Discworld RPG: Makin' characters

For October I'm doing some Octobereviews! Last time I took an initial dip into the Discworld Roleplaying Game (powered by GURPS), by Terry Pratchett and Phil Masters. This time I let my fingers go all pruney by soaking for 143 pages:

Parts 2, 3, and 4: All the character stuff

The Discworldesque characters you can make with this book are intensely personality-focused, in a very detailed and mechanics-driven way. That's at odds with my normal outsider's conceptualisation of GURPS's grittiness as being angled towards its combat engine, and it's a pleasant surprise. I actually really like this focus on character personality; it makes perfect sense for the comic fantasy genre in general and Discworld in particular.

The rules are very, very detailed though. I'd be interested to see whether that gets in the way at the table; I've tended to disfavour mechanical character roleplaying rules for that reason, but I could see it working here.

Making a Discworld GURPS character isn't so different from making any GURPS character,* so I'll gloss over that in-depth process.

* But with perhaps slightly less focus on equipping them.

A little commentary on the big size question

It surprises me that a system as granular as GURPS doesn't just account for different character sizes as part of its fundamental maths. Everything about size in this book comes across as a workaround (e.g. short arms, p 96) or special case (falling damage, p 102) because the basic engine can't handle really small or big characters. A few things just don't work at all (gnomes "can't carry enough protection to provide any useful DR" even against gnome-sized attacks, p 256).

My impression is that GURPS focuses almost all of its simulation power on the parts of physics that are in the human spectrum. It makes me wonder how GURPS Supers works.

It's complicated further because

(a) you need very small characters to be playable;

(b) some very small humanoids on the Disc are disproportionately strong and durable, so rules that treat them as 'special cases' of human actually make sense...

(c) ...but others ones aren't; 

(d) from a gameplay perspective you need to prevent various extremely strong, large, durable characters* completely dominating all physical challenges and fights, as they would in reality.

* Well, not 'various'. Just trolls.

On a whim I checked the maths, and the writers got the troll weight implications right (p 107). Being 6.5 ft tall and 430 lbs means that if a troll is built similarly to a human, their flesh is about twice as dense per the rules, and indeed, stone is 2-2.5× flesh density in real life. A quick pass of the square-cube law says that the template sizes/weights (8 ft, 850 lbs; 12 ft, 4000 lbs) are also accurate. Kudos!*

* But again, it's GURPS, so you kind of expect this.

Making characters: The meh bits

It's GURPS, so whatever you thinking of character-building in GURPS, you'll think that here.

Interesting that we get 5 pages of dense text on vampires (pp 109-114) and the text still needs to say "use these other GURPS" books a lot. It feels like the authors were in a bind; vampires are notoriously heterogenous in folklore, and the Discworld novels explore a lot of that.

Note that male vampires can get 'Fully dressed resurrection' but female vampires can't (p 93); for some reason this gets repeated about five or six times throughout the book. It's an off-colour joke* which the authors seem to absolutely love.

* It's from the novels, of course, but doesn't go unexamined there.

I also found some of the GM advice on page 157 to be ham-fisted, but these are rare sour notes in the whole book.

Making characters: The good bits

We get rules for most Discworld-relevant trades, species, and archetypes. I can't think of a notable gap, and there were plenty (like Fourecksian Backpacker) which surprised me but are a good fit.

The writing is all very tight and well-edited. I made it through 162 pages without spotting a typo.

I'm pleased that the authors know the difference between "sapient" and "sentient" (p 106).*

* Star Trek has done unbelievable damage to this particular corner of the English language.

The equipment section is good, with an actually laugh-out-loud "10 foot pole" joke (p 156).

Next time: Doing actual game stuff, and extensive thoughts on the magic system.

Monsters! Horrors & Abominations is on Kickstarter!

Can you ever have enough weird horrible monsters?

Are you ready for...

• Sapient coral!
• Were-angels!
• Infinite sky legs!
• Crooning rot!
• Primeval lizard gods!
• Undead swarms!
• Void oysters!
• Rule eaters!
• Divine parasites!

This year has been spent hewing away at my new creation, Monsters! Horrors & Abominations, a hefty tome full of unique, flavourful monsters for use in your D&D 5e games. The whole book is designed for running combat encounters, with dedicated tactics advice, new traits and powers, encounter tables, a touch of humour, and tons of variants for each base creature!

Help bring the project to life on Kickstarter!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/periaptgames/monsters-horrors-and-abominations

Discworld Roleplaying Game: An Octobereview

No, not the new one.

The old one. Not that old one, either. The GURPS one.

Actually, the GURPS 4e one, Version 2.0 from 2021. So it's practically new.

The Discworld Roleplaying Game, by Terry Pratchett and Phil Masters; illustrated by Paul Kidby and Sean Murray.

 

My background with Discworld

I was given a Discworld book (Sourcery) as a young teen and I suspect that it changed the trajectory of my life. I sought the novels out zealously, and for a long time it was the only series I had a complete set of, even as they started to number in the dozens.

