y, or Z game does A, B or C better than DnD doesn't broadly work. This why looking down on people for hacking DnD, or whatever their favorite system is, to do something the game "isn't good at" doesn't usually work.

I could tweet or blog until the letters are worn from my keyboard about how much better Magical Fury, What's So Cool About Magical Girls?, Magisk Tjej, or most other games tagged magical girl on itch.io does the magical girl genre than DnD, but that's not going to endear myself when someone doesn't want to pick up another game. Especially when you look at support for different games.

System matters from a branding point. If a game is DnD with changes, then it will have a wealth of official and 3pp content to pull from. This is also why OSR as a label is meaningless in some contexts—is it system or aesthetic. If someone wrote a how-to do magical girls with DnD 5e with some number of classes and monsters, at least one sample module, and a guide to how to use other official material with it, that's much more relevant to someone who's already invested money but more importantly time into familiarizing themself with that system. This is partly why the d20 boom and glut happened at the turn of the century, and the following flood of OSR retroclones. Various different games with minor system changes, and those minor mechanical differences matter.

But does System Matter?

No.

If system mattered, games like CoC, GURPS, Troika!, any PbtA, What's So Cool hacks, Lancer—I hope you get the idea here—wouldn't exist. You wouldn't be able to make games that are tonally different from the same system. Adding a subsystem or slightly changing math is on par with adding new spells, feats, classes, or other similar options to DnD. What is it about a class and level based system that makes it inherently good only to do dungeon crawling generic fantasy? Why does a system that is class-less or level-less or skill-less or attribute-less lack that assumption? What makes Traveller a science-fiction game but DnD a fantasy game? Why is CoC a horror game, but RQ a fantasy game?  Rifts is the conglomeration of all prior Palladium Books games, and Palladium Fantasy RPG is modified AD&D. The original version of it had Vancian magic.

System broadly doesn't matter so much that Chaosium publishes a book, a big book, one that is kind of golden yellow, that has the history of the Basic Roleplaying System, with abbreviated versions of the various subsystems and optional rules from pretty much game descended from Runequest. As a text to learn and teach and play a game from it sucks, but as a big book of addons to whatever other BRP derived game it's pretty cool. And the subsystems, things like Sanity (yes it's extremely problematic) or Traits or Passions, don't even really require the core BRP system to work. You could just stick them onto some other system.

If system matters, then I would never have been able to, using guidance from Heroes of Horror a 3.5 DnD splatbook, terrify players with goblins. I'm talking utterly terrified to the point of avoiding a lot of thing. And that was without the Taint subsystem HoH has. I didn't need a system to scare people in a generic fantasy system, one designed with a balance that favors PCs, while using encounters balanced specifically to how the DMG says to. Encounters intended to be easy to beat by level one characters. 

 Was it in spite of the system I terrified them? Depending on who you ask, yes. There are a lot of people, especially other indie ttrpg writers and publishers, that will beat the old saw with a death horse that system matters, don't use DnD to do anything other than murders in a hole. 

If I made the poor decision to ask on Twitter or Tumblr for recommendations on how to a folklore or fairy-tale fantasy horror game, I guarantee I'd get a massive amount of recommendations for Dread, because a jenga tower is inherently scary or something. And if I asked for recommendations for a gritty fantasy rpg, there would be a lot for Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Mork Borg. Mecha rpg? Mechwarrior, but probably now mostly Beam Saber and Lancer. And if I prefaced any of these requests as help with homebrewing DnD or for splats for DnD, there would a flood of people saying not to do it because DnD can't do any other genre. 

I have almost out of spite started to write a mecha game based on 5e, because let's face it Lancer is 4e in mecha drag. Will I? No because...system matters and I dislike 5e as holistic system. Could I? Yes. Granted if I wanted to make DnD but mecha I would start with Pathfinder 1e or a retroclone because I'm familiar with those systems, and system matters.

System matters, just not in the way people want it to.

Also fuck Wizards of the Coast. They suck ass. Stop playing the corporate dragon game because WotC has had and will continue to have a shitty presence in the tiny ass industry of ttrpgs.

07 July 2022

Rogues ruined DnD

 In this essay I will make the declaration that things went down hill when TSR made Thieves and Bards Rogue subclasses.

Although we could point to beginning of the decline with allowing any and all classes to have Dexterity improve Armor Class.

These show the change from loveable ammoral assholes stealing to halfling in a pvc suit stabbing people for one million damage, and still stealing everything.

In conclusion