I have of course read all the books in the series, most of them five or more times. If you're not familiar with Discworld, do yourself a favour and give it a go. Traditionally at this point a Discworld fan makes a big deal of recommending a starting point (and sometimes a stopping point, given the precipitous decline in quality at the end presumably due to PTerry's illness).* But almost any book you pick up will tell you whether you'll like the rest of them.

* The short version is that the first five (The Colour of Magic through Sourcery) are good, the next 30 (Wyrd Sisters through Wintersmith) are superb (although Interesting Times is, uh, a product of a bygone era), #36–38 (Making Money through I Shall Wear Midnight) are okay-to-good, and #39–41 (Snuff through The Shepherd's Crown) sadly read like unremarkable Discworld fanfiction.

I played the heck out of the Discworld MUD for a long time, and I vaguely remember reading the manual to Discworld Noir but I never owned it. That's my net experience with Discworld games, though, so I was excited to dig my teeth into something intersecting multiple key interests.

About that whole GURPS thing

GURPS isn't my system of choice, but I follow a few GURPS blogs, and I'm interested in the engine as an experiment in what can be done on the simulation end of TTRPGs.

I am fascinated by the choice to use it as the basis for a Discworld game. The claim (p 22) that "GURPS is ideal for Discworld games" surprised me. I think of GURPS as being very crunchy and consistency-angled indeed, and I think of Discworld as being narrative-driven and inconsistent (in that (1) the narrative is literally an important in-universe part of Discworld metaphysics, and (2) the background rules of the setting mostly feel like they were added 'as needed', and (3) some of the metaphysics has changed, dramatically, over the course of the series). I'd go so far as to assume the default for any Discworld TTRPG would be to build it as a collaborative story-telling game.

As we'll see, the writers did a good job in operationalising it for GURPS, even without that incongruity. And they also did their best to implement quite thorough in-universe-controllable story-telling game rules for Narrative within the GURPS framework (p 197-198; 213). They're not really to my personal taste from a TTRPG angle, but they're certainly necessary to get a Discworld feel.

The (410-page!) book is laid out in chapter order:

Introduction

Part 1, background setting detail

Part 2, character creation

Part 3, character templates

Part 4, equipment

Part 5, doing stuff

Part 6, further setting detail

Part 7, Ankh-Morpork

Part 8, the supernatural

Part 9, dramatis personae NPCs

Part 10, a bestiary of sorts

Part 11, campaigns and scenarios

Glossary/Bibliography/Index

As many people have pointed out, there is basically no winning with structuring TTRPG books, which have to be explainers and rules references and character generators and setting guides all at once. I nevertheless find it funny that someone unfamiliar with GURPS has to read through 165 pages of this book before they will actually be told how to play and what those terms they've been reading actually mean in practise.*

* And someone unfamiliar with RPGs has to read as far as page 218 to get to "the basics of playing a roleplaying game".

I jotted notes as I went, so I'll go through all this book's parts in turn.

Part 1: Background setting detail

The first big thing the reader will notice* is that this book is exceptionally well cross-referenced and has an excellent index. I call that starting out on the right foot.

* Unless they're an editor or layout designer, in which case they will first notice the non-traditional decision to indent the first line after a section heading.

The second big noticeable thing is that there are patches, necessary ones, to make it all work as a TTRPG. For example, the Agatean gold exchange rate post events of The Last Hero is kind of papered over* on page 20. The staff-as-magical-battery rules (p 192) are familiar from other bits of GURPS, and are a fairly good fit (see e.g. blowing stuff up in Reaper Man); I'm not familiar enough to say exactly how much they've been adapted for the setting.

* No pun intended.

The rulebook has to cover the full gamut of Discworld; I've noticed content from at least as far as Snuff. I assume the authors drew on Stephen Briggs' excellent companion work, because a lot of little details end up in the rulebook. Indeed, there are rules for really minor things from the books that I would never have thought to do, so kudos for that.

On the flip side, there are some interesting gaps. For example, there is just one dwarf bread weapon specified, other types all "counting as" a regular weapon.

It also occurs to me that the Discworld Roleplaying Game diligently discusses and operationalises all this highly specific content from the books, but does very little extrapolation where you might expect that.

• The interaction between salamanders and octarine light (rules on p 159) is a niche thing that comes up maybe twice in the Discworld, novels; there are no rules for comparable interactions.
• There are rules (p 160) just for enchanted doorknockers and neon signs, which are single-instance jokes, but those rules don't really generalise to all the other objects we ought to infer exist.
• The troll + siege engine combination is an obvious possibility that any player playing a troll would ask about, and is just waved away (p 155).
• A magical GPS ("DPS", p 146) is an extrapolation of the imp-based tech jokes from the books, but it's just descriptive text, with no rules crunch given!

This is I think part of an overall design criterion. The book makes as few canon-relevant decisions as possible where the series left those opaque. For example, it doesn't commit to any of the possible causalities for the troll name-substance-nature question (p. 230): "no one is sure".

It is also, perhaps, a good thing. The Discworld Roleplaying Game draws heavily on Discworld content and quotes the books extensively, but at points it needed to come up with in-world fiction of its own, for game purposes. I found this a little stilted, and the dialogue/characterisation of canonical characters feels slightly off (see e.g. p 21, 85), but they're big shoes to fill.* I will say that "Hunchbroad Modoscousin" is an exceptionally Discworldy name; well done there.

* It's certainly plausible that my deep respect for the canon is getting in the way.

Next time, I'll discuss parts 2, 3, and 4: the character-building bits.

Monsters! Horrors & Abominations

It's the Halloween season. And that means...

My new book, ‘Monsters! Horrors & Abominations’, is coming soon to Kickstarter! It's a 210+ page bestiary crammed full of weird and flavourful monsters for D&D 5e, like the...

👹 Endlessphant (wrinkled grey elephant's leg with a million knees)

👹 Big scaly one (gormless rubbery hound-god of trolls)

👹 Void oyster (nacre-petrifying abomination from beyond the stars)

All streamlined for combat encounters and delivered with tactics information, modern design innovations, great illustrations, and a touch of humour! Between base creatures and variants of them, we're looking at a total 240 monsters, ranging from Challenge Rating 0 to 20!

 

Unsettling, unspeakable things found underground, amidst the unholy and undead!

Follow along now on Kickstarter to get notified on launch!

Playtesting D&D monsters

I've been running quite a lot of playtests recently, so thought I'd talk about a few of the ins and outs of the process.

This is through a D&D 5e lens, but I suspect it generalises.

If you're planning to publish a monster, thorough playtesting is a must. It's not, sadly, a case of "run it once for your regular group's entertainment". You must run it until you have complete confidence in your work.

There are lots of design elements that you're going to need to juggle your focus on in playtesting, but we can group them into three main things:

1. Double-checking the maths
2. Ensuring it's fun
3. Watching for corner cases

Double-checking the maths

If you meticulously follow the D&D Challenge Rating rules in the DMG, you get a perfectly serviceable CR... As long as you can draw strong parallels between the monster's traits and those for which the book provides appropriate adjustments. For a trait that's really off the wall and you're not sure how large an effect it might have, playtesting becomes that much more crucial.

Particular things to keep an eye on:

1. Monsters designed for very low or high CR. Low-level D&D characters are more vulnerable to individual dice outcomes; high-level characters can take advantage of synergies and have more options.
2. Huge damage swings. A monster with a magic item that rolls 1d20 for 19 different cantrip effects and a ninth-level spell on a 20 might be balanced at a low-middle CR according to the mathematical averages. In practise, though, you're going to have one of two different unsatisfying play experiences.
3. Offensive/defensive balance. As well as a monster being 'too easy' or 'too hard', being 'too arduous' to fight is also a design failure. D&D 5e (a) makes combat front-and-centre, (b) has a lot of fiddly rules for it, and (c) disincentivises players planning their turn before taking it. This adds up to a big risk of combat encounters dragging on. It's generally (although not always) safer to tweak the OCR higher and the DCR lower.
4. Character optimisation. Creatures with book values are 'safe'. Starting players will on average have a good time fighting them, won't typically struggle at all with a level-appropriate Medium encounter, etc. Optimisers will take the same monsters and run them through the blender in a single round. There's no silver bullet here. In fact, there's no bullet. You simply have to balance for the 'default case' and then expect DMs to make changes to encounter design (or individual monsters) as necessary.

Ensuring it's fun

Monsters can be mathematically sound but boring to play. It's easy to come up with examples. Imagine a beast that negates a huge slew of character powers but can be readily whittled down with a steady barrage of normal attacks, while attacking once per round itself. Or one that hedges a specific character archetype out of the fight, while being unable to harm such characters. Or one that can only be engaged at range.

Judging the fun is the subjective bit of playtesting, and as hours and hours of combat turns pass, it gets harder and harder. Break up the work. Roll the dice instead of using average damage, just to see how it feels. Work out in advance how you're going to track player feedback on what feels satisfying and what doesn't.

Hopefully, you'll find sudden joy in stuff you didn't expect, and that will inform your work as a designer. The other day I tested a weak undead horde creature that I'd given an 'overkill' trait: a good enough roll lets the attacker kill it and cleave through into an adjacent creature of the same type. It turns out that kind of outcome, mowing down chaff with a single shot due to it being such a visibly fragile enemy, feels great for low-level characters who lack many special abilities for area damage!

Watching for corner cases

There'll be all sorts of things you didn't think of while designing. This creature is inorganic; it should be immune to poison. This creature appears in groups; it would be better off without the multiattack.

This creature's special power doesn't actually work as described... or lets it do this cheesy thing... or perhaps more commonly, it works fine, but you didn't describe it clearly enough for a DM to use. Get other eyes on your work as soon as possible (but that's a whole other article).

You won't find the problems if you don't actually examine the monster interacting with the existing rules, in a 'real' situation.

Playtesting is a big task...

...but it doesn't have to be a chore. Be organised, have a plan going in, intersperse it with other kinds of work, take joy from the emergent consequences as you would from a real game, and then the repetitiveness of it won't kill off all your fun.

Something wicked this way comes

Somewhere in the abominable deeps...

 

A long-delayed project is nearing completion.

Watch this space.